Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Civil Disability

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If there is to be a new eugenics, it will return to a hierarchy of citizenship, in which some citizens are fully empowered members of the public and many others are not.  In English jurisprudence, this latter condition is known as “civil disability.” It has kept those perceived as not equal to the standards of citizenship from enjoying the right to vote or even the right to appear as a witness in a law case.  It has applied to the enslaved, Jews and women. It still applies to minors and those designated insane. In the current optic of power, civil disability permits corporations to have the standing of people, while individual people are the objects of kettling, spraying, scanning and other forms of classification.

The very diversity and dis/ability of Occupy—even if widely considered insufficient within the movement—appears to add to the vengeful force of the reassertion of authority. Such bodies are not supposed to be able to make political choices but only to be the grateful recipients of Lifetime made-for-TV movies and to supply “meaningful” roles for able-bodied actors to win Oscars. It is as if authority says, if you will not accept the ways we disable you once, then we will do it again. That is to say, disability is not a physical condition but a social one: it is the lack of accommodations that makes a person in a chair have difficulty negotiating space not an inherent incapacity. This disabling is now extended to all suspect bodies: which is often everyone.

I have not flown since Occupy began, unusually for someone who travels a lot. Today I had to submit to being kettled by the TSA at JFK airport in order to wait for the privilege of partially undressing and then being scanned while standing with my hands raised over my head by who knows what purportedly safe form of radiation. It was presumably designed to make people feel powerless and it does. While hygiene was the key to the original eugenics and still plays a significant role, the new eugenics takes its energy from the discourses of safety.

Later in the overcrowded container called “coach,” a fellow passenger was harangued by a flight attendant because the straps of his backpack, which he was forced to stow “under the seat in front” because no other space was available, intruded by a matter of two inches into our seating space. If we had to evacuate, we were told, we might get entangled. I rearranged my feet and the emergency was over because we had displayed sufficient passivity. As the Italian cruise ship disaster showed, actual safety has nothing to do with any of this—passengers were sent back to their cabins as the boat took on water.

In such situations, any challenge to the “move on” authority of the police results in immediate arrest, deportation or deplaning. (By the way, is there an uglier world than “deplane”? One candidate would the use of the term “designated receptacle” to mean bin.)  The demonstrators at Move In Day in Oakland were repeatedly hailed to “submit to arrest.” That is, it is not enough that you be arrested. You must submit to it, accept the authority by which you are arrested and reconfigure your own practice from civil disobedience to crime.

Traditional eugenics and civil disability were not at all interested in what the disabled citizen thought of themselves because by definition their thoughts were not important. If it matters so much to the new agents of civil disability that we submit to being “disabled” by them, it is because they have learned their trade from counterinsurgency.  Under the Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency, it was not enough for the occupying power to be able to dominate the population. That population must “actively and passively” consent to being ruled. So you must not only go through the security checkpoint, you must accept that the checkpoint is there for your security and is therefore right. It doesn’t work and what’s more it has never worked.

Interestingly, the military themselves have abandoned the counterinsurgent fantasy. They are withdrawing regular troops from Afghanistan, having abandoned Iraq to pick  things up where they left off in about 2007. Now ubiquitous anti-terrorism is the goal, with targeted missions being carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles or special operations troops. Just as the brief triumph of counterinsurgency rested on the apparent success of the “surge” in Iraq, so is this new paradigm clearly based on the bin Laden assassination. The administration is impervious to anxieties about the lack of due process of those targeted or even the “collateral damage” done to the by-standers. All of these people, whether by virtue of being insurgents or failing to remove themselves from proximity to insurgents, are under the prescription of civil disability.

Just so, a TSA agent said to us a while ago, “you have no rights here.” Just so, police launch a “surge” in the Wind City Reservation to reduce crime statistics. Just so, you may be evicted from public space because you are not considered part of the public or expelled from federal space because you are not a fully-fledged citizen. Buttressing the entire process is the longest-running process of civil disability in the United States, the mass incarceration of African-American and minority populations. Over two million people are part of the prison-industrial system that so patently discriminates by ethnicity that Michele Alexander has called it “the new Jim Crow.” More exactly, one might say it was the old Jim Crow. As Angela Davis has shown, the penitentiary and work-lease systems were devised as part of As “felons,” many of the released lose civil rights.

