Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

The Shock of the Vertical: The University

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After a month in which I’ve been able to focus on Occupy, this week has been a blunt return to the vertical: the University. Today I worked on a third-year tenure review, chaired  a PhD proposal orals and participated in the first half of a two-day Mellon-funded open peer-to-peer review process. In short, I spent all day reviewing, or considering how to review, my “peers,” whether we construe that as my equals or those in a feudal relation of dependency. (By the way, a good number of students dropped my class on Politics and Visual Culture: but as many others added it–more follows).

So much time in purported judgment of others: often in fact deferred or displaced but the subject of much real or attributed “fear.” In this afternoon’s discussion, fear meant the worry that many academics feel about using digital media to disseminate their work, as to whether tenure and promotion committees will approve it as “refereed publication.” Employment concerns are entirely valid and real. We also need to recognize that the tenured and tenure-track faculty are a minority in the university teaching workforce and that many would be grateful to have such concerns.

Or we can look at a place like Egypt, where, despite the intense triangular struggle between the secular revolution, the Islamic forces and the Armed Forces, a group like Mosireen, the video collective I often refer to, can state:

The Mosireen workspace is open to everyone, regardless of their level of experience. We see a big part of our role as helping network between a wide variety of initiatives and projects, especially those born out of a spirit of civic engagement.

When we talk of “open” peer review in the quiet world of US academia, or of the “revolutionary” digital humanities, we should step back in respect to those committed to horizontal practice in the midst of a shooting war, exactly the situation often used to justify vanguard leadership.

I don’t intend to take the sanctimonious position that only the decolonial revolution can be in the right. A remarkable action by Occupy Baltimore shows what can be done. Along with many other delegates to the American Studies Association, I visited Occupy Baltimore last November. It was at this point that I felt we really had a national movement going. In a city where there was little media attention to their actions even locally, let alone nationally, a group of Occupiers had set up in a desolate space on the waterfront. They held a GA that lasted from 8 to past 10 when I gave up, feeling cold.

This January, despite the evictions, Occupy Baltimore demonstrated under the slogan “Schools Not Jails” and for good reason:

the Schools Not Jails Occupation took to the streets of Baltimore, brought public attention to the struggle against the State of Maryland’s plan to build a $104 million youth jail in East Baltimore – the budget for which could easily supplement and expand the City of Baltimore’s education funding, and prevent our recreation centers from being closed or privatized. We entered the site of the proposed detention center, and built a little red schoolhouse on the empty lot, to symbolize our desire for a city that prioritizes Schools, not Jails.

It transpired that, after the protest, this item did not in the end appear in the state budget, a horizontal victory for the movement, far from the spotlights of global media attention. All of us who loved The Wire, who use it in education and elsewhere, should be part of this movement.

These kinds of interfaces are perhaps exemplified by the Occupy Archive, who have created an open source, open access set of materials for activists, researchers and current/future scholars:

#Occupy Archive is documenting and saving the digital evidence and stories from the Occupy protests worldwide that began in September 2011 in Lower Manhattan. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) inspired groups to form in small towns and large cities around the world. # Occupy Archive seeks to represent each of those groups with individual collections.

There is a horizontal affiliation between these networked education and empowerment projects that those of us more ensconced in the vertical “research” university would do well to learn from and about in the effort to reconsider what the function of such institutions might be before the inevitable bursting of the education bubble. The tidal wave of one trillion dollars in student debt is about to break and the future is uncertain.

My modest proposal would be that a university program in the humanities would be a place where people might collectively experiment as to what “democracy” might mean for them. I know it’s “unrealistic” but then, how realistic is it to go to university to get a job?

Direct Democracy in the Classroom

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There is no more hierarchical place than the university. My graduate course this semester is trying to bring some of the practice and theory of direct democracy into the classroom to see if we can build a different university within the ruins of the old.

