Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

J17: The History of the Anonymous, part 1

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For the history of the anonymous to be written, it must first be visualized as something other than an absence. Since Mrs. Thatcher famously declared “there is no alternative” in 1980, neo-liberalism has been devoted to making this task impossible. Such a visualization is neither a history from below or a particular set of images but a reconfiguration of the “cognitive mapping” of the social. More precisely, it is the possibility of such a mapping, the ground against which it would be made and the techniques to be used in its formulation. A year ago this week that process began with the revolution in Tunisia.

From Port-Bou to Tunisia

On a climate-changing rainy day last August, I stood on a Spanish clifftop by the “Passages” memorial to Walter Benjamin, outside the cemetery where he was buried in 1940. It was not far to Barcelona with its neighborhood assemblies and a half-day on the train to Madrid and the indignados. But from the cliffs, you look out to sea, southwest, towards Tunisia, where a fruit-seller named Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself into history as the person in whose name the Tunisian revolution of 2011 was enacted a year ago this week.  The force of that revolution changed the way that I understood the monument.

From Port-Bou to sea from the "Passages" monument

Designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan and opened in 1994, “Passages” encloses a flight of stone steps running down towards the sea in a rectangular iron frame that encloses the entrance but opens up further down. Towards the bottom, there is a sheet of glass engraved with a shortened version of Benjamin’s aphorism from On the Concept of History (1940):

It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than it is to honor the memory of the famous, the celebrated, not excluding poets and thinkers. The historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous.

The construction of the iron sleeve acts as a projector so that the visitor also sees his or her own image projected, as it were, onto the open sea.

The projection at Port-Bou

In order to visualize a history of the anonymous, then, one has to superimpose Benjamin’s aphoristic writing on this phantasmatic projection of the self. The result of the contact between these layers is the new historical construction.

For a long time, it was hard to see oneself against the imagined background of European fascism, the imperative to never forget overwriting all other presents and futures, turning the projection into a spectre, erased on the always moving waters below. Michael Taussig’s fine essay on the memorial is haunted in this way, overwritten with the memory of 9-11. Like the photograph, always already about death as the Barthes-Sontag tradition has it, the memorial is held to be memento mori. Such is the posture of the angel of history, condemned to look back at the past.

History itself, Benjamin liked to remind us, is Janus-faced: it looks both ways. So if there are the anonymous of the past to be remembered, there are also the anonymous of the present to be named, projected by the very memorial itself into a different history than the history of great men. This transitory seawriting is not so much photography as photograffiti, a writing of the self by light that claims the privilege accorded to the name.

In his last preserved writing in 1940, Benjamin noted that in order to preserve the memory of the anonymous, it was necessary that “the epic moment will always be blown apart.” The epic is the account of gods and great men, once memorialized in portraits, now depicted in the ceremonial photograph such as that of Ben Ali, the only portrait photograph seen in public in Tunisia for the past forty years.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

Blown apart, which is not the same as blown up in either the photographic or military sense, photograffiti allows for a photographic common that turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past.

[part one of a series: this was originally given as a talk called ‘Occupy Visuality.’ It’s gradually evolving into an essay for a collection called ‘After the Global Turn’ edited by Aruna da Souza and Jill Casid.]

J16: Visuality is Slavery

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Today is of course Martin Luther King Day. OWS observances included a gathering at the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, followed by a march to Wall Street, where there was a slave market, established in 1709. This was not simply a historical recovery but a reminder that the authority claimed by present day claims to visualize the social derives from the power of the slave-holder.

The slave market on Wall St circled in red

New York was not a marginal place in the history of slavery:

the city contained the largest absolute number of enslaved Africans of any English colonial settlement except Charleston, South Carolina, and held the largest proportion of enslaved Africans of any northern settlement. By the first decade of the 1700’s, forty percent of New York’s households contained at least one enslaved African.

Its slave market was an unimpressive building designed for the rapid circulation of human property.

Print depicting the New York slave market

It is routinely claimed that such histories can safely be consigned to the past. There are three ways in which such claims are invalid.

1. Slavery and Capital

The Caribbean historian and decolonial politician Eric Williams established a key link between capitalism and slavery in his 1944 classic text of that name. In his recent magnum opus Debt, the OWS theorist and occupier David Graeber has shown that debt and money owe their very existence to slavery: “Money, then, begins, as [Phillipe] Rospabé himself puts it ‘as a substitute for life.’ One might call it the recognition of a life-debt” (133). Thus so-called “blood-money” is exactly the same as money that is used to arrange a marriage: money in exchange for a life. The “slave” is the person utterly alienated from life, so that to all intents and purposes they are socially dead.

