Forty symbolizes the overcoming of hardship. The Israelites wandered for forty years, while Jesus spent forty days in the desert. For hunger strikers, forty days marks the passage into system failure–the hearing goes, sight fails, the body collapses. Despite everything, let’s hear the call from Manchester: “don’t look back in anger.”
The failure of the strikers’ bodies symbolizes the catastrophic failure of seventy years of counterinsurgency waged by advanced capitalism in the Middle East. At least, a failure on any human terms. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has used the Manchester atrocity to not only acknowledge this but to call for
the solidarity, humanity and compassion that we have seen on the streets of Manchester this week to be the values that guide our government.
These ideas have closed the gap in the opinion polls from close to 20% to just 5% in a few weeks. Meanwhile everyone here tells me it’s all about 2018 and 2020, while the Democrats continue to offer warmongering and neoliberalism lite.
At the vigil to mark the deaths of twenty-two people in the Manchester Arena, one Mancunian woman just began to sing Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis, a song that so evokes the Northwest of England. And everyone joined in.
My friend Paul, an activist-artist and a truly inspiring person, who has deep roots in Salford, Manchester’s working-class and immigrant twin city, puts this sentiment into words:
I worry that the very use of the word “Terrorism” suggests that there is a need to identify an enemy, rather than the impulse to reach out to a friend. What has happened is human tragedy; it reflects the pain and suffering of countless others in distant parts of the world. Our only answer is unity. We must resolve to stay true to this purpose.
I worry that we in the United States cannot find this humanity in ourselves any more as a collective. I worry that we exalt a leader who pushes his way to the front and boasts of abusing women. I worry that voters in Montana looked at a candidate assault a Jewish journalist and elected him anyway. I worry that my Jewish peers can’t get past their anger to see that the new right are old-school anti-semitic.
Do we doubt that what happened in Manchester is not in very direct ways connected to the intervention in Libya? Do we not realize that a renewed willingness to kill civilians, which has killed 1793 people in Mosul alone since January (according to Airwars) can only make this worse?
How long can you occupy a country in anger? How many people have to die before your anger is exhausted? How many days are enough?
In the flash of the media cameras and the detonation of a bomb, Manchester and Palestine yesterday became a dialectical image of the present. The invisible, drawn-out suffering of the hunger strikers in Palestine shatters against the hypervisible instant of mass mediated murder. The clash of two sets of images produced a fragmented sense of the uneven time in which we live and die or, more exactly, live dying.
Last remains of the Peterloo Massacre (1815)
So many times were present in that moment. One could speak of the mediated spectacle of Ariana Grande in the home of the Industrial Revolution. Of the death of fifteen strikers in the Peterloo Massacre of 1815, less than a mile from the Manchester Arena. Of the gentrification of a city once known as “Gunchester.” Of the long unwinding of the British Mandate in Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East. Of the static condition of “terrorism” and “counterinsurgency” that has persisted since the Cold War. And, above all, of the intersection of lived lives that ended because fascism is willing to use them to make its interventions.
manchester
The so-called suicide bomber does not have suicide as their primary goal. It is a means to the end of producing the impactful image, the place that will be remembered until the next detonation. The index was defined by Charles Sanders Pierce as the bullet hole that indexed the passing of a bullet. That was the analog photograph. In the age of the camera as data-gathering device, the explosion and its impact is now the index of the “image.” This “image” stems from the release of light and energy caused by a bomb. If it makes sense, as I think it does, to understand this as an “image,” it changes what is meant by that term. It perhaps explains the difficulty an actual photograph or video has in recording or making social change.
If we were to ask W. J. T. Mitchell’s famous question, “what does the picture want?” of such images, the answer would be “to create multiple deaths and injuries.” That is “impact” in the age of data-gathering and quantification. Such is the actuarial calculus of the mediated spectacle of death, the counterpart to the “message” sent by the cruise missile or the MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs). To whom are such messages sent? By what device are they to be recorded? The indexical image pointed to a moment in time. The impact image stops time. Think of the clocks and watches from Hiroshima, all stopped at 8.15 am, the time of detonation.
