Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

The Future Present of Occupy

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Or: Waiting, Watching, Looking.

A summary of where we are so far: we occupy but there is not an occupation (in New York). The movement is now, it is over, it is coming (back). What do we do when we are in this future present of Occupy? We wait, we watch and we look.

If you’ve read any of these writings, you’ll know that I am haunted by the resonant phrase adopted by Jacques Rancière, in which the police say to us “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” Only there is, and we know it and so do they. The question is, who has the authority to claim to “see” the social. In refusing to move on, we claim the right to look.

Occupy will be (future present) so resonant a strategy because it does not just claim the right to look at the abstract level of look-to-look, but it takes over the symbolic space in-between that it reconstitutes as autonomy. I do not have autonomy: we do. It is that possibility from which we were always already supposed to be moving on. Thus the evictions were justified as the hygienic cleansing of vermin, rather than as politics because those who were there had no right to be where they already were: in the political.

”]For Rancière, that would be for the part that has no part to assert its place. I agree. The means by which we register that claim is to recognize one another. In person, we do that by exchanging a look, eye to eye, that oscillates between us and claims that space as autonomous. It is present but as it crosses between us, it anticipates a future that it is come.

Collectively, it registers the sense that democracy will either (have been) direct or will not be. Just as the right to look cannot be represented, nor can the democracy in which all have part be representative in the hierarchical sense. The charge of impracticality leveled against such direct democracy since Aristotle, the defender of slavery, can now be met with the use of horizontal peer-to-peer media and accompanying practice. This really is what democracy looks like, it turns out.

As we will be occupying we will invite the world to watch, as we have done since (in media history) 1968. More directly, the world has watched since the Diggers occupied St. George’s Hill in England in 1649 and declared it a “common treasury for all.” Or when the revolutionaries met in what will be Haiti in 1791 and Boukman declared:

Listen to the voice of Liberty, which speaks in the heart of us all

Koute vwa la libète kap chante lan kè nou

Anon: A contemporary Haitian rendering of Boukman's speech

Not: “I hear liberty” or “some of us hear it” but we all hear it. We have just waited to act on its suggestions.

Yet the world wears as it grows. We must watch the world as well. We Livestream. Uconnect, Facebook, Tweet. Who imagines that this space will be left open by the Guardians for long?

And so we wait. It is a messianism without the messiah, to quote Derrida thinking about Benjamin and Marx. It is that space between “the world can’t wait” and the necessity of Waiting for Godot. We, the tramps of the world, wait and discourse. It has grown dark but Spring is coming.

Occupy: an annotated concordance

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I have often noticed how well the word “occupy” seems to go with other words, whether nouns or verbs. So I looked it up in a historical dictionary and saw that it was for centuries a term designating power, especially colonial and patriarchal power, and the use of capital. The word has been appropriated and subjected to détournement by those such power would subjugate. As such, it should be made one of Raymond Williams’ keywords.

The colonial force of occupy comes through in the etymology:

 Irregularly < Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French occuper to take possession of, seize (1306), to fill a certain space (1314), to employ (c1360), to hold possession of (late 14th cent.), to inhabit (1530), to exercise (an employment) (1530), to fill time (1530), also reflexive, to busy oneself with (c1330) < classical Latin occupāre to seize (by force), take possession of, get hold of, to take up, fill, occupy (time or space), to employ, invest (money)

There are many senses of the English word before we get to the modern Occupy.

I: to employ, make use of

1. trans. To keep busy, engage, employ (a person, or the mind, attention, etc.)

There are a number of early modern examples:

  • 1500  (1413)    Pilgrimage of Soul (Egerton) i. xxi. f. 16v,   He hath occupied so my wittes with othir thinges.

Then, once we enter the Tudor period, a host of colonial and violent examples:

  • 1555    R. Eden tr. Peter Martyr of Angleria Decades of Newe Worlde iii. ix. f. 136v,   They occupyed them selues in the searchinge of particular tractes and coastes.
  • 1568    Haddington Corr. 270   Traitouris, quhais lwnatick branes ar continewalie occupeit with this thair poysoun. [read in a Scottish accent]
  • 1604   E. Grimeston tr. J. de Acosta Nat. & Morall Hist. Indies iii. i. 117   Then shall he truly occupie himselfe in the studie of Philosophie.

The philosophical sense returns to the metropole:

  • 1782    W. Cowper Conversation in Poems 215   Whatever subject occupy discourse.

And becomes political:

  • 1928    H. T. Lane Talks to Parents & Teachers 189   The citizens are occupied chiefly with earning a living.