2. “The New Jim Crow”

This is the name given by legal scholar Michelle Alexander to the extraordinary racialized disparities in the US “justice” system. One in three young African American men are in some way involved in this system. In Washington DC, 3 out of 4 such men will be imprisoned or otherwise subject to penalty, part of the 2 million in the current prison system. Such figures exceed even the ratios generated by the apartheid system in South Africa. As drug use is about the same in white and black communities, the cause is not outlandish substance abuse by African Americans. Alexander shows that:

A huge percentage of [African Americans] are not free to move up at all. It is not that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so…To put the matter starkly: The current system if control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. (13)

That is to say, the possibility of democracy is permanently impaired by a caste system, itself the direct descendant of slavery, as W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Y. Davis have shown. Any direct democracy must first be an abolition democracy, a democracy that refuses the caste system at a minimum and, Davis would argue, the prison-industrial complex itself.

3. Visuality and Slavery

Visuality is a means of suturing authority to power. Power can be reduced to the means to compel people to act or not act by force. Usually, however, people respect the authority of the state, even when they disagree with it. Authority is a separate category to power. It is derived from the Latin term auctor, meaning the head of a family. As head of this family, the auctor had control over the possible purchases of land, animals and slaves. His patriarchy depended on this power, just as his financial empowerment reinforced his patriarchy. This is why any questioning of authority sooner rather than later generates questions of gender and (in countries where Africans were enslaved) racialized difference.

This analysis still begs the question of why the auctor was held to have such authority. In the Roman historian Livy, authority is distinguished from power (imperium) by the ability to interpret signs. This ability to discern meaning in both the medium and the message generates visuality’s aura of authority. When it is further invested with power, that ability becomes the ability to designate who should serve and who should rule.

The rulers in these histories are the named, those whose genealogies are held to count. Those without part, who do not count, are the anonymous, as incapable of visualizing the social as they are of being themselves visualized. Abolition democracy begins with the history of the anonymous, a project for this week’s posts.

Re-(Un)Occupy the Square: Chiapas

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A re-(un)occupation of the public square is underway. The local population has reclaimed its space, forbidden drug and alcohol use and taken over the property of a Canadian mining company. Zuccotti? No, Chiapas, Mexico.

The Movement for Justice in El Barrio has circulated a report filed by Hermann Bellinghausen from Chiapas in La Jornada (1/14/12):

Organized residents of Siltepec Municipality, in the Sierra Madre of Chiapas, closed off access to the municipality to beer companies and distributers of alcohol and drugs, as well as Canadian mining and logging companies that exploit their territory. They also closed 18 cantinas (bars) and seriously questioned the police, the mayor and the state’s agent from the Public Ministry, who protect the criminals. Starting this Thursday [1/12/12] they decided to organize “as a municipal headquarters [country seat], in coordination with the ejidos, rancherías, barrios and colonias, to exercise control of our territory without the intervention of the political parties and the government.”

The action has been taken by Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo [People’s Light and Power] in the Sierra region. They have closed bars, banned drug sales and excluded polleros (migrant traffickers) from the area. However: “the Black Fire [sic] mining company has been coming in at night and has already covertly taken eight trucks of a mineral from the Campo Aéreo barrio (neighborhood) of the Honduras ejido [collective farm]. We warn that we are no longer going to permit this anywhere in the Sierra.”

They note that last year “their compañero Salomón Ventura Morales was shot dead,
in his home in the barrio of Las Cruces, ‘by clearly identifiable people’. Enough already (ya basta), they conclude, “of corruption, injustices and secret deals between criminals and authorities.”

The Canadian mining company in question is not part of Brookfield Asset Management, owner of Zuccotti Park but Blackfire Exploration, who even claim to be “benefiting the local indigenous people of Chiapas.” It looks harmless enough on the company website:

Blackfire open barite mine, Chiapas. View of the open mine

Let’s see what happens if we turn the camera around:

Alternative view of the open mine

Not so good. In addition to this devastation, Blackfire have been accused of colluding with the murder of activist Mariano Abarca Robeldo in December 2009.

What is barite anyway? According to Wikipedia, three-quarters of mined barite is “a weighting agent for drilling fluids in oil and gas exploration to suppress high formation pressures and prevent blowouts.” The mined barite is, then, simply a component of further drilling for oil and gas, especially in the process known as “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing. New York State is about to decide on whether to permit fracking and Pennsylvania has already allowed it across the state. It pumps water under high pressure into rock with a secret combination of toxic chemicals in order to “fracture” the rock and release natural gas for human use. It’s a combination of environmental disaster in its own right and continued obsession with fossil fuel-powered growth.