The goal of the insurgent and counterinsurgent is to create a battlefield that can then be visualized. Britain has rushed troops into the streets, as if in recognition that the bomb has succeeded in forming a new space of combat. The IRA bombings, like that in Manchester in 1996, were always “one-offs,” with specific targets. ISIS-style random attacks are designed to create the sense that there may be a series. It is, like it or not, insurgency for the socially-mediated network era. It is an image-event composed of a series of actual or potential “impacts.”
palestine
The Palestinian hunger strikers are, in the phrase of their Irish Republican counterparts in 1981, “going to the edge.” The temporalities here are the intersection of bodily time, the time of imprisonment and the fatal moment of release. Prisoners are making their bodies into icons by suffering, as Allen Feldman observed of the Irish hunger strike. There are, just as there were in 1981, furious denunciations that these are “just” violent criminals.How would those who are just see the strike, I wonder? Whether one accepts such charges or not, the time is different now. By striking to death, the hunger striker seeks to separate their physical bodies, which may or may not have done terrible things, from their iconic images as martyrs.
Watch, if you can, the video clip of prison officers dragging two hunger strikers into vans to be transferred to hospital. I don’t know who these people are, or what they have been accused or convicted of doing. But forcing them to walk when they have not eaten for thirty-eight days conveys the sense that the regime does not regard the prisoners as people. All Palestinians remain forbidden, until and unless they both “renounce” violence, as if it is a creed rather than an act, and “recognize” Israel, a form of seeing that would amount to self-denial. By contrast, any person of Jewish descent that does not so recognize the “right” of the regime to perpetrate such violence is “self-hating.”
But for the most part, the hunger strike is unseen, unmediated and, outside Palestine and those in solidarity with it, ignored. Further, those striking can do so only in the expectation of not actually seeing themselves as icons. They have taken the call to renunciation and turned into a form of self-directed action. In the words of one Irish Republican, hunger strikers use their own “bodies as a protest weapon.”
That is the “edge,” the rendering of the physical body into a counter-border. The power of this immaterial icon depends precisely on the time, forty to sixty days, it takes to starve oneself to death. By imposing a worse punishment on themselves than even the carceral state is prepared to mete out, the strikers defy its logic.
The messianic hope is that this defiance jumps the wall, as it were, and reaches the outside. By striking en masse–over a thousand are involved–the Palestinians are hoping to create a “wave” response to mass death. It is a perhaps deliberate contrast to the Irish hunger strike that went from person to person, but ended up diminishing the impact of subsequent deaths. It is astonishing what you can get used to seeing in the era of the mediated spectacle.
The icons of the hunger strike will be nothing in themselves unless they become a catalyst for change. The gamble is that the amount of time involved gives the regime plenty of time to prepare. When Bobby Sands died in 1981, Catholic areas in Belfast were sealed off and the British Army was in place. There will be no surprise, no time-stopping “impact” as there was in Manchester. Time is exactly what is in play.
Dialectics of oil
The dialectical image of the present does not operate within a philosophical “logic,” like that of Hegel. Rather it operates within the totalizing “logical” system that has demolished the balance of geological modernity, namely petrocracy, the mutually reinforcing rule of fossil fuels and monotheism.
Petrocracy is an autocratic state apparatus defined for and by the exploitation of fossil fuels, whose lineage can be traced back through the world-destroying projects of racial capitalism. Its presence today is self-evident from Putin’s gas-driven regime in Russia to Rex Tillerson, to the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, now the Secretary of State in the United States and, of course, the entire Middle East and Gulf region oil regimes.
So it is no coincidence that this dialectical moment opened with the United States agreeing to sell armaments worth $110 billion to the autocrats of Saudi Arabia in the name of peace. The US regime appears to be attempting to reconfigure the Middle East from Saudi Arabia, in alliance with Israel, against Iran. In so doing, they remarkably ISIS, funded and backed by Saudi Arabia, as were the 9-11 hijackers.
Trump in Bethlehem
The illogical “logic” of petrocracy was encapsulated in this image of Trump’s motorcade passing Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem (thanks to Richard Reilly for posting it). Established in 1948 after the Nakba, Aida is now bordered by the Separation Wall on one side and Banksy’s new “Walled Off Hotel” on another. Both the Wall and the hotel serve as spaces for protest art. The insufficiency of such visual depictions in the face of the spectacle of “peace” is epitomized by the poster created for Trump’s 90 minute visit.
Bethlehem Poster, May 23 2017 (Jerusalem Post).
It says: “The city of peace welcomes the man of peace.” One can only presume that the “man of peace” is Trump and Abbas is simply content to share the visual field with him as a form of legitimation. “Peace” becomes a battlefield in which to be seen. The poster, in common with all the media coverage of the non-event of their meeting, served as a screen, preventing any possibility of the actually-existing conditions of Palestine actually being seen.