2. To employ oneself in, engage in, practise, perform; to follow or ply as one’s business or occupation.

Early on, you occupy a trade or profession but again with imperial and colonial connotations:

  • 1535    Bible (Coverdale) Psalms cvi[i.] 23   They that go downe to the see in shippes, & occupie their busynesse in greate waters.

In the intransitive sense, this meaning conveys being busy with something, leading to anachronistic puns:

  • 1847    J. P. Lawson Bk. Perth 171   Permitting their servants to occupy on the Sabbath-day, as well as on the rest of the week.

Skipping one obsolete sense we get an interesting use:

4. a. trans. To employ (money or capital) in trading; to lay out, invest, trade with; to deal in.

Now also obsolete, this sense means that it was capital that occupied first: all our occupations are, then, un-occupations. This sense persists right up to the emergence of modern capital, in Dr Johnson’s Letters:

  • 1773    Johnson Let. 17 May II. 32   Upon ten thousand pounds diligently occupied they may live in great plenty.

No doubt.

II. To be in, to take possession of.

The older versions are all about state power, as in this early example:

  • c1440  (1400)    Morte Arthure 98   Myne ancestres ware emperours. They ocupyede [th]e empyre aughte score wynnttyrs.

More modern uses spread the sense of domination and power across society by means of law:

  • 1883    Law Times 20 Oct. 410/2   A married woman is now to occupy the same position as her Saxon ancestress.

Now we are getting warmer:

b. trans. To live in and use (a place) as its tenant or regular inhabitant; to inhabit; to stay or lodge in.

From Blackstone’s famous law commentaries of the 18th century to Cardinal Newman’s History of the Turks and lesser known genealogies, to occupy is to be landed power but also destructive of the environment and, once again, colonizers:

  • 1767    W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. II. i. 7   By constantly occupying the same individual spot, the fruits of the earth were consumed.
  • 1854    J. H. Newman Lect. Hist. Turks i. i. 2   This tract is at present occupied by civilized communities.
  • 1881    J. Russell Haigs of Bemersyde 5   Bemersyde House has been occupied by the Haigs for more than seven centuries.

In the variant “to take possession of,” Sir Walter Raleigh, pirate and colonizer, favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, was quite clear what was meant:

  • 1614    W. Raleigh Hist. World i. v. i. §2. 317   Which done, they occupied the Citie, Lands, Goods, and Wiues, of those, whom they had murdered

From here, it is a short step to the meaning “To take possession of (a place), esp. by force,” as in the example from the historian MacCauley:

  • 1849    T. B. Macaulay Hist. Eng. II. x. 582   The Dutch had occupied Chelsea and Kensington.

Only after all that colonizing, patriarchy and despoliation do we get to the occupy of Occupy, a relatively recent meaning in official English, cited here only in journalism (although it’s likely to be of much older vernacular use, as we shall see):

trans. To gain access to and remain in (a building, etc.) or on (a piece of land), without authority, as a form of protest.

 

  • 1920    Times 2 Sept. 9/2   The men have occupied the works in those cases where the masters have declined to run the works at a loss.
  • 1968    Newsweek 6 May 43/1   The university’s Hamilton Hall was the first successful target of the revolutionaries, and it was seized and occupied Tuesday.

The final acknowledgement of this meaning derives I suspect from a much earlier usage.

The learned dictionary has a long lacuna: Throughout the 17th and most of the 18th cent., there seems to have been a general tendency to avoid this word, probably as a result of use of the word in sense 8,

 

a sexualised sense. in Henry IV part 1, Shakespeare complained:

A captaine? Gods light these villaines wil make the word as odious as the word occupy, which was an excellent good worde before it was il[l] sorted.

 

Bloomberg might agree. Ben Johnson went further yet:

Many, out of their owne obscene Apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words; as occupie, nature, and the like.

 

Nature? we’ll have to look that up too.

So, using this sense, now we have a slogan that even Chris Hedges might not mind:

Occupy the Police.

 

 

 

 

 

The look of love

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In the first paragraph of The Right to Look, I wrote:

The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at the personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other or it fails. As such it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: “the right to look. The invention of the other.”

I didn’t say much more about love in the book, partly because I wanted to avoid the imputation of voyeurism and all the other issues to do with the gaze. It was also hard to configure the narrative around the politics of autonomy with the questions raised by the look of love.

While the difficulty of narrative remains, I now think it was a mistake to underplay the power of the exchange of looks that is love. It resonates with audiences when I give this as a talk because it is something with which many are familiar and it makes sense of the difficulties of representing that exchange.

With the hindsight of Occupy, two further ways of expressing the right to look in and as love should have been developed: the hierarchies of patriarchy that prevent visualized expression of love; and the interface of poverty and love that produces the desire for democracy.