So the occupation by Luz y Fuerza of their own territory is a defense against such devastation and the multinational corporate greed that motivates OWS. The focus on primary extraction should remind us that global capital is not all about finance–some of it is old fashioned “primitive accumulation,” as Marx would have had it. What is striking is how that extraction now leads immediately into new fossil fuel extraction to power, amongst other things, computers like the one I’m using now.

Visualizing the Square: Bodies

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The body in space where it is not intended to be is the Occupier. By chastising that body, the original occupation of the colonial police state intends to end the doubled state of Occupy. The two “classic” responses to state violence–carnival and organized non-violence–have been the most prominent means of resistance. Within the space of Occupy, new forms of non-conventional embodiment and self-visualization as bodies-that-think are in process.

Non-violence

Non-violence is the state-approved method of protest. When Mayor Kasim Reed shut down Occupy Atlanta in October 2011 he told reporters: “this kind of behavior isn’t consistent with my understanding and Atlanta’s understanding of traditional civil disobedience.” By this he appears to mean a march carried out where the police tell you to march, so that they can hit or spray you. As a tactic, this non-violence requires the protestor or occupier to submit to violence in order to demonstrate both their commitment to the cause and its moral superiority. It is a demonstration of mind over body in suitably Protestant form. As a thinking movement, Occupy is widely consensed on non-violence. The Occupy form of non-violence is, however, not that approved by the state. It assumes that non-violent bodies can act, not merely be passive recipients of violence. The body engaged in such action is also thinking. The simplest act of Occupy is emblematic: the protest march that occupies whichever sidewalk actors choose to use, using the freedom of public sidewalks, rather than following the prescribed police route, where protestors are so surrounded by cops that the action is in effect sealed.

Carnival and the Mask

To double the action of an actor is dangerous, it is said in Alexis. A Greek Tragedy. The danger is the old fear of the copy, the inauthentic and the mimic, which, by appearing similar to the original displaces the real. The double is out of place, uncanny to the police claiming to regulate the divide.

Masking in Liberty New Year's Eve. Credit: Jean Thevenin.

These two New Year’s Eve revelers are anonymous because they are masked. They are wearing Anonymous masks. Like most masquers, they are not unknown but the addition of the mask makes them into a threat. As Claire Tancons has pointed out, NYC police revived nineteenth-century laws against masks from the period of slavery in order to prevent Occupiers from masking. The carnival overturns the established regime, producing a world turned upside-down.

Authority has always been concerned that the brief autonomy of carnival might resist being turned back and has sought to prevent and contain it. This anxiety rests on the same weakness exposed by Occupy: how powerful can your authority be if the mere act of covering your face or pitching a tent can challenge it? State violence wants a properly abject object: a mocking, satirical costumed body makes the police look like Offissa Pup in Krazy Kat:

The Police Spot a Transgressive Act

Occupy Dis/Ability

Less discussed in the violence-obsessed mainstream media but perhaps more significant in the long-term has been the interaction between Occupy and dis/ability of all kinds. As many dis/ability activists have said, we are the 99%: about one in five of those counted by the US census have a federally-recognized form of disability as defined by the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. Dis/ability activists stress that many more are temporarily disabled, such as a person with a sprained ankle or broken leg and that, as the population’s age profile increases, these numbers will only increase. Hearing impairment, for example, is close to universal now that so many spend their days plugged into amplified music players.

Woman in wheelchair tear-gassed at Occupy Oakland

The dis/abled have joined with Occupy for many reasons:

Such groups cannot always be physically present at an Occupy site and may interface with the movement via Facebook pages such as “Krips Occupy Wall Street” and “Occupy Autism Speaks.” If you read across these pages for a while, you see that it makes no sense to speak of “one demand” for such diverse categories but also that this really is a different kind of movement. This thread of the movement extends to queer, trans, gender-queer and other non-conventional modalities of performed embodiment, as well as drug, alcohol and serotonin-uptake inhibitor dependent bodies. This survey predicts more investigation for us ahead.

Self-visualization

Cops Eye View of Liberty. Credit: Jean Thevenin.

In guise of conclusion, we have the furious comment of an NYPD officer to filmmaker Jean Thevenin at Liberty Plaza on New Year’s Eve: “Everybody here is a filmmaker” He was responding to Thevenin’s request for access to the space because he was a filmmaker. What Occupy offers is an embodiment that visualizes itself both for its own sake and for that of others. As the Occupy Dis/ability network shows, that visualization is by no means limited to the encampments taken to embody Occupy. It is an act of self-visualizing that depends on the affirmation and invention of others to perform properly. It is what I have called the right to look.

