Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Occupy Passover

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Why is tonight different from all other nights?–and all other Passover nights? Because tonight we don’t say “next year in Jerusalem.” We say “next year in Cairo.” Tonight we do not think about Occupy but about the ongoing colonial occupations around the world that continue to oppress. And tonight we hope for another future.

In the traditional Passover service, the gathering say “Next year in Jerusalem,” the utopian wish of the diaspora. The “Jerusalem” of the Haggadah (the text used during the service) was interpreted by many modern progressives in the manner of Blake as a place without slavery, the place of emancipation.

The Liberation Haggadah

Often, such affinities are felt to have been expressed by the work done by Jews during the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.

The Sarajevo Haggadah, noted for its beautiful illustrations was the exemplar of how the book could also mobilize cross-cultural alliances. It was hidden and protected from the Nazis during World War II by local people, including a Muslim cleric. Later it was again saved from damage during the devastating “ethnic” civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

The Sarajevo Haggadah

These affirmative histories feel remote from modern Jerusalem as it is ruled under what is, to use Jimmy Carter’s telling phrase, a “new apartheid.” In Jerusalem, Orthodox Jewish men actually send Jewish women to the back of the bus, as if to say that they want to erase the Civil Rights history.

So today the anti-slavery “Jerusalem” is somewhere much more like Cairo after the Tahrir revolution than it is the city of that name.

Perhaps no visual example is more telling than this picture:

The "separation wall" in Bethlehem.

It shows the city of Bethlehem, named as the birthplace of Jesus, a city of importance for Jews as the seat of King David and long part of the Arab Caliphate. Now it is divided by the separation wall that epitomizes the key tactic of global counterinsurgency: once you have identified your insurgent, separate them from the “good” population.

There’s so much writing about the disastrous consequences of Israeli policies, above all from progressive Israelis like Ariella Azoulay, Eyal Weizman and Adi Ophir, that there’s perhaps no need to dwell on them. Except that it has now become clear that Israel has embarked on a “necropolitics,” a sovereign determining of who it is that must die, which now extends to other nations. The entirely unsurprising “October surprise” of the 2012 election will be the Israeli attack on Iran, telegraphed and planned by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Obama might be enough to get him on the Supreme Court. Just because we can see this coming does not mean it will not have most serious consequences.

Not least will be a renewed clampdown on all anti-militaristic, anti-hierarchical politics. It should be remembered that the tent city in Tel Aviv was evicted long before Liberty Plaza. Only you can’t call it the Israeli Occupy because that already exists.

Looking back, as one does on ceremonial days, I reflect on the opportunity that the Oslo Accords appeared to present in 1993. Among them was the possibility for a secular Jewish identity that was not linked to Israel and also not shamed by it. At the time, the late lamented Edward Said indicated that Oslo was going to be a disaster. Along with many others, I could see that but hoped that it would lead to something better. It did not and the possibility to play with being “Jewish” disappeared as well. Israeli officials do so much in the name of “Jewish” and not just Judaism that it would be sophistry to do otherwise.

Nonetheless, there is of course a new Haggadah this year, translated and commented upon by earnest, bearded young men from Brooklyn of the Jonathan Safran Foer kind. Actually, it is edited by Foer.

The Haggadah says that

in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt

I don’t want to do that now. I want to stay in the “Egypt” that we’ve seen since 2011, the Egypt of Tahrir. I want to decolonize Palestine and finally bring an end to slavery. L’chaim.

Militant Research–Madrid

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It is one thing to call for activist research, it’s altogether something else to carry it out. There are a number of interesting existing models. They seem to have in common a willingness to work outside the formal structures of the university, to work on projects, rather than within disciplines, and to publish their work freely and open source on and offline.

One example is the Madrid collective Observatorio Metropolitano [OM from now on]. Their work was presented last night at 16 Beaver by Ana Méndez de Andés, an architect and urban planner who teaches Urban Design at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. In the announcement for the event, OM were described as:

a militant research group that utilizes investigations and counter-mapping to look into the metropolitan processes of precarious workers, migrants, and militants taking place in Madrid, brought on by crisis, gentrification, speculation and displacement.

In her presentation, Méndez de Andés described how the group had come together in 2007 at the height of the speculative building boom in Madrid to try and discover exactly what was happening in the city. With disarming wit, she commented that it was an advantage that Madrid was seen as a provincial city, lacking the cosmopolitan identity of Barcelona, because it was easier to examine the city’s changes.