Prisoners mothers waiting for Trump (Jerusalem Post)
Outside the Church of the Nativity, a long line of mothers of hunger strikers awaited Trump. Despite his recent claim to Christianity, Trump skipped the visit and the potentially challenging confrontation was avoided. In Northern Ireland, mothers were often deployed by the British to break the strike, as Feldman documents. To have twenty-two mothers within this one shot willing to endorse their children starving themselves to death would, one might have thought, been worthy of mention.
The ISIS-style action in Manchester had as one of its effects the occlusion of the Palestinian protest and the hunger strike from what was its best chance of gaining international attention.
Dialectics of Resistance
In the 1960s, James Boggs considered the dialectic and the possibility of revolution in Detroit. After the Detroit Uprising of 1967, he and Grace Lee Boggs came to consider that a Bolshevik-style revolution was no longer possible. It changed his view of the dialectic:
Reforms and revolutions are created by the illogical actions of people. Very few logical people ever make reforms and none make revolutions. Rights are what you make and what you take.
Boggs anticipated an idea better known in the later work of Jacques Rancière–that rights are made by those who do not have them in circumstances where they are actually denied. Rosa Parks taking her seat in the bus had no right to do so but opened the way both to the reforms of the Civil Rights Movement and the possibility of revolution.
If the logic of petrocratic capital requires “illogical” responses, then dialectically that opens the possibility of fascist actions, like those of ISIS, to claim the rhetoric of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Given their willingness to use the bodies of others to comprise their impact images, they garner media, military and political attention without parallel. I am not for one instant suggesting that radicals of the left should emulate or envy these actions. But just as Walter Benjamin noted the power of the fascist aesthetic in the 1930s, it would be foolish to pretend that the dialectic of the present is equal. Nor, as I have tried to show, can we respond like Benjamin with a simple injunction to politicize the “image.” That has been tried and it has failed and continues to fail.
Where the damned of the earth resist, we must be in solidarity and we must make that resistance visible, even and especially if it makes us uncomfortable and challenges some of our “givens.” The situation is new. The solutions we have are old. If not now, when?
These posts are difficult to write and I’m sure they are difficult to read. By measuring the time taken to write–or to read–it is possible enter the symbolic world created by the hunger strike, a world in which existence matters. It is the force of the statement made by the strike that enables this fragmentary sliver of participation. It is their gift to those in solidarity, the hospitality of those utterly without resource. Like all gifts, it invokes a response, the taking of the time to feel for an instant the stakes of their action.
For a hunger strike both compresses and expands time. Every moment without sustenance is freighted with meaning and, after the first days, haunted with danger. And yet it also makes things visible. It opens the understanding of the long hunger strike from Atlantic slavery, to British imperialism, women’s suffrage and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The long hunger strike is interwoven with British coloniality, from slavery to Ireland, the women’s suffrage struggle, India and the former British mandate of Palestine. This pattern stems from the British practice of using regulated hunger as a weapon, which was then turned against them by the enslaved and colonized.
the long hunger strike
The long hunger strike turns the state weapon of hunger against itself. It changes the terms of the encounter between the state regime and the body of those Fanon called les damnés, the damned–those who have no voice that the state can hear. By risking life, the damned reclaim dignity and in so doing make themselves heard. This is not a statement in the manner of a politician proposing a settlement, or a philosopher formulating a maxim. It is one that is felt within the body, at a molecular level. It is nonetheless articulate. It enacts the right to exist through the self-willed challenge to life.
The power to keep people in hunger of all kinds is a tool of coloniality, the transhistorical expansion of colonial domination and its continued effects. Whereas, according to Nelson Maldonando Torres,
decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world
Humans have the right to exist, so they share food and offer hospitality to each other. They know that living together is the only way that humans may live and the only way to avoid ge(n)ocide. Dignity is the right to exist. If it is refused, people strike.
Slavery and the hunger strike
For Marcus Rediker, the historian of slavery,
The Atlantic slave trade was, in many senses, a four-hundred-year hunger strike.
In Central and West Africa, a politics of “eating” was central to social ordering. As Africanist Wyatt McGaffey has summarized it
An ordered society is one in which ‘eating,’ both literal and metaphorical is properly distributed
Eating is both supplying food and creating conditions in which people, animals and spirits alike can thrive. A slave ship was very obviously not such a place. Many captive Africans refused to eat. In 1727 a man refused to eat on board the Loyal George, causing its captain to torture and kill him, whereupon all the Africans rose in revolt. Similar violence on the ship City of London caused all the 377 Africans on board to go on hunger strike in 1730. A Fante man (name unknown) undertook a fatal hunger strike on board the Brooks, the ship famously drawn by abolitionists. The little Black stick figures were people, who had a politics and acted on it.