I’ve been inspired to do so by the new teaching promoted by digital culture, such as Cathy Davidson’s experiments with peer-to-peer grading and Elizabeth Losh’s use of Twitter as instant feedback. So what might happen if you add the horizontal ethics of direct democracy to the hybrid learning space created by ubiquitous computing?

This will not be easy. The era of the league table, US News and World Report rankings and Research Assessment Exercises mitigates directly against the possibility of free, open, horizontal teaching and research. Let’s not even get into student debt.

Let’s just begin where we did today: at the beginning. I’ve mentioned before the politics of academic language. So I ventured to render the seminar into a workgroup, with a facilitator, not an instructor and an agenda, not a schedule. I distributed this proposal electronically in advance and today we broke down the various items that make up a “syllabus” into agenda items.

The workgroup now has three forms of meeting:

  • actions, where we participate in or actively observe a political event, defined by group members, as long as no one endangers themselves or others.
  • collective readings of key texts, where each person produces notes on a section of text, assembled into a Googledoc that is edited in the meeting to produce a collective in-depth reading
  • thematic discussions–assemblages of readings and visualized materials on a theme for collective discussion.

If this had been an Occupy meeting or an unconference ThatCamp style, the group members would have set the entire agenda, I realize. I didn’t go that far because I was not sure it was fair or appropriate. Instead, I circulated a proposed agenda and a group of other items in each section that I thought were equally worthy of inclusion and invited other proposals. People broke into small groups to decide what they wanted to do and discussed their ideas in an animated manner. The result was a noticeably changed agenda with different themed discussions, key texts and actions. We blurred the distinction between the categories as well: which is sensible, as they are entirely arbitrary.

We then proceeded to consense on a collective agreement (what is usually called requirements). There was agreement on working collectively and forming writing groups within the overall structure. We agreed to table a decision about outcomes. Some students were already thinking about a collective action, others less sure what they wanted to do–it was interesting to see that adbusters today launched their call to #Occupy Chicago in May, just when the project ends. This could get interesting.

It’s worth noting that the entire effort was not helped by the typical cramped post-industrial classroom space that was made available, dominated by a large wooden podium, far grander than the small Dell computer it shields really needs. Doing break out groups in this space required people to sit on the floor.

You will be thinking by now that the implied logic of all this is that I should not be directing matters. Item one on the agenda next week: a proposal to rotate facilitation.

 

January 25: (Re)Occupy Egypt

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Tahrir Reoccupied 1-25-12

Today we salute the courage of Egypt, one year on from the beginning of the revolution.
If we want to remind ourselves why the legend of Antigone risking her own life to bury her brother seems so relevant today, look at this new video by Mosireen, the inspiring Cairo video collective (I first embedded this last night: this morning, it had been sub-titled–amazing).

The dead body of a protestor, Mohammed Tousi, is hauled to the side of Tahrir and left in the garbage. His niece speaks of her grief, followed by his mother. It becomes clear that he was killed during the eviction of the midan or encampment in Tahrir on November 20, 2011. Tousi was beaten to death and hauled to the garbage: “Is this what they call honoring the dead?,” asks his sister. In a further evocation of the judicial killing of Antigone, she then criticises the walling-in of the square by SCAF, calling it a “separation wall,” like that used by Israel. But the conclusion is firm–this violence will not drive the protestors away but motivate them to renew their struggle. These women, veiled or not, want justice for their murdered son/brother/relative–Antigones all. The final long pan around the room shows the entire group, all radicalized, all looking for ways to claim their rights.

Today, and in the run-up to the anniversary, this vow to seek justice has been fulfilled.

Here’s a remarkable account by Ahdaf Souief, the novelist/activist of Mosireen’s recent action:

The campaign against SCAF has gained huge traction over the past three weeks. Inspired by anger at the mid-December killings of protesters in the parliament area, young revolutionaries held a press conference called Kazeboon (“they lie”). It was a packed and emotional meeting. They screened a film by the Mosireen Collective that showed the generals making statements – and the actions that belied them. A young woman gave an impassioned speech holding up a piece of fabric soaked in the blood of a protester: Rami Hamdi. The film ended with the camera slowly tracking the trail of blood that had poured out of the young man as his friends tried to carry him to safety. On each side of the blood the pathway had been marked with small stones. At intervals there were young people sitting by the trail. Kazeboon is now a countrywide campaign where young people screen footage of the military’s deeds in streets and squares and universities – despite intimidation, and often violence.