The group was intellectual but not academic, interested in carrying out what she called “militant research,” which she distinguished from activism. In their Manifesto for Madrid, OM define this as being [these are my no doubt dreadful translations: do consult the originals before quoting!] :

Militant investigations which will bring the knowledge and policy tools necessary to address these enormous processes of change. To build a communication space between members, technicians and stakeholders, and above all between small projects (or embryonic projects) of militant research already occurring in the city and the social movements.

Méndez de Andés joked that she herself was not very good at organizing events, so she had stuck to analysis. Their research generates both substantial books, 400 pages long, and short, accessible pamphlet-length works available free as PDFs. The Manifesto strikes the signature note for OM projects in its denunciation of

the destruction of the elementary bases, which make possible common life (la vida en común) in a city like Madrid.

Written at the height of the boom, the Manifesto was able to visualize the transformation of Madrid into a global city at the expense of the creation of a marginalized class of people living precariously, the undermining of social provisions for health, environment and education and (as we all now know) spectacular debt.

Banner from Traficantes website

The related open-source copyleft publishing venture, Traficantes de Sueños does not define itself as a publisher:

It is, however, a project, in the sense of ‘commitment’, which aims to map the constituent lines of other forms of life.

Central to this venture is “freedom of access to knowledge.” All publications are available either as downloads or as books. Some people buy all the books as a means of supporting the project, regardless of whether they intend to read them. Publications are generated rapidly so that they can contribute to the ongoing discussion and debate within the social movements, rather than reflect on them later (I was recently asked by contrast to contribute to a collection on OWS, bearing in mind, as the call put it, that Zuccotti Park will be ancient history by the time of publication).

In La crisis que viene (The Coming Crisis) [March, 2011] OM see the the financial crisis as a prelude to the unrelenting privatization of the commons across Europe. For OM, there is:

a constant underlying all measures: interest and financial benefits go first. Although this will cost the immediate and future welfare of entire populations. Although this will involve the dismantling of pension systems and the decline of social rights acquired over decades. Although such policies will cause the whole economy to slide, limping along the path of stagnation. The next decade offers us no more than a new round of privatization of services and social guarantees, a greater decline in wages, and a social crisis which is still known only in its embryonic stage.

By October 2011, this pessimism was offset by the possibilities of the new social movements across Europe. Crisis and Revolution in Europe argues that, to quote the poet Holderlin,

“there grows what also saves.” The antidote has been accompanied by citizens’ movements now extend across most of the continent. This is the 15M, the movement of Greek squares, the French strikers and the indignados in a growing number of countries. It is in this work in progress of political reinvention, where you can find a social outlet to the crisis, in addition to rescuing that which really matters: democracy and European society.

Their analysis is now being translated into Portuguese, English, Greek and Italian in order to create a transEuropean dialogue about the crisis and build towards transEuropean social movements, perhaps even strikes.

No-one yesterday asked the quintessential Anglo question about funding. I took it that there the project was sustained by a mix of commitment, donation and the blanket subscriptions.

While there are many nascent publishing ventures using online and low-cost publishing in the Anglophone world, I don’t think we have anything to quite match this: though I would love to be corrected! Too many of the new digital publishing ventures spend so much time accommodating the demands of tenure, the one per cent of academia, that the online virtues of speed and accessibility get lost. Too much of the Occupy research is about the vicissitudes of Occupy and not the collective issues that brought us into the movement.

That said, where the Spanish have led the way before, we have also followed from the “Take the Square” movement to Occupy Wall Street. Of those who are still reading at this point, I bet many of us are intellectuals of one sort or another. How about it? A collective militant/activist research project(s)?

A Day Without the 99%

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A day without the 99% is the part of the slogan used by OWS for its May Day action that has not been discussed enough. While even the New York Times has run a plodding exposé of the low chances of a mass observation of the general strike (no, I’m not linking, you can make it up), the day without us is much more than that.

In 1974, the Italian activist Mariarosa Dalla Costa already saw that a general strike was in fact no such thing

Let’s make this clear. No strike has ever been a general strike. When half the working population is at home in the kitchens, while the others are on strike, it’s not a general strike. We’ve never seen a general strike. We’ve only seen men, generally men from the big factories, come out on the streets, while their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers went on cooking in the kitchens.

Perhaps today some male-identified activists might question that 50% figure: I suspect not many of the female-identified ones would do so.

