Monthly Archives: April 2012

Vive la Rêve générale

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In 2006 I was stuck. Could you really in that oh-so-sophisticated era of globalization or late capital write about the general strike? That Spring, students and other young people across France went on strike against the “precariousness” of modern life. Anglophone commentators ridiculed the term as showing the absurdity of the French. Somewhere online I saw this photograph:

Rêve générale: general dream

It was a student march in (I think) Marseilles. The banner at the front reads: (on the left): “Avenir: je t’aimais bien“–“Future: I really love you”. And on the right a pun: “gRêve Général(e). You can’t translate this exactly: it means general strike/dream–add or subtract the G and the E at the end to make “strike” or “dream.”

Out of nowhere, as it seemed, the general strike had returned and reimagined itself at once: a general strike, a general dream. It was a challenge to the idea of the future as permanent austerity. It represented the general strike not as a quantitative measure of how many people out of the working population were willing to strike but a qualitative re-imagining of the future.

The idea went viral in French politics and could be seen all over the 2009 demonstrations in the wake of the financial crisis.

General Dream

It was part of a broad-based anti-capitalist imaginary, derived in part from the Situationists and the revolution of 1968.

2009 Paris demo. Credit: HdeC

In this poster, carried by someone who looks so French it’s almost parodic, the call is “Down with the Consumer Society of the Spectacle.”

What does a “general dream” mean? One way to understand it might be to put together Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the general strike and the dream image. Benjamin saw the general strike differing from the standard political strike in that it began

in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that the strike not so much causes as consummates.

These strikes were “general” not because everyone took part but because their aim was a general transformation and renunciation of domination. Benjamin saw this vision of revolt as not being violent but rather as “deep, moral, and genuinely revolutionary.” The right to look. The invention of the other.

That is to say, the general strike dreams the future that is to come (avenir), in what was to become Benjamin’s theory of the dream image. Dream images arise collectively when, says Benjamin,

the new is permeated by the old. These images are wish images; …what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.

Just as the general strike creates “a general image” of social conditions that otherwise struggle to be known and understood, so does the dream image try to

overcome …the inadequacies in the social organization of production.

The general strike is the limit of the dream image, its enactment as social life. Benjamin thought of the “constellation” which these images form as something he called “collective consciousness.” This idea can be thought of as what Virno, appropriating Marx, has called the “general intellect,” a stage of social life “at which mental abstractions are immediately, in themselves, real abstractions.”

The “general dream” is, then, just such a real abstraction in which the activity of the mind has the value of material fact. A general dream/ strike is the materialization of the potential that is inherent in the (image) of social action not as violence but as means.

The general dream founds the possibility of a new politics. And here we are three years later and a new formation has appeared in French politics. The Front de Gauche, the Left Front, headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a program that includes:

a 100% tax on earnings over $475,000; full pensions for all from the age of 60; reduction of work hours; a 20% increase in the minimum wage; and the European Central Bank should lend to European governments at 1%, as it does for the banks.

Now that’s not a dream, but it’s a long way from what you could propose in the Anglophone world. Mélenchon stands at 17% in the last opinion polls before the first round of the Presidential elections this Sunday. He has promised that the Left Front will not enter into coalition with the likely winner, the “Socialist” François Hollande. Hollande has made his intentions clear by saying that his first act if he wins will be to visit Berlin, the capital of Euro-austerity.

From ridicule and street demonstrations in 2006 to being a significant factor in national politics in 2012 by means of the general strike and its dream. It’s something to keep in mind over the next few weeks, as the negative reactions to May Day pour in from all sides.

The Renewal of Occupy

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I began writing every day about the Occupy movement both as a commitment to that movement and to be able to take its measure from my own perspective over time. Whatever anyone else makes of it–and many thanks to those of you who do take the time to read it–it has often surprised me. I find myself again surprised today as I look at the movement renewing itself, as a very different project than when I first published online about it back in October 2011.

Whatever happens on May Day, it’s now clear that on May 2 the movement will be closer to its goal being autonomous, decentralized and, yes, horizontal. Even if, as I suspect may be the case, the police in New York succeed in kettling protest to Union Square and a few other locations, the mobilizing for May Day now appears to have set in motion a transformation. Back in October, we were explaining the hand signals of the global justice movement and thinking about the General Assembly as a model. Now, autonomy is reinventing itself, not as a set of institutions but as “a process without end,” as Bifo has described it. Even ten days ago this pattern wasn’t evident–perhaps because I have not been able to be as active myself in the crunch period of semester–as it now appears to be.

