Category Archives: academia

Jubilant Theory

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Today was a work day at the University of Strasbourg. Over the past several months of giving talks, I have become accustomed to a certain routine. The organizer goes into a certain amount of detail as to why they are not sure how many people will attend. Their anxiety is two-fold. My academic work is not located in a specific discipline and it connects to the movement. Then we go in and find that far more people than expected have turned up and they then proceed to ask a great deal of questions. The organizers are then relieved and delighted.

That was the pattern here today, where I gave a talk showing how the research I have done on visuality requires an engagement with political practice. I then talk about a variety of militant visual culture research projects, ending with Strike Debt. It was a tad challenging because I had to do this in French, which is hard but not too bad. And then there were questions. If you read the above paragraph you will see the drawback. I got 75 minutes of questions, in French obviously.

What was interesting was that, for all that people downplay “French theory,” I was asked detailed questions about my relationship to Marxism, Autonomia, Situationism, Rancière and postcolonial theory. The mood in the room was far from as serious as this might sound because we had covered the Jubilee. Although the debt jubilee was new to this audience, the concept of jubilation might not have been so much.

Yesterday I bought a book called Postanarchism explained to my grandmother by Michel Onfray–at the station bookstall of all places, try getting something similar in Penn Station. Onfray has a rather dazzling list of the different aspects of anarchism that compose his concept of postanarchism, including

the right to jubilation…thinking of theory as the product of action.

Although I don’t really think I am a postanarchist, or that Strike Debt would be considered as such, who cares? But I prefer simply Jubilant Theory. What happens with Jubilant Theory is this engagement that people feel with the project that makes them even though they don’t know who I am and helps them enjoy what they hear.

One person said to me that they had never heard what they called un grand universitaire americain–a big-deal American professor–talk about engagement and political practice. Perhaps that’s just a measure of who gets invited. Or perhaps it’s an indication of one way to make the often-disparaged humanities more popular with the current precarious generation of students: to speak to their situation and offer something positive to do about it.

How To Change: Learning, for example

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How do we learn from change? How do we learn to change? These repeated but slightly different questions seem at the heart of the emerging difference between the academic assessment of the Occupy movement and its own internal process. Today Critical Inquiry published three intriguing essays about Occupy, written about the 2011 moment. Yesterday, I learned a good deal from Occupy University about how to create a successful “learning encounter.” The two are noticeably different and yet intersect.

The Critical Inquiry pieces (paywall protected) are by W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt. All distinguished figures to be sure, an amazing team to have backing Occupy, yet all three are white men of a certain age (as is acknowledged). While each essay movingly describes, and often quotes, the experiences of students and occupiers, it’s a shame that at least one of these people wasn’t given space to report back for themselves.

It’s not at all that the writers are not aware of the dilemma of doing academic work about Occupy. For Mitchell, one problem was simply that

it threatens to drown the researcher under a tsunami of material.

Anthropologist Michael Taussig resolved that issue by writing a moving account of last O13, the first attempt to evict OWS that failed because so many turned up to support the occupation. Yet even the span of one night raises difficult questions:

So how do you write about it? In such circumstance of dissolving norms, effervescent atmosphere, invention and reinvention, what happens to the ethnographer’s magic—as Bronislaw Malinowski called it—and that old standby of “participant observation”?

Is that magic strong enough?

Am I clear here? I don’t think so, and I think this is the problem of writing surprise and writing strangeness, surely the dilemma and sine qua non of ethnography. As soon as you write surprise—or, rather, attempt to write it—it is as if the surprise has been made digestible, so it is no longer surprising, no longer strange.

Each writer has interesting and provocative ideas: Mitchell saw Occupy as a new iteration of the revolution as “empty space,” as proposed by Michelet. Harcourt sees it as a new phenomenon he calls “political disobedience” that “resists the very way in which we are governed.” Taussig understands the mic check as a way to “come to grips with trauma,” using “the cultic expression of magic,” reminding me of Rebecca Solnit’s description of the occupations as a response to disaster.

There is for all that a certain tension in finding a place for what Occupy has tried to do within the established forms of academic practice. There is a seemingly deliberately retro list of theoretical references –Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Nietzsche. In short, all the Very Serious Germans–plus Foucault. But no Marina Sitrin, David Graeber, Rebecca Solnit, Zapatista writings and so on. Thus the diligent sub-editors at the University of Chicago changed Harcourt’s “stack takers,” the organizing of people to speak at a meeting, into “stocktakers,” a commercial counting of inventory.

Theory, in the American university, now serves as authority. It brooks no gainsaying other than more theory in response. Occupy has tried to resist authority and to be a leaderless movement. Bernard Harcourt, the legal scholar, takes this problem seriously and gets it right when he says:

[T]hose who theorize the Occupy movement—anyone who is trying to understand the movement, as I am here—cannot speak with authorial voice on behalf of or for the movement, since they are, at the moment, outside the movement.

What, then is the “author” who is part of the claim to authority to do?

Occupy University have been working on this for the past year. When I had the pleasure of doing a learning encounter with them yesterday, I saw a number of ways in which they have brought movement practice into the practice of learning. In this format, while there is a speaker in the conventional way, time is not limited to the standard hour. After I spoke to some images, we sat in a circle and a facilitator took over the discussion.

The facilitator controlled the flow of conversation and I was allowed to step back, rather than engage in the standard Q and A. The practical result was that this part of the evening, usually a test of the speaker’s authority in academia–can they withstand the questions or not?–became the main event. It took most of the time and generated more of the ideas and all the discussion. By the end, there was a joint ownership of the topics under discussion. I know this sounds a bit idealized, but it really was my sense of what happened.