Indeed, tonight at 16 Beaver, Ana Méndez de Andés from the Madrid-based Observatorio Metropolitano, a militant research collective, made an almost identical set of observations. She recalled discussing with the organizers of the Spanish strike what those who were unemployed or involved in domestic labor should do. The answer was simple: show solidarity.

In the U. S. context, the “big factories” are among the least likely venues to strike because they cannot call a solidarity strike due to anti-labor legislation. Manufacturing has been able to increase productivity while using fewer and fewer human workers by means of automation. So, as we all know, the workforce is susbtantially composed of dispersed individuals from the unemployed, part-time and casual labor, to those working as freelances, without documentation or on piece work, none of whom can visibly “strike.”

The OWS kitchen in action at Liberty Plaza

How, then, could a “day without the 99%” offer a visualization of the refusal to accept the neoliberal privatization of everyday life? Writing for the new Occupy.com aggregator site, Chris Longenecker suggests that the day should involve:

mobile street kitchens, free stores and free medical clinics, as well as occupy their schools and workplaces and make their goods and services available to all who need them.

Now that finance capital has withdrawn from the housing sector, it is eager to privatize health, knowledge, education, music and art (or to accelerate the existing tendencies to privatize). It is as if they will not be satisfied until no one can even imagine an alternative.

So a well-attended and highly visible union march and Occupy-style disruptions to the normal practice of expropriation and dispossession are excellent and important gestures. In Occupy-speak, these are “direct actions” and highly valorized, rightly so. What Dalla Costa, Mendez de Andes and Longenecker are calling for is usually known as “mutual aid.” It’s been crucial to those actually occupying space in providing food, health care and other services but it is less prestigious, if that’s the right word within an activist movement. There needs to be a leveling so that each form of action is seen as equally important.

So far OWS hasn’t been able to cater to all needs. A few days ago I remember a young woman intervening in a discussion about activism, saying that she can’t be active because there is no child care provision for her two-year-old. While efforts have sometimes been made (though not enough), there is a thicket of law around child care that makes such work really complicated. This is a recurring issue. The first radical event I was involved with in the U.K. called “Left Alive,” which took place just after Thatcher’s crushing second election victory, provided fabulous child care: which no one used because they hadn’t expected it to be any good.

So, no, there won’t be and can’t be a general strike on May 1. Certain duties of care will continue and should do so. Still more people can’t strike because they will be fired if they do. And many others have nowhere to withdraw their labor from, other than domestic situations.

So we need to become in Ana Mendez de Andés’s phrase “traficantes de sueños,” traffickers in dreams: what would make people’s day better on May Day that doesn’t involve work, housework, banking, or school? What do we have in common that we can share? How can we reclaim time from the compartmentalized day, just as we have struggled to reclaim public space? How do we make May 2 seem like a positive beginning to something for each and every day, rather than a return to the chores of the everyday?

 

Another Brain Is Possible

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Immaterial labor, the knowledge economy, service-based industries, call them what you will but they depend on the brain, in the same way that factory labor depends on the body. It is, then, a symptom of the suicidal autoimmune capitalism that has been forged in the past thirty years that fish, the single food most associated with improving the brain, actually kills it. Our brains ourselves demand a new global system as the precondition for our survival.

Nearly all varieties of fish, long exalted as brain food, contain significant quantities of mercury. The mercury arrives in the ocean as a by-product of coal, used above all in power stations. Washed out of the air into rivers by rain, it accumulates in the sea. It is absorbed by fish and more particularly by carnivorous fish. So the higher up the food chain you go the worse the problem becomes, because fish that eat other carnivorous fish get more concentrated doses. By the time you get to top-end carnivores like tuna, shark, marlin and swordfish, the levels are very noticeable.

But there’s no such thing as a “safe” level. Mercury doesn’t simply harm the brain–it makes it disappear. Here’s a video from the University of Calgary that shows how brain neurons wither and disappear in the presence of mercury–at 2 mins 30 if you want to skip ahead

So let’s say you don’t really worry about rising temperatures, drought and the other indices of climate change: do you care that you’re killing your brain by what you eat?

The dots are easy to join. A fossil fuel based energy economy puts increasing amounts of mercury into the biosphere, which concentrate in the bodies of fish. This toxicity makes the flesh of humanity’s last remaining wild food source unambiguously hazardous for consumption. It threatens the very possibility of human creativity itself. This problem is easy to describe but cannot be solved in the present economic system. Increasingly the choice is between sustaining the greatest number of human lives or the largest profit. The change for the former cannot be achieved by policy, by interstate treaty or by the market. It will either happen post-catastrophe or by systemic change.