With the continued sleepful protest in the vicinity of the Stock Exchange, the occupation aspect of Occupy has become both more pointed and less complex. It points directly at the scandal of Wall Street’s continued insanity: even Citibank shareholders protested the other day, when they refused to endorse a $15 million base salary for CEO Vikram Pandit. At the same time, it is not so difficult to sustain as the full encampment. It involves a fluid and revolving population of sleeping protestors, who are not required to abandon their political project to support themselves.

This version of occupying has attracted notable sympathy in the city, including from such unlikely sources as the free Metro newspaper.

Since January, the May Day organizing has generated a number of innovative approaches. Most notable, perhaps, is the 4×4 co-ordination of the rally in Union Square and joint march downtown. The four groups present are the trade unions, the Immigrant Workers Coalition. the May 1 Coalition and OWS. The first three groups send delegates. OWS send four spokes and as many May Day working group members as can attend. When a decision needs to be made the OWS delegates consult with the people present and report back the sense of the group. While many might think such a system to be unworkable, it has gone smoothly so far and there has been some interest from trade union rank-and-file as to how they might adopt a similar process.

Mirina Sitrin today reports back from the Brooklyn Court House, where many Occupy people congregated to prevent a series of foreclosure hearings from proceeding:

[W]ith tons of others, preventing foreclosures by singing, well, I have chills and tears from our power, so I am sharing again. I, along with dozens of others did not even get into the courtroom since it was full half an hour early

Such actions make no media waves but do make a real difference in people’s lives, people directly affected by the crisis.

Next, I got a copy today of the OWS Project List, reporting on all the different activities going on around the city. It’s in eight folio-sized pages of three column news and activities, ranging from an oral history project to the Feminist General Assembly and the Stop the Empire Tour. People are working with or without wider attention to create a space that they would like to live in and create new ways of interacting. It all looks like fun.

Finally, there has been much gloom and doom about the General Assembly and how to co-ordinate the movement. This Saturday, there’s a May Day Assembly in Union Square. It’s a way to share all the different things that people have been doing, to give others who have not yet taken on a project a chance to join in and for an open discussion that does not have the burden of taking collective decisions. Volunteers are out leafleting and fly-posting all over the place. As ever, I feel humbled by the amazing energy of the young people in this movement.

I can’t vouch for all these activities because no one person, however busy, could possibly go to them all, let alone be active in them. That’s a very good sign. Obviously, I’m having an “up day” in the whole bi-polar pattern of what it is to be involved with this whole project. In the beginning, there was a hope for decentralized autonomous projects. Now it begins to look like coming to reality. Some are small, some attract national attention. It’s so interesting.

Responses to “I Fought the Law”

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Yesterday I wrote about a sense that Occupy was under triple attack from academia, the police and the Law. There were a good deal of mostly hostile responses on Facebook. While I don’t agree with most of them, as you’ll see, I thought it was fair to post them in the interests of transparency. They are long but all the more reason not to limit the audience.

There was a great deal of discussion about Jodi Dean’s New School keynote, its use of theory and her questioning of the organization of Occupy. The length of these comments suggest that a nerve was touched–or, to be fair, that I was wildly wrong.

Rhetorics aside, at the heart of it is a central issue: does the horizontal leader-less strategy of Occupy continue to be beneficial (we all agree it was so at first, I think) or not? I continue to think that the process is the energy of the movement. If leaders are appointed, Occupy becomes just another political party or a pressure group like Moveon.org. And it would just disappear into the fringe. Others seem to be repelled by the process. Late in the thread you’ll see a comment that Occupy’s current procedure is “kafkaesque,” which Dean agrees is “very well put.” So we disagree.

We also disagree on whether appointing leaders, whether in a party format or some other frame, would be a way to prevent some of the issues that have arisen. It’s not as if hierarchy has not been tried, I would say. Or you can call this the “tyranny of structurelessness.”

How you read these posts will most likely depend on your own view of Occupy: it is nonetheless clear that we can agree that we disagree. And that marks a shift, one that I for one do not welcome.

Comments were made on this excerpt from my post:

“[T[he academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek.”

Jodi Dean [JD}: ‎”The Holy Trinity”–not the kind of label that signals comradely engagement.”

Daniel Spaulding [DS]: Eh, but in the spirit of comradely engagement: I, too, am confused where Jodi’s piece leaves us. Given that there isn’t a credible vanguard party or anything resembling such, where does the structure come from? It strikes me as a little idealistic to say that what we need is more organization when the dominant subjective or affective structure on the left is currently stuck between anarchist laissez-faire and an emergent collectivity of class struggle. Of course horizontalism is the mirror-image of neoliberalism, I grant that – but we start from where we are, immanently, and look for the dialectic, no? So, do we all become Leninists or is there some other horizon?

