Category Archives: refusal

I Fought The Law

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Today is the seven-month anniversary of OWS. It coincides with a remarkable ratcheting up of pressure on Occupy from authorities of all kinds–personal, police, professional. At the place where these three roads meet is the Law, saying: “enough, time to concede.” The reply is given: “I prefer not to.” But it’s getting much harder.

Now some of my friends  and colleagues give me a look: “Occupy? Still?” As if you had just discovered deconstruction. So, yes, I am a bit obsessed. Since when was that a bad thing in professional life? and it’s been seven months, not years.

Federal Hall. Credit @mollyknefel

By unrelenting hostility and willingness to improvise the terms of the law, the police do now have the upper hand in the streets. The NYPD yesterday determined that you may not have “moveable property” on the sidewalk in New York– and that did apparently include a dog that one of the occupiers had on Wall Street. The primary target of the police is the cardboard sign, now that the tent has been outlawed. The revived “sleepful protest” has  been driven onto the steps of the Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights was first introduced. It is supposed to feel like a last stand. While I don’t think it is, I feel the pressure.

The Federal pen

As mentioned yesterday, the academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek. Here’s her summary:

Bluntly put, some of the ideas that most galvanized people in the fall—those associated with autonomy, horizontality, and leaderlessness—have also come to be faulted for conflicts and disillusionment within the movement.

I haven’t heard this criticism, except in what you might call the academic wing of the movement, but there you hear it all the time.

I can’t get into a full analysis of this paper because she asks us not to cite it, so you’ll have to read it yourself. In short, she argues that Occupy should accept its own condition of “lack” in relation to the “lack” it has identified in the political system (The Big Other) and thereby set about representing the overlap created. While I’m not fully sure what to make of this, I take it to mean that if Occupy is to create a form of collectivity, it has to respect the laws of kinship or disintegrate. Occupy should thus negate its own negation of the political system. I can’t help but feel that it would no longer be Occupy were that to happen and in considerable part that transformation would come from a reassertion of the traditional authority of the Law, as Lacan would have had it. Not to mention the law as the cops have it. What we could gain by the strategy is opaque to me.

Is this Law unchallengeable? By chance, I’ve been reading Judith Butler’s lectures on Antigone, where she discusses the possibility of a “post-structuralist” form of kinship that would not be dependent on the Law of the Oedipus complex. She notes that in Oedipus at Colonnus, none other than Oedipus himself berates Antigone and her sister for being out of place, even as they take care of him instead of their brothers, “in their place.” Even Oedipus gets to castigate Antigone for asserting a willingness to “live out of doors.” His curse on his children/siblings is the re-assertion of the necessity of staying in place. That is to say, anyone transgressing their alotted role will be punished. The place one must be is the place where three roads meet and Oedipal destiny is enacted.

What if the incest taboo is not the only form of establishing kinship? What if kinship is not destiny? As the results of incest, Antigone and her siblings all embody the failure of the Law and, while they are punished for this, they also claim glory and honor of their own. Butler interestingly footnotes here the enfant terrible of anthropology Pierre Clastres. Like Sahlins, Clastres refused to equate power with kinship. Clastres asserts that the kinship system tells us almost nothing about the social life of a people. He further argued that the Amazonian peoples he studied were determined to prevent the emergence of permanent inequality by means of careful safeguards.

These arguments have been developed by David Graeber, who also notes that Clastres’ romantic over-investment with the Amazon prevented him from discussing the widespread use of sexual violence in these same “egalitarian” societies. He astutely concludes

Perhaps Amazonian men understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, backed by force, would be like because they themselves wield that power over their wives and daughters.

The point of the Antigone myth and the Amazonian egalitarians is, then, not that we want to be like them, but that these moments show cases where the “universal” Law does not apply, and is therefore not universal at all, but particular and backed by force of various kinds.

That’s why “I Fought The Law” is a counterculture classic: not because it celebrates a victory–the law won–but because it discovers that, unlike Bartleby who negates himself in the end, you can fight the law. And, yes, you can lose.

Creative Refusal

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The new strategy of creative refusal of impoverishment by austerity continues to unfold. After some different strategies in New York, today’s countrywide general strike in Spain made it clear that the crisis in the eurozone shows no sign of being over. Tonight in New York, David Graeber urged an overflow crowd to extend our historical as well as geographic understandings of creative refusal.

With the Greek elections ahead, new cuts promised across Europe and recessions now official from the UK to Portugal, refusal is just beginning. The electricity surcharge strike in Greece has been joined by a tax strike in Ireland with a rally planned for Saturday after only 23% of taxpayers have consented to the new austerity tax.

