About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

Occupy 2.0

So OWS is back up and running after some of us stepped back for the holidays–although many didn’t, I should add. Today I spent about seven hours in Occupy meetings and discussions but I’m by no means claiming that as exceptional–as I write many people are still attending the excellent 16Beaver seminar on the future of Occupy, which is a nine-day event.

The day began with the Education and Empowerment working group meeting, which I had the opportunity to facilitate. Facilitation is such an interesting exercise, very different to chairing. It’s about staying back, making sure everyone feels involved and listened to, and keeping the meeting on process–as well as making sure to celebrate moments of consensus over proposals. E and E is an easy group to work with, as everyone is very engaged with the project: details forthcoming on nycga.net for the interested.

The meeting divided with some heading to OccU [Occupy University] and the rest of us going to 16Beaver, which describes itself as a

space initiated/run by artists to create and maintain an ongoing platform for the presentation, production, and discussion of a variety of artistic/cultural/economic/political projects.

It’s been a tremendous resource for OWS with many working groups holding meetings in the downtown space.

The discussion began today by considering the international context for Occupy, led by Brian Jourdan and Marianne Maekelbergh, videographers who have covered events in the UK, Barcelona, Greece and Egypt. Each video showed a different emphasis and set of tactics on behalf of the Occupy movement, as well as a different set of problems they have to deal with.

In Barcelona (below), it was fascinating to see that the city has developed its long history of autonomy into neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies have occupied hospitals to keep them open in the era of austerity. They’ve occupied empty apartment buildings for the homeless. They’re dealing with 45% youth unemployment, an 80% fall in property values and a system that compels people who have been foreclosed to nonetheless keep paying their mortgages. In the recent election, the movement tactic of spoiling ballots–which still have to be counted–so as not to vote for either neo-liberal party resulted in a higher count of spoiled ballots than votes for the “victorious” conservative Popular Party.

Occupied Barcelona: The Spanish Election Rejection from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

Even more striking in some ways was the documentary from Greece. With a history of organizing dating back to the military dictatorship of the 1970s, the left is well accustomed to dealing with crisis in Greece, even though the situation is now extraordinary. Following a 4% contraction last year, the economy is set to contract again by 6% in the year ahead. Unemployment is officially 17%.

Greeks are responding by refusing to accept the austerity because their resources don’t permit them to do so. They have refused to pay new fees to visit doctors, to pay increased bus fares, electricity surcharges and new tolls on roads. The “I Won’t Pay” movement is gaining adherents daily. For US debt refusal movements there is much to be learned here, even as we need to recognize that the fascist and police violence far exceeds anything that Occupy has had to deal with.

Crisis in Greece from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

These striking documentaries prompted a wide-ranging discussion on relations of the local and the international, on the tactics to be used by Occupy after the evictions and how to grow the movement. It’s so not over.

On Shame and Wall Street

The British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen’s new film Shame explores the desires and mentalities of the Wall Street boys, who have so much of the world’s economies at their fingertips.Whether consciously or not, it shows how much their actions revolve around a homoerotics that in its closeted shame displaces desire across the cash nexus. These boys get off when someone gets paid.

Whether consciously or not, McQueen evokes Nan Goldin’s classic photographic project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in his film. His visual technique centers on long still shot, like the opening frame of the movie, below:

Michael Fassbender as Brandon in Shame

This is Goldin’s aesthetic all over: the mix of found color and beauty in the midst of urban sexual counterculture. Look here for the color:

Nan Goldin

Or here from the Ballad, for the off-center framing, the stillness:

Goldin, "Vivienne in the green dress"

The difference, though, is that Goldin was a participant on the scene and, as such, welcome to photograph. Her subjects know she is there. McQueen uses his camera in classic directorial fashion, wowing us with long tracking shots and composition in order to ask us to forget why it’s there at all: classic cinematic realism.