Surely this is the usual alarmist stuff from environmentalists we have become so adept at ignoring? Last year Time journalist Bryan Walsh had himself tested for mercury–and found his levels at twice the government recommended limit. He bizarrely adds that this is not a problem for men, presumably because they don’t use their brains. Under heavy pressure from fossil fuel industry and fishing alike, government has simply caved and designated mercury a risk for women and children only.

Still not bothered? Now studies are showing that sharks and other top predator fish are contaminated with BMAA, a neurotoxin related to cyanide that accumulate in human flesh:

A growing body of research suggests there may be a connection between exposure to the toxin and the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The bacteria that cause the toxin are naturally occurring: perhaps it’s just an indication that we did not evolve expecting to eat sharks and other animals with extensive rows of teeth that live in the open ocean.

Who eats shark anyway?

Shark fins, second row from the top, China Town NYC

Lots of people, that’s who, mostly as shark fin soup, which now stands revealed as the ultimate autoimmune dish. The fins are, even by shark standards, intensely concentrated sources of mercury and BMAA. The soup is eaten to celebrate special occasions or as a luxury item, mostly by Chinese people. I’m not even going to get into the practice of harvesting fins from sharks that are then thrown back into the ocean to die.

Let’s not get a frisson of superiority here if we don’t eat such soups but restrict our choices to more “sensible” fish. So many “forage” fish, the small fish humans don’t eat but larger fish do, have been fished that the species now face serious risk of extinction. What happens to them? Fish farms grind them up and feed them to their animals–what better way could be imagined to intensify the concentration of mercury and BMAA in the food chain? Your reasoned choice for a farmed salmon or whatever else is just as implicated in the collapse of world fish stocks and the toxicity of top-end fish as shark’s fin soup, just in different ways.

As usual, it’s Africans, least involved in any of this, who are paying the highest visible price. Off the coasts of West Africa, huge quantities of forage fish are gathered by European Union supertrawlers that freeze the fish on board. As such fish constitute a vital food source for Africans, the risks of overfishing are literally life and death for subaltern populations. Yet the European fishing industry is more concerned about Chinese boats than the sustaining of local people. Once again, threats to profit are taken more seriously than threats to people.

We like to say another world is possible. Another one is actively being made right now in which wild species of fish will be close to extinction with their few remaining specimens will be too toxic to eat. Human brains and bodies are suffering. Another world is necessary.

 

Take 2: Activist Research

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It seems that  my title “activism is the new theory” was somewhat misunderstood–or better, open to misunderstanding. I’ve had interesting comments via FB, email and word of mouth that made it seem worth following up the post today (by the way, if you feel nervous about posting a comment to the blog, you can email a comment to me and I can post it anonymously). If you’re not nervous do leave comments where everyone can see them:)

Objection one: isn’t “activist theory” just praxis by another name? Perhaps; but with a couple of caveats. Praxis is often described as something like the interaction of theory and practice, often with an able-ist quote of the “theory without practice is blind” variety attached. Or you can cite Marx: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world–the point, however, is to change it.”

For all that, the philosophy of praxis has tended to be more philosophy than praxis, especially in university contexts. On the other hand, I think it is perhaps the moment to leave philosophy to the philosophers. By suggesting that activism is the new theory, I didn’t mean it should replace theory. In rather compressed fashion, I meant that the highly privileged space afforded to “theory” in the academy might be replaced by activism, providing we take that to mean the “interface where we ‘do’ theory.”

Objection two: isn’t this is all wildly optimistic? Again, perhaps so. But if you look at the posts on debt, especially student debt, I am doubtful that you’ll find me so starry-eyed. I have spent my entire working life under the rhetorical shadow of crisis, from Thatcherism to the War on Terror and now the global financial crisis. I’ve been in left and social democratic political parties, pressure groups and even did some work for the Obama campaign.

I think this moment is different. The crisis is such that even as neoliberal austerity is clearly failing, a growth policy would only exacerbate climate change that is setting drought and temperature records daily. I’m still not pessimistic, because the global movement of which Occupy is a part has had more torque than anything I’ve seen. The very violence unleashed by the cops from coast to coast suggests that this movement gets under their skin in a different way. Once we give in to the pleasures of pessimism, though, it’s easy to read this as a “moment,” perhaps a transition. Since things started to move during the Arab Spring, it’s seemed to me that this is it–either there is change now or there isn’t for some long time to come.