You can download all of Mosireen’s films here. Do it today, show them widely.

Women wearing V for Vendetta in Tahrir today

As the news today shows, the reoccupation of Tahrir is underway, huge crowds have moved in. “The revolution is on its way to Tahrir”, was the chant. Earlier they were singing “Bread, freedom and human dignity, bread, freedom and social justice.” The continued crisis in basic food provision drives the revolution as it has since 2010.  Above, women using Anonymous masks as veils complicate and repurpose the debates over masking and veiling.

The young man mic checking early on in the video from Ahram Online says:

Yes, we’re chanting against the military./

We’ve come back again and this time we’re not leaving.

The slogan of January 25, 2011 “the people and the military are one hand” has gone. It’s now clear to the revolution that SCAF is the regime. Keep watching, it’s not over: follow events online via Twitter #J25 and please ignore The New York Times.

Jan 24: In the Cairo Streets

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Watching the Egyptian revolution for the past year has been an extraordinary experience. First we watched live online via al-Jazeera, when the feed held. We saw photographs posted to websites, blogs, Flickr and elsewhere. We read all we could of the blogs. And we learned about the dynamic forms of Cairo street art. From this distance I can’t pretend to any expertise but I am moved and inspired by this work.

It’s clear from what we can see online and what information there is in English on blogs like ArabStand that street work by artists like Keizer, Sad Panda and Ganzeer is strongly interfaced with that of well-known Anglo-American artists like Banksy or Shephard Fairey. In the Egyptian street art community these references are clearly appreciated. For all the real difficulties that the Western tagger confronts, the Egyptian context has nonetheless vastly more dangers and hazards. It’s clear too that the end of the dictatorship made it briefly far more feasible to work outdoors. How the recent crackdown by SCAF will impact their projects is less clear.

When we look at the streetscape of Mahmoud Street, Cairo, that leads from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry today, there’s a palpable sense of the change:

Mahmoud St. Credit: Suzeeinthecity

This isn’t graffiti in the derogatory sense: it’s a street gallery and a reclamation of space that says: “Whose streets? Our streets!” In this crucible of countervisualization, a number of artists have become prominent.

"Chess Game" by El Teneen

"Kill TV" by Keiser

Tahrir represented in the street

El Teneen’s visualization of the revolution as a chess game and Keiser’s Situationist reference might be seen in other cities, albeit with different references. Tahrir is a new way for the anonymous to visualize their history, a place that so few outside Cairo had heard about a year ago.

Keiser’s work has a sharp political edge, as in his détournement of Disney’s Snow White:

Keiser "Snow White"

In more allusive fashion, he visualizes the people as ants, not as pests but as determined and energetic collaborators working for the collective good:

Keizer "Ants"

On one wall in the Zamalek district of Cairo, there’s an interesting confrontation between two very distinct styles of work.

Ganzeer (left) and Sad Panda (right)

Left is Ganzeer’s work, clearly learning from Banksy, with a witty sense of how the new city is being carried by the person in the street. At right is Sad Panda, the work of an artist known only as Hatem. Before January 25 2011, Sad Panda worked in secret.

Sad Panda from the revolutionary period

Today his work is widespread and he shared with the blogger who posts as Suzee in the City how he makes his work by creating stencils:

Stencil in action

 

Stencil under construction

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad Panda is a multiply-repeated icon whose presence calls attention to the places where it appears and that which it looks at. By dint of repetition and familiarity, the Sad Panda reterritorializes the city. The Panda has become known by the metonym of its eyes, as if to say, you may be watching us but we can and do watch you back.