The phrase “the right to look” is my translation of Derrida’s droit de regards, often (oddly) translated as “rights of inspection.” Derrida was responding to the complex relations of looking at work in the photographs of Marie-Françoise Plissart.

Droit de regards

The cover shown here is from a recent reissue. Plissart’s images show two women in pursuit of each other, making love, escaping from men. Derrida’s suggestion is perhaps that in the context of 1983, eight years after Laura Mulvey had first published “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it was between women that it might be possible to allude to the right to look. For a man looking at a woman would too easily become the other translation: the law of the gaze. The photographs seem a little dated now. Would that we could say the same about patriarchy.

Both Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri develop the relationship of democracy to desire. For Rancière, the palpable “hatred of democracy,” which he describes in his book of the same name, in Western culture is motivated above all by the detesting of “the limitless desire of individuals in modern society.” By contrast, “good” democracy is about controlling and restraining both the extent of democracy and the passions of the individual. Thus the revisionist interpretation of the 1968 revolution is that it “really” expressed a desire for consumption. One could push this to it conclusion: a revolution is the love for democracy, a direct democracy between people that does not defer to representation.

This is precisely the move made by Negri in his poetic and philosophical text Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitude (translated in a volume called Time for Revolution). This is not the kind of writing one can easily summarize, building layer upon layer and allusion to allusion. The kairos, the instant, is something like the time of the right to look: always now, always predicated to the future to come. The “poor,”  or “those most exposed to the immeasurable” are the “biopolitical subject.” For unlike the emphasis on population or bare life in other readings of biopoltics, Negri stresses that it is “poverty that has always represented the common name of the human.”

The Kairos of the poor is love:

so what is “politics” today? It is the activity of production of the common name between poverty and love.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Waiting for Teargas/ Exit the Ghost.

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Poet–How goes the world?

 

Painter–It wears, sir, as it grows

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, I i.

Exit the ghost of Europe, pursued by teargas. A year after the self-styled “father of Egypt” was driven out, the Greek revolt saw the return of the spectre of global justice– and it has been driven offstage with teargas.

Teargassed woman by the Bank of Athens #12fgr

It has been known for some time that, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “haunting would mark the very existence of Europe,” a place designated by the “joining” of the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the spectre of Communism. Speaking in 1993, in response to the question “Whither Marxism,” Derrida appropriated Hamlet: “the time is out of joint.” As we ask, too insistently, “whither Occupy?” it might be good to linger a while in the place of the revenant. In that disjointed time we wait:

everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition.

Allan Sekula, Waiting for Teargas

In 1999, the photographer Allan Sekula was in Seattle, covering the global justice demonstrations that shut down the G20. He was at 16 Beaver last night revisiting the project, with its haunting title: Waiting for Teargas. At once this evokes Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot I have already had cause to remember, and Walter Benjamin’s sense that the most modern place of all is the waiting room. Sekula recalls:

In photographing the Seattle demonstrations my working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-journalism: no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.

[my emphasis]

Waiting for Teargas

The waiting is a space in-between, a time out of joint. There’s so much happening and yet so little action in this photograph. A protestor displays the US flag at the heart of a miniature recreation of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the legendary Earthwork of the 1970s. The gesture reminds us at once of the role played by forest activists and tree sitters in the Seattle protests, those who were used to direct action to defend the old-growth Pacific Northwest; and the soundtrack that Sekula reminds us was to come, Jimi Hendrix’s version of the national anthem, played over someone’s boom box, as the tear gas blew. Notice that the shop in the top right is actually called “Spray King.” And on the horizon, the cops, waiting.

In Athens yesterday, the tear gas blew into the Greek parliament from Syntagma (Constitution) Square. The Prime Minister Papademos demanded the sacrifice of Abraham, meaning that the son must die for the father. Or rather it was Papa Demos, the father of the people/demos, claiming the place of the sovereign, the place of the specter, even as he was tear gassed:

for the king occupies this place, here the place of the father, whether he keeps it, takes it or usurps it

(Derrida)

This new hauntology reconfigures all hitherto existing versions of Hamlet. Now we can understand that Hamlet tear gassed his father all along, in resistance to patriarchy:

The ghost of Hamlet's father from Olivier's 1948 film

It avails him little. By the play’s end, he has captured the conscience of the King but in so doing suicides himself and his friends, for patriarchal vengeance is nuclear. The Treaty has been signed: but it now awaits the approval of the German Bundestag. For in saving itself, providing for its own autoimmunity, Europe has ended. It is now an occupation.

