Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

What is Occupy Theory Now?

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The impetus towards this project began with a piece I called “Occupy Theory,” written last October, about what the Occupy movement was doing to theory. In keeping with the moment, I kept any resolution under suspension: “Occupy theory is what you do as you occupy.” I went on to discuss Judith Butler’s talk at OWS that she later expanded and published in the first issue of Tidal, the Occupy Theory journal, under the title “For and Against Precarity.”

Those days seem strangely far away now. Here to cheer us up is the second issue of Tidal with its subtitle: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. It was launched yesterday to an exuberant crowd off Grand Street in Brooklyn, where it was claimed that the interaction of theory with Occupy was one of the distinctive features of the movement. That’s an interesting idea–in many ways this project is about how you might use all the discursive practice assembled under the name “theory” for the past twenty years in the new context.

Tidal is a testament to the energies of the new movement. It’s thirty-two pages long, full color, free and 60,000 copies have been printed. Yesterday I saw people all over downtown distributing them. Inside are essays by Butler, Spivak, and Marina Sitrin, as well as by as key figures from the movement, writing collectively and individually. In this and following posts, I’m going to read the two issues against each other, measuring differences and transformations, as we gather breath for a new moment this Spring. Let’s say out loud in the affectless context of the Internet that I love Tidal, it’s a great project.

First issue of Tidal

You know that there’s a difference by looking at the front covers. On the first edition (above), a panoramic montage of Occupiers at Liberty (top) and on the Brooklyn Bridge (bottom). At bottom left we can see two arrests, one woman raising her head to shout or scream. But there are photographers recording this, three we can see plus whoever took the image we’re looking at. Inside the cover, a sign reads: “I still can’t eat GDP but I can see climate change out my window.” That’s the clarity of Occupy.

Cover of Tidal Issue 2

The new cover is a single shot of the D17 action when OWS tried to set up a new site at Duarte Street but were thwarted by the police and the church. Almost everyone in the photograph is either a cop or taking a picture. Only a handful of people are pressing the fence that divides the image and appears to be at the point of collapse. You wonder now if a few more people had put the cameras down and pushed, what might have happened? Inside, we see a line of Spanish police with multi-colored paint on their riot shields.

In both issues, the journal opens with a “Communiqué,” a title that unusually seems to pay homage to the Weather Underground, but it may just be a coincidence. In the first edition, the Communiqué used the language of the spectacle to render the unreality of Wall Street:

We were born into a world of ghosts and illusions that have haunted our minds our entire lives…We have no clear idea how life should really feel…We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual.

The disciplinary institution this Communiqué seemed most aimed at was the university. Projects for “People’s Dissertations” and an opening of higher education to community and educationally marginalized groups argued for a proliferation of educational action:

To liberate our education must include, then, expropriating our ideas from systemic hierarchical misevaluation.

By contrast, the new edition opens with the experience of jail, police violence and a sense of breach of the social contract:

When you’re sitting in jail, the topic of justice can’t help but come up.

Jail is that which, without knowing it, we had already demanded. The figurative language is closer to Benjamin here than Debord, although no citations are given. In discussing the unnamed Thing (system or apparatus) to which we have apparently consigned ourselves in some Terms and Conditions clause, Tidal write:

The Thing resembles a ship that we’re all on together. Not a cruise ship exactly, but more of a steam ship/trawler. We have a captain who steers while we shovel coal and swab decks. …The captain stares at the impending doom on the horizon and grins ecstatically.

Here is an Ahab for the world of finance capital, one without a White Whale to hunt. Unseeing, “he uses his eyes offensively to project what he wants to see on the world.” In the academic world, this is what I have called “visuality,” the way that power visualizes history for itself and convinces us that it is right.

We might extend the figure. Moby-Dick has often been used as a metaphor for industrial capitalism with the wretched whales being dismembered to serve the modern need for light. It’s often forgotten that the most destructive whale hunting was done after Second World War, not by the sail ships, but by nations in search of cheap calories to feed war-damaged populations. The whales, social and language-using animals like ourselves, were invisible to the military-industrial machine.

The Caribbean radical intellectual C. L. R. James wrote a wonderful study of Moby-Dick, while imprisoned at Ellis Island by immigration officials. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952) initiated a way of seeing ships both as the epitome of capitalist hierarchy, and as the site for potential and actual rebellion. It is worth remembering in this context that the very word “strike” comes from the maritime world, meaning to take down sail as a mutiny. The sailing ship was the first modern institution where the command line was instrumentalized: a highly specific technical language initiated changes in the function of the machine. Unless it crashed. Or was taken over by pirates.

The interface with present-day digital technologies is clear. As Tidal put it:

In our age, the capacity for connection, self-education and self-cooperation has exploded. This offers a window of opportunity with its unspoken, unresolved question: who will take and shape the bulk of the resulting potential?…The window will not remain open long before being overwhelmed by claims from those in power.

Here, then, is a different countervisualizing that might be possible for those of us in “jail cells, in city squares, on Wall Street, from every space we occupy,” a look out of the window, created in part by the connectivity enabled by, but not limited to, digital spaces and machines.

What might we see there?

May Day poster

  • No work
  • No chores
  • No banking
  • No shopping
  • No school

MayDay 2012.

Next: demands and horizontalism.

 

 

 

The Out of Control Society

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The disciplinary society of enclosed spaces known as school, army or work has largely collapsed under the assaults of neo-liberalism. What is becoming clear is that the society of control that was imagined to be its replacement is getting out of control.

Permanent school in the form of life-long training was the society of control: now we have debt out of control, and machines to do the labor. Permanent prison was to replace the panopticon but society can no longer afford it. The permanent counterinsurgency has collapsed into a brutal necropolitics–the right to determine who shall be killed.

