Why there will be a Greek Revolution this year

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The cut-up XtraNormal video says it all–the “deal” is a mess and is not going to work. The details of what ordinary Greeks can expect were revealed late yesterday:

The measures include nearly €400 million ($530 million) in cuts to already depleted pensions. Health and education spending will be reduced by more than €170 million ($225 million), subsidies to the state health care system will be cut by €500 million ($661 million), and health care spending on medicine will fall by €570 million ($754 million). And some €400 million ($529 million) will be lopped off defense spending — three quarters of which will come from purchases.

And no one expects this disaster to work:

The draft law also drastically revises the 2012 budget, changing the government deficit target to 6.7 percent of gross domestic product from an initial forecast of 5.4 percent. Even worse, plans for a modest primary surplus — which excludes debt servicing costs — have been scrapped and Greece will instead post a primary deficit of nearly €500 million ($661 million), or 0.2 percent of GDP.

If you wonder whether people might not just feel they have to accept this, here’s Ilias Iliopoulos, general secretary of the Greek civil servants’ union Adedy, not one of the more radical groups as you might expect: “I don’t rule out a popular revolt.”

Some nuggets suggest why:

  • Greek bank shares are down 10% this morning.
  • The “Socialist” party that brought in the crisis is running at 12% in the polls.
  • Greek debt was cut from CCC to C by the Fitch agency, which equals default.
  • As the New York Times speculated this morning, that would mean Credit Default Swaps start to be activated: do banks have the money to cover them? What do you think?

Unsurprisingly, what the Times does not mention is that the left is resurgent:

Left-wing parties that oppose the next round of cuts the coalition government is promising are meanwhile surging. A relatively new party, the Democratic Left, is nipping at Pasok’s heels, with 12 per cent, twice as much support as it had in December. Another, the Coalition of the Left, has 8.5 per cent support, and the communist party, KKE, has 9.5 per cent.

In the event that these parties were able to form a Popular Front against the Troika, they would win an election, as the Conservative Party that the Times claims is “heading” for an election win is polling at 19%. Even a coalition without the dogmatic Communists would win on these numbers.

The defense cuts might make us nervous about a military coup: which brought to mind Costa Gavras’s classic film Z (1969) about the repression that led to the Greek dictatorship of the colonels (1967-74). The title of the film is not explained until the very end. It is not a letter: it stands for zei (he/she/it lives).

In the context of the film, this is taken to refer to the lead character, who has been assassinated by the secret police. His identity is clearly that of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, killed in 1963. The list of those things to be banned include zei, which we might now want to read as “it lives,” that which was supposed to be long dead, interred and forgotten–the revolution.

Debt Servitude and (Micro)Fascism

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IMF leader Lagarde to Greek PM Papademos: "Do something for the poor? that's hilarious!"

The widely-circulated photographs of the Troika laughing it up as they imposed their settlement on Greece reflect their triumph at imposing a neo-liberal colonization of Europe. As Frantz Fanon noted in 1963:

What is fascism but colonialism at the heart of traditionally colonialist countries?

The debt servitude being imposed on mass populations in the interest of transnational capital represents a neo-colonialism, in which the colonial powers like Portugal, Spain and Italy will be recolonized after the long-term Ottoman colony Greece.

It’s worth rehearsing the breath-taking Treaty-of-Versailles-style conditions imposed on Greece. According to the Guardian:

the European commission will present proposals for “an enhanced and permanent presence” of debt inspectors in Athens later…Greeks have already suffered a 30% cut in wages and can look forward to steep cuts in the minimum wage as well as pensions…Eurozone finance ministers have demanded that the Greek Constitution be revised to give debt payments top priority in government spending.

The money for the bond markets will be placed in a charmingly named “segregation account,” as if to remind everyone of the fascist neo-colonialism that has been created.

There was an alternative: an 2001 Argentina-style default, with a relaunched currency. From this crisis emerged the practice of horizontalidad that has been so influential across the Occupy movement. In Occupy!#3, Marina Sitrin quotes Neka from the unemployed workers movement near Buenos Aires:

it was a sort of waking up to a knowledge that was collective…It was like each day is a horizon that opens before us

This “horizonism” is the direct opposite of debt servitude.

