Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

M17: Liberty Plaza ReOccupied and ReEvicted.

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The Occupy Banner back in place

Today was the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Activists gathered at Zuccotti Park to turn it back into Liberty Plaza. The mood was one of increased radicalism. In the late evening, hundreds gathered from Left Forum and in response to texts: the Plaza was reoccupied.

During the day there had been sporadic confrontation. A symbolic tent appeared. Brookfield’s top cop, dressed in paramilitary-style black clothing from head to foot, rushed into the Plaza with a dozen acolytes to tear the small plastic tent to pieces. Next the drumming on garbage cans had to be stopped because one person from the neighborhood complained about the noise. Drumming in the street at four in the afternoon–on St Patrick’s Day, the rowdiest day of the year–is now prohibited. A man dancing on the wall around the park was deemed illegal and arrested.

Late afternoon, people began discussing the fact that Michael Moore the filmmaker was giving a speech at Left Forum at Pace University on the subject of the Future of Occupy–even as the park was being occupied. It seemed ridiculous and so a group set out to mic check and challenge Moore to come to the park. There were some confrontations with security at Pace, who sought to keep the left away from the left but in the end Moore readily agreed to encourage the audience to head down to OWS at 9pm.

Meanwhile we had a great General Assembly, like the early days–no disrupters, no nonsense, no financial questions and breakouts full of enthusiasm and ideas. Tweets started to come in towards the end about the march being on the way, even as other texts were heading out calling people to come to reoccupy. A group of us headed off in search of the march and soon found it.

March from Left Forum to Liberty

It was an excited and raucous crowd that by-passed police lines and made its ways into the Plaza to cheers, chants and dancing everywhere. For perhaps an hour, the celebration ran free as original Occupiers, long-time activists and new people came together in a very special moment. It’s easy to see that nothing concrete was established but the morale boost and the energy of the assembly was real.

The Plus Brigades began training people in park defense, while well-organized people were bringing in blankets, setting up the People’s Library and a Medical station. The Plaza continued to fill as more people responded to the text and Twitter feed.

I had to leave to supervise a teenage sleepover. As I walked down Broadway, there was no traffic and it was clear the NYPD were planning an immediate eviction. As I write it’s already underway–so the park can be cleaned, although all day OWS people were picking up trash. Or trespass. Or whatever.

In order to keep to my pledge to post every day, this is going to have to go up. It seems that a lot of arrests are taking place, over a hundred. I can see people I know on Livestream. It’s a nasty spectacle to set against the mass drunkenness taking place across the city. It’s Zuccotti Park again, full of NYPD

 

M17: Why Occupy is Hunger, Climate Change and GMO food

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Storm over GMO corn

OWS and the campaigns against hunger, against GMO food and against climate change are different ways of saying the same thing: capitalism is an autoimmune disease that is now threatening the viability of its host. Occupy signifies here that these issues cannot be contained, let alone solved, by the normative political process, whether at national or interstate level.

It’s important to recognize how far things have gone in the past year. Harper’s magazine tells us:

  • there has been a 33% decline on newspaper mentions of “global warming” and “climate change” in 2011
  • Obama used the phrase “climate change” once in the State of the Union but mentioned “energy” 23 times.

Autoimmune capitalism believes it can afford the planetary degradation that is now under way worldwide and is indifferent to it. European airlines filed this week to be exempted from the EU carbon levy because of a possible trade war with China: in short, climate can only be a priority if it has no impact on capital.

By the same token, there was barely a ripple when Climate Central reported on sea level rise this week:

At three quarters of the 55 sites analyzed, century levels are higher than 4 feet above the high tide line. Yet across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide. In 285 cities and towns, more than half the population lives on land below this line, potential victims of increasingly likely climate-induced coastal flooding. 3.7 million live less than 1 meter above the tide.

There’s a 1 in 6 chance that the Battery in New York City will flood– not far into the future but by 2020. Zuccotti will become waterfront. You can only assume that people either think that these reports are false or that when they happen, there will be benefits because 5 million people will need new homes.

As I’ve often argued, the reason there’s a global movement of which Occupy is the U. S. variant is the interface of climate change and hunger. In 2008, a global food crisis was caused by the interplay of climate-change induced drought;  the switch to biofuels caused by climate concerns reducing the food supply; and the creation of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Futures Index.

This index was allowed to trade in futures as of 1999, on the principle “long only,” i.e. that prices would always rise. Investors included: Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Pimco, JP Morgan Chase, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Foreign Affairs magazine commentator Frederick Kauffman notes:

In the first 55 days of 2008, speculators poured $55 billion into commodity markets, and by July, $318 billion was roiling the markets. Food inflation has remained steady since.

What that means is an 80% price rise from 2003-8 that has kept moving upwards. One half of the world’s population spends 50% of their income on food. The real consequences were so-called food riots in 37 countries–they should have been called anti-autoimmune capitalist riots.

