Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Occupy and “The Queer Art of Failure”

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In Occupy circles these days, there’s a lot of discussion of success and failure. J. Jack Halberstam’s new book raises the prospect of what he calls “the queer art of failure,” creating a set of intriguing overlaps that I’m going to explore here. Yesterday, Halberstam introduced the book to a packed and boisterous audience in New York (his text will be forthcoming on Bullybloggers with those of the respondents!). So my thoughts are inspired by a combination of being at the panel and reading the book itself.

Failure is a provocative question for Occupy. Of course, the movement was a response to the catastrophic failure of neoliberal capitalism. But to suggest aspects of failure within is to seem disloyal to a project in which so many of us are intensely invested. Halberstam queers that logic by suggesting that in the search “to live otherwise,” it may be that

[u]nder certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing…offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.

In the OWS context, for example, any return to economic “success” by means of traditional growth would in fact be a disaster as it would still further accelerate the processes of climate change. Occupy needs to undo the imperative for “growth” in order to find ways by coexist and indeed to continue to exist.

Halberstam’s project again intersects with the way I have been thinking about these issues in calling not for success but for abolition. Abolition acknowledges that something has failed so utterly that it must be abolished and it is therefore a founding moment. Halberstam quotes one of my favorite essays at this point, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses:

Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be …uncanny.

[Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, behind paywall; I’ve extended the quote by a line beyond Halberstam, 114]

Halberstam’s book takes much energy from Benjamin, whose weak messianism can be understood as a form of abolitionism, in keeping with his concept of the general strike as an effort to return only to a radically transformed work, rather than to achieve a specific goal. As everyone should know, Occupy is supporting the call for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more on May Day. Much energy has been wasted, in my view, by trying to define what its success would mean.

For example, in a recent talk at NYU (also published in the Guardian) the philosopher Simon Critchley, very sympathetic to OWS, claimed:

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people.

Thus Occupy would be a success if it “got things done” by means of restoring democracy. There’s much to question here, notably the surprisingly instrumental definition of power that seems to want to forget Foucault. But to continue, things would get done by articulating the:

infinite demand that flows from the perception of an injustice; second, a location where that demand is articulated. There is no politics without location.

The formula combines queer philosopher Judith Butler’s influential call for “impossible demands” with what, following Halberstam, we could call a “straight” insistence on being in one place and one place only. Enter Plato, the opponent of all doubling.

In the Republic, as Rancière reminds us, Plato instructs:

It is right for the shoemaker by nature to make shoes and occupy himself with nothing else.

That is to say, if a person has an allocated role and then they go and occupy somewhere else they are at fault. A person should be “in” the nature which is proposed for them and not “out” of it by being elsewhere. When we occupy, we are in and out at once–in occupation and out of place, in a nature we have chosen and out of the one allocated.

For Halberstam, to be queer is precisely to be out of place, being where one is not supposed to be, refusing normativity. If we follow the spatial implications, to occupy is queer, a way in which we can live otherwise. Certainly the “anti-disciplinary” politics of his project can be thought of as the refusal to conform to the order sought by the police, as the refusal to move on.

What would it mean, then, to think of the queer art of failure in regard to Occupy? One way to respond to this complex question might be to think about the way in which the encampments were considered “home.” This gave Occupy the location from which to articulate its demands and in more practical vein provided a literal place to live to many migrant and unhoused activists, as well as the space to form a community.

It might be suggested that some failures also came from the normatizing effects of making a home. There were persistent allegations of sexual harassment at many Occupy sites, despite the many queer, trans, LGBT and feminist persons involved. Can these incidents be thought through as part of the (hetero)normatizing that might come with making a home, a failure to create a different form of living?

Being based in a single place also makes you a target. It was and is relatively easy for the police to evict Occupy encampments once the decision to do so has been taken. The direct action organizer Lisa Fithian has encouraged Occupy to imagine itself as a shoal of fish, or a herd of animals, or a flight of birds–moving, transitory and fluid ways of living. Halberstam might point us to Chicken Run or the adventure of the Fantastic Mr. Fox or other “radical animations” as the means to imagine such “stopping and going, moving and halting.”