JD: Well, people can recognize that the strength of the movement is in division and collectivity. This leads to questions about actions that make division more visible and strengthen collectivity. At the end of the piece, I suggest acknowledging leaders and making them accountable and subject to recall. I also mention diagonal and vertical structures, which suggests possibilities for delegating and combining that don’t involve “everybody”. Broached from a different vantage, if the movement learns from the disfunction that led to the collapse of Spokes and the GAs, and led to a great deal of frustration and ultimate dissolution of some groups, what should it learn? Maybe what it should learn that leaders will emerge, but they need to be accountable and recallable. Another example: since there was not a list of movement participants, there wasn’t a quorum for GA. So this made it sometimes feel like it couldn’t make decisions and sometimes made people who weren’t there feel like the decisions weren’t legitimate. Ultimately, though, my concerns are less with process than with the rhetorical and ideological self-understanding of the movement.

DS: Fair enough. I think those are good suggestions.

Nick Mirzoeff [NM]: If there are leaders subject to recall, how would these people be nominated? Who would determine those eligible to be nominated? Who would participate in the determining process? Who would vote? My worry was that by invoking a very widely sanctioned set of theorists these extremely difficult and practical questions were not being addressed. I think it would be almost impossible to organize Occupy like this and for it still to be Occupy, as I said later in the post.The issues with the GA and the Spokes were complicated: there were some disruptors, perhaps some infiltrators, a good deal of financial problems, burnout, cold, and so on. I don’t think the problem was a lack of direction. I don’t at all see an attitude of “wait and see if anything happens”–I see people working very hard to try and keep events moving. I think that any failures in that regard are more to do with the battering from the police than of organization or theory. If it is held to be taken for granted that horizontalidad is the mirror of neo-liberalism, then that in turn is not tremendously supportive/comradely of those who are trying to create a different movement.

DS: What I should have made clear is that horizontality being the mirror of neoliberalism isn’t, for me, a (or “the”) problem, because it’s only predictable that an anti-capitalist movement would, dialectically, approximate the form of the most current capitalism. Not to do so would be formalistic, i.e., sticking to an idea of correct organization at the expense of the real movement of history. So that’s my issue with Jodi and Badiou alike, although obviously the complaint is different with the latter. [Quoting NM] “I think it would be almost impossible to organize Occupy like this and for it still to be Occupy.” I read this as partly what Jodi wants: to make Occupy more like a party, specifically. Maybe I’m wrong about this. . .

NM: I understood the idea to be that Occupy becomes something like a political party as well. Without being uncomradely, I don’t support that and I just think that if that is the proposal it should be made directly and transparently. If the little joke at the expense of the master thinkers annoyed people, I’m sorry

JD: he specific procedural questions with which you begin can be answered in multiple ways. As you know, there isn’t one answer. Spokes was one attempt; it didn’t work out well. But there are other possibilities if people want to undertake them. One possibility: active working groups select a working head of the group to take responsibility for specific things. They also select delegates to other groups and to a broader assembly. Meetings could begin by asking whether people want those previously selected to continue to serve or not. A preliminary process might begin with the active people who put together the Spring Awakening and delegates to working groups to suggest a general structure and see what people think about it. Like I said, though, my primary interest isn’t procedural. On wait and see if anything happens: I’ve heard that in discussions of the general strike as well as the direction of the movement this spring. That some people are working very hard on some projects doesn’t mean that others aren’t saying, wait and see. On the police front: yes, this is demoralizing. But it’s not the whole of the movement. The frustrations in Facilitation and Housing, for example, can’t be attributed to the battering of the police. They can be attributed in part to problems with an ideology of leaderlessness that makes it difficult to work around toxic people.

I don’t understand what you mean when you say ‘invoking a widely sanctioned set of theorists’ these difficult and practical questions were not being addressed. If you are saying that I don’t provide a procedural blueprint–yes, that’s true. I didn’t claim to. I would be surprised to hear you say, though, that theory is irrelevant and we can’t learn from theoretical insights.

[To DS] my point is that structures need more than one dimension to be strong. Horizontality by itself becomes a fetish object/line and not an organization. If by more like a party you mean more organization and accountability, yes, definitely. Of course, there are different models of parties…

[To NM]: there isn’t anything undirect or untransparent in what I’m saying; I don’t use the word party in this talk because I don’t know what a new party form would like or whether that is the right term here.

Kailesjh Benengeli: leaderlessness can breed its own kafkaesqueness where if you don’t understand the tacit ideological rules for socializing you aren’t “in the know” or know the “right people” you’re functionally excluded.

JD: that’s very well put, clearer than I put it in the talk.