The New Eugenics

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As 100 million people sit down to watch the only one per cent union members, professional sports players, give themselves brain damage in a state that rushed through anti-union legislation just in time for the “Superbowl,” I’m still thinking about the National Park Service mobilized a new eugenics to evict Occupy DC. This is not the eugenics of forced sterilizations, let alone exterminations. It does, however, seek to separate and control populations on grounds of hygiene and the word “deportation” is being freely floated on the right.

it’s worth debunking the hygienist claims for a moment. The much-announced “explosion” in rats around Occupy DC was amazingly widely reported, as was the comment from some minor city official that the encampment resembled a refugee camp in the underdeveloped world. How many journalists bothered to do a Google search which quickly reveals that DC has had a long-term rat infestation problem? Remember the rat-infested Taco Bell in New York? There are at a minimum 250,000 rats in New York, perhaps tens of millions, no one really knows.

The arrival of haz-mat protected workers recalls some not so distant history of right-wing rhetoric and practice. In October 2005, French youth of color erupted in unrest so serious that the then government reauthorized legislation first passed during the Algerian revolution (1954-62) to give itself extraordinary powers. The relatively unknown minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, made himself notorious for his remark that he would take a “Karcher”–a power-washer–to the minority neighborhoods. The overt gesture to extreme-right sentiment stood him in good stead in the presidential election in 2008. Now Sarkozy has twice been by-passed: U. S. cities have implemented his power-washing strategy against the Occupy encampments. And there is even a chance that in April, he will be eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election by the extreme right National Front.

Hygienic repossession

Such casual deployment of highly charged language and practice to find a trumped up justification for the exercise of power is troubling, to say the least. Left economists have been pointing to the contradiction that global capital no longer has a need for as much labor as is available in the developed nations, even for the low-wage service professions. Youth unemployment in particular makes a worrying spectacle in Europe and the US:

If Spain tops the list at 50%, U. S. youth unemployment rivals levels in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the revolutions in those countries. Occupy does not feel like a revolution but it seems that some on the official side are finding cause for concern. The new authoritarianism has been tempted to use the new eugenics as a pre-emptive strategy against any manifestation of dissent, not as a sign of strength but of its weakness. The hoses can clean the streets but no such tool exists to dispose of mass unemployment.

 

 

Shots Heard Round the World

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In his classic 1997 novel Underworld, Don Delillo visualized the Cold War by the coincidence of finding on the front cover of one newspaper in 1951 of the first Soviet atomic weapons test and the “shot heard around the world,” the victory by the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers. More recently, W. J. T. Mitchell was struck that the front cover of the New York Times for September 11, 2001 had a lead story about cloning, leading to his book Cloning Terror, a visualization of the Bush era. Ironically, Delillo’s novel had André Kertesz’s somewhat sinister photograph of the World Trade Center on its front cover, seeming to foretell Bush’s post 9-11 “crusade.”

Kertesz, WTC, 1972

Today’s webpages have accounts of the shooting of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx by the NYPD and the continued upheaval in Egypt after the death of 75 football [soccer if you must] fans. The apparently contingent association resonates powerfully in the fashion of Delillo and Mitchell (and all good Surrealists). The connection here is the overreach of autocratic power, a countervisualization to their assertion “move on, nothing to see here.”

Since 9-11 the New York City police department have had a free hand to act as they choose, bolstered by their reputation as heroes on the day of the attacks and the decline in the crime rate. Most notably in the latter category, street crime of the kind for which New York was once notorious has notably declined, albeit not as much as you might think. The murder rate, according to official statistics declined precipitously from 2,016 in 1994 to 924 in 1998. It’s fallen further in the past decade but not that much: 866 murders were reported in 2010.

It looks as if Bloomberg has nonetheless decided to cut his police commissioner loose after this latest scandal. This week alone, three people have been shot and killed by police with Ramarley’s death simply the most egregious of the group. In an article that appeared in today’s New York Times with the evident approval of the mayor–because one detail that he disagreed with was noted–it is noted that

There has been a stunning rise in so-called stop-and-frisks — 601,055 in 2010, compared with 97,296 in 2002

This ethnically-discriminatory practice has been highlighted by activists for years, so it’s curious to see that it happens to make the One Per Cent Times front cover at this moment of scandal. The target is Police Commissioner Kelly, perhaps the one person in New York with whom Bloomberg  feels he has to share power. If Bloomberg succeeds in pushing Kelly into retirement, his regime will be truly autocratic.