In discussion yesterday, Halberstam mentioned being intrigued by the way that The Invisible Committee describe the spreading of resistance as being non-linear, a “resonance” that takes on greater density

[t]o the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

This interface of desire, the failure of the “normal,” non-linear ways of moving, new forms of imagining, anti-disciplinarity is perhaps what it might be to occupy the queer art of failure.

 

Welcome to the Twilight Zone

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Twilight is when the shadow city can best be seen and unseen, moving in and out of perception at the corners of our eyes. To see it is to see otherwise, an altervision. You may be called mad. For seeing inside and outside is a way of thinking alien to the police. As Brian Thill writes in his wonderful journal today, describing the scene in Zuccotti Park the day before the confrontations of March 17:

And this was the one thing that struck me most about the nature of the police in this twilight time, as they leaned against their cars or cracked jokes with their co-workers: “the police” is really the name for the conjunction of brute force and the absolute inability to imagine.

The twilight–my favorite time, the noir time of day, linking Baudelaire’s crépescule to The Twilight Zone, a time for imagining.

Let’s try some twilight visualizing, as an exercise in not thinking like the police–whether the disciplinary, thought, political, or what have you police.

In Walter Benjamin’s noir set in Paris, The Arcades Project, the altervisionary was the color-blind engraver and colonial explorer Charles Meryon. His city was cross-hatched, full of revolutionary shadows.

Meryon--The Ministry of the Navy--Fictions and Vows

At the left, jutting into the space, is the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, with whom Meryon had long disputes following his service. On the ground, horsebacked troops or police, with some footsoldiers, spin in confusion. For above them, there where there should not be anything to see, is an advancing formation of marine creatures.It is a work of artistic revolt–the engraving, like the marine painting, was considered a “minor” genre, irrelevant to the grand work of History painting.

The scene is also one of memory work–the Ministry abuts the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine had done its work. Renamed the Place de la Concorde by the Directory in 1795, it was colonized by Napoleon with the placement of an Egyptian obelisk that he had removed from Luxor. There’s another one in Central Park. In 1858 the Ministry of Navy and Colonies had begun the French colonial venture into Vietnam with what they called the Cochinchina War, leading to the establishment of a fully-fledged colony in 1864 with its capital in Saigon. We know how that turned out.

Meryon’s liminal engraving with its deep cross-hatched shadows visualized the intersection of empire and revolution with its sky-borne multitude, not quite real and yet clearly visible to the ground-bound police. Shortly after he completed this piece, he was interred in the Charenton, a notorious “asylum” for the insane.” He was released only to die.

Cross-hatch a bit further: the Ministry of the Navy was the Kreigsmarine under the German Occupation. I remember standing in the Place in 1984 at an anti-racism rally where a group of outraged French Resistance veterans pointed out the former Gestapo headquarters right next door to the Ministry. One of them was Stéphane Hessel, whose manifesto Indignez-Vous! [Get Mad!] (2010) was a formative influence in the Indignés movement that prefigured Occupy. In short, that’s us, up in the sky in the Meryon.

Cross-hatching was a term adopted by the novelist China Miéville for his noir/science fantasy The City and the City. Two cities co-exist in the same topographical space. Some spaces are total (in one city only), while many others are cross-hatched–partly in one, partly in the other. Citizens learn to negotiate this space by “unseeing,” a willed avoidance of attention.To fail to observe the divide is to “breach,” entailing catastrophic intervention by a mysterious uber-police known only as Breach.

Miéville insists that his work is not an allegory and we’re coming to understand why. Reviewing the book a year ago, Henry Farrell pointed out in the Boston Review:

Middle-class Americans and Europeans commonly unsee the homeless who are around them, affecting not to perceive them except as physical impediments to be circumnavigated. The homeless are recognized by their clothes, their gait, their way of being in the world, and in that act of recognition are dismissed.

Change “homeless” to “Occupy” and we have a good assessment of how the mainstream media and citizenry are dealing with the movement by “unseeing” it. If we stir, it is as a “remnant,” a twilight manifestation that is not quite real and should be avoided for fear of “breach.”