Towers of Debt at NYU

Today I was reminded that such servitude is local as well as global, a microfascism to match the global neo-colonial project. At my institution, NYU, there is currently a plan to build 6 million square feet of new office and residential space in a series of skyscrapers. As well as destroying the character of Greenwich Village, and making Washington Square a building site for 20 years, this plan will cost $6 billion.

When asked where this money would come from an official replied: “NYU is not afraid of debt.” Given the enormity of the sum–twice the entire endowment of the university–and the crisis of debt worldwide, you wonder why. I asked a friend who works at Credit Suisse–in the compliance department that makes banks abide by regulation–and she replied “Money is cheap.” Which is to say, the interest rates on the bonds will be so low that the investment makes perfect sense to a Board of Trustees filled with people from JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Paulson, Met Life and so on.

Who will repay the money? According to NYU4OWS and the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, the only possible answer is students–via their tuition fees, financed in turn by student debt. Student debt is about to surpass one trillion dollars and is the largest single sector of consumer debt, even exceeding credit cards. NYU is already top of the league for student debt per capita. What is especially heinous about this exchange is that money borrowed at less than one per cent interest is likely to be repaid by loans carrying interest in the range of eight to ten per cent. Student debt cannot be liquidated, meaning that even people who are bankrupt, or on social security have to repay it. As a powerful essay in the Village Voice last year showed, many NYU grads have to abandon ideas of careers serving the public good for corporate positions in order to make their payments.

What can be done about this servitude? Horizontalism insists that there is no point in applying for redress to leaders–as you can see above, the very idea makes them laugh. Yesterday at an event in New York City, David Graeber argued that one of the most critical developments of 2011 was a transformation of the imagination. In other words, it began to become possible to visualize a world in which the economic was not the dominant value.

In terms of debt, this would mean refusing the demand that debt repayment is the highest form of morality. When debts are imposed or exacerbated beyond any realistic possibility of repayment, the ethical approach is to move beyond the horizons of money. You can pledge to refuse to repay your loan if one million other people do so here: and decide whether you’re actually going to do that when it gets into the high 900,000s–for now it’s about pressuring for change. For faculty supporting debtors, pledge here and for family and others supporting debtors pledge here: this is important to show that the community supports debt refusal, but demands little more than a few clicks for now.

In terms of the horizontal imagination, imagine what was once the case: a public education from pre-K to PhD that is entirely free. This long-time position of abolition democracy needs to be insisted upon not in terms of accounting–that people need degrees to get jobs and so on–but in terms of democracy: a direct democracy needs citizens who are critical, knowledgeable, resourceful and autonomous.

That won’t happen overnight but here’s what we can do now: stop using economic metaphors for the critical projects that we engage in. Stop asking “how’s your work going?”, or using metaphors and scales of productivity, or otherwise commodifying the common intellect. In work using digital technologies in particular, leave aside notions of “rich” data, “robust” platforms and all the other quasi-market metaphors.

Stop thinking like a market. A market likes an investment (a beginning), a time of production (the middle) and, above all, profit, aka the end. This is why Occupy insists on the primacy of the everyday because it needs doing every day, like child care, sustenance, farming and other forms of sustaining.

Try it. It’s fun.

Occupy France, Occupy Global Steel?

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One conspicuous absentee from the Occupy movement has been France, despite its long radical heritage. At a meeting in November 2011 in New York, French intellectuals expressed disdain for the ideas of consensus and the indignés as being insufficiently rigorous. Now French steelworkers have occupied their plant and put up tents.

French steel unions occupy

A coalition of French unions has set in motion an occupation at the ArcelorMittal plant in the north-eastern town of Florange in the Moselle, following a decision taken at a general assembly of workers. The plant employs about 5000 people and several hundred workers have set up in the offices to prevent management from permanently shutting down the plant. They hope for a government intervention as the last hope of saving their jobs.

ArcelorMittal is the self-declared leading global integrated mining and steel production company with revenues of over $94 billion in 2011 and outlets in 60 countries. However, the firm has recently shut down plants in Belgium and Madrid, leading the workforce to distrust assurances that this will be just a temporary shutdown. Perhaps the fact that CEO Lakshmi Mittal is on the board of Goldman Sachs fails to inspire confidence in the workforce?