So it is fitting that we ask the question: where does a bankrupt nation like Greece get the money for so much tear gas? And find that the answer is: Israel.

Israeli tear gas: Made in the USA

Or, to be more specific: US-made tear gas, delivered to Israel and then re-exported to Greece. It comes from a plant in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, manufactured by a company called Combined Tactical Systems-CSI. The company flies US and Israeli flags outside its buildings, just in case you missed the point. Occupy activists have already been protesting the use of this product in Palestine, and discovered that $1.85 million of tear gas was paid for by the federal government and delivered to Israel. No doubt it was easy enough to spare the 4600 units requested by Greece.

There were many spectres in the square yesterday. The present is out of joint.

The present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage, in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives.

 

Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa–das Gespenst des Kommunismus.

Take a deep breath.

 

Greece, Slavery and the General Strike

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Today the Greek parliament met to approve the deliberately humiliating terms of the German-backed bond rescue plan (aka the bailout). In the streets, it is more precisely defined as slavery. The response is, as it has long been, to organize the general strike. For globalized neo-liberalism this is the moment to bring an “end” to 2011, a year after their man in Egypt, Mubarak, had to step down.

Estimates suggest 50,000 people in the street in Athens, perhaps as many as 100,000 with thousands more elsewhere, and many buildings occupied. The inevitable riot police and tear gas have been deployed. Exarchia, the radical district resounded to explosions. As fires burned, allegations circulated that the police had started them or ignored them. (Watch on Livestream here.)

Athens 2 12 12

The scenes were extraordinary–Starbucks on fire, smoke bombs, riot police–with the word “chaos” on every Greek website.

General Strike in Greece

The troika-installed Prime Minister Papademos–whose name seems to evoke a patriarchal “father of the people”–pushed the market line about debt refusal:

It would create conditions of uncontrolled economic chaos and social explosion. The country would be drawn into a vortex of recession, instability, unemployment and protracted misery.

Such remarks fly in the face of existing reality, in which those are already the prevailing conditions. Official unemployment exceeds 20%. Reports have suggested people returning to family farms in the countryside and islands from the cities in order to survive. The Church feeds 250,000 people a day in a country of 11 million people. Homelessness has increased by 25% (although the absolute numbers are low by U. S. standards. The official EU statistics agency Eurostat reports that one-third of the country is living in poverty. And yet Papademos called for more “sacrifice.”

Nonetheless, even this is not enough for the one percent: “The promises from Greece aren’t enough for us any more,” the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said in an interview published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. When the vote is passed, the minimum wage will be cut by over 20%, pensions will be reduced and the already ruined state will cut back still further. The graffiti in the streets calls this slavery.

"We Should Not Live as Slaves"

“We should not live as slaves,” it reads [Na men zesoume san douloi]. Evocatively, the word “doulos” is used for “slave,” the same term used by Aristotle in his Politics to approve the institution of slavery. His meditation on slavery is in fact one of governance, which manifests itself as the necessity of dominance. I’m going to quote at some length because it is the inability to “reason” according the “logic” of the markets that is being used to justify Greek slavery today. It’s also important to read this to realize how thoroughgoing and long-lasting the Western commitment to slavery has been.It is also a passage that contains within it so many of today’s critical concerns from the human/nonhuman, to the “soul at work” (Bifo), governmentality, Rancière’s division of the sensible, and the persistence of slavery. Let us note this is not a coincidence:

for that some should govern, and others be governed, is not only necessary but useful, and from the hour of their birth some are marked out for those purposes, and others for the other, and there are many species of both sorts….Those men therefore who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul, are to be thus disposed of, as the proper use of them is their bodies, in which their excellence consists; … they are slaves by nature, and it is advantageous to them to be always under government. He then is by nature formed a slave who is qualified to become the chattel of another person, and on that account is so, and who has just reason enough to know that there is such a faculty, without being indued with the use of it; for other animals have no perception of reason, but are entirely guided by appetite, and indeed they vary very little in their use from each other; for the advantage which we receive, both from slaves and tame animals, arises from their bodily strength administering to our necessities; for it is the intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and freemen different from each other {1254b-1255a}

The present rhetoric of the “lazy” Greeks, shiftlessly avoiding tax payments and demanding state support defines people driven entirely by appetite. They must therefore become the chattel of the troika, despite the likelihood that the cuts will still worsen the economy and necessitate yet more support for the external bond markets. What matters is that the Greeks be made an example: “Can’t pay! Won’t pay!” is reworked into “Can’t pay? Become a slave.”

In Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that the enslaved had ended chattel slavery themselves by mass migration from South to North at the beginning of the Civil War, long before the Emancipation Proclamation:

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.