From here we can summarize:

•2008 food crisis added 40 million to world hungry list
•2008: 943 million hungry
•2009: One billion hungry
•2008: 100 million Africans move into poverty
•A one-meter sea level rise, now regarded as inevitable, will destroy the Nile Delta
This already disastrous situation is now being exacerbated by the intervention of genetically-modified plants into Africa. The African Center for Biosafety, based in South Africa, reported this week:

Between January 2008 and January 2012, the cost of a 5kg bag [of] super maize meal increased by a staggering 83%. In 2007, the poorest 30% of the population spent approximately 22% of their monthly income on food, including on maize–a staple. The latest figures from January 2012 put this at nearly 39%.

In South Africa, Monsanto has cornered 77% of the seed corn market that generated over R1 billion in revenues, while one in four South Africans is “food insecure,” or hungry, in plain English.

 

In Europe this week, researchers showed that both the genetically modified component of MON810 Bt corn and the Roundup that is sprayed onto that corn kill human kidney cells. So in a particularly telling instance of autoimmune capitalism, the patented seed will either kill you by starvation because you can’t afford to grow it; or kill you by kidney disease because you emmiserate yourself to eat it.

Oh, and by the way? There are plenty of Roundup resistant plants in the U. S. now anyway, about twenty at last count. How could this have been predicted? Because Monsanto found the gene in plants growing downwind of its filthy Louisiana chemicals plant in the first place.

What to do?
For you: do not eat GMO based products–which is likely to mean anything with soy or corn in it, which is to say just about all food industry products. Go organic, go local, grass-fed meat and poultry only.

 

For all of us: be at or with the March Against Hunger tomorrow M17:

 

99 Per Cent Sovereignty

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Looking back over the six-month history of Occupy, it’s surprising to me that one aspect of its project has been understated. The concept of the 99 per cent has been taken to be newly inclusive–and perhaps it is, compared to class warfare of the Stalinist or Republican kind. As a theory of sovereignty, however, it is in fact surprisingly radical.

As the name suggests, sovereignty is the theory of the sovereign, the authorization of the ability to operate power. Its fundamental operation in European modernity has been to produce a singular sovereign, whether a person, a nation or a people. Hardt and Negri call this the “sovereignty machine,” the means by which

The multitude is in every moment transformed into an ordered totality.

[Empire, 87]

Whether the state declares itself democratic or not, modern sovereignty always tends to a single form of power.

Consequently, the authorizing form of the “people,” which is in theory limitless, has in practice been highly circumscribed. When the Declaration of “We, the People” was made in 1776, more people were excluded than included in that frame–the indigenous populations, the enslaved, women and children. The nationalist claim of the “people,” as in the obligatory invocation of “the American people,” is similarly exclusive.

Nonetheless, the constant accusation against democracy as a system of sovereignty has been that it is limitless and places too few constraints on its constituents. In Rancière’s pithy formulation

democracy=limitlessness=society.

The anxiety at work here is that the open-ended nature of “the people” might serve to derail the sovereignty machine in its perfect equation of law with property.

For Hardt and Negri, the “people” that must be reduced to what Hobbes called “one will” is always already distinguished from the “multitude”:

The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogeneous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it [103].

The concept of the multitude has been much criticized for this apparent vagueness. However, theological and apocalyptic theories of sovereignty have been received with open arms, as if the use of Latin terms is enough to bring us back to the Church.

Is the 99 per cent, then, the multitude? Unlike the “people,” the 99 per cent does not claim to be fully inclusive or limitless. It claims a right to authority without producing “one will,” and indeed expects to curtail the perfect mirror relation between law and property. The importance of this rupture far exceeds any quarrel with the limit that has been suggested. It is a theory of sovereignty, not of the practice of direct democracy. That is to say, it is not to be expected that 99 per cent consensus will be, or should be, achieved in all assemblies.

At the same time, this articulation of the divide between the multitude and capital in relation to sovereignty is itself a mirror of the new contempt that capital has for its human agents. The fantasy of a market based on Adam Smith’s “self-love” has been replaced by a slasher capitalism that wants to “rip the eyes out” of its own customers, whom it perceives as “Muppets,” according to the so-called scandalous revelation of Goldman Sachs’ internal culture.

This palpable disconnect renders the “image” component of the nation state’s “imagined community” highly problematic. As all the language of mirroring and specularity suggests, the image of the imagined community operates as a supplement: “I am like the nation and the nation is like me.” Only it isn’t. For “white” America, the impossible choice between the one per cent candidate they are told to want, and the image of the Confederacy they actually want, is playing out as farce, which is not say that it is not dangerous, as supplements always are.

For the 99 per cent, there is a genuinely new task: how to image and imagine multiplicity without producing another version of “one will.”

 

 

This is what Occupy looks like

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Axiomatic: to occupy is to place your body in space, there where it is not supposed to be. That space is three-dimensional but multiply so. Some of these can be evicted, some not. Some are not visible to the empire. But we can see it because power visualizes what it imagines history to be to itself. Let’s look around.

In the first instance, Occupy takes physical three-dimensional space in urban environments. It is attention-generating because the populace in global cities are highly regulated and policed. “Public” space is subject to particularly dense control, meaning that (in the U. S.) public-private spaces, where guaranteed access was the definition of “public,” became the location of choice.