Their strategy is to maintain political pressure on the government with actions on at least a weekly basis until the end of the French presidential elections in May. In the last election, Sarkozy promised to keep a neighboring steel plant at Garange in production but has failed. In fact, over 350,000 industrial jobs have been lost in France in the last four years. However, the leader of the Left Front,  Jean-Luc Mélenchon, reasserted today that “democracy is not a matter of consensus,” in the context of his entirely appropriate opposition to the fascist National Front. Mélenchon might want to think about a form of modified consensus as a means to mobilize anti-fascist unity, but his statement seems more like a form of political maneuver for percentage points in the election than a strategy.

The industries of primary extraction and manufacture–coal, oil, gas, steel, etc.–seem to recur far more often in the narrative of Occupy than one might have expected in a movement concerned with the financial crisis. We are often told that “old” industries of this kind are irrelevant in today’s post-industrial economy. Yet as the expansion of other Indian-led deunionized steel firms like Jindal Steel has shown, the primary motivation is reducing costs not ending production. The French unions point out that global steel production surpassed 1.5 billion tons last year for the first time, hardly a sign of lack of demand.

In their classic Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued that Marx’s theory of the “primitive accumulation” of capital via “looting, enslavement and murder” was not a once-and-for-all moment. Rather, this primitive accumulation stage is inherent to all capitalist development. Their stress on “immaterial” accumulation needs to be supplemented with these accumulations of basic extraction. Lost within the many takeovers of Mittal Steel, for example, is the remnants of Bethlehem Steel, one of the former great industrial powers of the U.S. The spatial relations of inside and outside mapped by primitive accumulation now seem still more complex. Mittal Steel was founded in India in 1976 and became Ispat International, based in Sumatra, in 1989. When this group absorbed the US steel remnants in 2004, Mittal was formed only to merge with Arcelor in 2006. Their accountants are Deloitte, mentioned earlier this week.

The French steelworkers believe that the company is directed from London. In corporate terms it is headquartered in Luxemburg but has industrial presence on every continent. It works in the tightly orchestrated pattern of globalized finance networks that are directed by firms like Goldman Sachs and Deloitte. As Hardt and Negri put it:

Informational accumulation destroys or at least destructures the previously existing productive processes, but it immediately integrates those productive processes into its own networks and generates across the different realms of production the highest levels of productivity.

Inside and outside reverse and re-reverse at such speed that it is hard to keep the process in sight. A supposedly powerful nation state like France is no more able to constrain this process than weakened locations, such as Greece. The French workers have tried to make this network visible to themselves and to others by means of their occupation. Occupy asserts a presence in space that the networks of accumulation seek to render invisible and irrelevant.

It remains to be seen if this step will produce an Occupy theory of political economy in France or if it was merely a move in the political theatre of the election. In any event, bienvenue chez Occupy, Français et Françaises!

Futures of Occupy

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As much as I have wanted to stress the present and future present of Occupy, I keep getting asked to do events or to write about the future of Occupy. I’m coming to think that the “future of Occupy” would be changing the terms of the way that the “economy” is discussed. From this perspective, we can see how two parallel, failing discourses of governance regarding austerity and climate change need to be converged and reversed.

The prevailing governance requires austerity to placate the bond market, even as it also wants to promote growth to generate revenues to make future bond payments. It dismisses the possibility of climate change being a present-day issue, displacing it to a remote future. If Occupy is truly “a state of mind,” as many post-eviction banners have had it, then one way to express it would be to present a radical alternative to this neo-liberal consensus.

Present austerity is actively producing the societal emergency it claims to be solving from Greece to Portugal, Ireland and Italy. It seems as if bond-holders hope to recoup as much of their investment as they can as soon as possible, ignoring the future social ramifications of the crisis thereby produced. The Greek elections in April will undoubtedly be, shall we say, interesting. There are rumors from France that the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen may finish first in the Presidential elections: if she is in a run-off against the Socialist, it is uncertain that right-wing voters can be relied on to rally to Hollande. So neo-liberalism seems actively willing to gamble with the rise of the far right in order to sustain profits.