I don’t pretend that this is all my idea. The 16 Beaver Group today circulated a very interesting text from 2005, a response from the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones to a set of questions from the Madrid-based Precarias a la Deriva, Precarious Women in the Dérive (Drift). Note that they were writing after the great wave of militancy in 2001 had passed. The Colectivo outlined their strategy of “research militancy” situated in tension with the “‘sad militant'” and the “detached, unchangeable ‘university researcher.'” Their goal:

a practice capable of articulating involvement and thought.

In a time when the phantasmagoria of common ground has dispersed, idealization of all kinds is problematic:

We think that the labor of research militancy is linked to the construction of a new perception.

This is precisely the project of my own work in all arenas. At the same time–because this project is after all not (yet) a collective one–I also agree with the Precarias

We consider as a primary problem to ‘start from oneself,’ as one among many, in order to ‘get out of oneself’ (both of the individual ego and the radical group to which one belongs) and encounter with any other resisting people [in order to] politicize life from within.

Research radicalism, a feminist politics of immediate experience, the necessity of a certain commitment, the awareness of the an-archive of refusal, all in a moment where uncertainty creates opportunity for new ways of thinking and doing–that’s what I mean by “activism is the new theory.” Call it what you like.

Activism is the New Theory

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Can we say that activism is the new theory? Not the replacement for theory, not the subject of theory but the interface where we “do” theory. As this project is today one quarter complete, a look around seems in order. I feel change, everywhere. I feel it most where I try to think, wherever that is: that place in the twilight of the shadow city where things look different.

I’m thinking back to Ruth Gilmore saying in her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association that “policy is the new theory.” She did mean “replacement for” (in part at least), I suspect. However, given the paralysis of the existing political process that began in November 2010 with the Republican takeover of the House and many state legislatures, such a move has not seemed promising.

With the wholesale conversion of the judicial branch to political theater, as evidenced by the ludicrous Supreme Court “hearings” on health care, the old stand-by of legal activism also seems foreclosed. Let’s pause to dwell on the rank misogyny of Scalia and his ilk, insisting that, like a bad mother, the government might force real men to eat broccoli. The legal and economic ripostes are beside the point–health care makes men into wimps, according to the Stand Your Ground right.

So in saying that activism might be the new theory, I’m not saying something as simple as “we can only learn in the streets.” I am suggesting that a certain kind of High Theory, so privileged over the past two decades, and so masculine in its exaltation of rigor, is demonstrably (as it were) not the way to get to grips with the crisis. For example, the widespread suggestion amongst theorists of a certain kind that we should read St. Paul–really? I’m just not going to do that.

For Jack Halberstam, the alternative is “low theory,” an approach that he sees as a mix of Stuart Hall’s Gramscian concept of theory as a “detour en route to something else,” the Benjaminian stroll and the Situationist dérive. Add to this Rancière’s concept of education as emancipation, learning what it is that we need to learn, and there’s a very dynamic way of thinking to hand. Unsurprisingly, these approaches have also featured widely across Occupy 2012.

What is surprising to an extent is the new viability of anarchist approaches in the critical context. When I was writing The Right to Look, I spent a good deal of time worrying about whether I could discuss anarchist interpretations of history, the general strike, Rosa Luxemburg and so on and be taken “seriously.” I wonder why I worried now. On the one hand, who cares if the seriousness police mark you down as one of them? On the other, the reason those ideas seemed important was a mark of the crisis in which we were already immersed. The an-archive is newly open for thinking.

At the same time, I’d be surprised if anyone who has been reading frequently here thinks of this as a theory project as such. I think of it as having a series of threads, one of which might be labelled “theory,” but which would not, as it were, hold up on its own. It gets energy from, and is sustained by, the interaction with a set of activities that can be designated “activism.”

The funny thing about being an activist is no-one really thinks of themselves as being one. Those that do probably get paid to do so, which is not quite what I have in mind. I think there’s a distinction between “being an activist” and learning from activism. In this sense, the current form of activism takes all of the activities and actions that we do every day as being the site of a new politics and a new invitation to theorize.

This invitation is about making connections, finding histories, creating tools, and hearing new voices. It is also about refusing: refusing the market view of the world, refusing to “move on, there’s nothing to see here,” refusing to give up, refusing to just accept that in the end it’s all about the [Democratic/Labor/Socialist/whatever] Party.