Debt was today discussed in genteel terms on the New York Times editorial page. The Times found it “welcome” that Mount Holyoke has frozen its price of attendance at a trifling $53,000. Sewanee, the University of the South, has reduced costs to “lure” students with a mere $44,600 charge, to be kept constant for four years.

On the facing letters column, the President of Sarah Lawrence, the most expensive school in the country, suggests that with grant aid her institution can be an “affordable choice” if “educational value” is factored in. In short, financial aid is another form of privilege. It’s been widely noted that for many students Harvard can be less expensive than the California State system, which was designed to cater to working- and middle-class students.

Less well-heeled institutions have stopped bothering to pretend. The University of North Iowa Regents today approved cuts, reported to involve closing its Physics department, among several others, as well as a Lab School and its museum. 30 tenured and tenure track faculty will be dismissed.

Yesterday came a spectacular declaration of the collapse of global counterinsurgency into sovereign assertion of the right to kill. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed:

Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate.”

This is, to the contrary, by any standard out of control. If the Bush administration had said this, we would all have gone crazy–and maybe run for President on the idea of restoring the rule of law.

Let’s consider how Deleuze defined the society of control in 1990:

The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

It is possible, then, to claim that the rapid change of direction we are seeing is simply an intensification of the society of the control. Deleuze did note that universities would abandon research and education would become corporate throughout. However, it seems now to read better as

Debt is continuous and without limit.

It was striking for ,e to see how often the closing phrase of my preceding post on debt was cited on Facebook and elsewhere:

The most dangerous idea now might be this: it’s not worth paying for college because there are no jobs anyway and no job that you want would pay you enough to service the debt.

As I reflect on this context, it seems that being dangerous means taking the fact that everything is out of control as a starting point.

In the era of the emerging disciplinary society, such people were called visionaries or prophets, like the Digger Gerard Winstanley, who saw that the “earth was a common treasury for all” in a 1649 vision during the English Revolution. So he and some companions went and occupied St George’s Hill in Surrey. They called for what has been called a “general strike” against waged labor and for communal living. The Army and the gentry soon put an end to all that. Their heir was the far better-remembered “prophet against Empire,” William Blake, who railed against “One King, one God, one Law.”

As if to remind us that this is no longer the age of prophecy, Mark Butterworth’s play Jerusalem has been running on both sides of the Atlantic since 2009, although it opened in New York in 2011. The play is a lament for the passing of a certain possibility, shrouded in mythic Englishness by being set on St George’s Day in rural Wiltshire with a lead character called Byron. Johnny Byron. Johnny occupies a patch of common land, like a latter-day Digger, except that he deals in drugs and his trailer acts as a hang-out for the local marginal population.

Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in "Jerusalem"

His encampment was an Occupy in all but name and the action begins when it becomes one, because a local real estate developer plans to turn the land into a sub-division (in US terms), so Rooster (as he is known) is served an eviction notice. These themes, like the English flag and the song “Jerusalem,” are not without clear overtones of white nostalgia for empire. The play ends in such a way that you either have to assume that Rooster is sleeping with a teenager or that her brother has been abusing her. It’s the dangerous supplement to the good old Oedipus complex that has been the stuff of drama for so long.

What Jerusalem was not was a revival of the prophetic voice–most critics talked about Shakespeare not Blake, lat alone the poet Byron, a reference they all seemed to miss. Nor did it in fact prophesy Occupy because the overwhelming majority of sites were urban, not rural, such as the long-lasting Occupy Bristol, closest to Wiltshire.

What’s dangerous about rejecting even the out of control society is very clear to people–that you risk giving up the one chance you might have, however attenuated, to break out of your social strata. US social mobility is amongst the lowest in the overdeveloped countries. At the same time, the chance of being perceived as a prophet, as opposed to an out of control homeless person, is too low to mention. In Terence Malick’s odd film Tree of Life, the only prophet that could be evoked was Job, whose sufferings at the hand of an apparently malign deity ring somewhat truer than stories of redemption.

The religiosity is the problem. Where messianism once offered a counterpoint to law, it scarcely does today in the evangelical US, where being Christian is a requirement for office every bit as strict as the shariah of Iran.

It’s the anarchic streak implied by “out of control” that now rings true from Rosa Luxemburg to Winstanley and Occupy–“no god, no master.” It’s perhaps the least commented on feature of the movement and it’s most dangerous one: not just out of control but a rejection of the desire to be controlled.

 

 

Order? Or Chaos? Love Rosa

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Rosa Luxemburg as Cindy Sherman

Today is the birthday of (radical, disabled, Jewish) Rosa Luxemburg. She’s 141. Her idea for the mass (or general) strike is going strong. In 1906 she wrote:

The overthrow of absolutism is a long, continuous social process, and its solution demands a complete undermining of the soil of society; the uppermost part be placed lowest and the lowermost part placed highest; the apparent “order” must be changed to a “chaos,” and the apparently anarchistic chaos must be changed into a new order.

It was expressions like that which once got her expelled from the canon of orthodoxy but make her seem all the more relevant today. Substitute “globalization” for “absolutism” and it reads like something from an Occupy pamphlet.

Let’s once again try and make visible the chaos of financial globalization that undermines its own substrate, the oceans by which it delivers its goods in steel containers. Their purported order is creating natural and social chaos.

Design for the Olympic monument: the AcelorMittal "Orbit" by Anish Kapoor

The monument above is Anish Kapoor’s “Orbit,” designed to be the symbol of the London 2012 Olympics. It is being financed by ArcelorMittal and their chair Lakshmi Mittal, held to be the wealthiest man in Britain at about $23 billion or so. Readers of O2012 will remember this firm as one whose blast furnaces in France are currently under occupation by a threatened workforce.