To occupy global city space is also  to intervene in the highly-mediated imaginary of “New York.” Citizen and  professional media alike are so densely configured and adept that actions taken by a relatively small number of people receive immensely multiplied levels of attention. Thus it seemed obvious to state power that removing those bodies from their spaces would end Occupy.

There are multiple spaces available, however, in vertical and horizontal configurations. Conceptually, the horizontalidad of direct democracy is challenged and displaced by the verticality of power and neo-liberalism: and vice-versa. In their trilogy on Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri give some useful ways of thinking about this encounter. Borrowing from the ancient historian Polybius, they suggest that the global empire can be understood as a pyramid with three levels: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The monarch would be the United States, the aristocracy would be the agents of globalized economics, and democracy is associated with what they call the multitude.

Bringing this figure up to date, they adopt the image of the mainstream foreign affairs commentator Joseph Nye, who suggests:

The agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional chess game, in which one can win only by playing vertically as well as horizontally.

His aim was to correct the Washington-speak idea of a “uni-polar” world governed by the US, and replace it with three “boards” representing “classical military interstate issues,” or war. This was placed above the level of “interstate economic  issues,” meaning the global economy. Finally the whole rests on a base of “transnational issues, [where] power is widely distributed and chaotically organized among state and non-state actors.” In some ways, Nye has less respect for the level of the multitude than Polybius but he does realize that power cannot be exercised without its at least passive consent.

Let’s push this a bit harder. The game of Raumschach, literally “space chess” or three-dimensional chess,  was devised in 1908 by Ferdinand Maack in Hamburg. He felt that as chess was a war game, it should now be possible to represent aerial and submarine warfare as part of play. His initial concept was for an 8x8x8 board that looked like this:

8x8x8 "space chess" in 1908

He refined this towering edifice to 5x5x5, the variant now mostly used by the devotees of the game. Pieces can move in three-dimensions: a rook, for example could move from top to bottom vertically, while a knight could move two layers up and a square across. Players use the standard pieces, plus two “unicorns” that can move from corner to corner. The board looks like this:

Raumschach 5x5x5

In short, let’s by all means think of the political as a three-dimensional contest but be aware that it would have more than three layers and the possibilities for interaction are very diverse. Occupy geeks of a certain kind will already have this in mind:

Spock plays 3-D chess against the computer in Star Trek

The future used to be imagined as a liberatory expansion into space of all kinds. If in Star Trek, this expansion was hard to separate from the colonial and Cold War projects of the U. S., the fans were always able to imagine otherwise in slash fiction and other forms.

However, let’s follow Nye this far: the “top board” of global conflict is the one now in chaos. The counterinsurgency doctrine launched with such fanfare in 2006 stands revealed in Afghanistan as the imperialist fantasy it always was–such is 3-D chess, a game of imperial imagination. But with the “monarch” having lost control of the top, the game is now open in a variety of ways.

Vertical power is not just exercised by states or interstate organizations. In contrast to their usual emphasis on immaterial labor, Hardt and Negri point out that

Extraction processes–oil, gas, and minerals–are the paradigmatic industries of neoliberalism.

This “verticality” of this economic power is literal as well as metaphorical: the rewards for mining fossil fuels and other raw materials are spectacular. The sea level rise that results from the resulting acceleration of climate change is by the same token a literal and metaphorical verticality: only those in the “high places,” like the Tyrel Corporation in Bladerunner, can and should survive.

The primary alternative available form of wealth increase in overdeveloped nations at present is privatization and upwards wealth distribution by means of regressive taxation and other measures. In short, the verticalization of what had been made horizontal by political action, such as the former attaining of free university education that is now a market for private loans.

These are nonetheless relatively crass and unsubtle ways to play. If you have sufficient pieces, they may gain an advantage, perhaps some victories. But there are at least two, perhaps five, perhaps many more levels at which our would-be hegemons are not playing because they can’t see them.

Take the horizontalism of direct democracy. In this exchange, each person consents to look and be seen at once. To authority, this exchange is invisible. Formally, authority imagines itself as deploying the gaze with its force of law in which we are the looked-at, the passive object. In this view, direct democracy is just chaos.

By the same token, as I argued yesterday, there are always already spaces of the “primitive” where power is not vertical, disrupting the arrangement of the “boards.” Such spaces are equally invisible to authority because they are not part of its life processes but they are nonetheless present, understood as ghosts, spirits and specters. Indeed, there are places that, in the manner of China Miéville, we might call crosshatched with other pasts, futures and presents, intermittently visible.

On these horizontal levels, you can win the game by playing only horizontally, or by cancelling certain vectors of the vertical by using your “unicorns.” If the unicorn does not “exist,” that speaks to the ways in which magic–understood here as that which exceeds the “rational actor” theory of value–continues to be a real presence. Colonial power always feared the magic of local religions because it knew that it “worked,” meaning that it generated horizontal values and imaginaries, as well as moves to negate the vertical.