In Egypt the scandalous connivance of the police and the military government in fomenting a riot between football Ultras in Port Said, leading to over 70 deaths, has been missed by nobody. Whether it was lighting that  mysteriously failed, or a gate that somehow was opened, it’s clear that Cairo believes its football Ultras, who held the line in Tahrir against Mubarak’s camels a year ago today, were being targeted in revenge.

Rather than launch attacks on the immediate perpetrators, the Cairo street has turned against the military government. The film clip below from Mosireen shows the demolition of the wall built by the military to protect the Interior Ministry, home of the police, from Tahrir.

The Ultras and their allies have done the unexpected and surprised the new autocrat Tantawi and his forces. At the same time, these events show that the casual analysis of the Egyptian elections, which would suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood won because they were better integrated into the Egyptian masses, missed the mark.

Even as we were digesting this interface, Washington DC police moved in on Occupy DC, whose encampment had remained in place under federal park regulations, until House Republican Darrell Issa targeted these protections last week. Ever fearful of Republican attacks–and the Park Service have been a long-term obsession for the right–the law was simply ignored.

This is not what democracy looks like

The fragmentation of the rule of law produced by the global crisis has generated a set of unequal and competing autocracies. This may not end well.

Sally Out Against Passive Recreation

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From the middle ranks of the Occupy movement, I have come to hear “occupy” as a question. The question is being put as to when and how I might be able to change. it sounds somewhere between portentous and new-age, I’m aware. It is nonetheless something that I go and practice–in the sense of perform and try out. I spent today at a workshop run by the amazing Lisa Fithian, called “Shutting Things Down to Open Things Up.”

As is now something of an Occupy cliche, change begins with yourself but it also has to be put into some form of practice: which is to say, it’s personal and it’s political. Hence my monstrous hybrid of a title. In the Areopagitica (1644), his great defense of freedom of the press, the poet John Milton declaimed:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.

So it’s one thing, whether good or not, to write about Occupy but you have to go and do it in the face of the adversary as well. And so the second half of the phrase comes from the regulations devised by Brookfield Properties for the appropriate use of Zuccotti Park: “passive recreation.” It is in its bureaucratic, unlovely way, a motto for the service sector of global neo-liberalism that the U. S. has become.

I am painfully aware of my own limitations in this context. The events I have organized or helped organize are details in a much broader picture. I am and will remain a university person. It is, however, one of those times in which you need to test the ideas you circulate by putting them into a form of practice because this is how we learn what to try and think next. Sometimes this is done text to text. Now it’s time for sallying out and seeing what happens, even if the result is another period of reflection.

The performative workshop is a very useful tool for measuring this sense of change and here I want to reflect on two such experiences that I’ve had recently: today’s exercise in taking space, and an earlier theatre of the oppressed workshop, based on the work of Agosto Boal, that I participated in at 16 Beaver. Both were very productive in making us think of ourselves as bodies in space with choices to make that might change the outcome of events. The comparison might help to highlight some tensions in Occupy’s relations to what we might call internal and external repression.

At the Boal workshop, facilitated by Eve Silber, the musician and actor, what had been a physically passive space of talking and listening became a very dynamic and open set of possibilities. Using the “image theatre” technique, Silber built up from a single image of direct democracy to an improvised encounter between protagonist and antagonist. The scenario involved an experience of trying to get access to an OWS Spokes Council, site of some of the most difficult personal interactions in the movement.

One woman present (I didn’t know her name) did a very convincing performance of such disruptions. She was as scary and confusing as the actual performances of such “blocks” and Joe N., playing the facilitator, did what I probably would have done–he played it for laughs, making fun of the rhetorics of facilitation. Afterwards in the discussion, I wondered if we’d missed a moment: instead of trying to work through the hardest place of internal dynamics, we’d stepped outside by being ironical.

Today in Fithian’s workshop, participants were again encouraged to visualize the space otherwise. This time, sets of bodily movement tactics were deployed to see if one set of people, playing protestors, could get past another, playing the police. The goal was to see if space could be taken, even symbolically. For most of those present, this was not an entirely abstract idea, because everyone has been on a demonstration where the police try and prevent you from going where you want.