Enjoy the celebration:

Everybody Here Is a Filmmaker (New Year’s Eve in Occupy Wall Street) from jaune! on Vimeo.

Visualizing the Square: Space

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Alexis. A Greek Tragedy

If Occupy is a “square,” as I discussed yesterday, what does that space contain? How is the boundary marked? And should it be? These sound like philosophical questions and so they are: but the scandal of occupy, wherever it happens, is the appropriation of such legislative process by those who should stay in their place. This projects a series of questions ahead about bodies in space, the history of the anonymous, their self-visualization in past and present crises and the embodied experience of self-visualizing in the space of Occupy. We’ll walk through these in the week(s) ahead.

To begin with, the very practical and tactical choices about where and how to occupy have pushed the question of public space into widespread discussion. A few months ago, few of us were aware that there were such things as privately owned public spaces (POPS), such as Zuccotti Park and the Atrium of 60 Wall Street where most of the business of OWS takes place. Intended as a sop to the notion of the public, POPS have become a key tactical resource in New York. Meetings are now taking place in such unlikely sites as the Atrium of Trump Tower, where the Donald is unlikely to be in attendance.

It is not the case that POPS are a diminished form of the public. Rather they offer a space of ambivalence that the public never did, permitting the possibility of Occupy. We could do this by theory but here’s an anecdote. There is an Institute for the Humanities downtown, full of people from the universities and the New York Review of Books, all self-designated public intellectuals. Once a friend was speaking and invited me to come. No sooner had I opened the door than a genteel gatekeeper was asking me who I was and why I was there: in this view, the public know who they are and why they should be there. The rest of us should keep out. The POPS are in fact much more the space of public intellectual thought than such enclaves ever were.

Quietly, governments are moving to eradicate such ambivalent spaces. The Danish government recently attempted to resolve the contradiction of the squatter city Christiania, after nearly 40 years of occupation. They forced the occupiers to buy the land where they were living: the residents responded by a campaign to “buy it free.” They stopped by OWS last October, and apparently sold $10 of shares at the New York Stock Exchange. This was seen as being ridiculous but the resulting publicity generated enough support to buy the land. Residents now see themselves as “carers” of the shares, not owners. More informal arrangements are being targeted in the UK, where the neo-liberal Coalition government added a last-minute amendment to unrelated proposed legislation, criminalizing all squatting, even of vacant buildings–which number 700,000 at present.

While such legal loopholes are certainly necessary, the Occupy sites are not simply vacant space in which people have pitched tents, like new typing in a blank document. By interfacing the attention economy of the spectacle with the historical built environment, the space of Occupy is an unpredictable and volatile combination. The Greek neighborhood of Exarchia, where Alexis was set, is evidence of that interface. It gains a certain energy from being adjacent to the Polytechnic, the leading university in Athens where students resisted the military dictatorship in 1973. The gates knocked down by military vehicles back then are preserved as a memorial. Gradually reclaiming the streets, Exarchia became accustomed to a form of autonomy within the system, like Christiania, only for Alexis’s shooting to make visible how fragile that autonomy actually was. That sudden awareness, combined with the rapidly disseminated news of the tragedy, brought people out onto the streets without having been told to do so by any organization. It is as if the spectacle and historical experience are two layers of space, co-existing but not usually coming into contact. A disruption like Alexis’s death brings them into contact, a clinamen of atomized modern experience, producing a catalytic force.

The occupation of Zuccotti Park and its transformation into Liberty Plaza are the subject of two long journalistic essays this week in Vanity Fair and Harper’s [paywall]. Both are interesting first-person accounts–the former is a weaving of many voices, while the latter is told by blogger Nathan Schneider. Each nonetheless misses the opportunity to explain the key phenomenon that made OWS different from so many other attempts to create alternative space in New York: people came. David Graeber, the anthropologist and a leading light of OWS, recalls:

I was thinking, Oh, it’s a couple hundred people. This is O.K. I was feeling a little disappointed, but then more and more people started streaming in, and a lot of them were from out of town. They obviously had no place to stay. So they had to occupy something one way or the other.

As Graeber notes below, they had not all come intending to do so. Many had simply intended to protest and came to decide to occupy. If there were a thousand people, then there are probably a thousand individual reasons why they chose to do that. But in their different ways, each person had learned about OWS, mostly via the Internet or in some cases a personal communication with the relatively small organizing group and thought, “I have to do this.”