China Miéville is now working on a revived 1960s DC comic, Dial H for Hero. In the original comic, anyone who dialed H-E-R-O on the special phone would become a hero. For visualization, this is no ordinary word. Generals began visualizing battlefields in the late eighteenth century and then the idea was (as it were) generalized to “heroes,” Thomas Carlyle’s own fantasy about all-powerful autocrats who alone could “visualize” history (his word). The concepts that leaders have “vision” and that “great men make history” are still central to mainstream notions of authority. Carlyle argued that the modern hero Napoleon first demonstrated his visuality when he turned his artillery on the revolutionary crowd in Paris in 1795. Bloomberg, Kelly and their ilk likewise imagine themselves to be heroes.

Dial H for Hero

In the new twilight of Miéville’s version of the comic, the heroes are just as hostile to the citizenry as Carlyle’s monstrous autocrats. The background of this image seems to be a cross-hatching of psychogeographies, the Situationist way of attaching feeling to space.

Don’t Dial H for Hero. There are none waiting in the shadows. It is us who wait there, unseeing, learning now to unsee our unseeing, and finding that we don’t recognize the twilight zone we have emerged into.

 

The Shadow City

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"Power to the Imagination! We will take, We will Occupy"--N17 sign

There has been a certain melancholic tone adopted recently about Occupy that also contains within it a hint of relief. It suggests that “politics” can now resume, that perhaps we need to be involved with the U. S. election, and that Occupy was just a moment, which could never be carried forward. I feel the force of this but resist it. There is nothing of the politics that interests me in “politics.”

What’s happening in the present awakening is a remapping of the old modernist haunt, the city. The cityscape of New York disappeared behind the facade of the “global city,” a phantasmagoria of the coup of finance capital. This imaginary pushes the long histories of settlement, colonization and internationalization into the shades of the unspeakable. Occupy’s city is returning from the dark corners, where resistance to those processes always lived, to allow for a circulation that is not that of capital.

When Occupy emerged and consolidated itself as a space, the means by which it was incorporated back into the spectacle was as a particular instance of space: Zuccotti Park. In this imagining, Occupy is active only when there are bodies in Zuccotti. There’s some energy to this idea because having the encampment was astonishing. What’s happening now is equally intriguing–a branching out of the first space to other spaces and a re-networking of the resistant cityscape.

As Nato Thompson put it this week:

In essence, the freedom to assemble is now the freedom to occupy the public imagination.

Likewise, David Graeber has been emphasizing the recapturing of imagination as a central process of Occupy. This process does not seem to me to be a liberation of the spaces occupied by capital, so much as the creation of a new space for the imagination to map, explore, desire and create.

In Alain Badiou’s essay on the Commune, this space is what happens when you break with the

parliamentary destiny of popular and worker’s political movements.

He takes this a step further to claim that “the ‘Left'” is that

set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement.

That “Left” is certainly articulating this claim in relation to Occupy right now. A “break with the Left”–which would in the U. S. also be the very possibility of a politics–would then open certain spaces to the imagination and not simply occupy one space in downtown.

The Commune was famously described as follows:

One enters, one leaves, one circulates, one gathers….Approach the groups, listen. A whole people entertain profound matters. For the first time workers can be heard exchanging their appreciations on things that hitherto only philosophers had tackled. There is no trace of supervisors; no police agents obstruct the street.

It sounds familiar and not, doesn’t it? The discussions are so Occupy. The entering, leaving and circulating as well, as long as someone stays behind; as for the absence of police, that’s our future imaginary. The barricade theatre at Union Square, the +Brigades, the mobile Occupy Town Square, the circle discussions outside the U. N. yesterday–all of these things occupy this imaginary. The shadow city is tangible now. You feel strange for noticing it and get told that you are extreme for doing so. But it’s there.

 

 

 

Law? Or Theatre?

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Another day, another few notches out of the right to assembly in Bloombergistan. A march against police violence was broken up  by–guess what? police violence. Learning from these repeated encounters, an action protesting climate change at the U. N. was a theater of the absurd of arrests, in which the cops had to arrest people claiming to be the one percent.

Cops playing their role at Disrupt Dirty Power

If you’re on the right kind of Twitter and Facebook feeds, you’ll have heard about the unnecessary use of force on the police brutality march. The use of some switchbacks by the marchers in NoHo seemed to irritate the police, who were themselves trying to prevent the march from reaching Union Square about a mile to the north. Of course, it’s not illegal to walk to Union Square but since the middle of this week it has suddenly become illegal to have a rally there, according to mysterious new “rules” that popped up overnight.

