Category Archives: research

For The Eight-Hour Digital Day

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In order to talk about militant research, as I have been doing, it’s necessary to sometimes do some actual research. Like most people my normal problem with this is finding time to do any. Having this research leave, I’ve also found that research in the era of the digital library is not as simple as we are often told.

Supposedly, search engines and other tools make it easy to find whatever you need. It’s true, for example, that when I was asked yesterday whether there was a secondary debt market in the UK, it only took a little Googling to get an answer. But that was about as far as I could go. Given that I could already guess that there must be such a market, arguably I’d made no progress at all.

This is the point that you need to hit the books. And that’s harder than it used to be, ironically. The British Library, long my exemplar of a research library, has been opened to a much wider range of readers, including undergraduate students. The result is a much greater demand on the resources. Consequently, many books have been shipped out to the North of England and are available at what they call “two plus” days notice. It turns out that this means at least two (business) days but potentially more if that’s what happens, which, in my admittedly limited recent experience, it always seems to do. Or at the Natural History Museum Library, all materials must be ordered at least 24 hours in advance, so if you want to pursue a lead, it has to be at that time distance.

So what? For me, it’s not a disaster, it just means that I get less done in the time I have to do research. But for the young researchers I have been talking to here and elsewhere, time is of the essence. Funding is limited and departments pressure doctoral students to finish their dissertations within tight time frames. Of course, they are likely to also be teaching in that time.

So completing a research project, whether you are under intense time pressure or not, has become far harder than it used to be. And so you have odd situations, such as the national discussion on the Levenson report in the UK, which is 2000 pages long. It was released yesterday and no one can possibly have read it yet. But the national parties all have positions and are busy fighting each other over it.

Radical demands since the early nineteenth century centered around shortening the working day. In the 1960s, it was common to speculate that a four-hour working day would become standard because machines would do all the work. Instead, our digital machines have demanded far more work from us at all hours of the day and night.

I think we need to start calling for an eight-hour digital day. By this I mean that we should only have online and email access eight hours a day, except in cases of emergency. It’s been shown that keeping Google/FB and everything else “always on” consumes enormous amounts of electricity, as well as generating extra emissions from the back-up generators that are run just in case. With the machines off, we could make a real contribution to reducing emissions and we could reclaim time for ourselves to live a life, not a loan.

The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual

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Occupy first changed the national conversation on inequality and capitalism to the extent that the full force of the nation-state was turned against a few thousand campers. Who would have predicted that a tent was so subversive an object that its sale would be banned in many locations? Next, it changed the national calendar by bringing together labor unions and immigrant groups to celebrate May Day together for the first time since the Cold War.

Since that day, Occupy has changed its internal conversation. Emerging from a series of horizontal assemblies in May, the Strike Debt campaign that will launch on September 17 moves from convergence around the tactic of occupation to consensus around the politics of debt. Debt is the tie that binds the 99%, whether you’re part of the 75% of Americans in debt, or the 25% below the poverty line whose lack of access to official debt is the scarlet letter of impoverishment. We stand with the millions already in default on mortgages, student loans, credit cards and medical bills, with those struggling to make ends meet, and with those whose life opportunities are foreclosed by the amount of debt it now takes to construct the disappeared American Dream.

We refuse the assertion that debt must be forgiven to corporations but totally repaid as a matter of morality by people. We understand this for what it is: a system of social control that constrains us to lifetime of debt, ended and resolved only by death. In short, you are not a loan. And to help you, Strike Debt has published this weekend The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, a systematic practical guide for debtors on how to improve your situation and what your options are, up to and including debt refusal. In the words of the opening declaration:

We gave the banks the power to create money because they promised to use it to help us live healthier and more prosperous lives—not to turn us into frightened peons. They broke that promise. We are under no moral obligation to keep our promises to liars and thieves. In fact, we are morally obligated to find a way to stop this system rather than continuing to perpetuate it.

Like Tidal, the Manual is free. It was researched, written and edited collaboratively in an intense two-month period and printed in a week. For those accustomed to the sclerotic pace of academic research, this process has truly been an eye-opener. It’s been published in paper by a mixture of donations and support from those within Strike Debt. You can get a copy this weekend in Washington Square Park on Saturday from 11-6pm or at the launch event for the Manual at Judson Church on Washington Square South at 7.30pm on Saturday 16 September. A PDF version is available here and the Manual will continue to be updated as we get better informed and as the situation changes.