The vague hope for “growth” as a solution to the social crisis fails to recognize that all industrial and manufacturing growth at present is going to entail higher levels of carbon emissions. In New York today, I saw a cherry tree in blossom: on February 19. Yet when the New York Times published today about the impossibility of ice-fishing in Minnesota due to the thin ice this winter, the phrase climate change was not used. The deniers have pushed the debate out of the liberal mainstream.

In a report published yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists entitled Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public’s Expense, the list of smear and diversion tactics described is as striking as the direct connection to the polluting corporations.:

the key driver of political interference in federal science: the inappropriate influence of companies with a financial stake in the outcome…

 

In 2010, the oil and gas sector donated more than $10 million to PACs. The largest donors were Koch Industries ($1.2 million) and ExxonMobil ($1 million).

For this, the oil and gas industry obtained the active support of a Republican House. A larger investment will secure the Senate and independence from the Presidency.

There is a further irony that one of the few government interventions into the recession that appears to have been very successful was also one that does most damage in terms of climate change–the auto industry “bailout.” After reading the UCS report, it is hard not to suspect that the same players that have targeted climate science were comfortable letting the government support the car industry, while being happy to see that mass transit options were defeated.

In the background lurks Keystone XL.

Al Gore's comment on Keystone

Al Gore has tried to characterize the tar sands campaign as “addiction,” part of the “addiction to oil” meme that is now a cliché. My feeling is that the neo-liberal corporate machine is constantly harping on Keystone not just to gain approval of the pipeline. The Canadians seem set on producing the “oil” and the Chinese will buy it, meaning that the multinationals will make their money. However, the “controversy” makes it less and less likely that the Democrats in Congress and the President will campaign on climate issues.

Therefore, any return to “growth,” the only solution that neo-liberal capital can offer, will not only be to the profit of corporations but structured around fossil fuel extraction and transport, leading to the continued success of the spectacularly profitable oil and gas sector. Mainstream liberalism nonetheless continues to believe that discussion can produce a return to what the UCS call “transparency and accountability in the use of science” and, by extension, in politics.

Occupy knows that this future is not going to happen. The future we’re likely to get is a willingness to “liquiduate everything” in the newly-fashionable phrase of depression era Treasury Secretrary Andrew W. Mellon. Fossil fuel generated growth will promote both greater climate change and further political chaos and extremism, funded by the unrestrained PACs. The Occupy encampments actively performed an alternative to that future. Other, unexpected ways have to be found to visualize it now, to make the connection between “prosperity without growth,” ending climate change and ending political corruption.

On Duration

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Does duration matter? How long is a protest? How long is a movement? When is it “over”? In beginning this project, I had in mind durational performances, like those of Tehching Hsieh, while realizing that there is a very considerable difference between durational writing and embodied durational performance.

Hsieh "Outside Piece (1981-2)

Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950) arrived undocumented in New York in 1974 from Taiwan via a job in merchant shipping. Four years later he began making astonishing year-long performances, beginning with Cage Piece (1978-79) in which he spent an entire year in a cage. He followed this with Time Clock Piece (1980-81)  in which he endeavored to punch a time clock every hour over the course of a year, missing only 134 hours over the course of the year.

His next project, Outdoor Piece (1981-82), has a striking resonance today.  “I shall stay OUTDOORS for one year, never go inside. / I shall not go in to a building, subway, train, car, airplane, ship, cave, tent. / I shall have a sleeping bag.” Hsieh occupied New York. He did not go near Wall Street, though.

In the film documentation embedded below you can get a feel for the project from Hsieh’s preparations, his sleeping, eating and grooming arrangements over the course of the piece and how he passed his time.

In the last few minutes of the film, the crisis of the project arises, when the NYPD arrest Hsieh for being involved in a fight. From what his lawyer says later it seems that Hsieh was attacked and defended himself, but the police take him inside a police station, causing him obvious distress. In one of many distinctions between present-day New York and the time of the project, Hsieh is permitted by the judge in his case not to come inside to his hearing because he is a “serious artist.”

You notice many other little details: the availability of pay phones, food vendors that sell out of the window to the sidewalk and street markets allows Hsieh to sustain his project and make use of a range of commodities, all of which would be much harder now. He makes a call next to a cop but is not harassed as present-day street people and Occupiers alike tend to be.

