Since the Rolling Jubilee happened, I’ve been looking for a chance to post the prepared text on debt and disaster that I didn’t exactly deliver at the event. Today was a travel day back from Puerto Rico to New York so here it is:
Tonight, even as we jubilate, we remember the victims of Hurricane Sandy from Haiti to Jamaica, New Jersey, State Island, Breezy Point, the Rockaways and Long Island. We do so because we know that the debt crisis and the climate disaster are both caused by the insatiable greed of the one percent. Just as debt destroys livelihoods, so does the climate disaster destroy life itself. To strike debt is to save the climate.
Every time capital puts itself in circulation it hopes to make a profit. We know that without fail it adds to the deficit in the biosphere and that is destroying human and non-human life. It has been working on this deficit for two hundred and fifty years. We, the 99%, declare capitalism past due on its climate debt.
We know too that in the planetary disaster there is still inequality. We who live in the historically developed world have benefited from a grossly dispropotionate share of carbon emissions. We too owe a climate debt: to the plurality of the planet’s population who live on less than $2 a day. We must decolonize the atmosphere so that they can claim the right to existence.
We know that abolishing climate debt means abolishing monetary debt. Capital creates money by making debt. Our labor pays it off. This is called “growth.” Our incomes do not grow. But carbon emissions always rise. More growth to pay off the sea of debt means flooding like Sandy every year, everywhere. We can’t afford to pay off the debt. Instead, tonight we abolish it.
I really hope that this message doesn’t get lost in the face of the invasion of Gaza. Insofar as there has been a rational thread to Israel’s policy in the Occupied Territories, it has been in significant part about control of natural resources, especially water.
On the other hand, what is happening now seems to represent a deliberate refusal of rationality. It’s a reverse of MAD–Mutually Assured Destruction–that dominated Cold War politics. The idea was that because both sides would be destroyed in a war, it would be insane to start one. Israel now seems to say: “we will act out in any way that makes us feel better, irrationally, angrily and violently.” Netanyahu decided to call Obama and as usual the latter blinked.
I’m so tired of making this kind of analysis of Israel, whether it’s accurate or not. I just want them to stop, to leave the territories and just be a small, unimportant country dealing with desertification, drought and sea-level rise. And, yes, I used to call myself Jewish until they ruined that for me too.
How do movements grow? How do they relate to established institutions? Today we had a case in point at the Creative Time summit under the title “Confronting Inequity.” Creative Time, the well-established and regarded arts agency with a social justice mission, has held these events for the past four years. This year’s event incorporated a theme on “Occupations,” involved many social movement activists, but also got itself into an entanglement with Israel. Aside from the issue itself, the ramifications created a form of Rorschach test for how people feel about the movement.
So first the issue. Creative Time (CT) announced that it had a series of “in-depth partners” for these events. One was the Israeli Center for Digital Art. While the ICDA seems relatively progressive by Israeli standards, it is funded by the Ministry of Culture and Sport and the town of Holon. This connection was first discovered by the Egyptian video collective Mosireen, whom I have often written about here, and I was really looking forward to meeting. In a statement that was widely circulated on sites such as Electronic Intifada, Mosireen announced that they could not participate:
The invitation to participate that we recieved from Creative Time initially impressed us with its language, claiming to be a response to “a growing community of cultural practitioners working in the realm of social justice and socially engaged art practice” and exploring “the impact of wealth inequity across the globe as it engenders totalitarianism and undermines democracy.” This language and other similar statements about democracy, equality and revolution were encouraging to us. We believed that the discourse around these topics was finally shifiting from its traditionally unjust and orientalist political coordinates.
It’s true that no money directly came from Israel to New York and a rapid name change to “screening partners” was implemented. Mosireen were nonetheless not arguing about equivalency. Their attention was on the Israeli Center for Digital Art and its involvement with the state:
After the Second Intifada [ICDA director] Mr. Danon said “we started doing projects that were aiming at communicating with artists/curators working in similar conditions in the region (Palestinian authority, Arab states) as well as in the Balkan area.” This inappropriate emphasis on symmetry runs through their work ever since. The deaths of 13 IDF soldiers (4 from friendly fire) during the 08/09 assault on Gaza is not a “similar condition” to the killing of 1,417 Palestinians, of which at least 313 were children.
You might not agree with this argument. There has nonetheless been an ongoing call for “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” since 2004, supported by major US intellectual figures like Judith Butler, as any progressive person must be aware. If I was organizing an event calling “Confronting Inequity,” I would not go anywhere near a partnership with an Israeli group. If for some reason I had to do so, I would surely have wanted to have many Palestinian organizations involved as well but CT missed that call, although there were screening partners in Morocco and Abu Dhabi.