Sad Panda's eyes watch Suzanne Mubarak and warns "danger"

In this complex cityscape, an image of the former dictator’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, is watched by the Panda at bottom right and a text warns of “danger.” It’s up to you to associate the pieces in this visualization in the same way that any city dweller constantly interprets and reinterprets the built and socialized environment. This metonym serves as a means to represent the claim of the right to look, which works precisely because it requires us to notice it, decipher its look and the relation to the other it invents and the one it refuses.

More on Egypt and countervisuality tomorrow, the anniversary.

 

 

 

 

Working Out Autonomy in the Street

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The emergence of Photography 2.0 is itself now in process. Its “darkroom” is not in a studio but on the street. Its transitional form is so-called “street art,” aka graffiti. Like that precursor, street art may be just a transition to a marketable art form. For the time being, it helps think through the paradox that autonomy eludes representation.

In Tunisia, the French “artivist” (artist/activist) who calls himself JR realized a transformation of photography was happening.  He organized an “inside out” visualization of the people as portrait photographs of random individuals, printed in poster size and posted as graffiti.

A JR poster replaces the portrait of Ben Ali

The project was called “artocracy.” This photographic commons turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past. Working in conjunction with Tunisian bloggers and using all local interlocutors and photographers, the goal was to create a series of one hundred portraits of people who had participated in the revolution.

The photographs were the large-scale head-and-shoulder closeups in black-and-white that have become JR’s signature style. Printed as 90x120cm posters, they were flyposted across four cities in Tunisia, including startling examples in the former secret police commissariat (below)

JR in the Police Commissariat

oron the façade of one of Ben Ali’s former houses (below).

Yet as the documentary posted on JR’s own website indicates, even this open access project was subject to intense criticism in Tunisia. “Why only a hundred?” was the common refrain. For the revolution is widely held to have been the work of the people, not a sub-set of heroes. No-one wants to replace autocracy with artocracy, even as a joke.

In Cairo, the contingency artist Ganzeer—his self-definition—who produced a widely-used PDF pamphlet on how to conduct a protest during the revolution, is now attempting the marathon project of street portraits of all 847 people who died in the revolution, the martyrs.

Ganzeer, "Martyr Portrait"

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who are running Egypt, persist in painting over these memorials so Ganzeer, and his fellow street artists like Keizer  and Sad Panda [more on them tomorrow] are using the Internet as an archive of their work. A Google maps mash-up indicates where and when the work was posted. Users are invited to “like” the link on Twitpic and Flickr but not Facebook, which is now too carefully under surveillance. Ganzeer had only accomplished three of these portraits as of last summer, making it unlikely that his martyrology will ever be accomplished.

The street art process centered on the individual, even when decentred and distributed, taken out of the gallery into the street, is not yet equal to the visualization of autonomy. I have argued that one person cannot convey the right to look: the interface between two or more people as they look at each other and allow the other to invent them even as they invent the other. In his essay that coined the phrase droit de regards, which I translate as “the right to look,” Jacques Derrida, the Algerian, insisted on precisely this incapacity of photography to convey the look into another’s eyes, whether literal or metaphorical. For the autocrat the answer is the same as it has ever been: “they cannot represent themselves: they must be represented.” So SCAF is as determined to push through a “representative” parliamentary democracy as it is to retain effective power.

The nub of the issue, then, is how, once autonomy has been claimed by the anonymous, they might visualize that autonomy as something that goes beyond transition. Street art has some components right–the value of the project is judged by the “street,” the anonymous. It perhaps overvalues the secrecy of its means of production as an end in itself–“how did s/he tag there?” is a great question under autocracy, less so as a means to autonomy. Its capacity to spontaneously generate new forms, however, is a striking way to think through how these issues are being worked out and worked over.