The result of the strike was an abolition democracy, whose participatory process centered on education and the capacity to be self-sustaining. The measures have passed. The occupations have been ended. It’s up to us to keep this present, to remain in the moment, to be present.

 

Against violence, for the general strike

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When I first started writing “on violence” after Abu Ghraib, an anthropologist friend warned me that from now on I would find myself characterized by this work. I did not understand what he meant until the very first question on the Abu Ghraib paper was “Why are you showing these to us?” The questioner was in no doubt that, while there were obviously things wrong with the images, there was also something wrong with me for wanting to show them. In the same way that advertising elicits a mimetic response from the viewer (I want that/I want to be like that), it is assumed that critical choice is evidence of preference. So consistent was this response that I later dropped out of a grant project on Abu Ghraib.

Since Chris Hedges’s piece on black bloc, the Internet has been awash with interventions for and against the use of violence that have even reached the comments section of this project. The assumption is the same: if Occupy is violent, and a person likes Occupy, that person must either be violent or “condone” violence. Nowhere is violence defined. A thrown bottle or a broken window count as violence. Calls for context or considerations of police action are ignored.

Just after the failure of the Spartacist revolution in Berlin in 1919, Walter Benjamin wrote a dense essay that sought to define violence in other ways. He quickly set aside the “casuistry” whereby ends and means are permanently debated in favor of the “historico-philosophical” interrogation of the law’s “monopoly of violence.” He saw that the goal of this restriction was not the preservation of “legal ends” but “the preservation of law itself.” Later he would come to call this condition the “state of emergency,” the permanent claim that in order to save the law, it must be suspended.

The clearest example of this distinction for Benjamin was the “class struggle” and the right to strike:

the right to strike constitutes in the view of labor, which is opposed to that of the state, the right to use force in attaining certain ends. The antithesis between the two conceptions emerges in all its bitterness in face of a revolutionary general strike…however paradoxical this may appear at first sight, even conduct involving the exercise of a right can nevertheless, under certain circumstances, be described as violent. More specifically, such conduct, when active, may be called violent if it exercises a right in order to overthrow the legal system that has conferred it

Ironically, German workers in 1919 did have the right to strike lacking for so many in the U.S. today, despite it being enshrined as a fundamental human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In this view, while the general strike was a contradiction within the system, it was not in itself illegal, even if the state perceived it as violent.

However, Benjamin understood the general strike to be different from an ordinary strike “in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that the strike not so much causes as consummates.” In this way, Benjamin saw this vision of revolt as not being violent but rather as “deep, moral, and genuinely revolutionary.” We can in fact go further than he did. Given that late capital has made a great show of the irrelevance of labor to its process, it is clear that the extensive legal prohibition against striking is not due to the “essential” nature of the workforce but rather the need to reinforce its subjection to the force of law.

Of course Benjamin also did describe such strikes as “anarchist” at this time, and he saw himself as a “theological anarchist.” Can we see Benjamin in a bandanna and a hoodie? I tried but my Photoshop skills aren’t up to it.

Call for A Day of Generally Striking

Since January, Occupy nationally has been involved in preparations for a general strike on May 1, May Day. Today, rather than attend a New School conference with excellent speakers like David Graeber and Rebecca Solnit, I spent a long afternoon in a basement working out some details of how this might happen. A substantial group discussed solidarity actions with people organizing in the Bronx over the recent police killings, especially that of teenager Rahmarley Graham. Much time was spent devising a way to interact with the labor unions and other groups that also want to observe May Day in a way that respects their process and that of OWS. Consensus was found. Nobody mentioned the black bloc.

In all the recent criticism, little has been said about the global context. It might be worth noticing that in addition to all the Iran panic, Israel has just had a general strike. Greece has also observed a two day general strike, while even mainstream reporting sees the country on the verge of collapse. On the streets, the view is a little more dramatic:

Grafitto in Athens 2-11

Yes, they’re talking to you.

Autoimmunity

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The current destabilization of the political situation by Israel risks the resurgence of the post 9-11 double-bind of “autoimmunity,” in which the very system designed to make you secure undermines your viability. By setting in motion such reversible definitions, the domestic project of  Occupy can be reconfigured as “insurgency.” To occupy is to place a body-that-thinks into space where it not supposed to be. If that body makes certain choices of action, some are now willing to see that body as out of control, no longer thinking but simply acting. Against such bodies there must be what the Israeli government has termed a “zone of immunity.”