Kapoor’s peculiar construct appears to be a capitalized deformation of Tatlin’s monument to the Third International, designed in 1919, the very year of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder at the hands of the forces of “order.” For Tatlin, steel was a modern material, forging a new way to see and understand the international.

Tatlin "Monument for the Third International" 1919

For Kapoor, it appears now to be a means to visualize planetary networks, as if seen from orbit, but rendered as a perhaps unintentionally revealing chaos. The point perhaps is to show how steel, the epitome of “strength,” can also be rendered flexible, neo-liberalism’s favorite word. “Flexible” means lower wages, higher profits, lower corporate taxes, longer hours and lower benefits.

And it also means flexible interpretations of data and what, in a naive way, one might call the truth. In this form of flexibility, steel furnaces are renewable energy now, once again at the behest of our friends ArcelorMittal:

AK Steel of Middletown wants to build a $310 million power plant that would use the foul gases from its blast furnace as a fuel rather than a waste gas that it must by law now flare. ArcelorMittal in Cleveland is interested in the technology, said a spokeswoman. AK Steel has already won a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for this first-of-its-kind U.S. power generator…The proposal also has the blessing of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because it would produce something of value from a dangerous waste gas. The company therefore has asked lawmakers to amend Ohio’s green energy law and classify the electricity generated with blast furnace gases as “renewable energy,” even though the blast furnace itself is fueled with coke, a substance made from coal.

Coke by-products are now “renewable energy,” steel companies are getting “green” grants and their order is chaos.

Today a review essay in Science examines the dramatic acidification of the ocean as a result of the continued acceleration of CO2 emissions like, say, blast furnace waste gases. The process they describe is literally chaotic in the scientific sense of multiply interacting strands of causation. It’s visualized like this:

Diagram of Occean acidification

To follow the diagram: black is reduced carbon. Yellow represents reduced alkalinity. whereas blue is increases in alkanization offsetting acidification. Red is increased acidity. Simply put, the vastly increased CO2 in the air overwhelms all the feedback loops and acidifies the sea to a dramatic extent.

Their conclusions are clear:

the current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 My [ie 300 million years] of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.

That means a system in which the change cannot be predicted by anything that has happened for three hundred million years. Or so. Their order is creating insane chaos.

What can we learn from Rosa in response to this chaos? Let’s refuse to get depressed: that’s what Big Pharma exists for, to medicate us with its happy pills. Luxemburg wants us to act–through the act comes real education, she says.

No more corporate “order” visualized as giant, phallic monuments. Time for some anarchic “chaos,” from the chaos of the biosphere to those of lived relations. MayDay is coming, Rosa’s day:

 a festival [that] may naturally be raised to a position of honor as the first great demonstration under the aegis of mass struggle.

 

The Empire of No Signs

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In moments of radical transformation, words lose old meanings. New events struggle to be represented and have to be experienced. In the Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes used an avowedly Orientalist fantasy of Japan to generate a sense of the “emptiness of language.” Now we can just look around us. The disconnect between how the world is represented in what we now call the “culture,” and the unfolding realities since 2008, is palpable.

There are a variety of indicators we might notice from “high” and “low” culture alike. This past Friday, the HBO comedian Bill Maher did not need to satirize the remarks of Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh so much as simply repeat them. The Right now inhabits a cultural universe that is laughably unrecognizable to mainstream liberals, let alone radicals.

Television nonetheless continues to represent a world in which comedy means perky young people living in vast apartments, untroubled by debt or unemployment. The dramascape is all cops all the time. In order to even make reference to the Occupy movement, writers have had to resort to bizarre stratagems, such as the recent random insertion into the CBS lawyer soap The Good Wife of a judge being pepper sprayed at an Occupy site (–viewer alert: there’s a tedious 30 second ad before the judge makes his random remark about a minute in).

You might remember that last December Law and Order did build a fake Occupy site in Foley Square for a set, only three weeks after the eviction of Zuccotti/Liberty. Occupy activists quickly installed themselves– and were as quickly re-evicted by the police, leading in turn to a rewrite of the episode, such that Occupy was a brief moment rather than the theme of the episode. The empire now fears even its own simulacra.

Perhaps this what is to be expected of a ratings-obsessed advertising-driven medium like network TV but there isn’t even a cable show that I can imagine taking on the questions posed by Occupy. All the shows that people discuss like Mad Men, Treme, Luck or Boardwalk Empire are set in the past anyway–Shameless might be the only possibility, except that its characters live so deep in the informal economy that crisis is their everyday.

We already had a go at Hollywood cinema–what about “high” culture? In the US, literature has been the site of engagement with the “national question,” especially since the Second World War. California novelist Steve Erickson’s recent These Dreams of You has tried to rework the Great American Novel trope for the Obama years.

It describes how Zan, a former novelist-turned-academic, loses his teaching job, putting his family on the path to foreclosure. The book drifts away from this all-too-realistic scenario into a complex narrative on multicultural adoption, race, history, empire and the legacies of the 1960s that is engaging without sustaining the compelling force of the opening. It’s usually not a good idea, for example, to have David Bowie as a significant fictional character;)

Interestingly, though, Erickson seems to acknowledge the impossibility of what he’s attempted. Towards the end, Zan gives a lecture on the novel in London:

“Maybe this has been going on a while,” says Zan, “but now the arc of the imagination bends back to history because it can’t compete with history.” A black Hawaiian with a swahili name? It’s the sort of history that puts novelists out of business.