Nonetheless, on the first effort, a pile of bodies resulted in the middle of the room. The “protestors” felt we had been successful in recovering someone the “police” had tried to arrest, until Fithian reminded us that the point was to get past them to the end of the room. The next sally went better, aided by the protestors numerical superiority and the absence of batons, helmets, shields and pepper spray that routinely appear in New York whenever police are deployed. Just yesterday an unarmed eighteen-year-old, Ramarley Graham, was shot and killed in the Bronx by the NYPD over alleged possession of some marijuana.

So the final venture, co-ordinated by Fithian rather than by us, had the protestors march up to the police and then suddenly sit down. There was a palpable moment of surprise from the “cops.” In that instant, a variety of options for claiming space would have become available. Then the cops recovered themselves and pepper-sprayed the seated demonstrators.

Doing what is not expected turned out to be the best resource, finding ways not to fulfill how power anticipates that we will perform. Fithian showed video of a trans group marching at the demonstrations against the G8 in Rostock, Germany and the complete bafflement of the police they confronted. Another group demonstrated nude.

In September 2011, physical encampments in public space were a brilliantly unexpected move: now the police regard tents as contraband. The difference would not have been that the police did not know an occupation was planned, as New York is now one of the most policed spaces in the world. Today at Penn Station in the shopping area between the subway and the Long Island Rail Road I saw five police officers and two soldiers. The occupation happened because the state did not believe it could be sustained. Paradoxically, the very sense that they have that Occupy is over could be its most useful asset come Spring.

 

Occupy Climate Change (again!)

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If the climate is the economy, then there is a political economy of climate. In the past few days, that politics has become noticeably visible in the U. S., reminding us once again why we occupied Wall Street and not, say, City Hall. The Wall Street Journal has aggressively launched a campaign of absolute climate ignorance–meaning both that they refuse to know what is patently known and also that they are campaigning for us to simply ignore the climate. It is no coincidence that Republicans are again pushing for the disastrous Keystone pipeline–and, big surprise, the Democrats are beginning to cave.

Thanks to the U.K. Guardian, I became aware that the Wall St Journal had launched a manifesto under the unintentionally hilarious title “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27, 2012. Yesterday, scientists published a rebuttal, which, while absolutely right on the substance, once again failed to take the measure of the political economy of climate. Their call is for respect for their expertise. A look at the brazen effrontery of the Journal‘s claims should have made it clear that this is a waste of time.

The piece begins with a long palaver, familiar climate denier rhetoric, that there are a “large and growing number” of scientists that disagree with climate change: in fact 97% of published refereed articles support the diagnosis, making it clearly settled science. The WSJ takes it up a notch by claiming that there is no perceived warming of the planet, flying in the face not just of all data but now of common sense.

However, they are just getting warmed up. Their next move is to go into Michele Bachmann territory:

the fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth.

There is no point in rebutting this kind of argument because it has departed from the norms of public debate, as has so much neo-liberal rhetoric in this election year. However, they have still more to say. Why, they ask are scientists afraid to question global warming, as they call it:

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have detailed how cold war ideology and those promoting it have been co-opted into climate denial. Nonetheless, even by red-baiting standards, this is pretty exceptional stuff.

It might seem that this piece doesn’t matter, it’s just more red meat for the Republican base: but the Tea Party does not read the Wall Street Journal. And this denialism has now produced its own “policy” proposal:

the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now.

That’s right–no controls at all because the “modest” warming will be beneficial anyway and cost-benefit analysis is always right, right?

In the rebuttal, the real climate scientists rightly observe:

most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert

It would be like asking your dentist about cardiology, they say. Forced to waste space rebutting the various allegations, it is only in the last paragraph that the group can hint at an alternative political economy:

In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.

Whether by choice or, more likely from space or editorial restrictions imposed by the Journal, they don’t give specific examples.

The neo-liberals, however, have one: the Keystone XL pipeline. While taking a break from throwing filmmakers out of Congress yesterday, Republicans launched yet another bid to have the pipeline approved. Opposing the pipeline are “hard-left environmentalists,” according to this logic, using the WSJ rhetoric, standing in the way of American jobs and energy security for ideological reasons. Even according to the pipeline’s most enthusiastic proponents, the maximum job creation would be some 20,000 jobs. The reality might be less than half that.