Both in practice and theory this immunity is proving hard to define. It sometimes seems to refer to an “immunity zone” that Iran might acquire, allowing it to develop a nuclear weapon and thereby become in some ways immune to Western threats. It also appears to designate a “zone of immunity” that Israel feels it must have from external threat. It is very difficult to determine exactly what Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, meant because the Israeli media are so full of debates about immunity insofar as it pertains to members of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament. The recent involvement of an Arab Israeli MK in the Gaza flotilla has led to demands for the legal immunity of representatives to be lifted, even as the papers are also full of corruption and bribery scandals that result from this immunity.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reapplied his earlier use of the term “autoimmunity” to the complexities of the situation in which U.S.-trained operatives (using a deliberately bland and neutral term) had attacked their former patrons. Derrida reminded us that

an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity.

It seems that this “autoimmunity” is precisely what Israel is engaged in: by attacking it will not only lay itself open to other attacks but may lose the immunity from criticism that it currently enjoys with its own “head,” the United States. Derrida shows that the beginnings of this autoimmunity were in the Cold War, whose ending reconfigured the body politic. Autocratic leaders in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose apparent immunity depended on their place in the Cold War, or its surrogate the war on terror, found that instead they had ultimately destroyed themselves.

W. J. T. Mitchell has called this reverse effect the “bipolar” character of the autoimmune, “a situation in which there is no literal meaning.” Interestingly, the immune system itself is now understood to be capable of “cognitive abilities,” in that it learn how to recognize specific antigens and remembers them. Autoimmunity is unable to make such distinctions. Yet the result is not simply a destabilization but the reverse of what was intended, as Derrida specifies:

repression in both its psychoanalytic sense and its political sense–whether it be through the police, the military or the economy–ends up producing, reproducing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.

The gambit of counterinsurgency was to attempt to permanently produce insurgency and yet manage it as a form of governance at the same time. As economic and police repression has escaped control from Greece to Egypt, to speak only of the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel appears to be doubling down on military repression.

Counterinsurgency has long been willing to move the boundaries between the policed  zone of authority and where we the policed are to be contained. The extraordinary Israeli tactic of the mobile checkpoint, literally manifesting the border in different places from one day to the next, epitomizes this disregard for consistency. Indeed the legalizing of the Israeli occupation itself, as Eyal Press relates, worked by

adopting an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire.

The Israelis thus repurposed this archaic imperial law to create a cover for legal transformation of occupation into settlement.

If the “reversible” effect of this counterinsurgency now moves into the global frame proposed by its theorists, Occupy can be rendered into a target of militarization. Note the way New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins–quoted by Mitchell as the epigraph to his chapter on autoimmunity–characterizes insurgency:

American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential character of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified.

As such, the insurgency was hard to defeat. However in the present context, with a little editing this could be taken for a casual description of Occupy. Perhaps Chris Hedges somehow confused the now-favored “Black Ops” of counterinsurgency with the purportedly violent black bloc anarchists of Occupy? You will say that doesn’t make sense–read his article again: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bipolar and has no literal meaning.

The militarized reversibility being put into motion by Israel risks more than an internal argument for Occupy: it risks redefining autonomy as insurgency. The problem of perceived “violence” in the movement is, then, the displaced affect caused by this return of the repressed. That does not mean that there is not a real issue here. We have to continue to claim our right to look, that is, to invent each other and consent to being invented by that other as part of our direct democracy. And we claim the right to be seen in the spaces and times of our choosing, whether that right is recognized by the current state of the force of law or not. Indeed, the worth of claiming that right is, as it was for non-violent campaigners from Mary Wollstonecraft to Gandhi and Rosa Parks, that the law forbids us from having it.

Pathologizing and Privatizing Occupy

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This week we’ve seen a very public attempt to pathologize Occupy and purported violence within the movement, even as I happened to see a very private closure of an Occupy in Pittsburgh. I’ve been reading Elisabeth Roudinesco’s history of the committed French intellectual, Philosophy in Troubled Times. She begins with Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s adviser and the author of the classic The Normal and the Pathological. Canguilhem had to abandon the pacifism he adopted in the aftermath of World War 1 when confronted with fascism. In 1943, he defended his thesis defining the modern formation of the normal as that which was not pathological, while active in the Resistance. My point is not that these were real choices compared to ours but that it was every bit as difficult to make them, even though they now seem so clear.

In Pittsburgh, there was a privatized eviction of Occupy Pittsburgh by BNY Mellon. In New York, the NYPD cleared Zuccotti for Brookfield who now place rent-a-cops in the space. In Pittsburgh, the bank did it. Here’s the sign they posted:

Evicting Occupy Pittsburgh

It is now the bank that occupies the park and anyone else who might remain is a trespasser. As befits this activism, BNY Mellon has a Political Action Committee:

Our PAC makes contributions to U.S. federal candidates, a limited number of state and local candidates, and campaign committees and other PACs. When making specific contribution decisions, the PAC considers a number of factors, including the candidates’ positions on issues related to our business, their leadership positions, legislative committees and communities they represent.