That’s why the signs saying “Game Over” in Egypt seemed so right. But this an odd game. You can checkmate the king only to find, like in the horror movie, that it is back in mutant form. The same is true for both sides. If empire has more power, its narrowness of vision means that Occupy has, paradoxically, more space. Game on.

 

 

 

 

Seeing against the state

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One night during the Paris Commune of 1871, Louise Michel found that she and an African veteran of the Papal Guard were the only two defenders of a key fort. To pass the time, he posed the question

–What effect does the life we lead produce in you?

–The effect of seeing a shore we must reach, she replied.

–Myself, he replied, it gives me the effect of reading a book with images.

These replies were in “reverse” order to what a certain modernism might lead us to expect. The African soldier gave a reply moving from print culture towards a cinematic imaginary, whereas the French poet created an image of a panoramic landscape that would exceed any one person’s capacity to see. These are deceptively simple images, then, by which to visualize what the Zapatistas would call the “walk” that the Commune was taking.

By contrast, the anthropologist James C. Scott has highlighted the way in which “seeing like a state” means a certain abstracting, centralizing vision. His first example involves seeing a tree simply as timber, compared to all the other known uses for the wood, bark and even leaves of the tree, let alone its existence as a living ecosystem.

How can we imagine seeing against the state, or better yet as a non-state? In a recently translated collection of the essays of Pierre Clastres, originally published in 1980 offers some perspective from that moment in the 1970s that seems to prefigure our own. Clastres was interested in creating a “political anthropology” and saw what he continued to call “primitive cultures” as being an “anti-production machine.” Rather than understand indigenous societies as pre-capitalist, Clastres presented them as radically different:

When the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive.

As in the example above from the Commune, the point is not to reduce alterity to a single image, as the state would do, but to multiply them.

In this sense, “primitive” society will always exist, as what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls

the force of anti-production permanently haunting the productive forces, and as a multiplicity that is non-interiorizable by the planetary mega-machines.

There is always, then, another possible world and it already exists and has existed for a long time. Clastres asks, if we set aside the hierarchical gaze of ethnography, “how are we to finally take seriously” societies where power is not associated with control?

In this question, there are two loud echoes. One is Derrida’s haunting question at the opening of Spectres of Marx: “I would like to learn how to live, finally.” Might we then understand that “finally” as meaning: at the end of the long Western metaphysic that has, since Aristotle, presumed that a separation of the political is the distinguishing mark of the human? Here the further echo is with Rancière’s concept of the “division of the sensible” that he tends to see as very long-lasting. To live, finally, without control would mean living in such a way that “the political” was not a separate domain.

Clastres points to the conquistadores, newly arrived in what they called the Americas:

Noting that the chiefs held no power over the tribes, that one neither commanded here nor obeyed, they declared that these people were not policed, that these were not veritable societies. Savages without faith, law, or king.

It’s easy to draw a parallel with the Commune and Occupy encampments, whose anti-production machines were held equally intolerable by the police of their own time. Less easy, but now more necessary, is to take that seriously and add what Philippe Pignare and Isabelle Stengers call “a sense of dread” to that comparison.

While it’s clear that Occupy might prefigure anti-control and anti-state ways of being to a certain extent, becoming anti-production (meaning anti-growth, anti-seeing-as-a-wealth-producer) and pro-sustaining, every day the work is at hand of enacting that seriously. In Argentina, some groups withdrew from confrontations with the state after 2001, according to Marina Sitrin, precisely to develop such possibilities. In Greece, many local governments have collapsed themselves back into their communities, helping people to resist the new electricity tax surcharge to pay back the banks. That is to say, they have ceased seeing like a state.

In the US we’re a long way from that kind of crisis–but also from that kind of altermodern “primitivism.” Here we don’t want to replicate the capitalist frenzy against the very collapse of Greek society that they helped to create but to mark the multiplicity of viewpoints that are now tenuously available in the crisis. I’m not sure we can see that yet.

This week the island nation of Kiribati (pronounced Kiri-bhass) [above] announced that it is buying land in Fiji for its people to move to after their islands flood because of climate change. These “South Pacific” (actually West Central Pacific) islands have been the Western “vision” of non-productive but plentiful societies since the first encounter in the mid-eighteenth century. Without dread, we are standing by as they disappear. Not one print or television outlet covered the news. We can’t see this as here and now, only as there and then.

So it’s a great thing to see that M17, the six-month anniversary of OWS will feature a march to the memorial for the Irish Famine and a further challenge to Monsanto and global corporate food. More on that tomorrow. Seriously.

 

The Spirit of Commune Past: A Picture Essay

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Place des Indignés aka Place de la Bourse

When I arrived in Paris just after the 140th anniversary of the suppression of the Paris Commune last summer, its spirit was walking the earth. The Place de la Bourse, where the French Stock Exchange is located, had been renamed the Place des Indignés, the Square of the Indignant. Or Occupy the Square, as we might now say.

Louise Michel Poster One

On the wide stone banister of the staircase leading up to the little apartment I had sublet in Montmartre, someone had flyposted an unusual poster. It depicted the plaque identifying the nearby Square Louise Michel–using the English word–commemorating the local hero of the Commune.