OWS had, and continues to have, that spontaneous coming-to-action form such as that which brought Exarchia into the street. It did not have a history to draw on–no one had occupied Wall Street before. But now they have, and the Occupiers (meaning the people who camped) refer to Liberty as “our home.” It has reconfigured the “map” of New York and created a place of fragile autonomy, which is still perhaps stronger than Exarchia was when it took on the colonels. The very density of attention around “New York” guarantees that.

At the same time, there’s a curious invisibility, a “move on, there’s nothing to see here” about the Financial District. If we know where the Stock Exchange is, and the awful bull sculpture on Broadway attracts a crowd of tourists with cameras, who knew who Brookfield Properties were before September 17, 2011? One of the most intriguing new developments in OWS is the organization of a series of Occupy walking tours of downtown, visiting POPS, pointing out the locations of the various now-infamous financial institutions, and de-anonymizing (if that’s a word) the capitalist towers. As the police seek to enclose everything, Occupy moves away from its “home” to visualize the mechanics and spectacle of that enclosure.

 

 

Visualizing the Square: A Performative Method

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Alexis, A Greek Tragedy, a remarkable performance by the Italian group Motus, both investigated the transition to popular action and created a method for critical visuality studies to follow. The project creates a complex interface between, on the one hand, the theatrical Antigone and the historical legacies of her refusal to obey the law and honor the dead; and on the other, between the police killing of 15 year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens in 2008 and the current crisis.

Silvia Calderoni/Antigone

The result was expressed by the device of a square on the stage as the center of the performance space. It was taken to represent the square in the Athens district of Exarchia, near the Polytechnic, the long-standing center of resistance to the military junta. During the performance we were shown video of open public spaces in Exarchia like Nosostros, a performance/meeting/social space.

Alexis’s death on December 6, 2008 sparked what can be called an uprising in Exarchia that has now merged with the protests against the crisis to create a revolutionary moment in Greece. For Motus, the key question at stake is: “How to transform indignation into action?” The term “indignation” has been central to European Occupy projects from the Indignados in Spain to the Indignés in France. The key question here is the moment of transition and transformation in which that sense of frustration becomes concerted action. And then behind that is the question of what “action” properly means: how to move from refusal to something that is not a form of accomodation or replication with and of the status quo?

Ross Domoney’s video tells the story of the riots around Alexis’s murder and their interface with the current crisis.

Exploring Revolt in Greece from Ross Domoney on Vimeo.

Watching the film, there is a certain performative element as the police throw tear gas and the rioters throw Molotov cocktails. Although this is clearly violent and dangerous, the petrol bombs largely land short of the police and don’t hurt anyone. Many demonstrators came prepared for the tear gas as well. I do not mean to say that this is not “real”—what emerges is to the contrary a sense that the tension within Greece is under constant escalation and it is not clear what will happen next: “the waters are too dark.”

In short: how to visualize the square, the crisis, the movement? What’s coming next? As you know, my recent book has stressed the role of visuality in creating authority precisely by means of being able to engage in such visualizing and to apply force to sustain it. The word was coined in English by the conservative Thomas Carlyle, who wanted to see the military technique of visualizing the battlefield applied to the social as a whole. His “hero,” the great man of history, was Napoleon who first epitomized these qualities, according to Carlyle, when he turned his cannon against the Parisian revolutionaries in 1795 and mowed them down in the streets, preventing a radical journée, or day of action.

How do you countervisualize when your goal is not to mow down the other side in the street but to catalyze a sense of alienation into social transformation? In Alexis, a cross historical identification of the abandoned body of Alexis was made with that of Polynices, Antigone’s brother for whom she sacrifices herself. The widespread A for Anarchy in Exarchia was read as also signifying Antigone. Giorgio Agamben’s question: “what life is worth being lived?” is understood as a reading of Antigone’s refusal to submit to Creon’s law and the current questioning of ways of being.

The square was visualized as the interface of four projects:

  • the interface of the ancient text of Antigone with Brecht’s interpretation and the historical legacies of the theme in Greece
  • the multi-year performance of Antigone by Motus
  • the already “historical” events of 2008, an event already forgotten by the media when the group began to investigate them in 2010
  • the moment of Occupy, from Tahrir to OWS and beyond

The method that emerges here is fascinating. The interface of formal work and questions of technique or theory is one “side” of the square. The group discuss theatre technique with the audience, reveal some of their methods and invite the audience into the performance. The play reflects over and again on its conditions of possibility: how can a part be performed? How should the words, even the punctuation, be rendered? Should an actor playing dead body have his mouth closed or open?