HMS Brooks, slave ship
As a result, the slavers resorted to force feeding, using a metal device called the speculum oris to force open African hunger strikers’ mouths. As the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson reported in 1808:
the slaves were frequently so sulky, as to shut their mouths against all sustenance, and this with a determination to die; and that it was necessary their mouths should be forced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased them might incur no loss by their death.
Speculum oris to open the mouth of a hunger striker, c.1850
It rarely worked (if by that we mean “kept the captive alive”) but it perhaps deterred others. Many more “returned to Africa” by means of their hunger strikes.
the suffragettes
The same tool was used against the Suffragettes, when they undertook hunger strikes in British prisons. In July 1909, the artist Marion Wallace-Dunlop was imprisoned for stamping a slogan on the walls of Parliament. She refused to eat, declaring
I claim the right recognized by all civilized nations that a person imprisoned for a political offence should have first-division treatment; and as a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me, I am now refusing all food until this matter is settled
She was, in short, on dignity strike. “First division” treatment was a provision of the 1898 Prison Act, whereby the prisoner would not be subjected to a month of solitary confinement, or have to wear prison dress. They were allowed visits and reading materials. “Second” and “Third” division prisoners were allowed none of these things and had to maintain silence at all times, or else be placed on bread-and-water diet.
As the writer Oscar Wilde, sentenced to two years hard labour, put it in a letter to the Daily Chronicle in 1898, there were “three permanent punishments authorised by law in English prisons”: hunger, insomnia, and disease. The hunger striker in British prisons, like those in the slave ships before them, turned the state’s weapons against itself.
For this presumption, they paid a terrible price. Using the speculum oris, prison administrators force fed the Suffragettes, especially those from the working class. Sylvia Pankhurst, arrested in 1913 for breaking a window as part of the Suffragette escalation of the period, described how she was force fed after a hunger strike of only three days:
I felt a steel instrument pressing against my gums, cutting into the flesh, forcing its way in. Then it gradually prised my jaws apart as they turned a screw. It felt like having my teeth drawn; but I resisted—I resisted. I held my poor bleeding gums down on the steel with all my strength. Soon they were trying to force the india-rubber tube down my throat. I was struggling wildly, trying to tighten the muscles and to keep my throat closed up. They got the tube down, I suppose, though I was unconscious of anything but a mad revolt of struggling, for at last I heard them say, “That’s all”; and I vomited as the tube came up. ….But infinitely worse than any pain was the sense of degradation, the sense that the very fight that one made against the repeated outrage was shattering one’s nerves and breaking down one’s self-control.
Force feeding was also rape. Sometimes the prison authorities tried to make this anatomically specific, by inserting food into women’s vaginas and rectums. The women called it “violation.”
the palestinian dignity strike day 35
The logic of colonial domination continues in the former British mandate of Palestine today. 33% of the Palestinian population are what the UN call “food insecure,” meaning threatened by hunger. This hunger is unevenly experienced: 57% of those living in Gaza suffer it, as do 19% of those living in the West Bank. An outside visitor to Palestine, like myself, would be hard put to document this suffering because Palestinians are so committed to hospitality. We visited a village demolished over 100 times by Israeli police, reduced to only two tents, where our hosts produced a delicious and generous lunch, quite unasked and utterly not to be refused.
Within the Israeli prison system, food supply is a consistent problem. Families are not allowed to bring in food and, according to a 2016 report by Addameer, “the quality of the food and the quantity has decreased dramatically” since 2011. Not least, the fall in quality is due to the fact that Israeli convicts prepare the food for Palestinian prisoners. As a result, prisoners rely on a privatized and expensive canteen, forcing them to participate in the prison labor system. Prisoners spend an average $111 on food per month, which is “shopped” and cooked collectively at a mark up of over 20% from outside shops. The Israeli Prison Service makes over $30 million a year from this system.
Like the enslaved and the disenfranchised women before them, the Palestinians are turning the system’s withholding of food into a means to reclaim dignity. So it is denied to them in other ways. Far-right activists held a barbecue outside a prison, taunting the prisoners with the smell of food, just as British prison authorities left eggs, bread, milk and chops in the cells of Suffragettes. The prison service released a video purporting to show Marwan Barghouti eating a candy bar after more than two weeks of hunger strike. If he had done, he would have vomited it immediately. No media bothered to mention that.