In the other hand, it’s often pointed out that it was the proximity of a McDonalds and a Starbucks to Zuccotti Park that allowed the occupiers access to bathrooms that enable the park to remain sanitary. Hsieh did not have that option, as the film shows. He has to make do as best he can, washing from fire hydrants and urinating in the open.

In other ways, Hsieh did not stand out as much as the occupiers did. As one can see in the film, there were numerous indeterminate “zones” in the city, such as the river bank on the West side and even Washington Square Park, where flexible living arrangements were tolerated. Indeed, the homeless population in both New York and the US in general began to expand dramatically in 1981, leading to the foundation of the Coalition for the Homeless in that year. It was not until 1983 that the New York Times began to refer to homeless people as opposed to vagrants.

What can we learn from Hsieh’s experience of duration? He has said that he did not find the performances difficult but that he was “depressed” afterwards. There is a relation of time, work and narrative here. Time is measured in his projects, whether by the punching of the clock or by the full duration of the project, but it is not a relation to alienated labor. It makes us realize how much our sense of time is dictated by work, from the so-called 9-5, to the weekend, the “holidays” and so on. We do not experience time as a measure of life or of understanding but more as a burden–as in the “thank god that’s over” response.

Hsieh’s work makes us understand that the Hollywood version of narrative  is always already about moving through a predictable “arc” to the predetermined ending. Investment, going to market, followed by profit has been laid over the classical exordium, agon, catharsis. There is no catharsis in the market relation. It is a narrative without reward other than the shadow of supposedly increased value.

Instead, Hsieh stayed in the moment–for a year. From Buddhist philosophy to revolutionary praxis, the task is precisely to stay in the moment, not to move on but stay there where always were but differently: as ourselves, between ourselves, not in predetermined market relations. Don’t go back.

Occupy (and) the Art World?

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There are so many artists involved in OWS and there are workgroups like Arts and Labor, Arts and Culture, Occupy Museums and more. But the official “Art World” was never that interested and now thinks it’s all over.

This morning, I click on a forwarded link for Holland Cotter’s review of The Ungovernables, the New Museum Triennial, and I read that the show is set

in the context of, among other things, the recent Occupy movement. The reference is getting old now, but you can see its point.

Here Occupy is a fashion point, referring back to last Fall’s talking points but getting a bit tired.

Why does the art world not get similarly tired of wealthy patrons dictating “taste” or indeed of the neo-liberal regime of the art market? Why is it not bored of Sotheby’s, the art auction house, locking out its union Teamsters Local 814 in order to reduce still further their labor costs? These staff are art handlers, so you would think you would want that job done well. Perhaps we get a clue when we learn that Diana Taylor, director of the board at Brookfield Properties, owner of Zuccotti Park, is also on the board at Sotheby’s.

Dahn Vo

The review is set under Dahn Voh’s We The People (pictured above). This is what passes in the art world for politics: fragments of a full size casting of the Statue of Liberty arranged tastefully in the by-now clichéd “propped-up-against-the-wall style” (indicates radicality, refusal to conform: by conforming to the new way to refuse to conform, see the last two Whitney Biennials at least). It’s vagueness leaves me, shall we say, bored.

Still from "Trainee"

To be fair to Cotter, a critic who has done a good deal to promote the understanding of so-called non-Western art, he does not miss the strong points in the show, stressing a

video piece, by the Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, is a triennial highlight. She made it in 2008, after taking a job at an accounting firm. After some training she took her assigned desk and sat there for a month, doing not a lick of work, just staring off into space, breaking the routine only to ride the company elevator repeatedly up and down. Her fellow employees were friendly at first, and curious, but soon grew wary, then hostile, as it became clear that her spaced-out behavior was going to continue and that she wasn’t going to explain.

[link added]

But he misses the politics here altogether. It’s not just “an accounting firm”–it’s Deloitte, the accountancy giant, with $12 billion in revenues in the US and $28 billion worldwide 2011. Because, as my grandfather used to say, accountants are the only people who work in a recession, they have actually grown since 2008. Many of their people go on to become Conservative MPs or House Republicans. In their own words:

“Deloitte” is the brand under which tens of thousands of dedicated professionals in independent firms throughout the world collaborate to provide audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk management and tax services to selected clients.