The Manual is one of the most substantive pieces of militant research to emerge from the Occupy movement, a pleasant contrast to the moribund rash of books and articles based on one person’s take on what happened last September. The not-so-easy-to-fool  people at Naked Capitalism have given it a thumbs up already:

this guide achieves the difficult feat of giving people in various types of debt an overview of their situation, including political issues, and practical suggestions in clear, layperson-friendly language.

Indeed, the Manual covers all forms of debt and offers a crisp political analysis of the debt society (no, I’m not praising my own writing here!).

1.5 million demonstrate for Catalan independence this week.

The future is about building the possibility of openly declared debt refusal, or debt strike, following the lead of students in Quebec, consumers in Greece and the Catalan independence movement. Do not go quietly into austerity, join us.

Meta

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At the invitation of an interesting and impressive faculty/student discussion group calling themselves “Aesthetic Relations” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had the slightly unnerving and very meta experience of discussing this project with real, live human beings. Although I do have interactions with readers online, this was the first time that I have talked about it with people other than friends and family. It seemed appropriate to do this in Madison, where the US wing of the global resistance first got going.

I stressed that this is not an “academic” project, or even a digital humanities project, like those I do with Media Commons or the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Such projects are on my academic CV and there is much discussion internally about credentialing and peer review. Occupy 2012 does not have these concerns. It’s a documentation of a process.

This process might be described as the way in which I have tried to measure what commitment might mean in relation to this very different movement. That is to say, if the engagé intellectual of the 1960s had to work out a relation to the “party,” at least in Europe, none of those terms quite applies here. While I’m engaged in the educational side of the movement, like the forthcoming Free University of New York City and the journal Tidal, there’s no operative activist/intellectual distinction in the movement. I do think that’s true, despite the obvious prominence of figures like David Graeber and Judith Butler in their different ways. Perhaps, as I’ve been suggesting over the past couple of days, we might now be in a position to move beyond the 60s paradigms that have dominated discussion and thought ever since.

In this sense, I was glad that the Madison group noticed how I’ve been calling this a durational writing project, a form that’s derived from durational performance art, rather than a blog pure and simple. Of course it uses blogging software and is a blog in format. But the commitment of writing every day makes it much different than the experience of blogging, which I did on and off all of last year. The blogger chooses when to write at will and can polish a post until s/he is completely satisfied with it. Writing every day drives the project in a different rhythm: sometimes I feel in control of it, sometimes it seems in control of me, and sometimes it’s plain out of control.

This stressing of terms of discipline and control comes from a theme that emerged in the discussion last night. One way to measure the present crisis in what I have called visuality, or the way that authority tries to authorize itself, is precisely as the end of a “human” that is dominated by measurement, disciplinary apparatus, techniques for the modification of population and coloniality. In this transition, whether to a new form of authority or a democratized democracy, change has very different forms. So the neoliberal hostility to state-sponsored education, welfare and health can be seen as a move away from governmentality, that concern with the conduct of conduct as registered at the level of population. The claim for autonomy within the global Occupy movement is perhaps another response to the same perceived crisis of governmentality. That leads some to think of autonomy as neoliberal, a means of trying to reassert the viability of existing forms of left critique, rather than trying to engage with what might be distinct and emergent in our own time.

This leads to a second theme of yesterday’s discussion: the question of time. I’ve written a good deal about the way in which I’m trying to stay “in the moment,” to draw out the sense that the culture is no longer stable in a set of authorized forms, and thereby to increase the possibility that such forms might change. I’ve talked also about the importance of duration and what I’ve called, after Derrida, the future present.

The group yesterday wanted to add the perspective of the reader, which entails thinking about the archive and past time. People talked about how posts might be read out of sequence, or re-read after the moment, and how the current software platform does not allow for easy searching. Generously, this difficulty was attributed to my wanting to make it not so simple to dive in and take out whatever you might need. That’s more of an accident. In fact, I’ve been constrained by the very commitment of the project to thinking of it on a day to day basis: what shall I do today? what about tomorrow? This has the intended effect for my own activism of giving me an extra motivation to go to actions, meetings and events that the force of the workday might otherwise tempt me to miss.