This interface was redoubled by the remarkable physical theatre: the performance opens with Silvia Calderoni edging across the stage, one half-step at a time, and at each step, jack-knifing her body–it was a stunning depiction of the pointless frustration of mundane labor under the Law. Calderoni brought the physique, self-possession and technological skills of Lisbeth Salander to Antigone, while also managing to be a welcoming presence.

Double down: one “performer,” Alexia Sarantopolou, is a resident of Exarchia and expresses her skepticism as to whether events such as this can be rendered as art. I was reminded of the disdain expressed  by the former revolutionaries who appeared in The Battle of Algiers, for whom the film was a “game” compared to what they had experienced. Calderoni agrees but then suggests that doing this work is all she can do, while stressing that the formal pretense that the “outside doesn’t exist” has to be abandoned.

So the performance describes and visualizes the events of 2008 and the space of Exarchia in detail, relaying visual images, interviews and film by means of projections from a computer and acting out their encounters. In Motus’s description:

the stage becomes the place of a choral presence, emotionally moving, which acts on a polyphonic and stratified text of a hybrid and lightning-swift nature: dialogues, interviews, solitary reflections, attempts at translation from Greek into English and Italian, audio and video fragments from the web, descriptions of atmospheres and landscapes, political statements and testimonies…

In this visualization, Antigone becomes the sound of Exarchia, the sounds of the revolt and the form of the transformation from subjected to subject.

Of course, it’s only a play. If you were to measure the success of the transformation by the number of people who accepted the performers invitation to join in their visualization of protest, you’d see only a small group–young Occupy types, older people of the all-experience-is-good variety, a few middle-aged hybrids like myself. Would a fully successful performance mean that there was no audience left? or does it mean accepting the immersive performative challenge inherent in the project: one of tarrying with the subject, one of staying with it after it is “current,” learning to countervisualize as we go?

For those few of you still reading, that’s what we’re trying to do here: a durational performative effort to stay with the moment, to understand what transition means and how to visualize it. Already the audience has dwindled. It’s OK. In fact it’s good. It’s all I can do.

Jan 11: Asymmetric Occupation and Citizen Media

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We're back! Liberty Plaza re-occupied 1-10-12

Listening to Egyptian activists yesterday at 16 Beaver, I was reminded how intense and costly their effort had been compared to ours. Yet the paradox of the global spectacle is that the concentration of attention on “New York” means that what happens here has dramatically asymmetric results. How can we leverage it, using citizen media to counter both spectacle and violence?

1. Egypt

The session began with the screening of a video by Mosireen, the remarkable Egyptian video collective that has been practicing horizontal “citizen media,” to use their term, since the beginning of the revolution.

Warning: this is a very graphic video, showing military violence against unarmed citizens.

The Army can be seen here operating with far greater tactical precision and willingness to use deadly force than the police and other security forces could muster to defend Mubarak. By walling off Tahrir, it has become a place of entrapment as well as liberation. Torture is again routine and cameras are targeted during demonstrations. The result of this violence instigated by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has been to reintroduce layers of fear that were set aside during the struggle against Mubarak.

The Egyptian activists emphasized that the Army is also an economic force, controlling about 40% of the Egyptian economy from pasta to real estate. They even suggested: “None of us understood what the regime is”–note the present tense. That is to say, the embedded presence of the Army at all levels of society since 1954 has rendered the militarization of the social “normal.” It was pointed out that the directors of the opera, zoo and national cinema in Cairo are all retired generals, who occupy some 70-80% of all government positions.

They suggested that the recent violence, especially during the November re-occupation of Tahrir, had woken people from the “dream” that “the people and the Army are one hand.” The present situation was described evocatively as “chaos,” with no one knowing who controls what. The three speakers presented very different assessments of the current situation. In response to questions from New York (via Skype), it was fascinating to see that even on the ground, people did not fully understand the flow of the popular movements. Why some calls to action generated response from thousands and others passed by remains unclear, perhaps inevitably–it is the other form of “chaos,” not a breakdown of order, but the formation of a new order from causes so disparate and multiple that they cannot be defined, even in retrospect.

2. Occupy

US made tear gas used in Cairo 1/11

The obvious question was: what can we do? One direct answer was campaign against the American- and UK-made tear gas that is being used in Cairo (and against Occupy). It was heartening to hear that an OWS working group has just been set up on this area. Who has shares in these companies? From past experience, it’s very likely that TIAA-CREF, CALPERS and other pension firms used by academics will do and pressure can be exerted on them.

Think of the asymmetry here: two pepper-spray incidents, one in New York and one in Davis by the cops Bologna and Pike respectively galvanized Occupy into its present position. In Egypt, such events would barely be noticed other than by those unfortunate enough to suffer them. On the other hand, there are more police in New York City than there are in the whole of Greece, so who’s living in the police state?