Unnoticed by Mosireen and others, there was also another partner in Israel at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, founded by the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, which seems fully integrated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has had the Prime Minister visit in 2006, and so on. More than the ICDA, this partner seems troubling.
Following Mosireen’s withdrawal in regards to the ICDA, the hip-hop duo Rebel Diaz withdrew in solidarity.
So at the opening of the Summit, CT president Anne Pasternak had the difficult task of announcing these withdrawals but did not do so in a way that made it clear to the audience what had happened, other than that it was over Israel-Palestine. Curator Nato Thompson followed and said that while CT “get it” about the issue, they wanted “to get everything on the table” and discuss it. Which would entail a screening partner in Palestine, even if you accept that argument.
The issue was widely discussed on Twitter (#CTsummit) but did not make the platform until the editorial team from Tidal, the OWS theory journal that I have again often discussed here, had their moment in the segment called “Occupations.” Amin Husain, a well-known figure at OWS, talked from his own background as a Palestinian. He recalled debates over whether to use the name “occupy” that had been decided in favor of reclaiming the language but not, as is often suggested, without being aware of Palestine. He noted that Israel is an “economy set up to benefit the elite at the expense of the indigenous,” while pointing out from direct experience of the negotiations that nationhood for Palestine has always come with conditions of subscribing to neo-liberalism. Tidal raised the question of the boycott but did not call for people to walk out. They used the remainder of their time to discuss what they had wanted to talk about: the Strike Debt campaign and a video they had made to show, which is below:
In a keynote in the afternoon, Queens Museum curator Tom Finkelpearl tried to intervene into the debate by sniping that if you boycotted a Creative Time event, there was really nowhere left for you to go. There were those who clearly agreed with this sentiment (see here, though, for notes on later presentations that supported the boycott which I didn’t see–scroll all the way down).
Before this view could take hold, it was undermined by the Spanish artist Fernando Garcia-Dory, winner of a prize for Art and Social Change. Garcia-Dory, who has done remarkable work with shepherds, giving attention to the Spanish Federation of Shepherds, which he describes as
a social system design that allow[s] an excluded community to get together, share worldviews and problem analisys, pose alternatives for action and unite[s] voices to get listened [to].
He further suggested that the assemblage formed by the activist artist working on a social justice project in a given community constitutes the artwork in itself, which has further mutual relations with questions of audience and content. Nowhere present in the diagrams he used to visualize this relation was the art gallery, museum or institution. Such realizations lie behind both the turn to performance and the occupy movement. If we have already seen a vogue for institutionalizing performance, to very mixed effect, we should be cautious about institutionalizing occupation.
That’s not to say that the social movement has to stay literally and metaphorically outside, but that, in the manner hinted at by Garcia-Dory, we have to build our own institutions. How those institutions are funded and networked cannot be treated as matters of convenience, as we have so often done in the past. We should not be preachy about it but we have to consider the much harder question posed to us by Slavoj Zizek in his keynote: what kind of future is that we want? And by Occupy lights, that means we have to act as if the future is now.
In short, it’s not just debt abolition. It’s what does a world without debt look like? How do we start living it? Who should we talk to in this discussion? The real shame of the whole imbroglio at the Summit was that the conversation could not begin there. But it will begin tomorrow across the world with the 13O day of action and week against debt. Get outside.
Why is tonight different from all other nights?–and all other Passover nights? Because tonight we don’t say “next year in Jerusalem.” We say “next year in Cairo.” Tonight we do not think about Occupy but about the ongoing colonial occupations around the world that continue to oppress. And tonight we hope for another future.
In the traditional Passover service, the gathering say “Next year in Jerusalem,” the utopian wish of the diaspora. The “Jerusalem” of the Haggadah (the text used during the service) was interpreted by many modern progressives in the manner of Blake as a place without slavery, the place of emancipation.
The Liberation Haggadah
Often, such affinities are felt to have been expressed by the work done by Jews during the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.
The Sarajevo Haggadah, noted for its beautiful illustrations was the exemplar of how the book could also mobilize cross-cultural alliances. It was hidden and protected from the Nazis during World War II by local people, including a Muslim cleric. Later it was again saved from damage during the devastating “ethnic” civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
The Sarajevo Haggadah
These affirmative histories feel remote from modern Jerusalem as it is ruled under what is, to use Jimmy Carter’s telling phrase, a “new apartheid.” In Jerusalem, Orthodox Jewish men actually send Jewish women to the back of the bus, as if to say that they want to erase the Civil Rights history.
So today the anti-slavery “Jerusalem” is somewhere much more like Cairo after the Tahrir revolution than it is the city of that name.
Perhaps no visual example is more telling than this picture:
The "separation wall" in Bethlehem.
It shows the city of Bethlehem, named as the birthplace of Jesus, a city of importance for Jews as the seat of King David and long part of the Arab Caliphate. Now it is divided by the separation wall that epitomizes the key tactic of global counterinsurgency: once you have identified your insurgent, separate them from the “good” population.