In Spain today, the general strike shut down the auto industry, heavy industry, the trains and the airports. Electricity use, the new index of strike action, was down 25%. Should there be any news reports here, they will no doubt show the small fire in Barcelona. Much more impressive were the direct actions. Here’s the Atocha Station, site of the bombings whose anniversary just passed, closed by the strike:

The Atocha Station closed by strike action

For the edification of Chris Hedges, here’s what Black bloc actually does–it shut down a major highway in Barcelona this morning and this took personal courage:

Students block Diagonal Avenue, Barcelona

And then this evening, Spanish time, a rally of impressive proportions in Puerta del Sol:

It was against this, shall we say, striking background that David Graeber spoke of creative refusal. As is his wont, he expanded our horizons in time and space. The true radicality here is to see the so-called modern with its obsession with self-interest and its invention of the market as the exception to a far longer human history concerned with very different cosmologies.There’s a real intellectual liberation at work here.

Cultural studies types of my vintage might think of E. P. Thompson’s eighteenth-century poachers, “stealing” the landlord’s fish or game, as a prototype for creative refusal, leading to de Certeau’s appropriation of “poaching” to mean using office stationery or doing personal tasks on work time. More recently, James Scott and others have talked of the ways that the enslaved and the colonized were deliberately slow at their work, pushing the horizons further back. Graeber wants to take the entire range of known human history as a resource for creative refusal, arguing that it impoverishes us to set so much of it aside. In a bold conceptual move, he called for thinking of history as social movements.

Drawing on his astonishing range of learning, Graeber cited examples from ancient Sumeria to Polynesia and Madagascar. He repeatedly suggested that the outcast and the marginalized might be thought of as choosing such status in order to defend an anti-hierarchical politics. He described, for example, how Madagascar was first permanently settled by slave colonies, whose enslaved revolted and established complex barriers to the establishment of a state.

What’s inspiring is the willingness to see all humans as political actors with mature motives and to assume that humans have always been far more connected than the so-called historical record demonstrates. In thinking about Polynesia, for example, Graeber asked whether it makes sense to assume that the so-called Polynesians reached as far as Easter Island from South-East Asia–and then stopped, never trying to reach South America, as even the shipwrecked sailors of the whaler Essex did in 1820. This assumption is necessary to reinforce the idea of “primitive” isolation so that when Captain Cook and others arrived, they must have been seen as gods with unheard of technologies, like ships.

Finally, he mentioned a Papua New Guinea people who have a consensus-building culture, which, like Occupy, involves endless meetings: only there is an obligation on all speakers to be funny, so the meetings are very popular. Now that’s an idea whose time has come.

 

 

Student Debt Crisis Intensifies

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Student demonstrations in MontréalThe new refusal of the student debt crisis first evidenced by the Occupy Student Debt Campaign appears to be spreading and to have good cause. Student strikes are shutting down Montréal, while new evidence makes it clear how serious the crisis is now and how it is going to get worse soon.

In Canada, Quebec has proposed doubling tuition over the course of the next five years. As it currently stands at roughly $2500, state authorities claim that tuition will still be lower than in other states and affordable. Students counter that nonetheless lower-income students will be deterred from college and that once the idea of substantial increases is conceded, they will become the new normal. Their resistance today has included shutting down the port of Montréal and a demonstration that even the media concede is around 100,000.

People there have obviously looked to the American situation. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has released a report giving striking new data showing both U. S. student debt and rates of delinquency reaching new highs. Unsurprisingly students have concluded that either tuition comes down or they will stay away.

According to their calculations, student debt is now at least $870 billion, the largest category of personal debt in the country, surpassing both the total credit card balance ($693 billion) and the total auto loan balance ($730 billion). This was already known but their analysis breaks it down further. $580 billion of the total student loan debt is owed by people younger than forty. About one million people owe more than $100,000. By excluding those people currently in deferral because they are still in education, it can be seen that 27% of debtors are either behind payments or in default.

That percentage is set to increase still further. The Obama administration has changed the regulations so that new federally subsidized graduate student loans will incur interest while a student is still in school as of July 1, 2012. As those loans currently attract 6.8% interest, a student in school for the six to nine years it takes to acquire a doctorate would find their loans had ballooned before they had even graduated.

For a long time universities have believed that they are immune to all protests for two reasons. Student debt is the most secure loan available, one that cannot be mitigated by bankruptcy, unemployment or old age. Loan companies can and do garner Social Security. Combined with what administrations believe is the unquenchable desire and need to gain degree qualifications for work, this security has given universities the confidence to raise tuition to the current levels.

Now the first sign has come that students are no longer lured by the Pied Piper of the career path. Applications for the Law School Aptitude Test, required for admission to law school, dropped by 16% this year. The combination of insane debt and 40% unemployment amongst newly-qualified lawyers was enough to deter nearly a fifth of potential candidates. What if other students are thinking the same way? High tuition schools without an endowment to back them up will become the Lehmanns and the Bear Sterns of the student debt bubble.

If we decided that higher education was “too big to fail,” it would cost $70 billion a year to make all public higher education free. Once that would have seemed like a lot of money. After the last few years, it seems like the bargain it is.