Calling that quote out makes the book seem still further from accomplishing its ambitions than I thought it was as I read it, but that’s not my point here. Erickson worries that Obama allowed us to hear the “song” of what he calls America again and

should it fade and be silent, it will never again quite be possible to believe in it….But without such faith, the country–this country in particular–is nothing.

And that is, in my view, probably a good thing. The “song” of “America” is past representing, past meaning–an empire of no signs.

I find myself drawing a parallel with the tension in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time between meaning, memory and forgetting in the political. While one reading of the novel might stress personal involuntary memory (madeleines and all that), another sees the ways in which meaning becomes undone in a stratified, class-ridden, wealth-dominated society by the intrusion of the necessity of political affirmation. That is to say, the snobbish salons frequented by the Narrator fall apart over the Dreyfus Affair.

While aristocratic elitism sides with the Army, using Dreyfus’s jewishness as the index of his guilt, their dominance of language is irretrievably fractured by this assertion. While the Guermantes for the most part remain anti-Dreyfusard, not even all the anti-semitic aristocrats can be convinced by their own argument as it is presented in the Dreyfus Case. For all the drama of these conversions, by the time Dreyfus is exonerated in 1906, society has contrived to forget what it once found so shocking and it requires Proust’s exhaustive hermeneutic investigation to reveal the interwoven layers of anti-semitism, homophobia, nationalism and snobbery that constitute the French empire.

The potential ludicrousness of blogging about Proust will not have escaped you. I have on my shelf the four gilded volumes of the Pléiade edition, bought as part of the whole mid-life crisis thing for a “year of reading Proust.” The volumes are themselves masterpieces of a careful annotated scholarship that is perhaps the polar opposite of this project. And perhaps not.

In a wonderful parenthesis in his short book Proust and Signs, Deleuze remarks

Few texts constitute a better commentary on Lenin’s remark as to a society’s capacity to replace “the corrupt old prejudices” by new prejudices even more infamous or more stupid.

That’s where Occupy is now (bet you didn’t think I could make a paragraph that included Proust, Lenin, Deleuze and Occupy). The “corrupt old prejudices” in the empire of no signs are now those reformed around the First World War period–anti-communist nationalism, the American century, global capitalism. The new prejudices are those being circulated by the Santorums and Romneys as “culture wars” in the neo-liberal empire of no signs.

By the time a twelve-volume assessment emerges from today’s Ivy League equivalent of the cork-lined room, it will have been too late to have prevented them–although by the same token I do see how I might finally write about Proust. Maybe the Internet is just the place to move away from songs of the nation, or hymns to empire, and consider again the prose of the world.

Abolition (Free, Open) Education

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If debt refusal becomes a point of self-affirmation, what then happens to education? The tactical answer is the common sharing of education in non-hierarchical institutions, as part of the strategic goal of creating free public education from pre-K to PhD. Yet this goal of abolition education since Reconstruction has always been undermined by debt. What’s so important, I think, is the emerging possibility of discussing this as a collective failure rather than as a set of individual problems.

Abolition education was forged by Reconstruction. Du Bois highlighted the complementary actions of the newly elected South Carolina Convention in ending imprisonment for debt and creating free, public education. While they complained mightily about their “loss” from the abolition of slavery

usury laws had been repealed by the planters in 1866, and interest rates rose to 25 and 30 per cent. Banks commonly charged from 18 to 24 per cent.

Nonetheless, South Carolina committed itself to creating public education by means of an annual levy on all property and a poll tax. The reason was clear: for the first time, those without property were making decisions. Twenty-three out of 47 white delegates and fifty-nine of the 74 African-American delegates paid no income tax. In our own time of millionaire representatives and billionaire financing, this seems scarcely credible.

The “free common school system” was in place by 1868 and made permanent in 1870. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, Wall Street financiers refused to back South Carolina bonds in 1868. Finally, with interest rates of between 15 and 20 per cent, bonds were issued, driving South Carolina into over $20 million of debt by 1871, at least half of which was payment of interest, a situation enabled, wrote Du Bois, by the

financial graft of Wall Street and its agents, made possible by the slander and reaction of the planters.

Debt has never been a separate question to public education in these not-so-United States.

On my way downtown for an Occupy meeting today, I looked up at the subway ads–no less than four for-profit “colleges” were advertised at my end of the car. These institutions like ASA College, Professional Business College and the Grace Institute are outside the research universities discussion about humanities versus STEM subjects: all degrees are vocational. That does not mean they are cheap: ASA expects tuition to be about $12,000 a year and total costs to be about $30,000 a year, according to its own website.

While this debt is, then, being imposed on people as a structural requirement for work, we still can’t ask people to renounce the formal structures of education: it’s going to be a process. Much of that might involve rethinking how we got here in the first place. Today I saw a discussion between the artist Deborah Kass and the young artist Amy Lincoln that highlights these issues:

Ms. Lincoln: …I don’t like the stereotype, the bohemian idea. We’re definitely very career-oriented. You have to be serious about spending time in the studio. You have no free time. You never have the day off…I know a lot of people who have to work a lot because they’re paying off a $30,000 student loan.

Ms. Kass: I didn’t get an MFA. I didn’t have a student loan. We expected our parents to pay for college.

Ms. Lincoln: We all got MFAs and the art market was booming. You could get picked up by a gallery at a student show. We had really high expectations. Now, there is so much angst over, “I want to be showing at such-and-such gallery, and this curator called but then I never heard back….”

Ms. Kass:I didn’t have any expectations. What you expected didn’t exist yet.

For all her debt, Lincoln sells work for between $300-700 in Bushwick where she lives. There’s no disgrace in that, far from it, and it’s interesting that in the short discussion, Lincoln doesn’t question her choices.