So I have not in fact thought about the project as an archive. I realized that there are now about 115 posts, that’s probably something like 85,000 words and a lot of visual material. So the discussion went very meta: what would be the best thing to do with all this, assuming it lasts for a while longer, or that it achieves its goal of every day in 2012? Given the short lifespan of web platforms, another more durable archive form might be needed. Some people suggested a PDF, which I think would have to be a set of PDFs so as not to be too huge:) Others were interested in a possible book, although here I have concerns–even if I donate whatever royalties there might be, is it OK to generate revenue for a publisher with OWS materials? As with all the other questions of this project, I keep this open, while welcoming your thoughts.

And here, gentle reader, a message from the Madison group to you: there was a hope that people might share their comments and ideas using the commenting function on the blog, rather than posting them to Facebook or elsewhere. In other words, Facebook is privatizing the Internet and is about to do so with a spectacular creation of profit on all of our labor. The Madison group of readers would like to hear what you’re thinking: so a comment could be thought of as addressing the readership, rather than the writer. There are quite a few of you now–such commenting could form a community of sorts that would give a new impetus to the project. I for one would welcome such a turn.

Learning Outside/Outside Learning

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Occupy in Union Square

Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting at the first Open Forum at Union Square. Open Forum was a daily event at Liberty Plaza during the encampment in which an invited presenter would talk at 6.00pm. It was interestingly different to do it at Union Square and to think about the ways in which learning outside and outside the official realms of learning have changed in this intense movement time.

When you presented at Liberty, you usually did it on the stairs on the East side of the Plaza, not least because the drummers often made the West side a talk-free zone. The unusual architecture of this space, designed to be overlooked or at best passed through on your way somewhere else, gave it an oddly private feel. When you stood on the steps and looked down at the group, it felt intimate, whether it was a few dozen as it was when I did it, or when it required two relays on the human mike as it did when Angela Davis was there. The policing came to reinforce that sense of separation, as cops would require people at street level to move on, meaning that if you wanted to be part of OWS you had to step into the Plaza.

Union Square is very different. It’s flat and open but also well-used as a venue in its own right. Yesterday there were a group calling for Free Tibet and an assembly of mostly African-American young people using a subcultural dress code that was very striking but not legible to me. So you present in a circle that is constantly changing as people come and go, stay for ten minutes and leave, as well as those who intended to be there. You’re open to the city in a different way, meaning that I could use a nearby Bank of America tower as a prop but also that the inevitable police sirens very much intrude. In short, it’s the difference between Zuccotti/Liberty as a proscenium space and Union Square as a theatre in the round.

As much as I regret Liberty Plaza and loved being back there on March 17, there’s also a sense in which Union Square feels more grown up. Liberty was like our own private space, literally and metaphorically our bedroom, whereas Union is downstairs, a public space. There’s also a new openness. We were talking about student debt. Two people present were working on projects about debt. One young man, who didn’t tell me his name, did tell me that he was “six figures” in debt for his Columbia degree. That would not have happened last September.

It’s still absurdly policed, so that we were told that you can’t put cardboard on the pavement now. Some Occupiers are now sleeping on the streets outside banks and have made a sign detailing how in the case of Metropolitan v. Safir, the U.S. District Court covering New York City ruled that

the First Amendment of the United States Constitution does not allow the City to prevent an orderly political protest from using public sleeping as a means of symbolic expression.

It has, at least for the time being, stymied the cops.

There is a dynamic to being outside in this hyper-policed city. It’s given expression by the Trayvon Martin case. If Trayvon had been in a car, Zimmerman would never have attacked him. Just as a woman in public in the nineteenth century was literally called a “street walker,” so is anyone on the street automatically a criminal suspect to the policing mentality. We are supposed to stay in our gated communities, in our buildings, or in our cars and not be outside.

In the Politics and Visual Culture Working Group, we’ve noticed this as well. When our meetings are outside, whether in a park or as part of an action, there’s a very different and more vibrant dynamic then when we are in an NYU classroom. Just to reinforce this, NYU’s new expansion plan calls for 70,000 sq. ft. of classroom space–underground, in what is now a parking garage, with access only from a security-controlled building. The institution tells its debtors to park their minds and pay their bills.

It’s going to be warm this weekend–get outside!

 

Militant Research–Madrid

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It is one thing to call for activist research, it’s altogether something else to carry it out. There are a number of interesting existing models. They seem to have in common a willingness to work outside the formal structures of the university, to work on projects, rather than within disciplines, and to publish their work freely and open source on and offline.