According to their filing with the Federal Elections Commission, BNY Mellon raised about $112,000 in the second half of 2011. None was spent on any specific election and will presumably be used this year, for which data is not yet available. Any wild guesses as to how it might be spent? All such information is, under current law, private.

In public, some leading figures in Occupy have decided to attack each other rather than engage with these or similar actions. Financial journalist Chris Hedges, who might have been able to shed light on the matter, this week decided instead to pronounce that the so-called “black bloc” are a “cancer in the Occupy movement.”  Hedges, who has covered Occupy widely, published a long, rather rambling attack on the anarchist “black bloc” as being a direct attack on the “organized left.”

For Hedges, the  “criminal…hypermasculinity…[and] inchoate rage” of the black bloc are linked to the violence of the First World War via Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 classic All Quiet on the Western Front. It would be just a few years after the novel was published that Canguilhem set aside his pacifism in response to the rise of the Nazis. I’m not saying we face a rise of Nazism now: I’m worried that the parallel is not helpful.

David Graeber has written a detailed reply to Hedges that makes the violence inherent in referring to people as “cancer” very clear. In Canguilhem’s terms, a cancer is the pathology of all pathologies. We cut it out, bombard it with radiation, saturate it with toxic chemicals. Very often it wins anyway. Like many people, I know this at first hand. You don’t do this, or make a verbal parallel, because people engage in the “shouting of insulting messages to the police,” as Hedges has it. That would have made all of ACT UP part of the Black Bloc, as Jodi Dean points out. To be exact, it makes almost everyone I know part of the Black Bloc.

It is no doubt not worth worrying about this too much at the level of its logic, except that it looks very much like a high-profile supporter preparing to abandon the movement. There was also an attempt this week to create concern that the Direct Action working group of OWS were abandoning non-violence. It was a bad misreading of their proposal to the General Assembly but it suggests that a range of people are ready to end their involvement with Occupy.

What we’re finding is that the state may be succeeding in turning Occupy into an occupation. In the Occupied Territories, it is always, in the joint view of the U.S-Israel government, the responsibility of the occupied to renounce all violence in all its forms. The precise nature of the violence to be renounced can be modified to meet given needs. Now that Israel has decided that there must be a “zone of immunity” in Iran, for instance, the US is scrambling to respond. Using the logics of counterinsurgent biopolitics, such discourse renders the body politic of Israel “normal” and that of Iran “pathological.” Only a zone of immunity–which has no meaning–can protect the good normal body from the pathological one. The immune system has exteriorized itself in this image into a wall of separation.

If part of Occupy is a cancer, then the “organized left” will need to declare a “zone of immunity.” It will heed the (meaningless) claim of the Oakland police that activists used “Improvised Explosive Devices,” the signature weapon of asymmetric insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “normal” will have to extirpate the pathological in order to survive. Let’s not go there.

Occupy Godot

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The signs posted to evict Occupy Pittsburgh were simple white board with black lettering. They reminded me of something and it bugged me all day. Then I remembered:

"Waiting for Godot" in New Orleans

It’s the stage directions for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as staged by Paul Chan in New Orleans after Katrina. His 2007 production was prompted by Chan’s own sense that the devastated city reminded him of something. When he remembered the scenario for Godot, the New Orleans streets now seemed to him to call for a production of the play. Audiences flocked to see it and the endless waiting of the “tramps” made sense to people in post-Katrina New Orleans because of their own interminable delays with FEMA and other governmental authority.

The Lower Ninth Ward

The play was performed first in the Lower Ninth Ward and then in Gentilly. The board above is now placed in the street by what are known as “the Brad Pitt houses,” a series of modern, flood-resistant buildings that constitute a permanent architectural exhibition by the banks of the Industrial Canal that flooded so disastrously in 2005. Tourists go by in buses and gaze on the scene. We wandered about and took photos. No one seemed to mind.

The three rivers that meet in Pittsburgh run into the Ohio river and from there into the Mississippi, down on to New Orleans. There’s a connection at work here. We could play with this is in a number of registers. Perhaps the “tramps” that have nowhere else to go have been evicted by Godot, who no longer wants them to wait. Perhaps Vladimir and Estragon have decided that they have had enough of being tramps and have occupied the country road: Occupy Godot. Perhaps Lucky disrupts their General Assembly.

Chain of associations: in the original French production of En Attendant Godot, Lucky was played by Jean Martin, a former member of the French Resistance, as indeed was Beckett.