If Goldin knows what sexual dependency is because she suffered from it, what is the “shame” in McQueen’s film? The overt narrative says that Brandon (Fassbender) is a sex addict who is shamed by his problems and increasingly comes to suffer for them. In order to accept this, we need to buy into–word choice deliberate–the idea that sex is an addiction. The film then proposes a solution: a committed monogamous relationship, somehow predicated as being beyond “sex.” And a punishment: the necessity for Brandon to seek out anonymous sex in a gay bar. While he is thus engaged, his sister Cissy (Casey Milligan) is attempting suicide, just in case the viewer wasn’t sure if it was a bad thing to do. This version is proposed by all the reviews I’ve seen and is supported by McQueen in interviews.

So the manifest content of the film argues that Wall Street is limitless, rampant greed, which is fine. And that same-sex desire epitomizes that relationship at its worst, which is not fine at all, although it certainly reinforces the interface of homophobia and neo-liberalism.

There’s another set of desires and drives at work here, though. In keeping with one set of psychoanalytic readings of the Don Juan complex, it could be said that Brandon’s gay encounter is the pinnacle of his desire, not the abyss of his degradation. In this view, the hyper-heterosexual is constantly acting out a repression of queer desire.

The “Wall Street” part of the film revolves around this displacement. We know it’s Wall Street because we frequently see the Fulton St-Broadway subway station, handy for both OWS and the Street. Brandon’s boss Dave, a rather gormless individual, clearly has what is euphemistically called a “man-crush” on him. He acts this out by sleeping with Cissy minutes after meeting her, much to Brandon’s displeasure. If the film lays on a clumsy aura of incest to this anger, it can’t entirely dispose of the sense that it was Brandon who really wanted to sleep with Dave and vice-versa. Dave is so enamored of Brandon that, even when the latter’s huge stash of porn is discovered on his work computer, the supposedly “high-tech” company is baffled as to who downloaded it.

You could also suggest that the later section of the film isn’t “real” at all. If we go through Brandon’s bad day, he supposedly tries and fails to have sex with the nice girl Marianne, uses the hotel room for commercial sex anyway, then goes out bar hopping, leading to dirty talk and intimate touching at the bar, a fight, the blow-job in the gay bar, culminating with a paid three-way with two women. At the end of all this he finds himself in his bathroom at home, where Cissy has cut her wrists. There’s masses of blood, although when we see the pair in hospital, the cut doesn’t seem that terrible. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud suggests that it’s possible to experience a long fantasy sequence in a brief space of real time if you’ve had the fantasy before. So one interpretation would be that when Brandon discovers Cissy in one of her self-cutting moments in the very bathroom where he so frequently masturbates, it releases the carefully constructed fantasy sequence by which Brandon is “forced” to have gay sex.

I want to be clear that I don’t think that this is the “right” interpretation of Wall Street and that if those bankers would only get in touch with their queer side, everything would be ok. The moments that resonated for me most in the film were the ways in which the cash nexus was so eroticised, such as when a sex worker counts her money early in the film, or when a woman working on a webcam sex-show knows Brandon by name and “what he wants.” It’s not for nothing that the porn industry calls male orgasm in straight porn the “money shot.” I’m not anti-sex or even sex industries but the shame here is the replacement of social life with the cash nexus–and to actually live as if “I’m loving it.”

 

Jan. 5: Sounds Like Fun

Occupy sounds like fun. It has a pleasant, amusing sound. It creates a soundscape that promises better things. It is not a metaphor: it is an analogy, it is analog. Since the days of the Puritans what the capitalist U.S. cannot stand is precisely the thought, let alone the sound, of someone else having fun. Here I’m going to assemble some nodes within that soundscape from memory and experience. Later I’ll try and formulate some more general thoughts about the analog and the digital in Occupy.

*Murmuration

*Yes, I know it’s a noun for birds en masse but I’m appropriating it!
The overall sound of Liberty Plaza or the Atrium at 60 Wall Street, where most of the working groups that I’m involved in meet, was a loud collective murmur. The left usually discourses in a shout, whether addressing a meeting or arguing amongst ourselves. It makes such a nice change.

Mic check

This is the signature gesture of Occupy, which breaks through the murmuration of a meeting or the ambience of public space.

Occupy Wall Street: Mic Check from NYU Local on Vimeo.

Although it’s now come to be used to challenge politicians and others (usually using amplified sound so they can easily drown out the challenge) the mic check was originally the analog equivalent of tapping the microphone: only much more fun. There’s something very exhilarating about shouting as loud as you can in a public space and having people shout back.