Louise Michel's Tomb Poster

Next morning when I went out for bread, I came across this much larger poster. showing Louise Michel’s tomb–her name was clearly legible on the headstone. The quality of the printing and the flyposting was such that at first sight I wasn’t sure if it had been painted. Feminist, ant-imperialist and later anarchist, Michel was one of the best-known Communards, once known as La Pétroleuse for the false accusation that she had been a fire-bomber.

It seemed that she and her Square were everywhere in her home village of Montmartre. She lurked above the head of casual tourists, equally oblivious to the plaque identifying the house as the former home of the artist Suzanne Valadon.

Gospel, Louise Michel, Suzanne ValadonFrom Valadon to the Gospel Dream to Louise Michel. Or the other way around? On the metro the next day, I saw an intense young man with a red beard reading a copy of Michel’s History of the Commune in a pleasingly old edition. Was this the flyposter artist? There was no way to ask, so I got off at FNAC and bought a less satisfying modern paperback.

The fly-poster gets creative

Whoever he or she was, the fly-poster was all over Montmartre. I sat in the café across the street and read Michel’s account of the Commune. She described being on field ambulance duty in Clamart, to the southwest of Paris in the direction of Versailles from where everyone knew the attack would come. With her was an African man with filed teeth, who was a veteran of the Papal Guard.

Later, she sat one night and had coffee with a young student who had brought a copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, perhaps the “definitive” edition published after the poet’s death in 1868. They read Une Charogne [A Corpse] together, one of his most challenging poems, finding beauty in a rotting corpse. A shell descended from the enemy lines, destroying the book and their coffee cups.

Louise Michel's tomb

There was nothing for it but to head to Michel’s tomb. A Google later and I’m on my way to the quiet and upmarket suburb where she now resides. In typical Parisian fashion, you don’t get off at the stop called Louise Michel but the next one. Here the plot thickens nicely: the photograph of Michel’s tomb used by the fly poster is revealed to be antique. The splendid flowers are perhaps the gift of the trade unions who bury their leaders in the same corner of the cemetery.

My book on Michel's tomb

So I left my book as an offering. The spirit of the Commune was alive and well, occupying her old haunts. Michel was no spectre, nor a phantom, or one of the frightening revenants. I don’t think Michel was as gentle a spirit as a fairy, who tend not to carry Remingtons. Although oddly, Benjamin’s first subtitle for the Arcades project was A Dialectical Fairy Play. Michel put her body in harm’s way, knowing full well what was coming and her spirit survived then and now. Remember her.

May 22, 1871: the Commune's last days

In the streets of Montmartre, the unsung heirs of Michel’s ideas were still in action, getting ready. Regular meetings were being held to help the undocumented regularize their situation.

Help for undocumented immigrants in Montmartre

Vive la Commune, one hundred and forty-one years young this week, long live the common!

Anniversary Week: Atocha M-11

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Yesterday began a key week of anniversaries: on March 11,  2004, known as M-11, the response to the Atocha Station bombing prefigured the indignados. March 17 is the six-month anniversary of OWS. And March 18 is the 142nd anniversary of the Paris Commune, which in some sense began it all. So this week I’ll think about these moments and some conceptual links between them.

The Atocha Statioo, March 11, 2004

To refresh the memory–several trains in or approaching the Atocha train station in Madrid were bombed simultaneously, causing 191 deaths and approximately 1800 injured. The atrocity occurred three days before national elections, in which José María Aznar’s conservative Popular Party were hoping for re-election despite their unpopular involvement of Spain in Iraq. Aznar held the Basque separatist group ETA responsible for the attack. However, it quickly became clear that an al-Qai’da inspired group had in fact carried it out. In the face of mass demonstrations, Aznar was defeated and the “socialist” PSOE were returned to office.

For Amador Fernández-Savater, the events of M-11 represented:

the emergence of a new form of politicisation which, summing up:

– does not necessarily have its meaning in the left/right dichotomy

– does not find its strength in ideology, so much as in first-hand feelings

– does not delegate representation or let others accumulate power at its expense

– thinks with its body and asks questions about meaning

– produces its own knowledge

– makes no attempt at cohesion, but at recreating the communal: an open, all-inclusive and joyful ‘we,

– transforms the map of what is possible

– does not declare another possible world, but fights to stop the destruction of the only one there is (We were all on that train).

The prefiguration of the indignados of 2011 and the related project of Occupy is striking. Equally significant, however, was the strength and speed of the popular refusal of the official explanation, drawing on the long experience of anti-fascism in Spain and the pervasive anxiety post-1975 about the possible return of dictatorship.

In very different vein, the young American writer Ben Lerner recently published his first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). A quick plot summary: a latter-day Holden Caulfield wins a literary fellowship to Madrid after leaving Brown, where he seeks literary, sexual and artistic experience without success, despite being present during M-11.