Continued tomorrow with the work of Sad Panda, Keizer and Ganzeer,

 

Photography 2.0

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The revolutions in North Africa and the global Occupy movement have seen the emergence of what I call Photography 2.0 in which people and “the people” envisage and visualize themselves as having a name, a place and the right to look. This photography uses phones, graffiti, the Internet, the demonstration and Occupy as its means of self-manifestation. Sometimes it uses cameras as well.

In the moment of the general crash of 1929, Walter Benjamin suggested in his essay on Surrealism

For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in the space of political action the one hundred percent image space

“Organized pessimism” was Benjamin’s response to a series of failures by the Social Democrats in 1920s Germany. In the so-called Great Recession, it has been Occupy’s response to the failures of the entire political class: because there is nothing to hope for from them, we must organize ourselves. By (re)claiming space, a newly affirmed self-image is placed in the street, in the square, in the place of occupation. It challenges the idea that all there is to do is circulate, to pass by and to continue as if commodity fetishism can still save us.

Organized pessimism: 400,000 “likes” on the “We Are All Khaled Said” page in 2011.

Mural of Khaled Said on a piece of the Berlin Wall by Case

Khaled Said was a blogger, arrested and tortured to death by Egyptian police in 2010. The mural above was painted by Andreas von Chrzanowski aka Case, on a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall in 2011. The texts say: above,”Khaled’s rights are Egypt’s rights” written by Zahraa Kassem and below “We are all Khaled Said”, calligraphy by Mohamed Gaber (photo: Joel Sames/From Here To Fame). It has been proposed by the revolutionaries that Mahmoud Street, which leads from Tahrir to the Interior Ministry, should be renamed for Khaled Said: in their usage it already has been occupied by this revisualized naming.

The image space in the place of political action: “The people want the regime to fall.”

In this famous slogan, now almost a year old, a self-image has formed where there was none before. It organized a collective political subject with desires: not demands. The new general will forced the dictator to yield. In the US, it was the move from posting on “We Are the 99 Percent” to occupying.

In short, there’s a new kind of “photography” taking place. It is a countervisuality to the concept of history in which autocracy, whether the Egyptian dictator or the military-industrial complex, is the only entity capable of visualizing the social and its flows. In Thomas Carlyle’s exaltation of the Great Man or the Hero, the “camera obscura of tradition” that reinforced and supported that visuality.  This “photography” aspired to create a Medusa-effect for the modern, immobilizing change and fixing the social hierarchy as it already was. Photography 2.0, by contrast, is an apparatus to name and organize the anonymous.

It is first an extension of the body, whose signature gesture is the young woman photographing herself using her phone at arm’s length. This self-portrait is the counter to the ubiquitous surveillance of the age of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). It asserts a presence and autonomy, from which can be derived the right to be seen and the right to look. Photography is becoming newly democratic, a literally direct democracy, beyond its first democratization of the means of mechanical visual reproduction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to a democracy of the self (image).

In Alexis. A Greek Tragedy, the Antigone character makes considerable use of the Mac PhotoBooth program to take pictures of herself and other characters as the play is taking place. Using the self-timer, she took a picture of herself jumping away from the computer’s camera, which, when rendered in the foreshortened view of the little lens in the MacBook, appeared to show her jumping headlong into the audience. In the same way, Photography 2.0 resolutely breaks the fourth wall and all the distancing apparatus of the Camera Obscura/Lucida. J25 is coming. There is more to follow.

Silvia Calderoni using the computer as a camera and projector

In sight of the law

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So I’m waiting for a Direct Action meeting to begin–probably my single greatest category of time spent at OWS has been waiting. I’m talking to an Occupy friend about the movement, who says something to the effect that it’s been like a relationship–all buzzy and idealistic at first, more complicated and argumentative later. From the media perspective, of course, we’ve broken up already. Perhaps that’s why cultural work that interfaces politics with law and familial structure seems so relevant to me now.