In Davis, the students turned around the police violence by forming a new relation of the visible and the sayable. They formed a wall of cameras, phones and iPads for the most part, and confronted the police with them. They then raised a chant of “Shame on you.” The combination of being narrowcast and named drove the police back into the welcoming embrace of Chancellor Katehi, a Greek university official who had been the first to accept police on a Greek university campus since the military dictatorship.These interfaces are in no way accidental.

The task ahead is to mobilize and activate–make “live”–these asymmetric connections. Ironically, the very networks of travel, media, communications and education that were intended to prepare subjects for labor in the global economy have made this possible, especially now that finance capital has no use for them. It is, as we used to say, no coincidence that the US Congress is rushing to criminalize such practices on the Internet. It won’t work.

Why We Are Winning

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Who asked yesterday: “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate  the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money?” Some OWS hack? Paul Krugman? No, Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney made a general election losing remark as well: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” Imagine the 30 second commercials…

So Occupy can set aside lingering anxieties about the 2012 elections. The discussion has been set in our terms and if Obama can’t beat a loser like Romney with all his corporate cash, he doesn’t deserve my help doing so.

Why are we winning? Because, not to sound too old-school, the crisis in globalized finance capital continues apace. Consider that just in today’s news:

  • Shares in the Italian bank Unicredit dropped 37% in a week because it holds $52 billion of Italian sovereign debt.
  • Commenting on the Unicredit situation, Carl B. Weinberg, economist at High Frequency Economics predicted: “If banks cut lending to achieve capital adequacy, we should expect a really, really big credit crunch and a really deep economic downturn to ensue.” Banks stashed 482 billion euros at the European Central Bank overnight, sign of exactly such a cut.
  • Investors accepted a negative interest rate of -0.0122% to lend 3.9 billion euros to Germany, clearly for fear that investing anywhere else would be worse.
  • Germany and France want Greek bondholders to accept a 50% downgrade, which is what should be called a default of a sovereign nation.
  • The bankrupt US trading firm MK Global used $200 million of customer’s money to pay off their overdraft at JP Morgan Chase.
  • In 2011, the average salary for Goldman Sachs partners was $3 million.
  • Goldman shares fell 45% in the past year while the percentage of its revenue used as compensation rose from 39.3 to 44%. They pay themselves more when they do worse.
  • Bank analyst at the brokerage firm CLSA Mike Mayo commented: ” Wall Street has its own 99 percent and 1 percent. The 1 percent continues to win against the 99 percent.” Wall St uses the language of OWS now.
  • The head of the Swiss central bank resigned over corruption allegations.

Tomorrow, while the US press bloviate over Mitt Romney’s margin of victory in New Hampshire, and which of the losers gets to come second and therefore be the frontrunner in 2016, the backpages will be seeded with talk of a second “bailout” for Ireland, of the seven percent interest Italy has to pay on its debt with 300 billion needing refinance very soon, the 17% drop in bank deposits in Greece over the past year and so on.The whole fantastical enterprise of globalized capital is out of control.

Jan 9: Betrayal or Electric?

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Betrayed at the beginning

“Banks got bailed out/We got sold out.” This was one of the first slogans of Occupy that suggests it has always been a mature movement that has worked out its first sense of loss. Perhaps some its sustaining force comes from that combination of the knowledge of having been betrayed already, even before anything has been attempted. The real depth come from the awareness that we betrayed ourselves.

In a recent essay on betrayal, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out

In psychoanalysis betrayal is called, variously: weaning, the birth of a sibling, the Oedipus complex, and puberty. At each of these developmental stages in the psychoanalytic story, the child suffers what feels like a breach of trust, a loss of entitlement, a diminished specialness.

“We got sold out.” We were betrayed, again, by the person in whom we had placed trust, meaning presumably Obama.

That works to an extent but it’s not quite right. Remember how, the very night he won the election, Obama’s address was something of a disappointment? The best thing about electing Obama seemed to be that it was an end to the Bush-style neo-liberalism. In more optimistic vein, it briefly seemed like a decisive stage in the civil rights movement, a transformation of relations of difference. By 2010 it was clear that none of that was true and that the Republicans, written off two years before, were going to win the mid-term elections. In an interview with Amy Goodman in October 2010, Angela Davis was asked how she viewed Obama:

What really disturbs me is that we have failed…. There are many issues about which we can be critical of Obama, but at the same time, I think we need to be critical of ourselves for not generating the kind of mass pressure to compel the Obama administration to move in a more progressive direction, remembering that the election was, in large part, primarily the result of just such a mass movement that was created by ordinary people all over the country.