The People’s Mic

Which forms the people’s mic. The call-and-response pattern of OWS discourse has a number of interesting features. Unlike religious or choral patterns, it is not given in advance what people may say. Some people, especially academics, tend to speak for too long before pausing so the crowd has trouble repeating the phrase. A skilled user knows how to break sentences into four to six syllable phrases but also to let conjunctions stand by themselves.

The stress pattern of the People’s Mic changes the dominant demotic speech of the past decade. On the one hand, you can’t use Valley Girl intonation because “Occupy? Wall Street?” is altogether different to “Occupy Wall Street,” let alone “Occupy! Wall Street!,” which is how it has been mostly used.

Nor is it the ironic, hipster tone of more recent years, the Brooklyn-ese of the 2010s. Rather than fall away on the last syllables–as in “what-ever“–People’s Mic uses strong but even stresses that generate a sense of confidence and optimism. When it’s being used, people smile, even when the content is challenging. Or perhaps especially when it’s challenging, the pleasure coming from the disjuncture between content and form.

Noise

Another aspect of the Occupy soundscape is, however, loud noise, whether in the form of drumming, noise makers or musical instruments. At Liberty Plaza, the drummers sat on the West side in a circle, making an almost constant percussion for the first six weeks until negotiations reduced the time slots, at least a little. The noise marked presence in a direct and unavoidable fashion, in intended contrast to the spoken discourse of the East side centered around the steps.

It is not wholly random. For example, the “Noise Demo Against the Prison Industrial Complex, for the Liberation of Political Prisoners & Prisoners Of Wars,” held in front of Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown on New Year’s Eve, noise was used to get the attention of those detained. Then the people’s mic declaimed: “You. Are. Not. Alone.”

Yelly people

On the other hand again, there are the Yelly people. These are people who come to the General Assembly or Spokescouncil–rarely, in my experience, to the working groups–and yell. Often these yellers are permanent occupiers, sleeping in Liberty till the eviction, now in churches and other refuges. They are not easy to talk to and I don’t know many of them personally so I can’t generalize: some people assert that they are police provocateurs. Some yellers, like Nan and Sage, have become sufficient characters that they seem more driven by their role as disrupters and the attention it brings. Right-wing hack Andrew Breitbart is happy to give them as much publicity as they want.

Each person at Occupy is, in the manner of Sabina Spielrein, a “dividual,” yelling to themselves, calling-and-responding internally and externally, trying to work out perhaps the hardest question: are you having fun?

 

Jan 4: Performing Elitism?

Are certain forms of cultural performance necessarily elitist? Are certain ways of consuming culture equally one percent? New York Times music critic Antony Tommasini recently worried that OWS reinforces the perception of classical music as “elitist and inaccessible.” His counterargument was based on such examples as the free Liederabend concerts at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. What, though, are the cultural requirements of admission? What are the politics of music performance?

I had to Google to find out that “Liederabend” means “song recital” and that the Juilliard is part of Lincoln Center: admission to such events requires cultural capital, even more than whatever price is being charged. While these events are listed on their website, they are not advertised as free until you click through to a specific event, so I would never have known. The Juilliard as a school is unabashedly elitist, according to its own website, admitting 7% of its applicants and charging $33,000 tuition.

Tommasini goes on to worry about the elitist patronage of the arts by people like the toxic David Koch, who uses the “arts” as the respectable side of his financial activism, otherwise devoted to the Tea Party and similar causes. He worries that such “dependence would seem to make the performing arts a natural focus for the Occupy activists.” Indeed, there were two notable actions this fall, one at Julliard and one at Lincoln Center.

At Lincoln Center, Philip Glass presented his new piece Satyagraha, an opera based on Gandhi’s non-violent theory of resistance. As it happens, I was today sent a link to a video by Jean Thevenin of the OWS protest at the première in which the NYPD and Lincoln Center refused to allow Occupy to use the space in front of the Met, on the grounds that it is “limited public space.” Philip Glass himself and Lou Reed joined in the action. You can see some OWS regulars in the crowd but also bow-tie types, listening to the presentations, set here to Glass’s music.