By contrast, J, the PhD student who I mentioned yesterday as being saddled with scary debt, wrote to me:

I used to have trouble sleeping at night because I was afraid that they would bring back debtors prisons … and hating myself for having taken out loans. It’s taken me a while to wrap my head around it and to decouple the value and necessity of education from the burden of the debt, and to see that debt structurally.

Here we see the full wisdom of the OWS slogan highlighted by McKenzie Wark: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”

Interim tactics: consider learning, or teaching, at free, open institutions like The Public School, OWS’s own OccU, or following courses by using free syllabi provided by institutions like MIT. If you teach, allow people to audit, sit in, podcast and live-stream. If you write, make it available free by open access means (you can publish it as well, of course, if you can find a press that will give you rights to your own work: and good luck with that).

I know people can’t learn how to be doctors like this and that’s why this is a tactic. Let’s also remember actions like those of the South African Students Movement in 1976, who refused to participate in the apartheid school system and set in motion the collapse of the regime. At the same time, many individuals deprived themselves of education to make things better for others.

So it is heartening to see the success of Chile’s high school students who did not walk out but occupied their schools:

“The assembly is the control center,” Cristóbal explains. “All students participate and at times it’s open to teachers. We have watch duty and volunteers come in to make meals. Teachers teach, but they also learn from the students. At the beginning we had classes subject by subject, but later we saw that parceling out knowledge wasn’t the real way to learn, and we all got together for each subject.”

The high school system is the key to an abolition education in the Americas. Here in New York the high schools are more segregated than they were before official desegregation. There was official celebration last week when admissions to the city’s selective high schools produced a class that is 6% African American and 8% Latin@–in a majority minority city. Behind that failure lies the still-greater disaster of data-driven quantification of education as a standardized test score result.

From Chile to South Africa and South Carolina, the impetus to a free, open public education is clear and elusive at once. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Arizona has banned the teaching of Paulo Freire’s classic The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We might want to begin by re-reading it, assigning it, making free copies of it, and discussing it at Occupies everywhere.

Endebt and Punish

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William Hogarth, "The Rake's Progress"--in the Fleet Prison for debt

Yesterday the M1 student march in New York stopped for personal and institutional histories. On three occasions people I’m working with at undergraduate, MA and PhD level recounted how debt has deformed their lives. I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

The accounts moved from an angry and articulate sophomore via an MA, who is teaching three adjunct jobs to keep up her payments, to a PhD candidate looking at 30 years of repaying $800-1000 a month. Hearing such stories one after another made it seem structural: the further one advances, the greater the debt and so the greater the pressure to conform.

The graduate students both spoke about wanting to stay in education, while not being sure that they could afford the profession. It’s the contemporary Student’s Progress, which, like a modernization of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, does not so much end in debtor’s prison as begin there–only it’s the “soul” that is imprisoned, not the body.

I started to think that debt was parallel to the transformation of the legal system over time. If Foucault taught us to think of early modern corporal punishment being transformed into modern discipline in the nineteenth century, Angela Davis has supplemented that analysis with her description of the prison-industrial system. Thus the penitentiary was instituted in the aftermath of abolition both to control and contain the free African population and to create lend-lease minimal cost labor to replace chattel slavery. The binary turns out not to be as simple as we had thought.

So we might think to map a parallel and intertwined structure for debt. In the early modern period, common people were hanged or otherwise punished for minor debt and theft. Those of higher social rank might find themselves incarcerated in the Fleet prison–bankrupts and those charged with contempt of the courts of Chancery, Exchequer and common pleas were not the working classes. Violent crime and theft was the province of the Court of the King’s Bench and the Assizes. The Fleet therefore usually contained only about 300 inmates, many of whom were well-known. It was closed in 1844, while imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1869.

This apparently Foucauldian pattern needs complicating. As David Graeber points out in his brilliant Debt, the violent punishments against debt crime were rarely enforced in the late Middle Ages, which is not to say there was no bad feeling:

the criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and a borrower….[C]ommunities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love will also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion.

The innovation of the “market” in the late eighteenth century was to challenge the possibility of such intertwined community by creating a new self-love, to quote the most famous passage of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love.

Graeber shows that the concept of self-love, or self interest, creates a new hybrid: a singular “self” that owes nothing except to itself; and “interest” that is paid to that self, now registered as “love.”

We might see Bentham’s Panopticon as a machine for the production of such self-interested operatives. For it was intended to function as well for the manufactures, or factories, as it did for the prison or asylum. Writing in the Panopticon Letters (1788) a decade after Smith, Bentham noted of Panoptic surveillance: “Each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time.” If I follow Graeber’s suggestions correctly, we should as much stress the singularity as the permanence: it is the process of breaking up mutually-endebted communities and the subsequent production of self-interested individuals with singular debts.

With the end of the reforming Panopticon around the same time as the resurgence of financialization (c.1975-81) has come a new configuration: the individual is “locked into” debt from the earliest age. If this debt is centered around education, it is more likely to apply to middle and upper-middle class children, who may have college savings plans created for them at birth or before. This debt is now the largest sector of consumer debt in the US economy at about $1 trillion, and it is regarded as highly secure because you cannot declare bankruptcy on student debt and agencies can even garner debtors’ Social Security.

What has further changed is the transformation of the equation of interest and love into what I think we want to call hate. It’s not enough to make sure most graduates have their lives locked into debt before they even graduate. Everyone has to suffer.