The writing is intensely self-reflexive, doubling back on its every reference. There are extended passages close to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a somewhat redundant interspersal of photographs in the manner of W. G. Sebald, while the political events are kept adjacent to the narrative in the classic manner of Stendhal. Even the title is a reference to a 1962 poem of the same name by John Ashbery that famously resists attempts to give its pictorial style meaning. It’s the kind of book that adapts the author’s own critical essay on Ashbery for several jarring pages.

Unsurprisingly, the narrator Adam Gordon wonders about applying for literature PhD programs: it’s really the other way around, this is a book designed to have dissertations written about it. At the same time, it’s engagingly written and the anti-hero “portrait of the artist as a young man [abroad]” works well in this endlessly referential context.

Without pretending to review the book as a whole, what I was wanting from it was some account of M-11. One of Adam’s love interests, Teresa, was an active participant but he himself spends more time online, taking anti-anxiety medication and sleeping during the decisive days. Here the book wants to have it both ways, like similar “year abroad” first novels such as Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel and Prague (actually about Budapest) by Arthur Phillips.

Each wants to reference major political events, which Lerner ironically calls “History,” while maintaining a suitable distance. Lerner has Adam give a talk in which he says: “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it.” It says something about the book that I felt I had to Google the sentence to be sure it was not a quote from somebody else. For all the arch knowingness, it’s a very old-fashioned reflection theory at work here–that “art” reflects “the real” but cannot engage with it directly.

For all that, I came to think that this failure to engage was precisely what we can learn from Lerner (pun intended). That is to say, during the Iraq war so much Anglophone political discourse was centered on the Bush-Blair axis that many of us missed the importance of M-11 as a long-term rethinking of the political. While my own Watching Babylon, finished in May 2004, was revised to take account of the Abu Ghraib photographs released in April of that year, I only referenced the Spanish events. On the one hand, we were too convinced of the importance of the photographs as “evidence” that might convict the entire war project and, on the other, our “context” was still too focused on the Anglophone.

Occupy has, by contrast, repeatedly tried to learn from Argentina, Spain, Greece, Egypt and other forms of planetary resistance to the crisis–imperfectly, no doubt, but as the Spanish example shows, new forms of politics in the widest sense used by Rancière and Fernández-Savater, are built over decades not weeks.

On this anniversary, let us not forget that the crisis continues to intensify in Spain, despite huge swathes of cheap money deluging the banks and bond markets from the European Central Bank. From a recent report by Reuters, here are a few details:

street cleaners, nurses, teachers and job trainers are struggling to get by as cash-strapped local authorities withhold wages….In more than 1.5 million Spanish households, not one family member has a job. Almost half of adults under 25 are unemployed. Close to a third of the 17-nation euro zone’s jobless live in Spain….Spain’s 17 autonomous regions are laden with around 30 billion euros in deficit — 3 percent of the country’s economic output

The Financial Times has called this renewed austerity on top of recession “insanity” in the sense that doing the same failed action over and over again must be insane. Half a million people went to the streets on February 24 to protest this nonsense.

The M-11 and M-15 movements are not done yet. This is an anniversary, not a memorial.

 

Sketches of Spain: From the Everyday to Every Day

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So I decided to step back for the weekend, meaning that I missed the visit of the Spanish activist Amador Fernández-Savater from the May 15 movement to OWS. As I read the wonderful materials provided, I found that in January Fernández-Savater had suggested that there were fewer people attending M-15 events because “people have returned to making their lives.” I want to explore what this phrase might mean.

If the encampments (whether in Spain or New York) were an exception to the crisis, it is nonetheless “difficult to live in an exception,” if you cannot devote your life to it as an activist. At the same time, Fernández-Savater follows the thought through to a consideration of how the crisis “forces us to constantly make and remake everything.” I think we can see a periodization emerge here: out the crisis of the 1970s emerged both neo-liberalism and its everyday ideology, and the counterpointed politics of the everyday. The present crisis has transformed neo-liberalism into an ideology of inequality and calls for politics every day in response.

Fernández-Savater locates the formation of a consensus in Spain to the Moncloa Agreements of 1977, two years after the end of the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco:

the culture that was imposed on the defeat of the dreams of emancipation and communism in the 1970s. Culture in the strong sense of the word: a configuration of sensitivity that decisively structures the play of politics, universities, the media, the production of work and our very perception of things.

I’ve recently been re-reading an evocation of that defeat in the detective novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Murder in the Central Committee, originally published in 1981. By means of an investigation into a classic “closed room” murder mystery, Montalbán was able to create a portrait of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. As befits the noir genre, there’s a certain romantic nostalgia–together with, it has to be said, some sad sexism and homophobia.

In one passage, however, Carmela, a PCE cadre, complains precisely of the difficulties of reconciling activism and making a life in terms that are familiar to many of us:

“In the end I’ve got to work, function in the Party, do the shopping, keep house and be a mother–which is the least of my worries. And if you complain some old comrades come round and tell you a life-story that makes your hair stand on end….There are more and more who cook in order to forget.”

When the detective Carvalho asks her what she’s trying to forget, Carmela answers: “That there’s been reform but no political break.”