In a series of arrests was one of Messiah Hamid, a 16 year-old woman with her shirt lifted by the NYPD. Many present and looking at the photographs were reminded of a similar photograph, known as “the woman with the blue bra”, showing her being dragged away by the military in Egypt. I’m choosing not to reproduce the photograph of Hamid’s arrest because she’s a minor but there were many such scuffles (see below).

Just another violent arrest of a minor in NYC

The sustainability action called Disrupt Dirty Power was designed to force police to arrest participants as part of the action. A group dressed as business executives marched onto the grass at the United Nations and started proclaiming their adherence to free market principles and the pursuit of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nukes. A ridiculously disproportionate number of police were present and leaped in to make the arrests. However, they had forgotten to bring their van, so the performers had a perfect stage to expound their views to assembled photographers and live streamers.

"The One Percent" address the media

The Disrupt Dirty Power action had a strong narrative to it that was about more than reacting to recent events. It suggested a “join the dots” strategy, in which the connections between social and ecological crisis and the profit-first motif of neoliberalism are visualized. It begins to look as if non-violent civil disobedience with the presumption of arrest is emerging as the next stage of the American Spring. Perhaps it’s better than volunteers who have been trained in civil disobedience should be those arrested than random teenagers. At the same time, is this law? or theatre? If law is a set of agreed principles  y which a society is organized, what’s happening in New York is not the rule of law. It’s an improvised way to maintain law enforcement, which is altogether different.

The contradictions in what the police are doing need to be stressed even in the U. N. action that was designed to involve arrests. For their intervention was so rapid that the second part of the action in which the 99% celebrated the just arrest of the one percent had to be conducted from across First Avenue.

The 99 percent

It’s not even clear under whose authority arrests are made at the U. N. which has autonomy–as anyone who has tried to park in New York knows–but is also subject to local and Federal law. One U. N. security person was present but was about as important as a Vichy cop would have been to the Gestapo. No comparison intended of course.

The action was intended to end with a projection onto the United Nations building by the intrepid OWS projections team. Somehow the police got wind of this and warned organizers that any projection would lead not only to the arrest of those involved but the impounding of the vehicle from which the projections are now done. In what sense is it a crime to project light onto buildings? Vacant buildings at that. By what law do the police get to confiscate expensive equipment and threaten to do so before it is used?

The law is a theatre it is a singularly monotonous one. There is only one line: “order.” The scenes are all the same. So every night at midnight in Union Square when the police put up their new barricade, the Occupiers stage a performance. Tonight: Animal Farm!

 

The American Spring: Debt, Segregation and the Limits of the Unspeakable

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Sign in Union Square

If there is to be an “American Spring,” as so many of us hope, it is now possible to see its emerging boundaries: a refusal both of the failure to change the real conditions that provoked the Civil Rights movement, and of endebted or indentured life.These boundaries have become literally unspeakable in everyday life. There is no racism, we are told, and any infringement is severely reprimanded. Debt, on the other hand, is purely and simply a moral failing on the part of the debtor, unspeakable because it is shaming.

These, then, are the boundaries of the unspeakable: debt and segregation. If there is the living legacy of chattel slavery on the one side, there is the present existence of debt servitude on the other. Many are on both sides of this sorry equation, which is resolved and kept stable only by the existence of the prison-industrial complex, which is so discriminatory that it has become known as “the New Jim Crow.” This is the true “American exceptionalism”–the willingness to imprison millions, have millions more in the criminal justice system, and countless multitudes in permanent debt. None of this may be spoken, except in terms of particular cases of failure, known as “tragedies.”

The Million Hoodie March, Union Square

If there is an American Spring, it will have the name Trayvon Martin. Just as the Egyptian uprising took the name Khaled Said to symbolize police oppression and the Tunisian revolution took that of Mohammed Bouzazi, the fruit seller who immolated himself in protest at the failure of the state. In just the same way, Trayvon Martin’s death is not a “tragedy” in the classical sense (in which the “hero” would come to grief over a tragic flaw) but the tragically likely outcome of a segregated punishment society.