Obama and the Democrats are stuck: having fudged the issue of climate change into so-called energy security and “green” jobs, they have little space to maneuver. Yesterday the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid started talking about a deal. Expect a “sensible” compromise in which the pipeline is routed away from the Sand Hills in Nebraska and there’s some boiler plate about not exporting the oil. None of the politicians will talk about the huge increase in carbon emissions that will result from using this heavy oil. For James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first detected global warming, if we go there, it’s “game over” for efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Pipeline Protest, Nov. 2011

Keystone activists already undertook a successful action of civil disobedience at the White House last November, when 12,000 demonstrated and many were arrested, including Bill McKibben. Now it’s important to realize that “Keystone” has become the symbol of a political economy that actively chooses to ignore all questions of climate. Remember, Transcanada, the promoters of the pipeline, are also the owners of Zuccotti Park. The lesson is that we cannot “demand” the cancellation of the pipeline, we have to make it an impossibility by our own actions.

I’m going to say this again and I’m going to keep saying it: occupy climate change.

 

Death, Debt and Climate Change

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There were 2900 temperature records set in the United States in January. Exxon Mobil reported yesterday that its quarterly profits had increased to $9.6 billion on revenues of over $70 billion. It’s 60 degrees on February 1 in New York City. These facts are connected. I continue to think that one reason Bloomberg evicted OWS was that he lost patience with waiting for it to get cold enough to drive the Occupiers out.

I have proposed that “debt is death.” It sounds a bit melodramatic. You can in fact map connections between the debt-financed globalized industries, direct violence caused by their expansion, and the indirect but nonetheless deadly violences of climate change.

Here’s a metonymic example from the flows of media that pass through our tired brains seeking for attention. My friend Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the artist and academic, circulated this video of events in Orissa, India. At a protest outside a Jindal Steel plant on January 25, 2012 at least 160 people were injured, some seriously, including over 50 women. According to The Times of India:

Most people injured in the incident have been simply lying in the verandah of the Angul district headquarter hospital and are not receiving proper treatment

The protestors were villagers, who are set to lose their land to global steel conglomerate Jindal Steel and Power.

Fearing further violence, the villagers refuse to meet the company except in the presence of media representatives. Jindal themselves tell the media they have no objection to this but in fact have evaded doing so. These people are the local costs of the “growth” solution to the global economic crash.

Shuddhabrata further points out that via its Foundation, Jindal is a major supporter of Art India magazine, a leading art journal with top national and international contributors. Jindal USA also promote themselves arts and culture donors, although the link simply takes you to the Indian site.These patterns of “art-washing” are familiar enough, as are the disclaimers about doing some good and so on.

Jindal take it a step further by their intricate association of debt financing to support global expansion of the most damaging forms of heavy industry in terms of carbon emissions and other toxic pollution. It has a giant $9 billion steel plant in Texas and is building a “2,640 megawatt coal-fired power plant in the northern province of Tete, home to some of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves” in Mozambique. Together with expansion in India, the company is set to deploy $6 billion, two-thirds of which it will borrow.

At a conference in Australia this week, Jindal revealed the basis for this confidence: it will use a new form of steel-forging, using soft coal and iron ore rather than expensive coking coal to generate heat. As a result, Jindal is buying its own coal mining concessions in India.

Soft coal is recognized to be far more polluting even than standard “hard” coal, creating higher emissions of greenhouse gases because it generates less heat per unit burned and because its side-products are more toxic. Of course Jindal would deny this and they have boiler plate on their website about the environment.

In one sense it doesn’t really matter. The International Energy Authority reported last year that if you calculated all the power stations that were already scheduled to be built, that alone would take carbon emissions to the maximum if temperature rise is to be restricted to two degrees celsius and 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide and equivalents. Each of these billion dollar expansions, debt-financed and justified in the name of growth, adds more emissions to the atmosphere, pushing us still further into environmental crisis.