Visible Shape (Philip Glass & Lou Reed occupying Lincoln Center) from jaune! on Vimeo.

For Tommasini: “it was easier to understand the issues that the Occupy Wall Street protesters care about than what policies they were seeking in relation to the arts.” At the low-point of the article, he makes the time-worn argument that the Metropolitan Opera is not elitist because some seats in the highest balcony are available for $40.

Occupy was not talking about the financial price of admission. The question at stake is whether the aestheticisation of politics in designated arts spaces can continue to be acceptable, in a climate where only passivity is permitted in social space.

At a performance by the Israel Philharmonic in London in September 2011, activists intervened inside the arts space, calling on Israel to “end the occupation” by singing words set to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” over the orchestral performance. Composer Janice Misurell-Mitchell, reporting on the happening, felt she could not have joined in but empathized with the “brilliant concept examining ways we may take power through sound.”

It is the sound of Occupy that seems to return here: the use of sound to occupy three-dimensional space that counters both the flattening occupation of monetizing everything and the “politics of verticality” that constitute Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

More on this tomorrow.

 

Jan. 3 Occupy Cultural Studies

Two very contrasting approaches to Occupy from British cultural studies have recently been published. One thinks that Occupy still has to reach 98% more people. The other sees it as a new expression of the “general will,” by and against which decision making is measured in democracies. While both measure their distance from OWS, it turns out I am involved in the dispute.

Sunil Manghani, reader in cultural and critical theory at York St John University, takes my blog post “Occupy Theory” as a key point of reference and critique for his op-ed in the Times Higher Education Supplement. We learn first that the students in his course did not recognize the #OWS hashtag or find their field trip to Occupy London very exciting. It’s not clear why this is so important. Manghani opines “it is the ‘theory’ behind Occupy that is the wider preoccupation.” Yes, folks, we’re back in the theory wars, I’m afraid.

Manghani then muses over my post, finding it “conceptual” despite my explicit claim that Occupy is a performative. The clincher for Manghani was watching a video of Judith Butler speaking at OWS, in which she read her remarks from an iPhone. There are a couple of things wrong with this.

Butler reads her text to Occupy

As the picture shows, Butler read her talk from old-fashioned paper: I was standing next to her, I remember it.

Some people did read from iPhones at OWS, though, like Angela Davis. What’s wrong with this? For Manghani, the practice evokes Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history in the form of liberal democracy, leaving our choices as solely consumer options. Fukuyama himself has backed away from this 1990s position and now critiques such neo-conservative positions. Davis herself spoke of the general strike being organized by Occupy Oakland and a revolutionary turn. She answered questions in the cold for over an hour–without referring to her phone.

For Manghani, the Arab Spring that so exemplifies the end of the end of history is a proper movement, to be visualized, bizarrely, as a Tracey Emin artwork: “gritty yet faltering.” I’m not sure how Tahrir Square evokes the tabloid heroine of British art and her unmade beds?  I certainly prefer to be a Rachel Whiteread sculpture, Manghani’s visualization of the “fringe” that is Occupy.

A very contrasting position can be found in a striking piece by Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton, “Occupy: Rediscovering the General Will,” published on the Social Science Research Council website. Couldry and Fenton, Professors of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, see Occupy as a reconceptualization of democracy in the context of both the financialization of everything and the crisis of [Western] democracy. Bringing Foucault to bear on the rise of neo-liberalism, they argue that “markets” are a modern invention (as does London-based Occupy theorist David Graeber), which have become predicated as natural, producing “democracy” as their natural outcome. Yet there is a palpable gap between the promise of democracy’s voice and what it can now offer its citizens: “We have grown used to living in democracies that aren’t working, that is, don’t work as democracies.”

While their argument is centered in the UK, it clearly applies very well to the US, where the Obama election in 2008 seemed at first to reinvigorate the possibilities of representative democracy and has now come to represent the falseness of its operations. Many Occupy activists were inspired by the idea of fundamental change in 2008–and perhaps in 1997 in the UK, with the first Labour victory. What is now, as Couldry and Fenton have it, “so striking about the Occupy movement is that it is a peaceful, collective attempt to face up to that unwelcome ‘post-democratic’ truth and to explore new ways of experiencing the general will.”