One example is the Madrid collective Observatorio Metropolitano [OM from now on]. Their work was presented last night at 16 Beaver by Ana Méndez de Andés, an architect and urban planner who teaches Urban Design at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. In the announcement for the event, OM were described as:

a militant research group that utilizes investigations and counter-mapping to look into the metropolitan processes of precarious workers, migrants, and militants taking place in Madrid, brought on by crisis, gentrification, speculation and displacement.

In her presentation, Méndez de Andés described how the group had come together in 2007 at the height of the speculative building boom in Madrid to try and discover exactly what was happening in the city. With disarming wit, she commented that it was an advantage that Madrid was seen as a provincial city, lacking the cosmopolitan identity of Barcelona, because it was easier to examine the city’s changes.

The group was intellectual but not academic, interested in carrying out what she called “militant research,” which she distinguished from activism. In their Manifesto for Madrid, OM define this as being [these are my no doubt dreadful translations: do consult the originals before quoting!] :

Militant investigations which will bring the knowledge and policy tools necessary to address these enormous processes of change. To build a communication space between members, technicians and stakeholders, and above all between small projects (or embryonic projects) of militant research already occurring in the city and the social movements.

Méndez de Andés joked that she herself was not very good at organizing events, so she had stuck to analysis. Their research generates both substantial books, 400 pages long, and short, accessible pamphlet-length works available free as PDFs. The Manifesto strikes the signature note for OM projects in its denunciation of

the destruction of the elementary bases, which make possible common life (la vida en común) in a city like Madrid.

Written at the height of the boom, the Manifesto was able to visualize the transformation of Madrid into a global city at the expense of the creation of a marginalized class of people living precariously, the undermining of social provisions for health, environment and education and (as we all now know) spectacular debt.

Banner from Traficantes website

The related open-source copyleft publishing venture, Traficantes de Sueños does not define itself as a publisher:

It is, however, a project, in the sense of ‘commitment’, which aims to map the constituent lines of other forms of life.

Central to this venture is “freedom of access to knowledge.” All publications are available either as downloads or as books. Some people buy all the books as a means of supporting the project, regardless of whether they intend to read them. Publications are generated rapidly so that they can contribute to the ongoing discussion and debate within the social movements, rather than reflect on them later (I was recently asked by contrast to contribute to a collection on OWS, bearing in mind, as the call put it, that Zuccotti Park will be ancient history by the time of publication).

In La crisis que viene (The Coming Crisis) [March, 2011] OM see the the financial crisis as a prelude to the unrelenting privatization of the commons across Europe. For OM, there is:

a constant underlying all measures: interest and financial benefits go first. Although this will cost the immediate and future welfare of entire populations. Although this will involve the dismantling of pension systems and the decline of social rights acquired over decades. Although such policies will cause the whole economy to slide, limping along the path of stagnation. The next decade offers us no more than a new round of privatization of services and social guarantees, a greater decline in wages, and a social crisis which is still known only in its embryonic stage.

By October 2011, this pessimism was offset by the possibilities of the new social movements across Europe. Crisis and Revolution in Europe argues that, to quote the poet Holderlin,

“there grows what also saves.” The antidote has been accompanied by citizens’ movements now extend across most of the continent. This is the 15M, the movement of Greek squares, the French strikers and the indignados in a growing number of countries. It is in this work in progress of political reinvention, where you can find a social outlet to the crisis, in addition to rescuing that which really matters: democracy and European society.

Their analysis is now being translated into Portuguese, English, Greek and Italian in order to create a transEuropean dialogue about the crisis and build towards transEuropean social movements, perhaps even strikes.

No-one yesterday asked the quintessential Anglo question about funding. I took it that there the project was sustained by a mix of commitment, donation and the blanket subscriptions.

While there are many nascent publishing ventures using online and low-cost publishing in the Anglophone world, I don’t think we have anything to quite match this: though I would love to be corrected! Too many of the new digital publishing ventures spend so much time accommodating the demands of tenure, the one per cent of academia, that the online virtues of speed and accessibility get lost. Too much of the Occupy research is about the vicissitudes of Occupy and not the collective issues that brought us into the movement.

That said, where the Spanish have led the way before, we have also followed from the “Take the Square” movement to Occupy Wall Street. Of those who are still reading at this point, I bet many of us are intellectuals of one sort or another. How about it? A collective militant/activist research project(s)?