When I was in Arizona recently, I heard about a proposal from the Arizona State legislature to require even students who have full scholarships or grants to pay at least $2000 in tuition. Here’s the legalese (in blue block capitals on their site):

each student who is a full‑time student enrolled at a university under the jurisdiction of the Arizona board of regents in fiscal year 2012‑2013 shall personally contribute at least two thousand dollars during the academic year for tuition.  A student may not use any other source of public or private funding, including grants, gifts, scholarships or tuition benefits or other types of funding administered by or through a university or an affiliate of a university, to reduce or eliminate that student’s contribution.

What is the motive of this “personal contribution”? Last night I happened to see a production of Brecht’s classic play Galileo. It begins by stressing Galileo’s debt. His need to repay his debt leads him to leave Venice and venture into the monk-controlled regions of Italy. When his decentering astronomical discoveries imply a different social order than the Bible-sanctioned control of the nobles, he recants under the threat of the Inquisition’s torture, ending his days in a physically comfortable prison of the soul. He ends as he begins, locked into a system that only debt can supply.

If debt is a means to teach you to hate yourself, it is also and equally true that the imagination is dangerous. Ideas can overturn social order. The most dangerous idea now might be this: it’s not worth paying for college because there are no jobs anyway and no job that you want would pay you enough to service the debt.

On Optimism

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At every forum outside the Occupy movement that I attend, the question of optimism is raised, usually negatively. In academia in particular, you never lose by raising the bet on pessimism, on predicting negative outcomes and highlighting the gaps between stated goals and presumed realities. I get it. There’s a lure to tarrying with the negative and it somehow always seems more intellectual to do so.

At the same time, on a day when I have every personal reason to be a tad pessimistic, I wonder about this. I think back to Stuart Hall, who would deliver amazingly “pessimistic” analyses of the Thatcherite revolution and yet you would feel uplifted by his personal energy and the force of his insight. I’m no Stuart Hall and I’m not making a parallel between us. But his evocation of Gramsci’s old tag about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will is worth revisiting.

What is optimism of the will? It can’t be simple optimism, firstly because it would not have needed qualifying if it were so simple. And in the current conjuncture, to use a Hall-flavored expression, we are all obviously aware of the branding of optimism by neo-liberal politics from Reagan to Obama. Political journalists offer us two incontrovertible “truths” all the time: that positive campaigns succeed and that negative ads work. This polarity expresses the relations of commodity fetishism at work in political marketing: the advertiser sells us what we can’t have (positive), or lets us know we can’t have it (negative).

Optimism of the will would have to be resistant to that fetishism, because it is constantly monitored by the pessimism of the intellect. Despite the term, it cannot be a simple emotion in the William James sense–I think optimistically, therefore I am optimistic. Rather it is the paradox: I think pessimistically, therefore I have optimism. Pessimism has to be distinguished from cynicism, which is a very attractive way to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same, just as the logics of capital would want.

It is not, then, just pessimistic to realize that we are everywhere opposed and that the defeat of the immense materiality of capital can seem unimaginable. What’s truly surprising and the grounds for an optimism that is not one is that nonetheless, there is for the first time in a long time, a way of thinking ahead that does not lead to inevitable defeat. This optimism of the will is harder than pessimism because it means you have to insist on that “nonetheless” without the pay-off derived by the fetishist (the je sais mais quand même, I know but still).

Let’s double-back and note that by “fetishism,” I don’t mean here what people choose to do sexually or affectively. I mean the belief that if you buy a new hybrid car, with the immense energy and material consumption that is involved to manufacture such a vehicle, you are nonetheless (quand même) acting for the good of the environment, part of the solution.

Finding alternatives is difficult, slow, full of defeats and without much by way of gratification. That’s optimism of the will. It means going off, as I am about to do, to spend several hours wandering around in the cold and the rain and calling that “Occupy Education,” even though it’s been poorly organized and not well publicized. That’s OK. It’s not without a tendency to a certain Puritanism, I get that. Anyone who has “ambitions” in the emiserated higher education sector has such tendencies, after all. I get that it’s also, in my own case, the very literal expression of a mid-life crisis and for many younger people in the movement, that this is tedious. It is, as they say in New York, what it is, a statement of non-commodified equivalence that is strangely a comfort.

F29: Against Trapezocracy

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Yesterday the Dow crossed 13,000 for the first time since the crash of 2008. Things have not gone so well for the 99%. Today was a global day of action against the rule by banks. Rendered into Greek, this becomes “trapezocracy” from “trapeza,” ancient and modern Greek for bank. Rule by and for the “banks,” meaning the transnational neo-liberal financial order is what Occupy makes visible and challenges.

Today’s OWS protest in New York made visible several pillars of trapezocracy. The first stop was Pfizer, key player in Big Pharma, followed by a teach-in and rally outside the Bank of America Tower. The NYPD chimed in helpfully by barricading off the otherwise anonymous glass towers and saturating 42nd St with an overkill presence, including lots of men on motorized scooters. This isolating strategy made the corporate invisibility visible in a way that simple protest would not. The trapezocrats came out of their little cubicles to photograph us, although they might want to consider that cell-phone photos from long range behind glass don’t come out all that well.

The “trapeze” in trapezocracy indicates nicely the wild market swings that neo-liberalism has made its trademark, in which they sell overpriced products like derivatives on the upswing, even as they bet against them with by “shorting” the market (a bet that prices will fall). The new OWS  Plus Brigades, dressed as clowns, superheroes and other circus performers, visualized the comedy of errors very nicely.

Standing across from BoA in the cold rain this morning, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone reminded us that it is a profoundly corrupt institution, surviving only because of enormous tax payer support. Its miserable stock price would have brought any other company into bankruptcy but it survives because markets believe the government will always support it.