The proliferation of Occupy newspapers, journals, blogs, essays, commentaries and other thought-provoking materials is visible evidence of this new general moment, centered, as I suggested yesterday, on exterior discussion. If the general strike is the first moment of refusal, the “no” to markets being everything, the general “yes” is always and already in formation: “Nothing could be harder than this.” Everyone agrees on this at least, including Manghani.

Couldry and Fenton recognize the challenge for those who have the chance to work full-time in universities: “our main task perhaps is to go out from our institutions and listen on the streets, and then, on return, to open our doors.”

The implications of such general, open listening might include:

  • free, open, libre publishing
  • not publishing Occupy materials with for-profit publishers, especially Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Times newspapers
  • learning to listen not “teach”
  • not referring to “my/our” students
  • maybe not using the word “student” at all?
  • working for free, public, universal pre-K to postdoctoral education.

And no, those are not demands.

Jan 2 “The Talking Cure”

Yesterday I caught up with David Cronenberg’s new movie, A Dangerous Method (2011) about the Freud/Jung divide embodied in their mutual patient Sabina Spielrein.

Keira Knightly as Sabina Spielrein

For all its period film denial of the present, I found it haunted by the “talking cure” practiced by Occupy and the desires that it evinces. What does Occupy want? The answer most often given in relation to the talking cure of consensus governance would be “empowerment.” The trouble with such tactics is that, after the initial break-through, resistance is generated from within and without.

In A Dangerous Method, Freud is obsessed with the resistance to psychoanalysis and subjugates everything to promoting “the sexual theory.”

"Sometimes," Mr Cronenberg, "a cigar is just a cigar"

As a creature of the psychopharmaceutical era–so many people take anti-depressants in New York that the river fish have measurable doses in their bodies– the film finds Freud vile and uncouth and is forced to find in Jung’s favor. It is Spielrein who raises the truly dangerous questions of resistance and the death drive that are now forcing the OWS talking cure to consider a different form of practice.

The film is a palimpsest: based on a 2003 play by Christopher Hampton, derived from a 1995 book by John Kerr, itself inspired by the 1970s and 80s discoveries of Spielrein’s papers. As Michael Billington spotted in his Guardian review, the play always wanted to be a film. What does the film want? It wants us to once again reject the version of the 1960s in which freedom and free love and open sexuality were supposedly equated. Such ideas are traced back to the beginning of psychoanalysis and emphasized by an unlikely stress on the concept of “freedom,” not a very psychoanalytic concept, and the disruptive presence of Otto Gross, played as a mix of Van Gogh in Lust for Life and Abbie Hoffman. You could wonder again at the fascination in English culture with spanking and its odd mix of philo- and anti-semitism. But let’s stick with the talking cure and its object, Sabina Spielrein.

Spielrein is not allowed much presence in the film as an intellectual, compared to the extensive scenes of her in hysterics or sexually involved with Jung. Here it’s worth noting that, as she wrote about the “essential homosexuality” of women, perhaps Jung and his male surrogates have protested too much?

Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender)

In a brief scene, Spielrein presents the idea of her paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” to Freud. The film can’t do much with this, because to acknowledge that Freud cited Spielrein in Beyond the Pleasure Principle would complicate the caricature of his being obsessed by pleasure/sex. Similarly, Spielrein’s own essay is a widely-ranging, hard-to-summarize assemblage of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Wagner, the Talmud and her own case-study of schizophrenia (you can find it on Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing behind a pay-wall).

Within the film, what Spielrein wants is to be married to Jung and this her tragedy–not, as the last intertitle notes, that she was shot by the Nazis in 1942. What she herself wanted is a question beyond my scope here but it’s intriguing to think about a woman that inspired Freud, Jung and Melanie Klein and went on to organize child services for the Third International. And maybe read her letters alongside those of Rosa Luxemberg, recently translated?

What she seems to have known very well is that desire is complicated, indeed articulated by complexes. So to ask, as everyone does, “what does Occupy want?” is to revisit Freud’s least successful question: “what does a woman want?” Here Occupy is figured as the recalcitrant woman, demanding,  but refusing to say what it is precisely that she wants. Such narratives refashion the complex anti-hierarchical and multi-tasking practice of Occupy into inarticulate need. It reduces the layers of feminist thought around Occupy from Arundati Roy, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Naomi Klein and many others to a simple demand line.