NM: Many things to say! I would like to put these comments into a post so that those who don’t see this FB can benefit. If the primary concern is not procedural, then it was not clear to me. I felt the criticism of the horizontal process was rather central: and I felt that as another attack, rather than as support, or constructive criticism. Again, my post was not about your paper so much as my feeling that academia has decided that it’s time to move on and give up on Occupy. Specifically: To what end are we to adopt a representative system? The energizing experience of Occupy has so much been about the chance to participate as an equal. More organization: presumably this means more effective organization as there is no shortage of meetings etc. It depends whether we feel that the goal is to intervene as directly as we can in the current system or to build an alternative, accepting the necessary time involved. The problems of disruptors, those with unmet needs and other issues that did much to complicate Housing and Facilitation are not, to my mind, primarily problems of leadership or it’s lack. The police did have something to do with that, as they sent disruptive people to Liberty from other locations. As I have written in other posts, the enormous issues these problems revealed surely show how much damage has been done by the neo-liberals.

On theory: of course, I think it can help. I am not clear how those affiliated with a very different process would be likely to be good resources to work through the issues that we have, as opposed to being citations to reinforce an existing desire for more leadership etc: which is exactly what I’m seeing here. For example, the explanation of the horizontal discussion process is standard Occupy procedure and, while I am not one of those who knows “the right people,” I have always felt able to participate if I wanted to do so. That is, the rules are explicit–in democratic centralism, that’s really not so much the case.

On another FB:

JD: Kinship? That seems like a weird leap to me. I don’t say not to strike on May 1 at all–I note the fact that there has been criticism of that plan (I don’t go into the criticisms but a significant one comes from women and the nature of childcare). It’s funny that you haven’t come across any activists frustrated over non-accountability in the movement, over the emphases on horizontality and leaderlessness; I have heard people invoke Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness” with fair frequency. I’ve heard women criticize the domination of men in the movement, different people criticize the insidery-ness in the movement.

NM: I’ve talked a good deal about the place of women and child care in the movement in the Occupy 2012 project. It’s my understanding that Mutual Aid at Bryant Park and Union Square do intend to offer child services as does the Free University. Parents for Occupy Wall Street also have plans. However, there’s an absolute forest of state law when you offer formal child care. Getting city permission to offer child care would be, shall we say, unlikely.

 

I Fought The Law

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

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

Federal Hall. Credit @mollyknefel

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

The Federal pen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murmuring

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And the whole Congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wildernesse.

Exodus 16: 2 King James version 1611

I.

They sat in an “assembly.” They mike checked Moses. And Aaron.

And Moses said, This shalbe when the Lord shal giue you in the euening flesh to eate, and in the morning bread to the full: for that the Lord heareth your murmurings which ye murmure against him; and what are wee? your murmurings are not against vs, but against the Lord.

[yes, the text is right. It was before copyediting–u and v are interchangeable, so it’s ‘give’ in line 1 but ‘us’ in the last line]

So the leaders always say. Your murmurings are not against us, but against the Lord, against the Authority of Authority. Moses bought off the anarchism of the people with the appearance of “manna,” or free food. Nice trick.

A murmuration of birds

The murmur is the voice of the multitude. Its form is the murmuration, which cannot be policed.

II.

Rancière tells a story about ancient Rome. It varies a bit depending on where he tells it but the gist is that once the people approached the Aventine Hill, where the Senators lived, intending to make a set of claims on the Republic. But the senator Appius approached them and explained that he could not hear them, for while he could tell that they were speaking, all he could perceive was noise, the murmuring of the multitude. Shut out by the division of the sensible, the people retreated.

III.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin listened for the sound of the time in which social nonconformism was intertwined with the proletarian revolution. But he was not naive:

In the flaneur, one might say, is reborn the sort of idler that Socrates picked out from the Athenian marketplace to be his interlocutor. Only, there is no longer a Socrates. And the slave labor that guaranteed him his leisure has likewise ceased to exist.

Leisure is schole in Greek, the root of scholarship. The dialectic method depends on that slave being there for the master. Benjamin was, as Adorno liked to point out, no Marxist scholar. He was, however, aware where you might hear the revolution:

the muse herself turns away from the poet to whisper words of inspiration to the air.

Who was listening, there in the air? The ragpickers, the street-walkers, the revolutionaries, the flâneurs: the people of the street.

IV.

In an interview published in 2011, Rancière responded to a question about whether he was an anarchist:

At a fundamental philosophical level my position can be called anarchist stricto sensu since I hold that politics exists insofar as the exercise of power does not rest upon any arkhê.

The murmur rises–no authority, no hierarchy, no scholarship.

V.