Women in Kashmir burning their electricity bills, 10-18-12

As a result, the conversation was more interactive and engaged than is often the case in academia. Several reasons for this engagement seemed clear. It was a very diverse group, especially in terms of national origin, which allowed for a range of perspectives on debt and the global social movements, rather than referring mainly to OWS. At the same time, people active in the movement here used the encounter to be self-reflexive and critical of their own practice. When there was an opportunity to speak, care was taken to see if someone who had not yet spoken might want to do so. What began a little hesitantly opened up into a space in which Bedouin, German, Palestinian and Indian experience was being cross-referenced.

There were those who touched on theory–Jameson and Rancière for cognitive mapping and the division of the sensible respectively–but I really felt something else was emerging here. This was not a naive or unschooled room of people, in an art foundation in Manhattan. But there was a sense that we were trying to reach a little further, not to score points, but to learn how to learn. I got too involved in following and listening to take proper notes. And that in itself reminded me of being in the park in the first days that the Critical Inquiry team were writing about, when for a long time, I just wanted to be there and be part of it.

It’s Just Academic

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When I was first involved with Occupy Wall Street, academics and intellectuals were everywhere. Education and Empowerment was a massive working group, which did achieve a great deal. A year later and the academics, with honored and honorable exceptions, are on the sidelines, sniping, even as conferences and courses with titles using words like “radical,” “rethinking” and “political” abound. While European movements seem ready to change the paradigm, universities here remain comfortably asleep.

This injunction is against my tenured and tenure-track colleagues. One of the most noticeable features of the movement is the prominent place of adjunct and contingent faculty, and especially graduate students–precisely the people who do have something to lose. These are the people behind Occupy University, the Free University, Occupy Student Debt and many other of the best movement moments. Meanwhile there are a growing wave of books and articles by the tenured, weighing in “more in sorrow than in anger” about the various failures that they perceive in Occupy.

Let’s take an example that has been bouncing around Facebook of late, called “Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements and American Politics,”  published in the online section of Dissent by David Plotke, a professor of politics at the New School. I don’t know Prof. Plotke and as far as I’m aware we haven’t met at any Occupy event. The piece isn’t evil or terrible. It’s just operating in such a different conceptual to those of us working in the movement as to render it ineffective as as intervention.

Plotke offers four contrasting interpretations of Occupy, all of which make judgments in relation to electoral politics, especially the current election., enabling his conclusion that it was a “flash movement.” This undefined term is rendered as calling Occupy

the Herman Cain of the left.

It’s a cheap shot and Plotke quickly disavows it, in a “have your cake and eat it” form of writing.

The three paragraphs on his own answer to the question of Occupy’s meaning are followed by much longer excurses on the impact of Occupy on the Democratic Party, and whether it is more or less effective than the Tea Party. Nowhere does Plotke consider that Occupy was founded as a direct democracy movement, precisely because participants have little or no belief in the current system’s capacity to effect change. It’s right there in the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City:

no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.

It is entirely consistent with such an analysis that, in Plotke’s words:

The Tea Party experience shows how political currents can now appear both inside and outside the party system.

For most in Occupy, and indeed many others, the Tea Party is a well-funded corporate vehicle, tapping into white racism for a brief set of “upsets” in 2010. Plotke is nonetheless impressed with the selection of a far-right candidate for the 2012 Senate election in Texas:

There is nothing marginal or purely symbolic about this sort of success.

We might question how much difference one right-winger from Texas over another will really make. We might make parallels with the nomination of Tammy Baldwin for Senate in Wisconsin, where Occupy activists have invested in electoral politics; or we might talk about Elizabeth Warren. But this is to hold the electoral mirror to Occupy as if it was the goal of the movement: and it is not.

In fact, it is remarkable that throughout the long essay, Plotke never once quotes anyone involved with Occupy, or any of the many documents it has produced, although he did apparently interview people for the piece. Imagine writing on the Republican Party without naming or quoting any known Republicans. Plotke prefers the straw man strategy:

Neo-anarchists and other far leftists provided part of the core leadership of Occupy

He gives these unnamed persons fake credit for starting the movement but continues to note ominously:

There were leaders—yet OWS tended to deny they existed. Without any formal means of selection, they were there.

This is a combination of familiar scare tactics. First, it suggests that there were good things at the beginning (the “flash” moment) that became corrupt. This is a version of the interpretation of the French Revolution that claims to like “1789” but deplore everything that came after the storming of the Bastille. Next, it updates the “reds under the bed” meme of the Cold War to suggest that the poor dupes of the rank-and-file were manipulated by extremists:

Affirming the virtues of a leaderless and unprogrammatic movement afforded room for maneuver for actual leaders, without requiring them to articulate and defend their political and ideological positions. In this rapid and surprising sequence, neo-anarchists became Popular Front Leninists of a sort.

Does that sound familiar, Occupy people? Or does it sound more like a familiar Cold War paranoia from the New York “public intellectual” class?

This America-centric reading is consistent with the lack of mention of any of the other global justice movements from the Arab Spring to the Indignados and Quebec strikers that both inspired and sustained Occupy. On and on, Plotke goes misrepresenting the movement. He snips:

We’re not likely to see large efforts by an Occupy Dallas or Occupy South Carolina.

Really? But Occupy Atlanta was very strong before its eviction, and Occupy Tampa continues to be so. Just today word came in of activists in Utah creating a Strike Debt project and reprinting the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. Plotke will say, well, that’s not a “large effort.” It is for the people involved. What has mattered in this first year to most of us is the chance to try to be the change we’d like to see. We’re carrying on, making links with colleagues in Europe and Latin America. It’s a shame so few have been willing to get out of the ivory tower to join in.