In this period, a new activism of the everyday chose to celebrate such activities as cooking as in themselves a form of resistance. So de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, with his emphasis on cooking as one element of that practice, was formed in the aftermath of May 68, while British cultural studies were part of the response to what Stuart Hall called “the great moving right show.”

The neo-liberal consensus on everyday life is familiar to us all as the boilerplate of every mainstream politician: work, homeowning, health care, college and pension provision. Within that consensus the technocratic discussion has been about the allocation of state and so-called “market” provision. It need hardly be pointed out that all these aspects of the everyday (aka the “American dream”) are rapidly moving out of reach. Further, the current Troika and market consensus is that people don’t deserve these things unless they can afford them.

So we find ourselves in the situation of “precariousness,” an awkward word for an awkward situation. It means finding that even if you have health insurance, your plan no longer covers a drug you use and the cost is $248, as recently happened to me. It means that if you did what the consensus told you to do and “saved” for college tuition, the amount saved has reduced in absolute terms and the costs are anyway so far higher than predicted that it is pointless to try and catch up. It means discovering that as people live longer, there is a new duty of care for elders to which the state is indifferent because these people are no longer economically active. And so on.

Living precariously is a struggle every day, and it is not in the least everyday. Although I did not know this when I started, it is why I do this project every day. It is part of the collective struggle to find a way to combat inequality every day.

X-marks

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For all its success, Occupy has had conceptual failures as well. So far, the movement has been aware of the need to address indigenous issues but–at least in New York–we have not got very far with it. By the same token, while people are aware of climate change, it’s been hard to turn it into an action agenda item. It could be that the accelerating disaster of the Keystone XL pipeline serves as the catalyst to bring these crucial questions to the forefront.

Yesterday two votes in the Senate showed that the Keystone advocates continue to gain ground. A proposal to void the requirement for a federal permit to cross the US-Canada border won by 56-42, falling only on the filibuster rule. That means that eleven “Democrats” voted for the pipeline and with two Republicans absent, Big Oil needs only two more votes to get this passed. While the White House is oddly touting this as a victory, a quick look at the list of pro-pipeline Democrats reveals a major overlap with seats the party needs to retain to hold the Senate. Translation: expect a “compromise” soon.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben has become a convert to direct action. Yesterday he wrote:

we need to stop just playing defense against bad projects and go on the offense. The next clear target is subsidies for fossil fuels–why are we paying the richest industry on earth billions in taxpayer dollars?

The Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, along with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, have already passed legislation against the Keystone XL oil pipeline and have adopted the Cochabamba Mother Earth Accord. Debra White Plume explains why in this video.

Now Oglala Lakota people from Pine Ridge in South Dakota have started to take direct action against the pipeline by placing their bodies in the way of trucks carrying its equipment. This Monday 5 March, as Brenda Norrell’s blog Censored News reports:

Lakotas Alex White Plume, Debra White Plume, Andrew Ironshell, Sam Long Black Cat and Don Iron Shell, were arrested at a blockade of tar sands pipeline trucks. Debra White Plume, released from jail in Kyle, South Dakota, said Monday night: “We formed a blockade to stop tar sands oil mine equipment from passing our lands. The truckers told us the corporation office from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the State of South Dakota made a deal to save the truckers $50,000 per truck, there were two trucks, from having to pay $100,000,” Debra White Plume told Censored News. “There were about 50 to 75 people on the blockade at the village of Wanbli in Eagle Nest District on the northern side of the Pine Ridge rez.” Debra White Plume said the trucks were coming from Texas and going to Alberta, Canada to the tar sands oil mine. “They each carried a ‘treater vessel’ which is used to separate gas and oil and other elements.”

The protestors were, ironically enough, arrested by Tribal Police for disorderly conduct, the catch-all offense that has been widely used by the NYPD.

No doubt it was entirely a coincidence that the next day the New York Times ran one of those long social issue pieces about alcoholism in indigenous populations: on the very same Pine Ridge reservation. This is not to minimize the issue but there was no mention of the Keystone action, the questions of sovereignty and Treaty observance that it raises.

I’m reminded of Scott Richard Lyons’s work on the signing of those treaties and the x-marks that were used to designate native signers:

The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency.

Lyon suggests that all the Indian nations are in effect x-marks. It might be interesting to think of Occupy sites as x-marks as well, places where we try to do what we want under conditions that are not of own making. And then get evicted whenever they want. One of those conditions is that we occupy land that is already occupied and cannot do otherwise.

Decolonize Wall St

This problem was and is recognized but has been hard to address. An issue like Keystone allows us to demonstrate actual solidarity with First Nation peoples in Canada and indigenous peoples in the US, creating a new space between Occupy and Un-Occupy that could be where we should go next, a horizontal action against the inequality that is constitutive of the settler colony.

 

To strike horizontally against inequality

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After comparing the first two Communiqués in the OWS theory journal Tidal, today I’m reading the essays by Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Marina Sitrin. I see here an emerging concept of Occupy as the horizontal strike against inequality.