The “docile minds” desired by Big Pharma and neo-liberal governance alike supposedly have no such thing as an unconscious. The repressed cannot return, in this view, because there is nowhere for it to go. Spielrein argued otherwise, quoting her patient Martha N:

‘The suspicion can come into being in the real world in order to prove its right to exist.’ I have come to the conclusion that the chief characteristic of an individual is that he is ‘dividual’. The closer we approach our conscious thoughts, the more differentiated our images.

In this view, it’s not so surprising that Occupy has run into resistance as that its initial tactic of talking in groups was so successful. The anti-hierarchical group discussion was a tactic used by anti-psychiatry from Frantz Fanon’s experiments in Algeria and Tunisia to Félix Guattari’s clinic at La Borde, France, just as Deleuze made much of the “dividual.”

In a recent article on Deleuze and Guattari, Adam Shatz has pointed out how Deleuze asserted in an early essay that:

inner life (la vie intérieure)… was a bourgeois delusion: not for nothing did it sound like ‘domestic life’ (la vie d’intérieur).

Is it too semiotic and old-school to wonder if the very act of being outside, refusing interior life in the domestic sense, facilitated transformations in inner life? Again, we might stress the crucial presence of LBGTQI people in the Occupy movement, those unconstrained by what J. Jack Halberstam calls “family time.” The movement has placed a premium on “safe spaces” for discussion, calling out transphobia and able-ism as being every bit as disruptive to that safety as the old mantra of “race, gender, class.”

At the same time, Occupy encampments became spaces for those once offered care, such as the mentally ill, drug and/or alcohol dependent, and homeless people, to find space. The talking cure was stretched to its limits to deal with these “unmet needs.” Recently, at OWS, the General Assembly, and its operations twin the Spokescouncil, have all but ground to a halt thanks to the blockers. That is to say, one key element of consensus is the ability of any person to “block” a proposal on ethical or safety grounds that might cause them to leave the movement. However, some have taken to the block as a permanent tactic to disrupt all governance with the explicit goal of destroying the Spokescouncil.

Where do we go from here? There are proposals for rules, for hierarchy, for demands, for a third party, for links with the Tea Party and so on. The least fashionable, least exciting and different proposal is still the right one: keep talking.

Jan. 1 “Occupy My Generation”

Patti Smith at the Bowery Ballroom in 2010

“The transformation awaits.” Early in her New’s Year Eve set at the Bowery Ballroom. Patti Smith signaled that this was no golden oldie retread session but an evening devoted to evoking the historical crossroads that is Occupy. In the 1929 building completed weeks before the crash of 1929 and left vacant till after the Second World War, Smith hailed her old avatars in the new context. She was a shaman, conjuring pasts that seemed forgotten and making them newly alive.

A song was dedicated to Charles Baudelaire, somewhat to the mystification of one section of the eclectic crowd. She talked about Verlaine and Rimbaud, she read from “Howl” and she sang “The Drifter’s Escape” from Dylan’s 1967 John Wesley Harding. Then she told a story about how she and Robert Mapplethorpe had bought the album while both were working at different branches of Brentano’s bookstore. She talked about CBGB’s, site of New York punk, about a mile up the road.

Then the word “occupy” started to appear, as if by coincidence. Over and again, the idea resurfaced. At midnight there was “People Have the Power,” followed by a roof-lifting version of her Who cover from Horses, retitled “Occupy My Generation.” In a cascading version of “Fade Away,” Smith announced that this was (maybe) the last of her fourteen years residency at the Ballroom for New Year’s Eve. Insisting over and again that “the future is now,” it was fitting that the last words sung were the iconic “outside of society” with which she and other punks had scandalized New York in the 1970s.

One of the stranger liberal complaints about Occupy is that there are no new songs from the movement. Patti Smith replied that we have two centuries of music to draw on, to repurpose and reimagine. As she stepped down from her position as Queen of Downtown, she passed the legacy to us, to Occupy.

You might be reading this thinking that you wish you had been there. You were. You still are.