This is code for one percent firms and one percent anti-tax politics.

Here you can see [not embeddable] that Takala is not completely silent but evasive with her colleagues. While riding in the elevator, Takala claims to be a student working on her thesis, and that the elevator is a congenial place for her to think.

Takala’s durational performance is a modern version of Bartleby the scrivener, who, in Herman Melville’s story, responds to all the injunctions of his Wall Street legal firm with the now immortal phrase: “I would prefer not to.” The term “prefer” becomes viral in the law office and all attempts to remove Bartleby by firing him or by force are unsuccessful.

Takala thus occupied Deloitte at a time when their work undoubtedly involved processing the ruins of the financial disaster. Instead of carrying out this task, she asserted her claim to “prefer not to” and spends her time in thought. As a trainee, she was not supposed to think. She is not supposed to be out of place.

The exhibit calls her “ungovernable.” We would call her autonomous. It’s not a fashion, and it’s certainly not a “style.” The art world doesn’t get it. Occupy it? Actually, I think I would prefer not to.

The Future Present of Occupy

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Or: Waiting, Watching, Looking.

A summary of where we are so far: we occupy but there is not an occupation (in New York). The movement is now, it is over, it is coming (back). What do we do when we are in this future present of Occupy? We wait, we watch and we look.

If you’ve read any of these writings, you’ll know that I am haunted by the resonant phrase adopted by Jacques Rancière, in which the police say to us “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” Only there is, and we know it and so do they. The question is, who has the authority to claim to “see” the social. In refusing to move on, we claim the right to look.

Occupy will be (future present) so resonant a strategy because it does not just claim the right to look at the abstract level of look-to-look, but it takes over the symbolic space in-between that it reconstitutes as autonomy. I do not have autonomy: we do. It is that possibility from which we were always already supposed to be moving on. Thus the evictions were justified as the hygienic cleansing of vermin, rather than as politics because those who were there had no right to be where they already were: in the political.

“]

Edouard Duval Carrié, "The Voice of those Without Voice" [La Voix des Sans-Voix

For Rancière, that would be for the part that has no part to assert its place. I agree. The means by which we register that claim is to recognize one another. In person, we do that by exchanging a look, eye to eye, that oscillates between us and claims that space as autonomous. It is present but as it crosses between us, it anticipates a future that it is come.

Collectively, it registers the sense that democracy will either (have been) direct or will not be. Just as the right to look cannot be represented, nor can the democracy in which all have part be representative in the hierarchical sense. The charge of impracticality leveled against such direct democracy since Aristotle, the defender of slavery, can now be met with the use of horizontal peer-to-peer media and accompanying practice. This really is what democracy looks like, it turns out.

As we will be occupying we will invite the world to watch, as we have done since (in media history) 1968. More directly, the world has watched since the Diggers occupied St. George’s Hill in England in 1649 and declared it a “common treasury for all.” Or when the revolutionaries met in what will be Haiti in 1791 and Boukman declared:

Listen to the voice of Liberty, which speaks in the heart of us all

Koute vwa la libète kap chante lan kè nou

Anon: A contemporary Haitian rendering of Boukman's speech

Not: “I hear liberty” or “some of us hear it” but we all hear it. We have just waited to act on its suggestions.

Yet the world wears as it grows. We must watch the world as well. We Livestream. Uconnect, Facebook, Tweet. Who imagines that this space will be left open by the Guardians for long?

And so we wait. It is a messianism without the messiah, to quote Derrida thinking about Benjamin and Marx. It is that space between “the world can’t wait” and the necessity of Waiting for Godot. We, the tramps of the world, wait and discourse. It has grown dark but Spring is coming.

Occupy: an annotated concordance

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I have often noticed how well the word “occupy” seems to go with other words, whether nouns or verbs. So I looked it up in a historical dictionary and saw that it was for centuries a term designating power, especially colonial and patriarchal power, and the use of capital. The word has been appropriated and subjected to détournement by those such power would subjugate. As such, it should be made one of Raymond Williams’ keywords.