The women in Orissa who have no homes thanks to Jindal will not be the last. Making these interfaces visible needs a new Rachel Carson. MInd you, were she to be at work, she would not find a receptive audience. Republicans in Congress today ordered the arrest of Academy-award nominated filmmaker Josh Fox, whose Gasland vividly shows the disasters of fracking. Presumably they didn’t want the publicity. Just like Jindal. This is why we occupy: it creates a medium, which creates a message.

ACT UP Occupy

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Gran Fury "Riot" (1989)

The opening today of a retrospective of the work of radical art collective Gran Fury during the AIDS crisis is timely and suggestive of what Occupy needs to learn from ACT UP. ACT UP’s first action in 1987 was a die-in in Wall Street. Gran Fury produced a mock newspaper called The New York Crimes, prefiguring the Occupied Wall Street Journal. ACT UP demanded change from the government but also change from its audience, whether men or women, gay or straight (to use the dominant terms of the 1980s). ACT UP operated an extensive direct democracy in its process, centered on the use of affinity groups. From the start, though, they had very specific demands in relation to the treatment of people with AIDS.

It’s easy to forget now how terrifying the disease was in the 1980s. The first person I knew with it, Mark, was diagnosed in London in 1986. He was active, out and activist but very soon caught the previously rare pneumonia, pneumocystis carinii, that killed so many early AIDS patients. He was dead within the week. The funeral was terrible, with hundreds of young friends and activists shut outside at the wishes of his Catholic family. It was not until 1996 that the “cocktail” seemed to offer a way to live with AIDS, at least for those with access to health care and the expensive pharmaceuticals.

In the midst of the AIDS crisis, Gran Fury expressed the anger and the militancy that came from so much mourning. I’d forgotten this one, though:

Gran Fury "Civil War"

In the current exhibition, the poster is landscape and takes up an entire wall at the 80 WSE gallery. It’s really worth getting over there just to see this, although the whole show needs to be seen. The question seems to want to be answered “hell, yes” all over again, in a different context. In the news today, it emerged that Freddie Mac, the government’s own mortgage guarantee company, has been buying billions of dollars of complicated derivatives that bet against people being able to refinance their mortgage. Is debt to Occupy what AIDS was to ACT UP?

The two subjects, in classic Occupy fashion, need not to be separated but brought together. On December 8, 2011, World AIDS day, Housing Works and OWS staged a Robin Hood action on Wall Street.

World AIDS Day 2011

Housing Works details why the slogan “Poor and HIV? Billionaire Mayor Doesn’t Care” has bite:

Mayor Bloomberg has cut more than $10 million for HIV/AIDS housing and services during the past year, plus an additional $3 million more in his November Financial Plan, while opposing the state 30% rent cap affordable housing legislation that would prevent homelessness for thousands of people living with HIV/AIDS.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria just announced that it would not make new grants during the next two years due to broken pledges by donor governments.

Bond holders, of course, must be made “whole,” meaning get every penny back and so the pennies have to come from people with AIDS and other diseases.

It’s often said that ACT UP was able to motivate activism because people were literally dying. They’re still dying. What ACT UP did was make visible the connections of “greed and indifference” to those deaths. As the British queer activist Bea Campbell has pointed out this week, feminism (and ACT UP was distinctly feminist, I would argue) was at once about “recognition” and “redistribution.” Debt causes death. Time for (another) riot.

 

 

 

Event? Performance? Or Theatre?

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In these observations from the ranks of the Occupy movement, I have often been driven to think about the performative and theatrical dimensions of Occupy. It seems to be catching on.

In a recent essay in the SSCR series “Possible Futures,” Yale philosopher Matthew Noah Smith takes a generally positive view of the movement but disagrees extensively with its tactics and strategies. He argues:

OWS is not a movement—at least not in any sense that we would use the term to refer to other movements. OWS was, first and foremost, an event more than an organization.

That would certainly come as a surprise to many in Occupy who refer to it precisely as the “movement.” Their sense is a widespread turning away from one set of goals and aspirations to another way of understanding being in the world. Rather than define what a movement might be, Smith goes on to claim:

Because OWS was no more than an event, it always had to be located in a determinate place. This is why the evictions from Zucotti and the various other OWS sites were seen as existential threats. A performance needs a theater, and if the theater closes, then the performance ends. Organizations, on the other hand, are abstract entities and so can coalesce anywhere they choose.