When I saw the Motus refiguring of Antigone (Alexis. A Greek Tragedy), Antigone’s complex defiance of the law and her incredibly complex family were somewhat in the background because the company had spent years exploring Sophocles’s and Brecht’s versions of the theme. Watching Asghar Farhadi’s film A Separation (2011), though, these questions really can’t be avoided. Set in present-day (which is to say post-Green movement) Iran, A Separation shows a complex but open set of events that suggest a new form of spectatorship might be possible.

The opening shot of "A Separation"

The very opening shot establishes this new problematic. At the end of the credits, the screen fills with a man and a woman arguing about a divorce. It becomes clear–as perhaps would be obvious to an Iranian audience–that they are debating in the presence of a judge as to how the divorce might be carried out. Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) cannot agree on their future: she wants to leave the country for an unspecified destination to improve the chances for their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), while he feels obligated to stay and care for his father, who has Alheizmer’s. As we watch the debate, our perspective is that of the judge before whom the hearing is being held, whom we hear but do not see. The screen, then, is the Law. But which law? The state law that requires both parties to agree to a divorce? The law of the (male) gaze that is held to structure narrative cinema? What kind of watching might be possible if legislated on the psychoanalysis that Judith Butler imagines as being derived from Antigone, rather than Oedipus?

Antigone, as Oedipus’s daughter and brother, is decidedly “postoedipal,” as Butler puts it, “caught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship.” Just as Butler shows that Antigone’s position has no singularity, in A Separation everyone tries to do the right thing, only to find that there is no single way to be right, that the law breaks down against itself. To take one resonant example, a subaltern woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) is employed to look after Nadar’s father after Simin leaves him. Perhaps confused by the change of circumstances, the old man soils himself and cannot (or will not) clean up. In her understanding of Islam, Razieh feels unable to look on a naked man other than her husband. She calls an authority–a rather interesting reconfiguration of the deus ex machina–who gives her permission, given the “urgency” of the situation. Here she fears god, her husband and her new employer in equal amounts.

Razieh

The dilemma resonated with me in two ways. I once had a student who refused to look at images of naked bodies in a photography class for religious reasons. It turned out that she was a nurse and when I asked her what she did at work, she said that she imagined the bodies to be objects. Apparently this tactic did not operate in the classroom. Bemused, I found a workaround for her. In another context, we might recall the legend of Ham, cursed by God for seeing Noah’s nakedness. His “punishment” was to become “black.” This purported Biblical story was often used as a post-hoc justification for slavery.

In the context of Antigone, it resonates twice. Oedipus cursed Polyneices that he would not be buried with honor, a curse that further entailed Antigone’s claim to autonomy from law, when she buries her brother’s body, resulting in her own death. Antigone dies for a brother: but which one? In the story of Ham, God is Noah’s father–but also Ham’s, making them in a sense brothers. Ham’s “reckless eyeballing,” to use the Jim Crow term, is the alleged origin of the “social death” of slavery. A farmer named Matt Ingram was convicted of “reckless eyeballing” in North Carolina–in 1951. A white woman had not liked the way he looked at her from the distance of sixty-five feet. In Abu Ghraib prison at the time of the scandals, US guards yelled at the detainees: “Don’t eyeball me.” The law does not like to be looked at, it prefers to look.

Towards the end of A Separation, for reasons that I can’t go into without giving away the whole plot, the middle class family leave Razieh’s house to stare in horror at the screen. A cut shows them inside their car with a smashed windscreen. Suffice to say that all concepts of the law have been challenged by the pervasive interference of the state apparatus, the intransigence of multiple and divergent familial constraints and the uneven but thoroughgoing effects of the financial crisis. In the post-Green movement moment, gently but noticeably referenced in Nadar’s insistence on getting “change,” the final question of the film remains unanswered. It’s not as simple as breaking up, it’s not possible to go back to the way it was. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.

That Sinking Feeling: Cruising and Counterinsurgency

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A cruise ship on the rocks in Italy. Counterinsurgents urinating on their targets in Afghanistan. The military-industrial complex is in such crisis it is now parodying itself. And the President went to Disneyland.