The colonial force of occupy comes through in the etymology:

 Irregularly < Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French occuper to take possession of, seize (1306), to fill a certain space (1314), to employ (c1360), to hold possession of (late 14th cent.), to inhabit (1530), to exercise (an employment) (1530), to fill time (1530), also reflexive, to busy oneself with (c1330) < classical Latin occupāre to seize (by force), take possession of, get hold of, to take up, fill, occupy (time or space), to employ, invest (money)

There are many senses of the English word before we get to the modern Occupy.

I: to employ, make use of

1. trans. To keep busy, engage, employ (a person, or the mind, attention, etc.)

There are a number of early modern examples:

  • 1500  (1413)    Pilgrimage of Soul (Egerton) i. xxi. f. 16v,   He hath occupied so my wittes with othir thinges.

Then, once we enter the Tudor period, a host of colonial and violent examples:

  • 1555    R. Eden tr. Peter Martyr of Angleria Decades of Newe Worlde iii. ix. f. 136v,   They occupyed them selues in the searchinge of particular tractes and coastes.
  • 1568    Haddington Corr. 270   Traitouris, quhais lwnatick branes ar continewalie occupeit with this thair poysoun. [read in a Scottish accent]
  • 1604   E. Grimeston tr. J. de Acosta Nat. & Morall Hist. Indies iii. i. 117   Then shall he truly occupie himselfe in the studie of Philosophie.

The philosophical sense returns to the metropole:

  • 1782    W. Cowper Conversation in Poems 215   Whatever subject occupy discourse.

And becomes political:

  • 1928    H. T. Lane Talks to Parents & Teachers 189   The citizens are occupied chiefly with earning a living.

2. To employ oneself in, engage in, practise, perform; to follow or ply as one’s business or occupation.

Early on, you occupy a trade or profession but again with imperial and colonial connotations:

  • 1535    Bible (Coverdale) Psalms cvi[i.] 23   They that go downe to the see in shippes, & occupie their busynesse in greate waters.

In the intransitive sense, this meaning conveys being busy with something, leading to anachronistic puns:

  • 1847    J. P. Lawson Bk. Perth 171   Permitting their servants to occupy on the Sabbath-day, as well as on the rest of the week.

Skipping one obsolete sense we get an interesting use:

4. a. trans. To employ (money or capital) in trading; to lay out, invest, trade with; to deal in.

Now also obsolete, this sense means that it was capital that occupied first: all our occupations are, then, un-occupations. This sense persists right up to the emergence of modern capital, in Dr Johnson’s Letters:

  • 1773    Johnson Let. 17 May II. 32   Upon ten thousand pounds diligently occupied they may live in great plenty.

No doubt.

II. To be in, to take possession of.

The older versions are all about state power, as in this early example:

  • c1440  (1400)    Morte Arthure 98   Myne ancestres ware emperours. They ocupyede [th]e empyre aughte score wynnttyrs.

More modern uses spread the sense of domination and power across society by means of law:

  • 1883    Law Times 20 Oct. 410/2   A married woman is now to occupy the same position as her Saxon ancestress.

Now we are getting warmer:

b. trans. To live in and use (a place) as its tenant or regular inhabitant; to inhabit; to stay or lodge in.

From Blackstone’s famous law commentaries of the 18th century to Cardinal Newman’s History of the Turks and lesser known genealogies, to occupy is to be landed power but also destructive of the environment and, once again, colonizers:

  • 1767    W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. II. i. 7   By constantly occupying the same individual spot, the fruits of the earth were consumed.
  • 1854    J. H. Newman Lect. Hist. Turks i. i. 2   This tract is at present occupied by civilized communities.
  • 1881    J. Russell Haigs of Bemersyde 5   Bemersyde House has been occupied by the Haigs for more than seven centuries.

In the variant “to take possession of,” Sir Walter Raleigh, pirate and colonizer, favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, was quite clear what was meant:

  • 1614    W. Raleigh Hist. World i. v. i. §2. 317   Which done, they occupied the Citie, Lands, Goods, and Wiues, of those, whom they had murdered

From here, it is a short step to the meaning “To take possession of (a place), esp. by force,” as in the example from the historian MacCauley:

  • 1849    T. B. Macaulay Hist. Eng. II. x. 582   The Dutch had occupied Chelsea and Kensington.