For all that Smith is a philosopher, we might be surprised at the lack of precision in his language here: is this a performance in the sense of Austin, Butler, Derrida, or J. Jack Halberstam? It seems that there is a certain tautology at work here: a performance is what happens in a theatre, which is a place where performances happen. At the most literal level, however, performances have mostly not taken place in theatres. Scripted plays may be performed there, but no one is proposing Occupy as following a script.

To be concrete where Smith prefers the abstract: yesterday, there was a call to demonstrate in support of Occupy Oakland and against police brutality. It appeared on NYCGA.net and was disseminated on Facebook and Twitter. Later I saw leaflets at Washington Square Park. I don’t know who did that. I still decided to go. For Smith, this is evidence that OWS is organized but not an organization.

The fineness of this distinction is nonetheless precisely where we disagree. Occupy is a direct democracy between people. The organized democracy that Smith wants to see proposes abstract entities that do the business of what there is to be done: so there is always a House majority and minority leader regardless of who those people actually are. That is the maintenance of authority. It is in the recognition of the other and in allowing that other to invent us that the possibility of autonomy is created. We already have an abstract autonomy, the right to consume. That’s not going so well. We need a real autonomy, and it can only be found in moments of performance.

For Smith, the self gets abstracted in the process of coming to democracy:

One no longer thinks of oneself as a patient or a lone figure in struggle against injustice. Rather, one begins to think of oneself plurally and democratically. That is, one understands oneself as part of a democratic ‘we.’

I’m all for solidarity, I just don’t think it has to be seen outside the event and without a relationship between singularities. Yesterday’s demonstration did not go anywhere in particular, an organized walk to a “specific place.” Rather it made the claim of the right to be seen. So a rabbi walked quietly in the middle of the march, while hundreds danced past Fifth Avenue restaurants singing “A-Anti-Anticapitalista!”

Did they fail because capitalism was not overthrown? Perhaps, unless you think that capitalism is in the process of overthrowing itself anyway. Or you could say that some at least have found a way to articulate their refusal to move on and see nothing. This articulation is the performance of a movement. It proposes a dissensus that allows for the emergence of a politics in which there is no person without part.

J 29 Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay!

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OWS occupied a square for a day this afternoon in Washington Square Park. The fountain was encircled with tables from working groups, the Octopus puppet and the drummers were there. It was quite like old times–from two months ago. Not wanting to be left out the police arranged their own gathering on the North side of the square but failed to consense on an action, so Occupy Town Square went ahead.

In the fall, I was active in Occupy Washington Square Park, so it was nice to be back in the Square. The Education and Empowerment working group did a great job–there were protest song teach-ins, walking tours of corporate interests around the Square, books from the OWS library: and in a collaborative effort with Direct Action and the Performance Guild, we performed scenes from Dario Fo’s 1974 classic play Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay!

The performance project came about from a discussion at the Occupy Student Debt Campaign when we were looking for a slogan for the launch. I suggested “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay” and I quickly had to disavow any originality. It seemed that I finally found something I could do for Occupy–remember things that happened long before most of the activists were born. Fo’s play was first written and performed by himself, his wife Franca Rame and the theatre group Collettivo Teatrale La Comune in 1974.

It was based on the auto-reduction movement in Italy, in which women and men refused to pay price increases in shops, increased rent and other price hikes, while their own wages were stagnant. These actions were part of the operaismo or worker’s power that has been so influential in academic circles of late via Paolo Virno, and other Autonomia writers.

The play is still performed worldwide from debt-destroyed Ireland to supposedly-booming India:

Irish production

From Bangalore

When Greek citizens started to refuse to pay new road tolls and other imposed tax increases, the parallel was noticed at once. Now actively described as the “I Won’t Pay” movement, it’s likely to grow in size now that Germany is demanding that a European Union commissioner be imposed to run the Greek economy. In the US, any such movement is seen as a moral failing on the part of the debtor, rather than a social crisis in which unreasonable prices and interest rates are imposed on citizens.

So Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay! is a play whose time has once again come. In the scenes performed today, Antonia and Margherita describe how a group of women banded together to refuse to pay increased prices in the supermarket. Then Margherita’s husband, Giovanni, a play-by-the-rules middle-of-the-road type reports his amazement that his workmates refused to pay for the mediocre food at increased prices in the works canteen. Any investigations into the identity of the mediocre “actor” playing Giovanni today will be summarily dismissed;) So in two short scenes issues of striking, price refusal and feminism were raised.