The cruise ship disaster is now being viewed as a metaphor for the crisis in Italy.  This reflection is certainly preferable to the continued silence in the U.S. over the latest videotaped military scandal, in which Marines urinated on Afghan corpses. The ongoing interface between the crisis of counterinsurgency and the financial crisis that is producing the widespread crisis of authority cannot be acknowledged but continues to surface irrepressibly.

The wreck of the Costa Concordia

The Ship of State?

The shipwreck of the Costa Concordia falls so neatly into the pattern of imagining Italy that it cannot be avoided. The ship-of-state runs aground, steered by the hapless womanizing Captain Schettino. The Captain is Berlusconi to the coastguard’s play-by-the-rules parallel with the Troika-imposed technocrat Mario Monti. As details emerge, it just gets worse. The extraordinary injunction from one of the Costa crew that: “Everything is under control. Go back to your cabins” is this week’s version of “move on, there’s nothing to see here.”

The real priorities, according to the Corriere della Sera, were financial:

Captain Schettino spoke on the phone three times to Roberto Ferrarini, the man in charge of Costa’s crisis unit.

It seems likely that their discussion was as to whether a very costly evacuation could be avoided. Costa is a subsidiary of the giant Carnival Cruise Lines, a $15 billion-a-year outfit controlling 50% of the global cruise market. Labor conditions on cruise ships are predicatably appalling, with all the usual coercive stratagems of low-cost, low job security. The giant cruise ships, literal symbols of the circulation of capital, need to be cost-effective even when sinking.

The crew of the Costa Concordia were mostly Philippino, as is common in modern  shipping. They in effect mutinied to begin the rescue of passengers before they were belatedly ordered to do so. Benigno Ignacio, a chef on the ship, described the Captain’s actions to the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper:

His fault was he abandoned the ship while the ship’s crew including us Filipinos were busy saving the lives of the passengers.

In short, the real parallel is not with “Italy” but with multinational corporations sacrificing people for profit. The Captain will go to jail and he should: but Carnival will sail on into the corporate sunset.

The Collapse of Counterinsurgency

Meanwhile, the globalized counterinsurgency launched with such fanfare in 2005 as the “surge” in Iraq has been reduced to a condition that would be farcical, if it did not again involve such loss of life on all sides. With no apparent sense of irony, the US airforce now call their sorties over Afghanistan “overwatch,” just as I have argued that visuality is derived from the “oversight” practiced by a plantation overseer.

The Marines video barely caused a ripple in the US news cycle, as if it was only to be expected. There will be some charges against the individuals involved and no consideration of the culture of racialized contempt that a decade of “war on terror” has produced. The stresses of this culture were made clear today:

For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While that is shocking, it is made more so by the spike in sexual assault within the military reported yesterday: 19,000 assaults, 95% of which were on women, who comprise 14% of the services. These two sets of figures are undoubtedly related and it must also be likely that male-on-male assaults are under reported.

After four French soldiers were killed and 15 injured, eight seriously, by an Afghan soldier, the French government, one of the last non US “partners” in Afghanistan, is today suspending its operations in the country, prior to a withdrawal.

The “Coalition” is fighting itself, attacking each other directly and indirectly, because the mission is a patent disaster. The “military” part of the military-industrial complex is accelerating the crisis of authority that it is above all supposed to sustain.

Yes We Can?

This was the response of the “change we can believe in” crew yesterday, taken from Walt Disney World News. Words fail me. Supply a caption for me in the comments or elsewhere and I’ll add the best one tomorrow.

J19 History of the Anonymous: Steps to Direct Democracy

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Oliver Ressler "We Have A Situation Here" (2011)

To the anonymous, as I’ve often said, the police declaim: “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” To form a subject capable of enacting a different history, the anonymous claim at once the right to look and the right to be seen. When I was writing my book, I found it difficult to even imagine this scenario under the pressure of the neo-liberal state of exception. Now it’s possible to think about breaking that process down into a set of steps.