Only after all that colonizing, patriarchy and despoliation do we get to the occupy of Occupy, a relatively recent meaning in official English, cited here only in journalism (although it’s likely to be of much older vernacular use, as we shall see):

trans. To gain access to and remain in (a building, etc.) or on (a piece of land), without authority, as a form of protest.

 

  • 1920    Times 2 Sept. 9/2   The men have occupied the works in those cases where the masters have declined to run the works at a loss.
  • 1968    Newsweek 6 May 43/1   The university’s Hamilton Hall was the first successful target of the revolutionaries, and it was seized and occupied Tuesday.

The final acknowledgement of this meaning derives I suspect from a much earlier usage.

The learned dictionary has a long lacuna: Throughout the 17th and most of the 18th cent., there seems to have been a general tendency to avoid this word, probably as a result of use of the word in sense 8,

 

a sexualised sense. in Henry IV part 1, Shakespeare complained:

A captaine? Gods light these villaines wil make the word as odious as the word occupy, which was an excellent good worde before it was il[l] sorted.

 

Bloomberg might agree. Ben Johnson went further yet:

Many, out of their owne obscene Apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words; as occupie, nature, and the like.

 

Nature? we’ll have to look that up too.

So, using this sense, now we have a slogan that even Chris Hedges might not mind:

Occupy the Police.

 

 

 

 

 

The look of love

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In the first paragraph of The Right to Look, I wrote:

The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at the personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other or it fails. As such it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: “the right to look. The invention of the other.”

I didn’t say much more about love in the book, partly because I wanted to avoid the imputation of voyeurism and all the other issues to do with the gaze. It was also hard to configure the narrative around the politics of autonomy with the questions raised by the look of love.

While the difficulty of narrative remains, I now think it was a mistake to underplay the power of the exchange of looks that is love. It resonates with audiences when I give this as a talk because it is something with which many are familiar and it makes sense of the difficulties of representing that exchange.

With the hindsight of Occupy, two further ways of expressing the right to look in and as love should have been developed: the hierarchies of patriarchy that prevent visualized expression of love; and the interface of poverty and love that produces the desire for democracy.

The phrase “the right to look” is my translation of Derrida’s droit de regards, often (oddly) translated as “rights of inspection.” Derrida was responding to the complex relations of looking at work in the photographs of Marie-Françoise Plissart.

Droit de regards

The cover shown here is from a recent reissue. Plissart’s images show two women in pursuit of each other, making love, escaping from men. Derrida’s suggestion is perhaps that in the context of 1983, eight years after Laura Mulvey had first published “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it was between women that it might be possible to allude to the right to look. For a man looking at a woman would too easily become the other translation: the law of the gaze. The photographs seem a little dated now. Would that we could say the same about patriarchy.

Both Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri develop the relationship of democracy to desire. For Rancière, the palpable “hatred of democracy,” which he describes in his book of the same name, in Western culture is motivated above all by the detesting of “the limitless desire of individuals in modern society.” By contrast, “good” democracy is about controlling and restraining both the extent of democracy and the passions of the individual. Thus the revisionist interpretation of the 1968 revolution is that it “really” expressed a desire for consumption. One could push this to it conclusion: a revolution is the love for democracy, a direct democracy between people that does not defer to representation.

This is precisely the move made by Negri in his poetic and philosophical text Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitude (translated in a volume called Time for Revolution). This is not the kind of writing one can easily summarize, building layer upon layer and allusion to allusion. The kairos, the instant, is something like the time of the right to look: always now, always predicated to the future to come. The “poor,”  or “those most exposed to the immeasurable” are the “biopolitical subject.” For unlike the emphasis on population or bare life in other readings of biopoltics, Negri stresses that it is “poverty that has always represented the common name of the human.”

The Kairos of the poor is love:

so what is “politics” today? It is the activity of production of the common name between poverty and love.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Waiting for Teargas/ Exit the Ghost.

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Poet–How goes the world?

 

Painter–It wears, sir, as it grows

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, I i.

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.

Take a deep breath.