It’s not about being the cleverest kid in the class, showing how much we know, upstaging or undercutting others with ideas. For me, it was enabled by Occupy but it is not in any way limited to that frame. In some ways, it’s already moved out of the encampments into the networks and beyond the control of all the police trying to contain it.  I’m looking forward to seeing what the next nine months will bring.

The Anarchic Archive of Refusal

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As people worldwide develop new tactics to refuse the subjugations and humiliations imposed on them in the name of austerity, an archive of resistance is re-emerging into view. It details the present, as evanescent as it is, and generates connections to past struggles. It is what we might call the an-archive, an archive of the desire for a fairer life, which we might call a world without hierarchy. Or anarchy.

Has any nation in the developed world been more damaged by neoliberalism than Ireland? When I visited after the 2008 crash the sense of despair was palpable. It’s all the more remarkable, then, to see the success of the campaign to resist the so-called “household levy,” a quaint-sounding term that attempts to disguise the fact that it is in fact what one might call an “austerity charge.” Each household is supposed to pay 100 euro (about $130) in advance of a more onerous property tax to come next year. As of this writing, only about half of Ireland’s households have complied. No doubt the authorities will try and claim that getting just over 50% is somehow a victory.

5000 demonstrate against the tax--note the Occupy banner top right

It’s clear, though, that no-one anticipated this refusal because the tax process is voluntary. As there is no existing register of households, each is supposed to register themselves and then pay. It says much about the hierarchical culture of Ireland that it was just assumed that this would happen.

The refusal brought a  predictable response from former Celtic Tiger booster economist Jim Power:

If we go down the road of breaking the law because we believe it to be unfair, we will create a total disrespect for the law and the logical conclusion is that we will gradually descend into a state of anarchy.

For the aptly-named Power and his ilk, this anarchy is the worst imaginable state, the war of all against all. The actions taken by the majority of the Irish people suggests that an anarchy in which laws are consensed, and the quality of life of the multitude is the determining factor, might indeed be just what they want. And they are not alone.

It’s very interesting to see how widespread the global contempt for the solutions proposed by austerity has become and how the desire for an alternative is reviving long-forgotten precedents. Over the last couple of days, activists in Tahrir Square, Cairo, have set about demolishing the walls built by the Egyptian military to contain and separate the square from the rest of the city.

The wall comes down

In these photographs by Mosha’ab El Shamy, the familiar Tahrir coalition can be seen, toppling a wall that had been brightly graffiti-ed by star artists of the new street art movement.

Celebrating the collapse

No nostalgia here, no call to preserve the art, as there would inevitably be in the overdeveloped world. Luckily Suzee in the City had documented it already:

Graffiti by Kaiser on the separation wall, Cairo

Such photographs now become part of the resistance archive that is being rediscovered and recirculated at the moment. I have already posted some examples of the photographs of past May Day actions in Union Square. Gavin Brown today posted a photograph of a rent strike in London from 1959:

3500 refuse higher rents in London, 1959

Such organized rent strikes were a common tactic of radical city life from the 19th century on. Here’s a painting by the Parisian genre artist Louis Léopold Boilly known as The Movings from 1822, showing a typical scene on the day that rent for the next quarter fell due and many of the city’s working classes were forced to move.

Boilly, "The Movings" (1822)

I like these kinds of genealogies that lead us from present-day actions to the now canonical archives of a certain modernism. This moment of quiet dignity, a refusal to pay a rent that could not be afforded, is the backdrop to the more celebrated Paris of the dandies, the courtesans and indeed the revolutionaries.

I draw energy from these past and present reconfigurations of everyday life, the archive of a set of claims that laws should be fair and that a certain anarchy should indeed prevail.

 

Local Space, Local Bodies

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Where and what is the local? We spend a good deal of time worrying about the global but the local seems obvious. Occupy is intriguingly showing that not to be the case.There are many ways in which physical localities can be configured, as we saw first with the encampments and more recently with anti-foreclosure and anti-school closings activism in the movement. Yet the concept perhaps begins with the most local space of all: our bodies.

At a meeting in New York today, Aaron Bady who has been active with Occupy Oakland discussed the clear differences between OWS and OO. In fact, locally Occupy Oakland is known as the Oakland Commune, not as Occupy. Most notable was his demonstration that OO operates in a media desert, where even the local “newspaper” the Oakland Tribune is simply assembled from press releases. So when OO activists participate in City Council meetings and tweet the proceedings, they are meeting a real journalistic need.