Once again, though, the loud chatter raises itself: Occupy is corrupted, the anarchism must be eliminated. Murmur back: there is no Occupy without the anarchism of the streets, the claims that must not be heard. There is no more manna to hand out. Perhaps the murmur might be heard a little more clearly now.

Car 59, where are you? The voice of the police, of arkhê, of authority is loud. It does not want to talk. But there’s this noise, it makes it hard to hear. How they long for quiet, the return to leisure, to scholarship and the dialectic. Sorry about that.

Self-killing and (the) Depression

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The subprime Depression of 2008 to the present has entailed a notable wave of personal depression. At the same time, neoliberal austerity presents itself as a required correction from the superego for the excessive “exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan notoriously called it, of the boom. Yet the formerly exuberant are not the depressed: we are. Depressed about debt, climate change, unemployment, you name it. All efforts to mobilize a political response, even the irreversible step of self-killing, have to be discredited in order to maintain the regime of credit. It is in every sense unsustainable.

A memorial for Dimitris Christoulas

These thoughts were prompted by the observation that the suicide of a 77-year-old man in Syntagma Square on April 4 has now provoked a wave of mitigating journalism. Feeling unable to survive on his austerity-reduced pension, Dimitris Christoulas left a suicide note that was a call to action (I don’t wish to edit this, so the quote is long):

The Tsolakoglou [1940s Nazi-collaborationist] occupation government literally nullified my ability to survive on a decent pension, for which I had already paid (without government aid) for 35 years. I am of an age that prevents me from offering a decent individual response (without of course ruling out the possibility of being the second person to take arms, should one person decide to do so), I find no solution other than a dignified end, before resorting to going through garbage in order to cover my nutritional needs. One day, I believe, the youth with no future will take up arms and hang the national traitors at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did with Mussolini in 1945 [at Milan’s Piazzale Loreto[.

Not unlike Stéphane Hessel, the former French Resistance activist turned writer, Christoulas saw a parallel between the fascist occupation of Greece in the 1940s and the current decimation of social life by the Troika.

In the days following, pieces from Ireland to Italy, Jakarta and now New York have created a new syntagm “suicide by economic crisis,” traveling from newspaper to newspaper. The verb-less fragment gives agency to the economic crisis as the means of self-killing, just as one might say “suicide by hanging.” In today’s New York Times piece, Christoulas is neither named nor quoted. Instead, the lead goes to a debt-destroyed Italian contractor named Giovanni Schiavon with a more familiar message

Sorry, I cannot take it any more.

This “acceptable” message (for those not acquainted or related to the self-killer) is the regime of truth around depression, bipolar conditions and self-killing: it is an individual “tragedy,” which could and should be prevented by medication.

Yet the self-killing to provoke social change has a long history. It was a resistance to empire, as in the suicides of the enslaved, and also its tool in episodes like the suicidal attacks of the First World War. Recently it has been the weapon of asymmetric warfare, most notably on 9-11,  and the last resort of the oppressed, such as the self-immolation of Mohammed Bou’azizi in Tunisia in December 2010. Christoulas was clearly hoping to provide a similar inspiration to that of Bou’azizi and it remains to be seen what may yet happen in Greece.

Earlier in this project, I thought about Antigone as a figure for resistance. She might be said to have suicided by state, in the same way that people today are said to choose “suicide by cop” when they get shot by the police. For she knew that to bury her brother was to incur death at the hands of Creon, and she welcomes it as a path to what she calls “glory” in Sophocles’ play.

In Judith Butler’s telling analysis, Antigone’s story reveals that the carefully policed distinction between the social and the symbolic cannot hold. In the present crisis, it is notable how Antigone welcomes the grave as a “deep-dug home to be guarded forever,” as if suiciding wards off symbolic and social foreclosure. Butler concludes that what Antigone

draws into crisis is the very representative function itself, the very horizon of intelligibility.

Butler notes that those who disagree that the “law” (here as much the psychoanalytic law of the Oedipus complex as state law) must hold accuse her of “radical anarchy.”

Perhaps it’s time to embrace that anarchy rather than foreclose it. Perhaps the crisis of the representative engenders a new horizon-tal, making intelligible what it would be to live in a sustainable social world of degrowth and chosen kinship. For Antigone’s choice puts pressure on all norms of gender, as she challenges the “manly” place of sovereignty. It is telling that all the people said to be affected by debt and depression in this recent flood of articles are men. It seems that the old binary that men work, while women care is still in circulation.