Left Jean Martin as Lucky

A decade later, Martin would play the paratroop colonel Mathieu in the classic revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers (1966). The only professional actor in the film, Martin had been blacklisted for signing the petition of the Cent Vingt et Un (121) in 1960, a statement by artists and intellectuals protesting the Algerian war.

Think of this:

Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

We are paused, vehemently.

Pausing is to dwell in the moment, to extend the moment. That is what Occupy is: an extension of the moment in which it has been possible to challenge authority, to claim autonomy and to refuse to “move on.”

Pause.

Banks, Steel and Empire

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In what has become a sorry tale of repetition with the closure of Occupy sites, today we had a first: an Occupy encampment shut down by direct order of a bank.

Occupy Pittsburgh--rally against eviction

Since October 15, Occupy Pittsburgh has had a permanent presence in People’s Park formerly Mellon Park. The space is located downtown in front of BNY Mellon’s towering skyscraper, testament to its $25.9 trillion (yes, trillion) in assets. It is leased from the city on conditions that are in dispute. Investment bank BNY Mellon claims that it is a three season park, closed in the winter, and that they comply with the regulation that at least 20% of the space must be open at all times by making the sidewalk available. Clearly people in Pittsburgh treat the park as open space, as they were using it today for access and a place to smoke even though being there was legally trespassing.

For on February 2, BNY Mellon persuaded the usual compliant judge that they had the right to reclaim the space, remove all the structures and tents, and declare anyone present to be trespassing. That order went into effect today. Posted signs around the park announced that BNY Mellon had declared it illegal to set foot in the space. No mention was made of any other form of state authority.

Indeed BNY Mellon like to make fun of the whole Occupy thing, in the manner of London stockbrokers waving wedges of cash at Occupy London. Here’s their “hilarious” ad for the Financial Follies last year:

Occupying Wall St for 227 years: BNY Mellon

If you can’t read that, it says “We don’t mean to brag but we’ve been Occupying Wall Street for 227 years.”

So, perhaps it’s not so surprising that, unlike in New York or Oakland, there was an apparent reluctance on the part of law enforcement to get involved. Pittsburgh Occupiers I talked to today described how Pittsburgh police had helped them organize marches and had turned on their flashing lights to attract attention to the Occupiers. The reasons for this sympathy are obvious. I took the bus from the University area of Oakland where I’m staying to downtown. You pass one abandoned or derelict building after another with the only visible businesses being bars and gas stations, while the sole sign of life was outside a soup kitchen.

There’s a sense of absence throughout the city from the moment you arrive at the enormous airport, designed by US Air as a hub and now abandoned by them. People even lament losing the US Air call center where 50 people were employed, so tough is it to find a job. And then there are only 800 police in Pittsburgh, compared to the 30,000 in New York. I can’t move in New York without seeing the NYPD but I’ve been here two days without seeing the police although I spent all morning at Occupy.

This is still a steel town. BNY Mellon occupy a skyscraper once owned by the giant US Steel. The United Steel Workers union have an impressive building downtown that has been an important resource for Occupy Pittsburgh.

United Steel Workers Local 3657 in support of Occupy Pittsburgh

And then there are the nineteen steel bridges across the rivers here. From Occupy, I walked across the spectacular Seventh Street Bridge, now renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge, to visit the Andy Warhol Museum.

Outside, the streetscape is bleak and empty with no one passing by. Inside there’s lots of life and energy. I had Campbell’s Tomato Soup for lunch and thus fortified spent some time in the galleries. The Race Riot and Electric Chair series made it clear that Warhol was always aware of politics. The cold reality of the electric chair is difficult to confront even in a screen print. It was Empire that really caught my attention today, though.

Andy Warhol, "Empire"

I came into the screening of Warhol’s eight-hour film of the Empire State Building at a point where it was completely dark. The lights at the top of the building were the only point of illumination and they flared in the lens, giving the illusion of a fire. Thus Empire regards us. It would have us believe that it is a burning bush that never consumes itself but will scorch us should we try to touch, let alone extinguish it.

As I stood in the dark watching Empire burn, uncomfortable questions kept surfacing in my mind. Many of us in the humanities, very much including myself, are direct or indirect beneficiaries of the Mellon empire. Indeed, it seems that almost all new initiatives in the field are funded by the Mellon Foundation. In the face of today’s quasi-legal provocation what should we do? Move on, say nothing, and take the money because it is a repurposing of it for better things? Or try and use our place on the inside to somehow influence BNY Mellon? Or consider whether it might not be better to refuse to collaborate with them? What do you think?