Giovanni and Antonia in the Nora Theatre production (Boston, 2008)

While the play felt a little dated and the UK English translation lost people in places, the good-humored little audience watching enjoyed the rehearsal and stayed around to discuss debt refusal and other issues.

In this group were two mothers who are being pursued by Citibank for student debt incurred by their children, which is being repaid, only not fast enough for the bank’s liking. We heard about a popular refusal of mortgage debt in Hungary, where debtors deposited bricks outside the Parliament building. Thousands participated, prompting the government to allow a revision of foreign currency mortgages that had been very popular (as in Iceland) before 2008 but were now ruinous.

Can’t pay? Won’t pay!

 

Tools and “the master’s house”

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After another day of discussing open access and open peer-review, I come home to find Oakland looking like Tahrir Square on livestream. How do we evaluate our tools, on- and off-line, as the situation changes and as the state becomes more and more willing to use force? Once again, it’s time to think of Audre Lorde’s injunction “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Oakland

Oakland Commune

Today was advertised as “move-in day,” when Occupy Oakland was to reoccupy an abandoned building. Looking at the streaming pictures, first impressions are that the police were forewarned of their target and came heavily armed with smoke bombs–some say tear gas–and there are reports of rubber bullets after they declared “unlawful assembly.” So much for the First Amendment, then.

From what I have seen the Occupy people have been non-violent–although abusing the police is being classified as “assault” these days. No doubt the media will report a “violent” clash with arrests, if they report it at all. The situation is still unclear but it looks as if there won’t in fact be a reoccupation. Infiltration by police agents was a better tool today than occupation. On the other hand, the excessive and almost casual resort to force may give Occupy as a whole a new impetus.

Net choices

I’m getting much of my information on Oakland from Twitter, as has become the norm over the past year. Yesterday, however, Twitter seemed to take a far more cautious position in relation to internal censorship than it has in the past, promising to abide by local laws in countries where there are “different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” What has become a critical tool of horizontal expression seems under threat.

By the same token, we were all struck at the peer-to-peer meeting when every person present cracked open a Mac to begin work. Given the latest revelations of appalling working conditions at Apple’s Chinese factories, some are now calling for a boycott. And then there are the phones that we use to coordinate activities: the same reports show that all major phone brands are made at places like Foxconn in China and that there are no phones made to decent labor or environmental standards. The long-standing call for open-source software seems to need a hardware counterpart that would require resources that only a state could mobilize. How about it Finland?

In the likely continued absence of such hardware options, how about software tools? In our discussions today, a distinction emerged between open access and open review. The latter might not be in the end too much of a disruption to current vertical patterns of gatekeeping. There’s an argument that it might even increase requirements for seemingly permanent review of everything by everyone.

Open access is different. When we see a company like Oxford University Press giving established writers contracts deeming their work “for hire,” and thus totally the intellectual property of the press, it’s time for a change. Steven Shaviro, the writer in question, points out the convergence at work across the “knowledge economy”:

Writers would become “knowledge workers” whose output belonged to the press that published them (or to the university at which they worked, in another variant of the scenario) in the same way that code written on the job at Microsoft, Apple, or Google belongs to those companies, and not to the writers themselves.

The conclusion he came to, along with many others on Facebook and elsewhere, was not only that one cannot write for such presses but also that we should not assign their books. Oxford’s UK counterparts Cambridge University Press have taken to renting articles on a daily basis–no printing permitted.

The alternative is free publication, using open source software and online distribution. Open Humanities Press is the model. Yet even OHP has retained the double-blind peer review. Today, some felt that for the humanities monograph, there was as yet no real alternative. If that’s right, which it may well be, I suspect that’s because the “master’s house,” the vertical university, has no space for alternative tools. Just as in other areas of economic activity, the rhetorics of scarcity and austerity are used to sustain and reinforce intense competition among the aspirant workforce.

It’s an open question as to whether there’s one last “bubble” in the post-2008 economy: higher education. The very noticeable extent of participation in Occupy by graduates and post-graduates suggests that for the user, it already has done. We need to prepare our tools not for an ever expanding system but for one that places value on equality.