Bady further talked of his own personal experience and suggested that OO had made him feel like an Oakland resident for the first time, despite having lived there for four years. His account resonated with me. OWS has made me revise my psychogeography of New York in so many ways. In the interstices of a city that appears to be nothing but nail salons, banks and pharmacies, I have found my way to trade union halls, churches, artist-run spaces, and other spaces that are not usually imagined as being part of “New York.” It comes to seem as if the commercialized New York has been imposed on top of this other New York, sometimes squashing it altogether as in the transformation of the old CBGB’s into a fashion boutique.

At the same meeting, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg spoke of dis/ability activism, reminding us again of how central non-normative embodiment and self-actualization is to whatever it is that is Occupy. On March 17 at the re-occupation and re-eviction of Zuccotti Park, activists from the Disabilities Working Group were present throughout, some in chairs and one person using a ventilator apparatus. They were absolutely unintimidated by the cops.

Ginsburg showed a remarkable video made in 2007 by Amanda Baggs, in which she is shown first making movements and sounds characteristic of a person on the autism spectrum. Then the video moves to a “translation” into sub-titled and machine-generated English, in which Baggs explains that in her view she experiences the environment in a very different and  more extensive spectrum of feelings and connections. She scoffed at “expert” suggestions that other people “must” have made the video and reeled off a long list of software and equipment that she had used to a Wired journalist. The inevitable Internet sites that call her a “fraud” miss her whole point: it’s not that there are no differences but there are far more differences than is normally–and that’s the mot juste here–recognized.

In 2007, Baggs wrote about wishing there were an equivalent to the queer liberation movement for people with autism. Her video was part of the accomplishment of that goal. She now writes as a “political” or “ethical” blogger and has expressed balanced support for the Occupy movement:

most people (and therefore most people involved in this movement) fundamentally don’t grasp that disabled people are people. They’ll deny it, and they may believe they think we’re people, but their actions treat us differently than their words do. Even people who are against capitalist greed in theory, have usually not worked out that part of capitalism is valuing people differently based on the kind and amount of work they do, and the creation of a system that figures that if it can’t manage to exploit disabled people then we’re basically trash….I absolutely support the general idea of the movement…. but I also know that without disabled people’s voices getting heard the outcomes could still be quite bad for us even if their goals are totally met otherwise.

So while it has become quite popular, even standard practice, to say that the movements for recognition distracted from the struggle against capitalism, it’s starting to seem like the opposite: that a set of localized distinctions and claims is precisely what is forming the possibility of imagining a world without capitalism, something that many had come to think impossible.

 

Creative Refusal

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The new strategy of creative refusal of impoverishment by austerity continues to unfold. After some different strategies in New York, today’s countrywide general strike in Spain made it clear that the crisis in the eurozone shows no sign of being over. Tonight in New York, David Graeber urged an overflow crowd to extend our historical as well as geographic understandings of creative refusal.

With the Greek elections ahead, new cuts promised across Europe and recessions now official from the UK to Portugal, refusal is just beginning. The electricity surcharge strike in Greece has been joined by a tax strike in Ireland with a rally planned for Saturday after only 23% of taxpayers have consented to the new austerity tax.

In Spain today, the general strike shut down the auto industry, heavy industry, the trains and the airports. Electricity use, the new index of strike action, was down 25%. Should there be any news reports here, they will no doubt show the small fire in Barcelona. Much more impressive were the direct actions. Here’s the Atocha Station, site of the bombings whose anniversary just passed, closed by the strike:

The Atocha Station closed by strike action

For the edification of Chris Hedges, here’s what Black bloc actually does–it shut down a major highway in Barcelona this morning and this took personal courage:

Students block Diagonal Avenue, Barcelona

And then this evening, Spanish time, a rally of impressive proportions in Puerta del Sol:

It was against this, shall we say, striking background that David Graeber spoke of creative refusal. As is his wont, he expanded our horizons in time and space. The true radicality here is to see the so-called modern with its obsession with self-interest and its invention of the market as the exception to a far longer human history concerned with very different cosmologies.There’s a real intellectual liberation at work here.

Cultural studies types of my vintage might think of E. P. Thompson’s eighteenth-century poachers, “stealing” the landlord’s fish or game, as a prototype for creative refusal, leading to de Certeau’s appropriation of “poaching” to mean using office stationery or doing personal tasks on work time. More recently, James Scott and others have talked of the ways that the enslaved and the colonized were deliberately slow at their work, pushing the horizons further back. Graeber wants to take the entire range of known human history as a resource for creative refusal, arguing that it impoverishes us to set so much of it aside. In a bold conceptual move, he called for thinking of history as social movements.