Matt Taibbi addresses the crowd at Bryant Park

Some of the details he was impressively able to recall were remarkable: the sub-prime bonds that banks issued against mortgages were ranked as AAA: only four corporations in America have AAA rating. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway with over $20 billion in capital is AAB. But a set of bonds drawn against random people’s mortgages, many of whom were shuffled through the process in the most negligent way, were AAA. One Bank of America employee alone recalled forging 8000 documents a month to facilitate creating more mortgages.

Meanwhile the administration has encouraged BoA to move its corrupted $73 trillion in derivatives from the speculative end of the bank to the federally-insured depository side. Now every taxpayer in America owes for BoA’s speculative bets. But should a student or homeowner ask for rescheduled debt, lower interest or reduced principal, the cry of moral turpitude goes up all around.

Elsewhere in his magazine today, you can read the Wikileaked document from the Department of Homeland Security on OWS:

The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters. As the primary target of the demonstrations, financial services stands the sector most impacted by the OWS protests.

As RS point out, why is the onus on “controlling protestors” as opposed to the criminals in the banks? Good for them–but is anyone else a tad troubled that a music magazine is doing the most incisive reporting on the crisis?
Let’s do a quick review of some other actions against the Trapezocracy:
In Arizona, a small group of protestors shut down a G4S privately-owned detention and deportation “facility” by direct action. As Angela Davis has long reminded us, the prison-industrial complex is the negation of abolition democracy, as well as a highly profitable privatized “enterprise.” By the way, if you are a university employee with a TIAA-CREF pension, you are a shareholder in G4S. The company resorted to cutting down their own fence to get out!

Picket at Acelor Mittal, France

Across the Atlantic, at the occupied Acelor Mittal steel furnace in France, a joint union picket closed all operations down for 24 hours beginning yesterday morning French time, in defense of their jobs. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that turnout for the anti-austerity F29 protest in Paris was higher than expected, about 15,000:

Rally at the Place de la Bastille, Paris F29

And the indignados, who never went away, turned out all over Spain where unemployment is 23% and over 50% among 16-24 year-olds.

Barcelona Student March F29

This student march in Barcelona in defense of the public universities was matched by similar rallies in Madrid, Valencia and across the country.

Finally, the Greek “parliament” today rubber-stamped the demands of the Troika, the very embodiment of Trapezocracy, cutting pensions and the minimum wage for a country deep in Depression. There were only symbolic protests, as people know the sell-out was done. The market responded by putting Greece into default anyway but the European Central Bank saved the Trapezocracy by opening yet another slush fund. This story is not even beginning to be over.

Tomorrow: M1 Occupy Education!

 

 

Abolition Democracy–Visualizing Occupy

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As part of the build-up to May 1 and beyond, I’m going to devote a series of posts to the concept of the general strike and abolition democracy as the means by which we might visualize Occupy. Over the next few weeks, I want to delineate a genealogy that draws its energies from the abolition crisis in the Atlantic world (1861-77), triangulated by the abolition of US slavery, the Paris Commune and Reconstruction. In a moment where we are so often told it is impossible to imagine the end of capitalism, let’s draw energy from the overthrow of a much longer-lasting means of production–chattel slavery.

While these events are of course remote from present-day concerns, the unexpunged energy of that moment can inform and illuminate our own. Just as Walter Benjamin looked back to the formation of Empire from 1830-71 to understand its crisis in the moment of European fascism (1923-45), so too might we imagine the resistance to the present crisis of the military-industrial complex by considering the resistance to the crisis of the plantation complex. In short, this is the work that an intellectual and historical materialism can contribute to visualizing Occupy as a movement in and across time as well as space.

In affiliation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Angela Y. Davis, I think of abolition democracy as the radical transformation of democracy both so that all have a part in its process and so that social institutions designed to exclude designated sectors of the population from that process should be abolished. In his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois saw that “the true significance of slavery” was the question of democracy:

What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black and white, became free, were given schools and the right to vote, what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men [sic] regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship would rule, and how would property and privilege be protected?

If Occupy has a signature issue it is economic justice, but its signature as a movement is the commitment to a renewed democracy that reopens such questions. The force of abolition democracy is its capacity to at once visualize what needs to be transformed and what might result from that transformation. It is therefore realist in the sense that it envisages the real difficulties of the present, that which must be made sense of, but also is aware of real possibilities for future alternatives.

In the nineteenth century, the dynamics of abolition, colonization and revolution formed a new realism that I call “abolition realism.” Abolition realism brought together the general strike and the Jubilee (the end of slavery and debt) in order to forge a refusal of slavery, such that abolition was observable, and capable of being represented and sustained. Consequently, it needed to be legible to others as “real,” as well as to those involved in making it.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx summarized the dilemma of revolutionary change as “the creation of something which does not yet exist.” Such creation took two forms. First it was necessary to name what was being created and then to give it visualizable and recognizable form. In short, this was a task of imagination.

Timothy O'Sullivan, Untitled (former 'slaves', nr. Beaufort, S. Carolina), 1862

The enslaved in the United States engaged in this representative labor immediately at the outbreak of the Civil War. As soon as hostilities commenced, the Sea Islands of South Carolina were captured by Union forces in 1861, causing the plantation owners to flee in disarray. With the Emancipation Proclamation still two years off, the status of the enslaved Africans left behind was unresolved, in a kind of juridical no-man’s-land or interregnum. It was clear to many African Americans that this kind of freedom was better than none and many made their way there. We can now say that they occupied the Sea Islands.

For Du Bois, this mass migration was not a casual activity but a general strike of the enslaved, a decisive move to end forced labor:

This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps half a million people.