There’s so much writing about the disastrous consequences of Israeli policies, above all from progressive Israelis like Ariella Azoulay, Eyal Weizman and Adi Ophir, that there’s perhaps no need to dwell on them. Except that it has now become clear that Israel has embarked on a “necropolitics,” a sovereign determining of who it is that must die, which now extends to other nations. The entirely unsurprising “October surprise” of the 2012 election will be the Israeli attack on Iran, telegraphed and planned by Benjamin Netanyahu, whose contempt for Obama might be enough to get him on the Supreme Court. Just because we can see this coming does not mean it will not have most serious consequences.
Not least will be a renewed clampdown on all anti-militaristic, anti-hierarchical politics. It should be remembered that the tent city in Tel Aviv was evicted long before Liberty Plaza. Only you can’t call it the Israeli Occupy because that already exists.
Looking back, as one does on ceremonial days, I reflect on the opportunity that the Oslo Accords appeared to present in 1993. Among them was the possibility for a secular Jewish identity that was not linked to Israel and also not shamed by it. At the time, the late lamented Edward Said indicated that Oslo was going to be a disaster. Along with many others, I could see that but hoped that it would lead to something better. It did not and the possibility to play with being “Jewish” disappeared as well. Israeli officials do so much in the name of “Jewish” and not just Judaism that it would be sophistry to do otherwise.
Nonetheless, there is of course a new Haggadah this year, translated and commented upon by earnest, bearded young men from Brooklyn of the Jonathan Safran Foer kind. Actually, it is edited by Foer.
The Haggadah says that
in every generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out of Egypt
I don’t want to do that now. I want to stay in the “Egypt” that we’ve seen since 2011, the Egypt of Tahrir. I want to decolonize Palestine and finally bring an end to slavery. L’chaim.
Exit the ghost of Europe, pursued by teargas. A year after the self-styled “father of Egypt” was driven out, the Greek revolt saw the return of the spectre of global justice– and it has been driven offstage with teargas.
Teargassed woman by the Bank of Athens #12fgr
It has been known for some time that, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “haunting would mark the very existence of Europe,” a place designated by the “joining” of the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the spectre of Communism. Speaking in 1993, in response to the question “Whither Marxism,” Derrida appropriated Hamlet: “the time is out of joint.” As we ask, too insistently, “whither Occupy?” it might be good to linger a while in the place of the revenant. In that disjointed time we wait:
everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition.
Allan Sekula, Waiting for Teargas
In 1999, the photographer Allan Sekula was in Seattle, covering the global justice demonstrations that shut down the G20. He was at 16 Beaver last night revisiting the project, with its haunting title: Waiting for Teargas. At once this evokes Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot I have already had cause to remember, and Walter Benjamin’s sense that the most modern place of all is the waiting room. Sekula recalls:
In photographing the Seattle demonstrations my working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-journalism: no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.
[my emphasis]
Waiting for Teargas
The waiting is a space in-between, a time out of joint. There’s so much happening and yet so little action in this photograph. A protestor displays the US flag at the heart of a miniature recreation of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, the legendary Earthwork of the 1970s. The gesture reminds us at once of the role played by forest activists and tree sitters in the Seattle protests, those who were used to direct action to defend the old-growth Pacific Northwest; and the soundtrack that Sekula reminds us was to come, Jimi Hendrix’s version of the national anthem, played over someone’s boom box, as the tear gas blew. Notice that the shop in the top right is actually called “Spray King.” And on the horizon, the cops, waiting.
In Athens yesterday, the tear gas blew into the Greek parliament from Syntagma (Constitution) Square. The Prime Minister Papademos demanded the sacrifice of Abraham, meaning that the son must die for the father. Or rather it was Papa Demos, the father of the people/demos, claiming the place of the sovereign, the place of the specter, even as he was tear gassed:
for the king occupies this place, here the place of the father, whether he keeps it, takes it or usurps it
(Derrida)
This new hauntology reconfigures all hitherto existing versions of Hamlet. Now we can understand that Hamlet tear gassed his father all along, in resistance to patriarchy:
The ghost of Hamlet's father from Olivier's 1948 film
It avails him little. By the play’s end, he has captured the conscience of the King but in so doing suicides himself and his friends, for patriarchal vengeance is nuclear. The Treaty has been signed: but it now awaits the approval of the German Bundestag. For in saving itself, providing for its own autoimmunity, Europe has ended. It is now an occupation.
So it is fitting that we ask the question: where does a bankrupt nation like Greece get the money for so much tear gas? And find that the answer is: Israel.