The key form of that punishment other than prison is debt. By making personal and systemic endebtedness “speakable,” activists and writers from the famous, like David Graeber, to the most anonymous “We Are the 99%” Tumblr poster, or Occupy sign-maker have opened another side of the new space for political action. Personal debt from student loans, cars and credit cards now stands at $2.5 trillion. Add in mortgages at about $13 trillion and you have a good approximation of US gross national product, about $15.3 trillion. No one can imagine this to be sustainable or solvable, yet it cannot be discussed.

By giving a name to the persistence of segregation and racialized division in this country, despite and/or because of Obama’s election, the senseless death of Trayvon Martin has given that space another dimension. Please be careful to note that I do not think his death was thus “useful” in any way. Rather, this pointless act of violence has simply given a name to the pointless persistence of racialized punishment that subtends the policing of the United States.

As of this writing 1.4 million people have signed the petition for justice in Trayvon’s case in a remarkably short time. The unspeakable persistence of segregation now has a name and a moment. It does not exist as a single question of rectification. When George Zimmerman is convicted, it will be a rupture in the systemic structure of “move on, there’s nothing to see here” that has so hegemonically policed the social as a whole.

At that point, a new space to see and speak, to say what there is to see, will have formed. It will be the space for a politics in which the limits of possibility will be redrawn. The American Spring will have happened.

 

Student Debt Crisis Intensifies

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Student demonstrations in MontréalThe new refusal of the student debt crisis first evidenced by the Occupy Student Debt Campaign appears to be spreading and to have good cause. Student strikes are shutting down Montréal, while new evidence makes it clear how serious the crisis is now and how it is going to get worse soon.

In Canada, Quebec has proposed doubling tuition over the course of the next five years. As it currently stands at roughly $2500, state authorities claim that tuition will still be lower than in other states and affordable. Students counter that nonetheless lower-income students will be deterred from college and that once the idea of substantial increases is conceded, they will become the new normal. Their resistance today has included shutting down the port of Montréal and a demonstration that even the media concede is around 100,000.

People there have obviously looked to the American situation. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has released a report giving striking new data showing both U. S. student debt and rates of delinquency reaching new highs. Unsurprisingly students have concluded that either tuition comes down or they will stay away.

According to their calculations, student debt is now at least $870 billion, the largest category of personal debt in the country, surpassing both the total credit card balance ($693 billion) and the total auto loan balance ($730 billion). This was already known but their analysis breaks it down further. $580 billion of the total student loan debt is owed by people younger than forty. About one million people owe more than $100,000. By excluding those people currently in deferral because they are still in education, it can be seen that 27% of debtors are either behind payments or in default.

That percentage is set to increase still further. The Obama administration has changed the regulations so that new federally subsidized graduate student loans will incur interest while a student is still in school as of July 1, 2012. As those loans currently attract 6.8% interest, a student in school for the six to nine years it takes to acquire a doctorate would find their loans had ballooned before they had even graduated.

For a long time universities have believed that they are immune to all protests for two reasons. Student debt is the most secure loan available, one that cannot be mitigated by bankruptcy, unemployment or old age. Loan companies can and do garner Social Security. Combined with what administrations believe is the unquenchable desire and need to gain degree qualifications for work, this security has given universities the confidence to raise tuition to the current levels.

Now the first sign has come that students are no longer lured by the Pied Piper of the career path. Applications for the Law School Aptitude Test, required for admission to law school, dropped by 16% this year. The combination of insane debt and 40% unemployment amongst newly-qualified lawyers was enough to deter nearly a fifth of potential candidates. What if other students are thinking the same way? High tuition schools without an endowment to back them up will become the Lehmanns and the Bear Sterns of the student debt bubble.

If we decided that higher education was “too big to fail,” it would cost $70 billion a year to make all public higher education free. Once that would have seemed like a lot of money. After the last few years, it seems like the bargain it is.

 

 

And the lid comes off Bloombergistan

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Just like that, the One Per Cent Emirate of Bloombergistan lost control of the streets. A day that began with news of the re-eviction of OWS from Union Square unfolded into a re-occupation with more people by midday.

Re-occupied: banner appears at 2pm

In the early evening, it became the scene of an extraordinary gathering in memory of Trayvon Martin, the young man killed in Florida. Union Square was packed with people and the crowd was majority minority.