Take the emblematic case of Mohammed Bouazizi, the fruit-seller whose self-immolation on December 17, 2010, set in motion the Tunisian Revolution and from there the global Occupy movement. He lived in a small town called Sidi Bouzid, the epitome of anonymous for many even inside Tunisia. Some 80,000 people live there, and work centers on huge new olive groves planted by the state (M 15) [for references, see below]

Sidi Bouzid to Gafsa (Tunisia)

About 100 km south-west of Sidi Bouzid is Gafsa, a major phosphate-mining town. In the 1970s, the first cultural dissent against the regime began there, with the formation of an alternative theatre group, including performers like Fadhel Jaziri and Jalila Baccar (M 146). The mining company was given over to members of the ruling clan, specifically relatives of Leila Trabelsi, Ben Ali’s legendarily corrupt wife (G 51). So extreme was the corruption that the entire city rose up on January 5, 2008, protesting unemployment, corruption and repression. Although the occupation lasted for six months, there was a total news blackout. The one journalist who did report it was jailed for four months.

So Mohammed Bouzazi was unlikely to have been as politically naive as he was often presented. Western reports first claimed that he was an unemployed graduate–like many others–but soon retrenched to saying he was a simple fruit-seller. According to Martine Gozlan’s book on the 2011 revolution, the truth was in-between. Mohammed had dropped out of high school to support his family but did want to go to university. One of those he supported, his sister Leila, was in her third year of university ( G 16). For Gozlan, the family epitomized the clash of the “two Tunisias.” There was a high degree of university training with 34% of the population having a degree. On the other hand, the economic crisis since 2008 had led to price rises in basic necessities, mass unemployment and the withdrawal of state ownership in favor of privatization.

However, one year earlier in the city of Monastir, a young man selling doughnuts had also had enough of the police and immolated himself in front of a state building. Nothing happened (M 40). A year later, Mohammed Bouzazi repeated the act, whether in conscious imitation or not, and Tunisia moved to a revolutionary situation. Hamadi Kaloutcha, who blogs as Sofiane Belhaj, is clear that the difference was simple: the diffusion of Facebook and other forms of peer-to-peer communication (M 31, 41). It’s quite unpopular in digital circles here to make this case but Sofiane is not saying that Facebook caused the revolution, only that it allowed for the dissemination of information.

It’s interesting to see that, as the revolution got under way, some of the signature gestures of Occupy were already being used. On January 9, 2011, striking students at Sousse held a general assembly (G 36). In Tunis four days later, key phrases from the national anthem were repeated across the length of the massive demonstration in the manner we now call the people’s mic (G 43).

Back in Gafsa, the workers occupied the phosphate mines again, creating a tent city,

and there were demonstrations, including Che Guevara banners.

By now we should be learning to be careful to make claims of originality. But the emerging story of the Tunisian revolution suggests the following pattern for the emergence of direct democracy:

  • economic crisis combined with government and corporate indifference and/or corruption
  • a dramatic difference in rhetoric and practice–human rights were taught in all Tunisian schools but not even minimal press freedom existed before 2011
  • state violence to repress dissent
  • peer-to-peer electronic communications to alert people to what’s happening
  • a generalized use of horizontal tools that have been used by a few in specific locations and circumstances

Looking at the list, it’s interesting to see how closely the pattern has been replicated in Western capitalist countries. Let’s hope it does not take more violence for people to want to make a generalized use of direct democracy here.

references:

G: Martine Gozlan, Tunisiee, Algérie, Maroc: La colère des peuples (Paris: L’Archipel, 2011)

M: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Printemps de Tunis: La métamorphose de l’Histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).

J18: Occupy 2012 joins the web strike #SOPA

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In solidarity with the Internet strike called over the SOPA and PIPA bills currently under consideration in Congress with the support of all media moguls, Occupy 2012 is “dark” today: this project will be one of those made impossible if SOPA/PIPA, or any version of them concoted in the future, should pass. Occupy the Internet.