Israeli tear gas: Made in the USA
Or, to be more specific: US-made tear gas, delivered to Israel and then re-exported to Greece. It comes from a plant in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, manufactured by a company called Combined Tactical Systems-CSI. The company flies US and Israeli flags outside its buildings, just in case you missed the point. Occupy activists have already been protesting the use of this product in Palestine, and discovered that $1.85 million of tear gas was paid for by the federal government and delivered to Israel. No doubt it was easy enough to spare the 4600 units requested by Greece.
There were many spectres in the square yesterday. The present is out of joint.
The present is what passes, the present comes to pass, it lingers in this transitory passage, in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and what arrives.
Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa–das Gespenst des Kommunismus.
The current destabilization of the political situation by Israel risks the resurgence of the post 9-11 double-bind of “autoimmunity,” in which the very system designed to make you secure undermines your viability. By setting in motion such reversible definitions, the domestic project of Occupy can be reconfigured as “insurgency.” To occupy is to place a body-that-thinks into space where it not supposed to be. If that body makes certain choices of action, some are now willing to see that body as out of control, no longer thinking but simply acting. Against such bodies there must be what the Israeli government has termed a “zone of immunity.”
Both in practice and theory this immunity is proving hard to define. It sometimes seems to refer to an “immunity zone” that Iran might acquire, allowing it to develop a nuclear weapon and thereby become in some ways immune to Western threats. It also appears to designate a “zone of immunity” that Israel feels it must have from external threat. It is very difficult to determine exactly what Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, meant because the Israeli media are so full of debates about immunity insofar as it pertains to members of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament. The recent involvement of an Arab Israeli MK in the Gaza flotilla has led to demands for the legal immunity of representatives to be lifted, even as the papers are also full of corruption and bribery scandals that result from this immunity.
In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reapplied his earlier use of the term “autoimmunity” to the complexities of the situation in which U.S.-trained operatives (using a deliberately bland and neutral term) had attacked their former patrons. Derrida reminded us that
an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity.
It seems that this “autoimmunity” is precisely what Israel is engaged in: by attacking it will not only lay itself open to other attacks but may lose the immunity from criticism that it currently enjoys with its own “head,” the United States. Derrida shows that the beginnings of this autoimmunity were in the Cold War, whose ending reconfigured the body politic. Autocratic leaders in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose apparent immunity depended on their place in the Cold War, or its surrogate the war on terror, found that instead they had ultimately destroyed themselves.
W. J. T. Mitchell has called this reverse effect the “bipolar” character of the autoimmune, “a situation in which there is no literal meaning.” Interestingly, the immune system itself is now understood to be capable of “cognitive abilities,” in that it learn how to recognize specific antigens and remembers them. Autoimmunity is unable to make such distinctions. Yet the result is not simply a destabilization but the reverse of what was intended, as Derrida specifies:
repression in both its psychoanalytic sense and its political sense–whether it be through the police, the military or the economy–ends up producing, reproducing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.
The gambit of counterinsurgency was to attempt to permanently produce insurgency and yet manage it as a form of governance at the same time. As economic and police repression has escaped control from Greece to Egypt, to speak only of the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel appears to be doubling down on military repression.
Counterinsurgency has long been willing to move the boundaries between the policed zone of authority and where we the policed are to be contained. The extraordinary Israeli tactic of the mobile checkpoint, literally manifesting the border in different places from one day to the next, epitomizes this disregard for consistency. Indeed the legalizing of the Israeli occupation itself, as Eyal Press relates, worked by
adopting an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire.
The Israelis thus repurposed this archaic imperial law to create a cover for legal transformation of occupation into settlement.
If the “reversible” effect of this counterinsurgency now moves into the global frame proposed by its theorists, Occupy can be rendered into a target of militarization. Note the way New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins–quoted by Mitchell as the epigraph to his chapter on autoimmunity–characterizes insurgency:
American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential character of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified.
As such, the insurgency was hard to defeat. However in the present context, with a little editing this could be taken for a casual description of Occupy. Perhaps Chris Hedges somehow confused the now-favored “Black Ops” of counterinsurgency with the purportedly violent black bloc anarchists of Occupy? You will say that doesn’t make sense–read his article again: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bipolar and has no literal meaning.
The militarized reversibility being put into motion by Israel risks more than an internal argument for Occupy: it risks redefining autonomy as insurgency. The problem of perceived “violence” in the movement is, then, the displaced affect caused by this return of the repressed. That does not mean that there is not a real issue here. We have to continue to claim our right to look, that is, to invent each other and consent to being invented by that other as part of our direct democracy. And we claim the right to be seen in the spaces and times of our choosing, whether that right is recognized by the current state of the force of law or not. Indeed, the worth of claiming that right is, as it was for non-violent campaigners from Mary Wollstonecraft to Gandhi and Rosa Parks, that the law forbids us from having it.