Even today one can read historical accounts by Ivy League historians claiming that the abolition of slavery had been inevitable since 1776, as the logical end point of the Declaration of Independence. Du Bois and many others, insisted to the contrary that slavery was ended by the enslaved themselves.

Timothy O’Sullivan, who later became famous for his photographs of the American West, captured the “general strike” against slavery as official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. At the Old Fort Plantation, Beaufort, O’Sullivan took a group photograph of well over a hundred African Americans (above). The group represented a mix of those on the move during the war and those to whom the war had suddenly arrived where they were already located.

There were African Americans illegally volunteering for the Union army, known as “contrabands,” wearing soldier’s caps (most clearly at extreme left, third row back.) The term was a legal fiction, reinforcing the paradox that these soldiers fighting for freedom were not free and had “stolen” themselves. The camera was placed high up on the roof of a former slave cabin in order to get everyone into the shot in a bright, sharp light that produced some strong contrasts leaving some faces in “white-out,” others too dark to see. Others moved before the exposure was complete, creating a “ghost” at the left edge and many blurred expressions.

The long exposure time prevented any displays of celebration but the very event of the photograph itself suggests that all the participants were aware of the historical significance of the moment. There was no leader present, or a suggestion of a hierarchy. Men, women and children are gathered together in a collective assertion of their right to look and therefore be seen.

Under slavery, the enslaved were forbidden to “eyeball” the white population as a whole, a law that remained in force in the Carolinas until 1952 and is active in today’s prison system. So the simple act of raising the look to a camera, and engaging with it, constituted a rights claim to a subjectivity that could engage with sense experience. The photograph can be seen, then, as depicting direct democracy, the absence of mastery.

On the Sea Islands, the space between regimes became a space without regime, democracy. Their occupation hails ours across time, one space of temporary autonomy to another. See them.

Seeds of Democracy and the Smog of Law

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Today was the inaugural Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park seed swap and seed library. Just to be sure we got the point, a federal judge rejected a class action lawsuit by organic farmers against Monsanto. Chemical culture got a boost from the UK government who decided that their own Parliamentary recommendations on clean air are too expensive, even though the pollution is acknowledged to kill thousands a year. To adapt Gandhi, we might say that Western democracy would be a very good idea.

Seed swapping at Liberty/Zuccotti today

Occupy the Food Supply’s day of action began outside the Stock Exchange and then marched to Liberty. We heard from David Murphy (below), an Iowa-based activist with Food Democracy Now! about the threat posed by Monsanto’s aggressive patent campaign for its genetically-modified corn. He held up an ear of Oaxaca corn that he had acquired at the recent California seed swap (covered here).

Murphy with indigenous corn

Because it has been decreed by agribusiness that corn is yellow and that other forms are therefore not corn, this green cob is a biological misfire in their view. In fact, Monsanto used the food crisis to push GMO corn into Mexico:

After originally denying authorization for a pilot program to cultivate its GM corn in Sinaloa last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) just gave the company the green light to plant genetically modified yellow corn resistant to the herbicide glyphosate as a part of a pilot program in Tamaulipas’ current agricultural cycle. According to the National Commission for the Use and Understanding of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Tamaulipas is home to 16 of the 59 remaining strains of native corn.

The risk of contamination between the GMO corn and native varietals is clear to everyone except agribusiness and their allies, who don’t care. Nonetheless, Monsanto also aggressively sue farmers who find themselves accidentally growing Monsanto’s patented pesticide-resistant plants because of seed dispersal. That is to say, they not only patent life, they sue it.

The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and several other growers and organizations filed a counter-suit against Monsanto to prevent the company from taking such hostile action. Regrettably but unsurprisingly, today we learned that:

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a “transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists.”

The hard lesson here is that seed democracy is unlikely to be fostered by a legal system whose prime function is the defense of “property” rights.

Against this grim background, Liberty was filled with would-be urban growers collecting and swapping seeds. The organizers had sensibly brought an extensive collection, which they gave away in packets and then encouraged us to sub-divide amongst ourselves.

Seed distribution

The promise exchanged was that everyone who grew plants should let a portion run to seed and bring them back to the next seed swap, or to create a seed library. On the way downtown, I happened to read an essay by Jeff Sharlet about OWS in which he spoke of the “joyousness” and “beauty” of what he called “the physical democracy” of Zuccotti during the encampment. In the more confrontational atmosphere post-eviction, we sometimes forget what that was like and how good it felt. This event reminded me and gave me hope.

And in case you wondered why we occupied in the first place, a quick look over the Atlantic shows why. In November 2011, a Parliamentary committee reported that air pollution caused over 30,000 death in 2008. EU air quality standards are being flouted wildly in London, whose air is notorious.

Welcome to London

Yet today the appalling heirs to Mrs Thatcher (another quick boo for Meryl Streep here, please) in power in the UK dismissed the issue as generating “disproportionate costs.” Disproportionate to whom? Certainly not to the one in five Londoners whose deaths are attributable to the pollution, a figure the government did not dispute. And, let’s see, who thinks we’ll have a debate about London air quality before the Olympics in the way that we did before the Beijing Olympics?

These two issues are linked biologically as well as conceptually. Aldo Gonzalez, a Zapotec engineer who has led the struggle against GMO corn in Mexico, points out that indigenous varietals evolved over 10,000 years in a great diversity of climates and altitudes. It may very well be literally life-saving to have some of these hardier plants at our disposal once the neo-liberals have had their way with the climate.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When the Occupy movement began, the Very Important People wanted to know what our demands were. When the courts and the representative governments reject basic claims to life–except should one happen to be a foetus–there was and is no point in making demands to them. You have to sow democracy.