Drawing on his astonishing range of learning, Graeber cited examples from ancient Sumeria to Polynesia and Madagascar. He repeatedly suggested that the outcast and the marginalized might be thought of as choosing such status in order to defend an anti-hierarchical politics. He described, for example, how Madagascar was first permanently settled by slave colonies, whose enslaved revolted and established complex barriers to the establishment of a state.

What’s inspiring is the willingness to see all humans as political actors with mature motives and to assume that humans have always been far more connected than the so-called historical record demonstrates. In thinking about Polynesia, for example, Graeber asked whether it makes sense to assume that the so-called Polynesians reached as far as Easter Island from South-East Asia–and then stopped, never trying to reach South America, as even the shipwrecked sailors of the whaler Essex did in 1820. This assumption is necessary to reinforce the idea of “primitive” isolation so that when Captain Cook and others arrived, they must have been seen as gods with unheard of technologies, like ships.

Finally, he mentioned a Papua New Guinea people who have a consensus-building culture, which, like Occupy, involves endless meetings: only there is an obligation on all speakers to be funny, so the meetings are very popular. Now that’s an idea whose time has come.

 

 

Occupy on Ice

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Air bubbles in Tenaya Lake, Yosemite

Breathe in. Relax. Do it again. You just engaged in time travel. In the air that you inhaled will have been molecules released by melting glaciers, ice sheets and tundra that previously circulated tens of thousands of years ago. There’s neolithic air in your blood, air that never before passed through a human body. A little uncanny, isn’t it?

Our bodies seem intensely singular at one level, uniquely “us.” At a different scale, they are assemblages of cells, microbes and atoms of varying provenance. These non-human “actants” (to use Bruno Latour’s term) engage with each other in ways that do not impinge on our consciousness but are cognitive actions. Think for example of the operations of what we like to call the immune system. White blood cells “remember” whether a virus or other form is a pathogen they have encountered before or not and act accordingly. You don’t know what’s happening but your body does.

Indulge me a moment. Let’s imagine that the previously frozen air and your body cells are talking: what are they saying to each other? Get your headphones now, preferably some good ones.

The ice, as we all know, is melting. Moving or melting ice generates a remarkable set of sounds. Artist Katie Paterson has created an installation that gives us the sound of the melting Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland–scroll to the bottom of the page and click play. It’s a harmless enough and familiar noise, trickling water, the clink of ice.

The Vatnajokull glacier

The voice of the moving, shifting ice is intense–Cheryl Leonard recorded it this winter in Yosemite–listen here but give it a moment to load, it’s a large file. Or listen to the sound of the Antarctic ice sheet posted by Andreas Bick–it’s the WAV file close to the top and make sure to be listening around 40 seconds in. Check out how DJ Spooky brings together the African-American concepts of “chill” and “ice”–Ice Cube, Ice-T–with the disappearing ice, the nation state, and climate change:

You might say that these sounds are pure signified–a cacophony of overlaid meaning about time, duration, space, human/non-human interactions, melting, movement and more. Or you could say: this is what climate change sounds like.

What does it say? It speaks back to the human empire. It has long been held that the colonized “cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” So it might say:

"These Romans are crazy" Here’s Obelix from the Asterix cartoon (done before there were graphic novels) using his catchphrase “These Romans are crazy.” Some people see this as anti-imperialist pure and simple, others think it’s Gaullist, which at least has the merit of being anti-NATO. Let’s say that it represents anti-transnationalism. The ice is just saying, “these humans are crazy.”

What he said

Anglophone culture has a short answer to that.

In this view, the imperial project brings benefits to all, including the colonized. The muppet known as Rick Santorum has been saying that responding to climate change is wrong because that would be putting earth over humans (ok, he says “man”). For neoliberalism  that would be to put the People’s Front of Judea in charge of the Roman Empire.

Jane Bennet has suggested that a critical “division of the sensible” is the distinction between “life” and “matter,” the latter often qualified as “mere” or “mute” matter. We can no more hear what the ice in our bodies is saying than the Roman senators could interpret the “noise” made by the plebs.

Rome fell, of course. The human empire is teetering. No statistics: I am told that is depressing. Just breathe.