I do not wish to minimize the actual experience of depression and its cognate diseases. Each year there are said to be 30,000 suicides by bi-polar people in the US and an estimated one million attempts. For Franco “Bifo” Bifardi and others in the radical psychiatry movement known as “schizoanalysis,” these conditions are not random but actively produced by a regime that insists on the pure rationality of a market that is nonetheless out of control. Bifo sees a “bipolar economy” that insists on more and more stimulus, leading to the inevitable crash. Even the Harvard Business Review now accepts that there is no “invisible hand” guiding the market, which does not attain the mythical “general equilibrium.” Now it’s generally on Lithium.

What would be the resolution for those so depressed today? It would be literally to get outside, outside the depression but also into different spaces, as Félix Guattari puts it

to get out of their repetitive impasses and in a certain way to resingularize themselves.

As I said on Friday, being at Occupy makes me less depressed. I am certainly aware that the kind of unmet need that the Occupy encampments did much to reveal is not going to dealt with so easily. However, the statistics on suicide make it just as clear that the psycho-pharmaceutical regime isn’t working any better. The desire not “to be a statistic,” as the euphemism for suicide goes, is suggestive. It expresses a hope for the resingularizing of people as non-normatized individuals with a right to the pursuit of happiness that is not measured in consumption patterns.

 

 

 

Once More Into the Debt, Dear Friends–at TEDx

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I spent today at a TEDx event organized by NYU students. I was approached to participate by a woman who had taken one of my classes. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do it, so, knowing that most of the organizers were from the Business School, I proposed a talk on the student debt crisis, expecting them to reject it. But they called my bluff.

So I presented the now-familiar cocktail (to regular readers) of $1 trillion of student debt, the 27% default rate and declining applications to high-cost institutions. I localized it by considering the rising debt crisis at NYU. At present some 55% of NYU students graduate in debt with the average debt amounting to just over $40,000.

Some of this is unintended debt. One young man came into a class of mine last semester smiling broadly. When I asked him why, he said that the loan office had given him four times as much money as he had requested. Horrified, I asked why he had accepted it and he said: “Free money!” If only it was. No surprise then that NYU ranks #6 in the nation for student debt. Ahead are a group of very much less well-known institutions, such as the Florida Institute of Technology and Barry University, scarcely the New Ivy company that NYU likes to claim for itself.

So we are all puzzled that NYU has launched an expansion plan that will build immense new towers across the middle of Greenwich Village, including a hotel. No indication has been provided as to how this will be paid for but NYU has announced that “[it] is not afraid of debt.” Perhaps it should be. It has been calculated that, if you use a low estimate of $4 bn. for the construction, the interest payments alone would be more than the current tuition and fees generated by the flagship College of Arts and Science.

The University is pursuing debt financing like never before at what may turn out to be precisely the wrong time.For other participants in the TEDx event highlighted the continuing impact of the global financial crisis, arguing that it was likely to redefine our sense of how markets operate–in this new context, debt is certainly something to be concerned about.

There’s another form of convergence going on, whose consequences are less clear. No less than three TEDx presentations highlighted the interface between new ideas about marketing, the viral idea, and the global Occupy movement. All the presenters wanted to see socially good results from this, but it’s not hard to see how others might try and appropriate it.

The concern about being co-opted is widespread in Occupy circles at the moment. Are the Move On 99% training sessions–direct imitations of the OWS Spring Training–which are patently directed towards promoting the Democratic Party, a good thing or not? We can take a positive view and see the progressive wing of the Democrats being mobilized by Occupy. Or we can be less sanguine and see the ideas as being diluted into the usual election-year boilerplate.

Berlin Biennale Occupy space

Another discussion is happening around the Berlin Biennale, one of the many global art fairs, hosting a space for Occupy (as above). Based on discussions with Occupy Berlin, the space includes recycling, a garden, an autonomous university and undefined action space. Here Occupy is rendered into a shopping list for a want-to-be radical art fair, whose ultimate rationale is the continuation of the global art market, the epitome of one percent luxury furnishing.

Yet the very packaged nature of the Move On and Berlin Biennale projects misses the key element to all viral memes–the unexpected. These gestures are so predictable within the context of two-party politics and art world solipsism that I’m not sure I can even be bothered to be annoyed by them.

The last convergence is the most obvious–the interface between Occupy and structured digital media platforms like TEDx, which is a licensed and carefully-filtered project:

  • TED does not grant licenses to those associated with controversial or extremist organizations.
  • TEDx events may not be used to promote spiritual or religious beliefs, commercial products or political agendas.

Given that, as Alessandra Renzi pointed out in her recent talk at NYU, many apparently familiar organizations are now being officially designated as “extremist” from environmental groups to art activist performers The Yes Men, you wonder how such filtering is applied.

Organizers of TEDx events always hope that one of their talks gets “promoted” to the highlighted section of the site. My guess is that a talk on student debt–especially one given by a surprisingly nervous professor–won’t make that list. Except maybe with a little help from his friends…now that would be unexpected;) Links to follow.