Obama didn’t betray us: we betrayed ourselves by assuming that November 4, 2008 marked the end of our participation. Unusually, we got another chance.

In this view, the eight weeks of the encampment at Liberty Plaza were not the rise and fall of Occupy–that had already happened over a long period of time, dating, in Angela Davis’s perspective to the abolition democracy that put an end to formal slavery. You might call it the setting aside of the “hope” that a vertical politics of leaders and the led, whether of left or right, could actually implement “change you can believe in.” Or you could call it the (re)start of a commitment to building within the ruins.  There’s a curious rhythm to Occupy: rise and fall, success and setback, stepping up and stepping back that echoes that pattern. It frustrates the desire of some that the movement should simply go away, even as it also prevents the emergence of “leaders.”

Phillips points to a precedent. In 1966, when Bob Dylan was playing in Manchester, a fan infamously called out “Judas.” Dylan replied: ” I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” He turns to his band and says: “Play it fucking loud.” It being Like A Rolling Stone.

What Phillips doesn’t get, though, is that by calling Dylan “Judas,” the fan figured himself as Christ. It’s a very satisfying subject position, no doubt. In Scorcese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home, the folkies are still playing the betrayal card: forty years later. That’s what happens when being betrayed becomes a means of identification. All that mourning, all that trauma. Or you can refuse the figuration as either betrayer or betrayed, accept that there’s no going home again, and go electric.

Direct Action

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The Bat symbol on New Year's Eve

Direct action is at the center of Occupy: the general assembly is a direct action, the refusal to make demands is a direct action, the decision to place our bodies in public space is a direct action. Arguably, it’s the commitment to actions that has made Occupy feel different from the many political organizations and interest groups that already exist. Today the OWS Direct Action group held a four-hour open meeting as part of the 16 Beaver seminar. It was energizing, exciting and, by the end, a little exhausting:)

The room was packed and there were people from Occupy Philly, DC, Chicago and Oakland as well as New York City GAs. There was a diverse age-range and about the same level of visible ethnic diversity as in most academic contexts: which is to say, not fully representative of NYC. As this was an open meeting and people were warned not to say anything they wanted to keep confidential, I think it’s OK to report back in general terms on the process.

Several general goals were set for direct actions in 2012:

  • Grow the movement and make it more inclusive
  • Clarify its story
  • Set concrete agendas
  • Generate structures to support the actions
  • Find more space/think about space

Ably facilitated, the meeting began with a set of reflections on past actions that people had found inspiring. Complaints or criticisms were not allowed so, by the end of the 30 minutes, there was a very positive energy in the room. Comments from my notes include: actions encourage participants to develop ways of “shedding layers of fear.” Similarly, actions should be structured with different “levels of risk” so that a wide range of people can participate.

A striking comment noted the way OWS actions “break the fourth wall,” meaning that these were not simply events to watch but actions that make people feel involved: you might have experienced the way that OWS marches, whether legal or not, produced a really remarkable level of enthusiasm from passers-by. People would lean out of cars, not to yell at demonstrators but to high five them.

After these reflections, the meeting turned to the future. For an hour, ideas tumbled out about actions already planned, ideas under discussion and brand-new ideas generated in the space. It was striking to see how many events are already planned–here are just a few:

  • January 16: Martin Luther King day events
  • January 20: Against corporate personhood
  • March 1: Student General Strike in California and New York
  • May 1: General Strike for MayDay
  • May 15: Chicago: remembering 1968

New proposals were arranged under four headings: Direct Impact and Mutual Aid; Shutdowns; Community Outreach; and Issues. Breakout groups prioritized two items from each area for future development by the Direct Action working group.

Above and beyond these formal arrangements, people were networking about ideas and issues of importance to them. Having resolved to say nothing, I found myself proposing direct actions about climate change, such as having people dressed in blue form a line around downtown at what will be the waterfront after sea levels rise. And some other more, shall we say, confrontational things. And it was great to find a range of people from different backgrounds–journalists, artists, feminists–interested in developing those conversations.

Lest this all seem too utopian to be credible let’s note some dissent. Feminists expressed concerns that the movement was too “patriarchal” and that a women-only action was, by the form that action was going to take, reinforcing rather than challenging stereotypes.  By the end of the session, a meeting had been set to work on these issues. It’s not for nothing that Occupy can sometimes feel like an occupation in the sense of full-time employment.

So this is no dreamworld but nor is it anything like much of the political process I’ve experienced elsewhere. It remains very absorbing and a movement that continues to develop.