"True Democracy Is in the Streets"--Argentinian graffiti

First let’s applaud both the editorial team at Tidal and the authors for this mutual engagement: very few established publications could command such writers for their debut issues and it’s to the credit of these much-in-demand figures that they have prioritized writing for Tidal.

In two essays, Butler develops her approach from an initial stress on the “call for justice” in December to today’s key

claim that capitalism relies upon, and reproduces, social and economic inequalities [that]…are becoming greater, assuming new and devastating forms and [that] this accelerated process of inequality remains unchecked by existing state and global authorities.

If the earlier stress was on the “precariousness” that the global financial crisis has produced, as it were, by accident, Butler now suggests that capital is operating in such a way that labor has become a “disposable population.” We might recall that whereas it once took approximately eighty per cent of the workforce simply to generate sufficient food, contemporary agri-business can do so with only two per cent.

Any small adjustment in the current organization of society would not, then, address “the reproduction of inequality” that can be seen as the intended consequence of neo-liberalism. Here we recall Butler’s evocation in Tidal 1 of the cheering Tea Party crowd when invited to imagine a person without health insurance dying. Or the new waves of hate against people using contraception, marrying each other, or otherwise organizing to defend their equality.

Volumes have been written about the ways in which capitalism has always exacerbated inequality, and treated colonized and enslaved populations as disposable–and it’s safe to assume that Butler, of all people, has read most of them. What she is articulating here is a theory of resistance, and of the means to challenge the legitimacy of such a system. Interestingly, the counterinsurgency promoted by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan was centered on creating just such a legitimacy.

The counterinsurgency theory of legitimacy 2005

This combination of neo-liberal “economic pluralism” with militarized governance is precisely what is presently in crisis. As David Graeber might say, there is an inherent resistance to such notions, based on his demonstration that “communism is the basis of all human sociability.” By communism, he does not mean in any way the oddity of the Soviet system. It is a general theory of the possibility of society and a particular refutation of the neo-liberal fetish of “self-sufficiency as a moral ideal” (Butler).

As Butler now argues, this contestation of legitimacy is the moment at which Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the general strike becomes so important. She understands the strike as “a collectivity of disenfranchised citizens,” in which citizenship is not a formal case of documentation, so much as the index of membership of a given society. After giving a precis of the various forms of general strike from Du Bois to Gandhi and Luxemburg, Spivak provocatively suggests

[I]n the “Occupy Wall Street” movement the spirit of the General Strike has come into its own and joined forces with the American tradition of civil disobedience: citizens against an unregulated capitalist state, not against an individual and his [or her] regime.

The “spirit” of the General Strike is the specter haunting neo-liberalism. It is not the specter of state-centered command economies. It is a gesture towards the justice that cannot be deconstructed.

Writing with the collapse of Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacist uprising fresh in his mind, Walter Benjamin, whose spirit pervades Tidal 2, defined the general strike as the event that

takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not
so much causes as consummates.

In its “American” form, taking America to refer to the hemisphere, Marina Sitrin sees such a strike as something

we are discovering together, as we create, which is also how we create: together, horizontally and with affect. What we are doing and how we are doing it are inextricably linked, and both are part of this prefigurative movement.

What we do imagines, forms and creates what there will be next in place of this present disaster, if there is anything. Sitrin warns, based on her experience in Argentina after the crisis of 2001, against two potential distractions. First, the movement may be distracted from this project by already existing left or centrist parties seeking to use its energy. Secondly, and this will be a real issue once the Republicans decide which puppet best suits their Super PACs, we must guard against the electoral distraction: “vote? not vote? organize against the candidates?” In place of such vacillation, Sitrin offers the powerful slogan

With, Against and Beyond the State.

Which is to say, yes, vote in November as a tactical measure, but organize against the state that continues to be the agent of neo-liberal legitimacy. Above all, imagine and create a practice that is beyond the state.

The Tidal theory of Occupy as a horizontal general strike against inequality is moving and dynamic. It suggests two motifs for the present and some for the near future.

First, all Occupy action is a general strike. We should not get drawn into the numbers game that only a massive shut down of all services and industries would count as such a strike. There has been such a strike in North America since September 17, 2011 and in the Americas since the first indigenous revolt against the settlers and the first uprising by the enslaved. MayDay 2012 is a celebration of the return of this spirit of the general strike, not its coming into being. It grows as it turns, yes, but no one instance will be transcendent.

Next and by corollary, the state against which we strike is strong and weak at the same instant, which Negri has called “the porcelain effect.” Porcelain is both very resilient and breakable at once. It endures right up until the moment that it does not, as we saw most recently in Egypt. This is why it cannot be reformed: you cannot recast porcelain once it has been fired, you either use it or discard it.

For the future: Tidal can and should drive this debate, becoming the locus of a new discourse on the horizontal strike against inequality that prefigures what we are creating. There are questions in the spirit of the general strike as to the practice of direct democracy, the recognition of climate injustice and the rights of the non-human in the midst of what has been called the Great Extinction.

For the time being, let’s salute the work already done and the impetus it gives to us all.