Rally for Justice for Trayvon Martin

There was a strong undercurrent of controlled anger that in 2012 a police-sanctioned vigilante killing of a totally innocent child could not only happen but be excused by a ridiculous “law.” George Zimmerman, the murderer, had recourse to the “Stand your ground” law that allows people to use guns if they feel threatened and that’s the end of it. Except here, he was the stalker and the aggressor, while Trayvon had nothing more than some Skittles and an iced tea. Both were much in evidence at Union Square, with packets of Skittles flying across the crowd.

During the speeches, people stood respectfully. There were some emotional moments when Trayvon’s parents, showing enormous dignity under the appalling circumstances, addressed the crowd. His mother’s voice broke a little but she came back to call for justice. As the rally ended, the Square circulated with mic checks and calls for a march.

Taking the streets

With OWS people in the front, people poured into the street, closing down 14th St in minutes. As thousands joined in, police attempts at blockades were swept past at the corner of Sixth Avenue, where we went north.

Occupied Sixth Ave tonight

Similar efforts at 20th St, similar results. The march headed uptown for a while and then doubled back to Union Square. There were more people on the streets than at any time since N17 last year–estimates of 10,000 seemed about right. No doubt the New York Times will say 500.

From there people headed in a variety of directions. As I write there are people in Times Square, Union Square and downtown on Broadway. The silly bull statue on Broadway was liberated from its barricades and is now surrounded by police. Zuccotti has been surrounded by police in riot gear all night, the perfect visualization of Bloombergistan.

Zuccotti, new capital of Bloombergistan

Now Union Square has apparently been cleared because of a “suspicious package” and the arrests are beginning as the marches thin out and people disperse.

None of that is the point, although it will form whatever headlines there are for this march. What was striking about today was to see the way that the Union Square occupation merged and integrated with a much wider section of New York’s 99 per cent with mutual goodwill and respect. The sense that enough is enough, which has been so notable since the demonstrations of the weekend, has struck a chord across New York. As we marched down the streets, many people joined in and even more waved, gave clenched fists or other gestures of support. There were more people of color on the streets and in downtown than I can remember and I have never felt safter. The locked-down, hyper-policed, segregated money machine broke down for a few hours and out of the cross-hatched space that emerged, you could see the outlines of a new city. I liked it. I would like to live there.

Why We Refuse What We Resist

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At Left Forum over the weekend the debates could be summarized as follows: is the current system a new form of capitalism or not? What was striking was those from Occupy all agreed that this was a new formation, while many others, who wanted to see a continuity with existing forms of analysis and organizing, did not.

As it happens, I’ve been here before. In the late 1970s and early 80s, cultural studies intellectuals and activists began to identify Thatcherism as a distinctly new phenomenon that cut across existing class lines. Although New Left Review and others later came around to accepting this analysis, at the time it was greeted with howls of outrage. So both past and present experience lead me to side with the sense that we are again experiencing a new intensity of capitalism, creating divides and antagonisms that did not previously exist.

This divide is what I call “autoimmune capitalism,” a capitalism that destroys its own hosts, human and non-human life, whether by intent or by accident. Food poisoned by pesticides, a climate increasingly inhospitable to life, the ongoing great extinction of non-human species, one billion people worldwide hungry and the massive failure of overdeveloped nations to sustain employment within neo-liberal economies are all symptoms of this syndrome.

Like AIDS–Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome–this autoimmune capitalism is a syndrome not a disease. There is no single cure or response. By the same token, it can only be stabilized by introducing a radically different “economy,” in the sense of a balanced regimen.

Anarchist meeting in Union Square May 1, 1914.

It makes sense, then, that the compelling new “Spring back” from Occupy centers around refusal. The May Day action is a set of negatives–no work, no school, no chores, no banking. no shopping. But even “on holiday,” how many of us have lived a day like that, except as privileged children? The May Day from 1914 (above) is amazing both for the fact that you could fill Union Square with anarchists and that they are all (apparently) white men in hats. There is an echo but it’s not a repetition.

For the interface of autoimmunity is with autonomy, self-rule. To claim that “self” requires a certain kind of refusal: abolition. I’m going to use a perhaps unexpected example to make this point: the Haitian Constitution of 1805. I do so in part because for the first time, a copy of that Constitution, the only one known to survive, is on display in New York at the New-York Historical Society. I like to think that it’s abolition energy is spreading around the city.