 

 

OWS Spring Training

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After spending a somewhat dreary week in academic salons, being told that there was no song and dance at Occupy or that there was no point to the General Strike, I chose to skip another round of conferences and head downtown for OWS Spring Training. These weekly Friday sessions have been happening since March but, for one reason or another, this was the first one I could attend.

Photo credit: Eva Destruction

It was an energizing relief after all the talk to be doing something. I was at once impressed with how much things have moved along in the street organizing. Following the influence of the excellent +Brigades, there’s a good deal of co-ordination, tactics and wit back in the actions. Extra energy came from last night’s successful Sleep to Protest, in which about a hundred people managed to sleep overnight on Wall St itself, despite the sudden desire of the city to clean sections of the street for hours on end. There were also lots of “new people,” by which I mean faces I didn’t recognize, and a noticeably wider age range.

After some tactical training by the +Brigades, we set off for a set of Bank of America branches where supporters were planning to close their accounts. Along the way, despite my academic colleagues, a nice range of old and new songs and chants kept the mood light. Protestors have identified the short-tempered white-shirt police officer assigned to OWS marches and when he appears, they set up a drawn-out mocking chant of his name. He didn’t seem to like it. OWS organizers were making sure that the marchers took up no more than half the sidewalk to deny police the pretext for arrests. The obvious good humor of the event and the interest of many downtown passers-by mitigated the chance for mass arrests.

When we arrived at the banks, those who closed their accounts were hoisted shoulder-high and spoke via people’s mic about how hard BoA made it to do so. After properly denouncing the vampire squid, they then ceremonially cut their debit cards in half to loud cheers. One closer was a Democratic official of some kind.

Then we dispersed in order to make our own way to the Stock Exchange. Just as well, because the police had placed a checkpoint at the Broadway entrance to Wall Street, permitting only those with workplace IDs to enter. Luckily downtown has many byways and it was a simple matter for those who wanted to do so to congregate on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial. At a signal, we congregated into a large cluster and sounded the People’s Gong, closing the Stock Exchange for violations against the people. Proceedings were closed with an exuberant chant of A-Anti-AntiCapitalista, with a new twist: after a couple of choruses, we went quieter and quieter, lower and lower, jumping up at the end in full voice.

All quite silly in some ways but it prevented Mr White Shirt from the mass arrest he was clearly itching to orchestrate by catching a lot of public attention and not being demonstrably an offense, as no signs were displayed. There were just a lot of people there at the same time doing the same things. Needless to say, perhaps half-a-dozen were arrested for no apparent reason.This exercise has been going on for a few weeks now. It’s creating new energy, new songs, new ways of being in space. So much for academia.

 

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!

 

The Debt-Prison System

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Debt is prison. Few debtors, whether dealing with students loans, credit cards or mortgages, would disagree I imagine. By this phrase I intend not a metaphor but a description: debt is a systemic way to limit options, impose unfreedom and sustain the unfree labor market on which capitalism depends. In the United States, this debt-prison system is necessarily intertwined with what Angela Y. Davis calls the post-slavery prison-industrial complex. Resisting debt servitude in this country is a central part of extending and completing the Civil Rights movement.

The old face of the new refusal

This is a proper concern for Occupy for any number of reasons. As I mentioned a while ago, Wall Street was the site of New York’s slave market. Combine that with its role as a barrier against the indigenous population (hence the name) and as a site of financial speculation and we begin to understand what the symbol “Wall Street” really means. So while what I have to say here may sound like a history lesson, it’s very much a history of the present that enables us to see what how high the stakes are in the apparently technical problem of student debt.

Transatlantic slavery was a system dependent on debt financing. The slavers borrowed money for the costs of the voyage and the trade good they exchanged for human property in Africa. These goods were far from worthless and developed into a money form based on copper. The enslaved were purchased by American planters buying on credit. It was only with the sale of the products of the plantation back in Europe that true profit entered the system.

But this profit was spectacular: a ship called the Lively left Liverpool, England, in 1737 with cargo worth £1307 and returned with £3080 in cash plus a cargo of sugar and cotton. In short, a profit of at least 500%, unavailable anywhere else in the early modern financial system. Don’t take my word for it: here’s Adam Smith, inventor of the concept of the market in his 1776 Wealth of Nations: “The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known.” Haiti was the wealthiest place on the planet when its revolution began in 1791.