Printed version of the Haitian Declaration of Independence

Having fought for independence from France for fourteen years, the new nation declared:

Slavery is forever abolished.

In four words, the sentence encompasses past, present and future (abolished/is/forever). It provides no authority for the abolition, even the tautology of holding it to be “self-evident.” Because those “truths held to be self-evident” did not include abolition. That short sentence is a world-historical revolution.

Having abolished the primary political distinction between “free” and “slave,” Haiti then made itself into the scandal of modernity by decreeing in Article 12:

No whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein.

This clause undid colonialism, neo-colonialism and segregation. If the rest of the document reinscribed other masters and proprietors, it nonetheless insisted, against the highly complicated racial hierarchy of miscegenation created by slavery, that all such persons were to “be known only by the generic appellation of Blacks.”

The point here is that abolition and refusal are in fact creative tactics by which we can make a different social order and it has been done in the past. More recently, the refusal of Rosa Parks to move to the back of the bus, supported by a non-violent direct action group, transformed the United States to such an extent that she has had to be reimagined as a solitary heroine of American exceptionalism. In Ireland, people are refusing the new tax put in place as part of the Troika-inspired austerity.

85% support refusing to pay the new tax in Ireland

However, the full diversity of what we are now refusing cannot be simply legislated out of existence. As with AIDS, we need a diversity of tactics to oppose the new capitalism including direct action on the ACT UP model; a “cocktail” of curative measures to begin addressing the damage done to human and non-human bodies; and the elaboration of a regime of prevention. The first step in prevention–just say no.

 

 

 

 

A-Anti-Anticapitalista! Welcome to the Resistance

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In people’s comments about M17, the six-month anniversary of OWS, you can see a broad agreement that there’s a new feel to the movement. It’s epitomized by the gradual shift in chant preference from “We Are the 99 Per Cent!” to “A-Anti-Anti-Capitalista!” The former is a statement. The latter expresses the new resistance.

AAAC–as we’ll call it–is also inherently danceable with a 1-2 2-2-3 rhythm built in. It helps that it’s in Spanish, it feels global and properly hemispheric. Not that anyone has consciously thought this out I suspect. On Saturday at Liberty, when hundreds were celebrating what felt like the re-occupation by singing AAAC, a young woman leaned over towards me and asked “What does it mean?” When I told her she smiled in a way that indicated both pleasure and relief–it was what she thought it was and that felt good.

At the General Strike panel at Left Forum, Mike Andrews–one of the leading figures in the May Day planning group–told a similar story. He described how he had seen a group of teenagers jumping up and down shouting “General Strike!” As he said, it’s unlikely that any of the events remembered by left archivists, whether Seattle in 1919 or Britain in 1926 were in their minds. It’s possible that they didn’t even really know what general strikes have been in the past. Right now, as Mike put it, it means for them: “Fuck my shitty job”–and the desire for something better. Some were clearly surprised by this choice of words but it rang true to this precarious generation.

Natasha Lennard, writing for Salon, also turned to this theme:

There’s no adequate explanation for why, for example, on Saturday, it was beautiful to go back to one of the dreariest slabs of concrete that lower Manhattan has to offer and find nearly a thousand other bodies — dancing, chanting “a-anti-anti-capitalista,” catching up and dashing off into spontaneous street marches.

It’s that “magic” feel of Occupy, the sense of making something different, something resistant to commodification that is the distinguishing factor here, especially from the shouting soap-box orators of the traditional left.

To add my own story, a couple of weeks ago I was in Arizona to give a talk at Arizona State, a place where the University President is aggressively neo-liberal and has hiked tuition dramatically. My hosts were very nervous about the attendance, expecting they said perhaps 12, maybe 20. Much to their surprise, about 150 people showed up for the talk because the word “Occupy” was in the title. After the traditional academic introduction, I looked at this group and said, “Hi, my name is Nick and I’m part of Occupy Wall Street.” The whole room smiled–not for me, of course, but for the idea of Occupy. So we consensed to occupy the room for the next hour and a half.

What you can feel here is the pleasure of resistance, not simply refusing to move on, but claiming the right to look at what there is to see here. Look back at September 2011 and there was of course plenty of outrage at the banks and at Wall Street–which is why, after all, it was Occupy Wall Street and not Occupy Lincoln Center. Some of the ideas being floated back then by Adbusters and others included reintroducing the Glass-Steagall Act, creating a one per cent tax on financial transactions and so on. You don’t hear much about those kind of ideas now, although they would have been sensible reforms.