Just as the factory system described by Marx was not participated in by anything like a majority of workers but was typical of its time, the slave system was the hallmark of American capitalism. Today I would argue it’s the debt-prison system that marks out the peculiarity of the United States. Debt servitude, racialized segregation and mass incarceration of those so racialized are thus the true American exceptionalism–while debt is central to capitalism worldwide only in the United States do we have such a peculiar and networked system of debt as racialized punishment.

US slavery persisted much longer than in Europe, as we all know. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the enslaved enacted a general strike against slavery in which half a million people moved away from plantations to the North. The South claimed that millions of its capital were, so to speak, contained and hence “lost” in the bodies of the enslaved in 1863. The period known as Reconstruction (1865-77) was a struggle by the formerly enslaved to escape being, as it were, recouped by the planters into the debt-prison system. In so doing, the freed used many of the tactics we continue to deploy today from occupying to marches and strikes. It failed because of a Wall Street real-estate speculation crash that produced the typical binary form of US racism in its wake.

The freed claimed their own land to farm. If the Freedmen’s Bureau would not give it to them, they occupied it. The concept was simple: a small group of people would create sufficient food for themselves and a surplus to trade with. It was a sustainable anti-poverty system that did not rely on wage labor. But as David Graeber puts it:

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.

The idea that the freed would work freely was abhorrent to the planters and to Northern capital alike. Instead, they were to be compelled to work for their former owners.

All the new labor systems that were developed to this end were, as Angela Davis puts it, “dramatic evidence of the persistence of slavery.” That is to say, share cropping, tenant farming, the scrip system and the convict lease system of imprisoned labor all depended on a new series of connections between debt, labor and prison. Share cropping meant that the farmers were entitled to a share of the crop they produced, usually a third. However, as this meant they were paid only once a year, they had to make purchases on credit for the rest of year at the notorious crossroads or company stores. Very often the annual payment would not cover this debt meaning that the sharecropper could never escape the land. In fact, wage laborers were often not paid in cash but in scrip, a paper form allowing you to buy things at inflated prices in the company store.

Even this labor was too expensive for the planters. So the new Black Codes passed in the South after the Civil War criminalized minor financial transgressions. In Mississippi any person who “handled money carelessly” could be declared a vagrant and imprisoned. Simple theft, whether of bread or an animal, was turned into a felony and those convicted were imprisoned. The new African American prisoners were turned into a virtually free labor force by the convict lease system in which employers could use convicts to work for almost nothing. Even today, the University of California gets its office furniture from prison workshops.

The freed resisted these innovations. In South Carolina, the legislature attempted to borrow money to buy land for the freed. Wall Street would not buy their bonds. The laborers organized and called strikes for waged field labor. In Louisiana, workers refused to labor for their former owners, organized and marched. One freed organizer named John J. Moore testified that planters said  to them: “if you do not let politics alone you will get killed here.”

But in 1873, Wall Street crashed, having speculated wildly in railroads and real estate. It took down the Freedmen’s Bank and with it about $3 million of deposits made by the formerly enslaved. Emboldened by the crash, known then as the Great Depression, planters reduced wages where they were paid, as in Louisiana, from $18 plus food to $13 only a month. When the Hayes-Tilden compromise withdrew Federal troops from the South, the political gains of Reconstruction were rapidly overturned and the convict lease labor system swung into full effect.

Even now, the freed were not willing to give up. In 1887, a major strike on the sugar plantations of Louisiana was repressed only by armed force, in which about thirty strikers were killed and hundreds injured. Although the strikers came from all backgrounds, the planters defined them as “black” and themselves as “white.” It was three years later that the “Separate Car Act” enforced racialized segregation on trains in Louisiana, leading to the infamous 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson case at the Supreme Court that declared “separate but equal” facilities to be legal.

In short, the debt crisis that has generated over one trillion dollars of student debt, $700 billion in credit card debt, 4 million foreclosed homes, 6 million other homes in danger of foreclosure is part and parcel of the system that has placed over two million people in jail.

The consequence is simple and challenging: there will be no making the debt system better, or less burdensome. Even today, sub-prime lending was reported to be on the rise again. Graduate student loans accrue interest immediately as of next year so that someone working on a PhD will have eight years of interest at a minimum of 6.8% by the time they graduate. Debt is so central to what we are trying to occupy when we Occupy Wall Street that it cannot be separated out.

I do not think this is depressing but rather it shows that Occupy continues to advance our understanding of the tasks that lie before us. It should be remembered that it was once said to be impossible to abolish slavery, and not long ago it was supposed to be inevitable that there would always be segregation. It’s not inevitable that we agree to live in debt, accept debt as our punishment for not having been born wealthy and apply for opportunities to get more and more in debt. The first step is refusal, which is why the new slogan going the rounds is Bartleby’s rejoinder to a Wall Street banker:

I would prefer not to.

Me too.