In China Miéville’s photo-essay London’s Overthrow [by the way, the New York Times excerpt cut out all the politics, big surprise, read it online}, he writes

The lion looks out from its apocalypse at the scrag-end of 2011. London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliché than a truism. This place is pre-something.

Pre-figuring is going on all day, all week. Here’s the logo from Occupy the Movie, currently being advertised online:

Occupy The Movie

The parody of Emmanuel Leutze’s corny Washington Crossing the Delaware was well-timed. This morning the Metropolitan Museum of Art used the painting for a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating their corporate sponsors, including all the usual criminals from Goldman to Citibank and Bank of America.

They don’t get it. Do you? Do you feel the change?

How to Think During an Eviction

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Once again, we reflect after an eviction. In the face of violence and violent speech, how do we respond?

The actions by the NYPD yesterday were plain old-fashioned violent (see below). They evicted people from a 24 hour park without stating any offense that had been committed. They erected a barricade around the park that is still up at the time of writing, in contravention of an earlier court decision. They refused medical care to a woman having a seizure. Public transport buses, brought up in advance, were used to take protestors to jail. The message here is very simple: no action that is or appears to be an occupation will be tolerated in New York, legal rationale to follow.

The political culture of New York is macho and violent. It takes its cue from its paymasters on Wall Street. Remember the “masters of the universe” on Wall Street in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities? They became the “big, swinging dicks” in Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker and last week the hapless Goldman Sachs apostate Greg Smith described how traders like to “rip the eyes out” of their clients. No wonder there are few women at the top of these firms.

A week or so ago, I happened to be in an open meeting with a senior New York City elected official about a zoning issue where I live. In a clearly studied way, the man became incensed at what he deliberately took to be a provocation and talked about “tearing [us] a new arsehole.” In a more public example, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, when queried by the City Council over the stop-and-frisk policy that led to over 600,000 frisks of people of color last year responded with what even the New York Times called a “pugnacious assault.” Elected officials may not question the police in New York.

Such talk is supposed to indicate an awareness of reality, whether at the elite level of city planning or the street level of minority neighborhoods. To “get things done,” verbal and, if “necessary,” physical violence must be used–the metaphors are of knocking heads, breaking balls and so on.

After a few hours sleep, I headed to Left Forum at Pace University this morning, hoping to get some perspectives on the moment. I found three. My panel on “Environmentalism and Occupy” was, once again, all male. The next time this happens I will just have to make a public protest. It seems that the injunction to respect diversity, so prevalent in 1990s political and academic culture, has been forgotten, except by the Occupy movement. What I initially experienced as Occupy’s continuity with academia looks more like a bridge to past (not always successful, to be sure) efforts. However, at Left Forum  the all day prevalence of violent language, shouting, pointed fingers and so on served as reminder of how much remains to be done.

In a more positive vein, both on my panel and the following discussion about the general strike, it was stressed that the place of the global south was central. While the general strike question was mostly discussed in the context of the May Day action in the U. S., Gayatri Spivak stressed the need to think it in relation to the global south. Spivak’s train of thought was multi-faceted and hard to summarize. Her main points were that finance capital is digital so that it cannot be blockaded; further global trade is a relatively small component of gross global product; and that it no longer makes sense to speak simply of “the working class,” in a manner she derived from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

All that would be to say, then, that the general strike is an impossible demand, not a quantifiable project, whose “success” can be measured by the number of strikers. It needs to “surprise” us (to quote Spivak again).

Certainly, there will be no surprise to find a vast array of police on May Day and every time we step out of the places allocated to us. The repeated representation of that injunction is the arrest of a demonstrator who steps, whether deliberately or by accident, into the roadway.

Claiming our own place will be interpreted as “violence” by the state because it is the language that they speak and understand. Prefiguring a horizontal world not configured by the command means adopting ways of acting and speaking that at once insist on our right to say what our place should be, rather than be allocated one, and to do so in ways that we understand as non-violent. That does not preclude non-violent direct action. It is to say that if another world is possible, we need to start living in it.