Category Archives: citizen media

OWS and the Press

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Two new journalistic takes on OWS and the September 17 anniversary day of action are causing some waves in the movement. It’s interesting to look at them and see how two journalists can talk to much the same set of people and generate very different interpretations. It raises the question of what a social movement wants from the media, as well as the more discussed question of what it gets.

The pieces in question are in very different publications. In the Village Voice, house journal of the NYC counterculture, Nick Pinto has a long take on “Occupy Wall Street, Year Two.” Many people are greeting this as the best piece on OWS for a long time, which I take to mean closest to how OWS views itself. On the other hand, there’s Max Abelson’s piece for Bloomberg News, entitled “Occupy Sets Wall Street Tie-up as Protestors Face Burn Out.” While Abelson seems not unsympathetic to the movement, look at who he’s writing for: so it’s no surprise that the piece feels more critical. Internally, people have been disappointed because he did spend a long time talking with leading figures.

Let’s walk through the pieces quickly. Pinto begins with the standard observation that the very diversity of OWS opinion makes it hard to create and sustain consensus. However, he then suggests:

The factionalism that for so long seemed to threaten to tear the movement apart seems increasingly manageable. After a year of precisely these sorts of arguments, anarchists, liberals, and union stalwarts all know the contours of their disagreements, but they’re also better than they’ve ever been at pushing through them.

They’re also increasingly confident that whatever this thing is that binds them together, that keeps them coming back to the next meeting, the next hard-won consensus, whatever they call that shared project, it has a future beyond this first anniversary.

That’s what I meant when I said that the piece reflects the internal discourse of OWS. Pinto continues to describe the combination of police violence and the “dominant media narrative” that there’s “nothing to see here.”

Acknowledging that, for many occupiers, it’s how things get done as much as what the immediate results are that matters, Pinto talks about the projects like Strike Debt, Occupy Homes, and Foreclose the Banks that get activists excited and have emerged or grown significantly since May 1. Perhaps it’s in part because Pinto quotes a lot of people that I happen to know or have met but this piece does convey my own sense of OWS right now. The acknowledgement that May Day was not a complete success. The recognition that there won’t be another occupation. The determination to continue.

It’s that last that Max Abelson doesn’t see. The emphasis for him is on dysfunction and burnout:

Organizers said there has been more fatigue than fresh thinking this year. Occupy’s New York City General Assembly, which oversaw planning by consensus, ceased functioning in April because of infighting, ineffectiveness and low turnout, according to organizers and minutes of meetings. The group’s funds were frozen to preserve money for bail, ending most cash distributions, they said.

While the unnamed organizers are correct, for most of us April is an age ago. It’s hard to find people who still regret the passing of the GA, although there are occasional calls for a central decision making body. As the piece continues, the emphasis remains on “burnout,” “calcification,” “ossify”–a movement past its prime.

The Abelson piece reads as if it has been edited hard from a longer essay, as quotes float in and out without discussion or context. Subheads like “Venemous Forums” or “Anarchist Core” catch the eye but aren’t the writer’s fault. He does place a lot of emphasis on what I can only think was a throw-away comment about making citizens’ arrests on September 17, which runs counter to most people’s sense of what OWS is about.

In the end, then, what we have is a nice snapshot in a friendly media outlet and a not terrible but not great, slightly sensationalist piece in a very hostile outlet. Why is that no good? Why do we so often want to have a “celebrity” endorse a cause or an action, just like every other media-directed project? In part I’m thinking back to a job search we did last year in my department for someone working on media activism. The overwhelming impression I was left with was how hard such activism is in the face of the corporate behemoths. Now that even the New York Times has taken to calling Republican media statements “lies,” perhaps the gap is closing.

If Occupy is trying to build a new world in the shell of the old, what would its media look like? Projects like Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, whose third issue is just out; or Occupy! the OWS-Inspired Gazette (new edition due September 15) are trying to do that work. It’s very hard: questions of funding, printing and distribution have to be solved by the same people doing the editing, writing and commissioning.

These publications are not, as some might say, preaching to the converted. They are given away free, often to the curious people standing on the edge of a meeting or a rally who wants to know more but isn’t ready to get involved. In a city of 19 million people, working like this takes time. That’s OK. At certain moments, like last September 17, new possibilities emerge. What we’ve all been doing ever since is to try and keep that possibility open for as long as we can.

The Media and the Message

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Yesterday I left one significant May Day lesson off my list: the mainstream media in the United States cannot be seen as a means for the movement to develop. It’s not enough to say that the sparse coverage that appeared was lazy and predetermined. It means accepting that the military-industrial-entertainment complex (MIE) uses the same strategy in its entertainment “wing” as it does for military interrogations. The goal is to produce a state of perceived helplessness in the detainee/spectator in which the only source of redemption is the interrogator/media authority.

Counter-spectacle cannot expect the MIE to broadcast our discourses of “truth” any more than the interrogator is likely to suddenly agree with his prisoner. That said, the MIE is not monolithic, is not subject to a single directing authority. and currently has very little sense of what narrative to offer. It’s precisely that crisis that gives us our opportunity.

Certainly, we should be careful of conspiracy theories. Yesterday, many of us found our inboxes filling with emails about planned activities for May Day. Some quickly assumed that there had been some cyber-skullduggery, delaying the messages until they were irrelevant. Given the pre-event raids by the NYPD on Occupy activists, it did not seem impossible. Quickly, however, it emerged that the list administrators had been too overwhelmed with work to approve all the messages.

So we should not assume that all the media directly conspire against Occupy. If the New York Times City Room stopped covering May Day events after 5.25pm, my guess is that the one employee working on it went home at that time, rather than there being censorship. On the other hand, some media certainly do fabricate their narratives. There were no less than four hostile pieces in the New York Post, a Murdoch tabloid. The editorial entitled “Goodbye, Occupy” opined that the protestors’ “ranks, as usual, were largely made up of union members, dispatched by their leaders after their workday ended.” In fact, union turnout was low but this was not reporting.

Meanwhile, in the business section a “May Day inspires markets” piece lets us know that “Wall Street celebrated May Day by driving the Dow to its highest level in four years.” That coincidence has been followed by a sharp decline, not attributed to the success of the day’s demonstrations. It’s hard to give a rational explanation as to quite how the same people who have told us for years that all markets are globally interactive can maintain this confidence in the face of the double-dip recession in Europe. In Spain there are now 5.6 million people out of work, a staggering 24.4% of the population. Greece is close behind at 22%. In both countries, youth unemployment exceeds 50%. Across the Eurozone as a whole, the unemployment rate is 11%, kept that “low” only by countries like Austria and the Netherlands.

There are two aspects of this crisis to notice. First, despite the dogma that only markets let people survive, Southern Europe has not had a social collapse, despite very real suffering. As ever, people help each other “against” their purported self-interest. Second, U. S. commentators have recently chosen to celebrate the “success” of 8.2% official unemployment here, a rate that is certainly comparable to Europe’s given the different means of accumulating data, which they will do right up until they begin attacking Obama again for his “failed economics.”

Here it’s hard not to think of David Graeber’s claim that neo-liberal economics has in fact been primarily directed to political ends:

it’s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

That is to say, the extraordinary efforts devoted to overkill policing on May Day and derogatory media coverage afterwards can be understood as component parts of a collective movement against the possibility of imagining a different way of being. As Graeber puts it:

So what is this obsession they have with us never feeling we’ve actually accomplished something? And I thought: everything in neoliberalism can be thought of in that sense.

I would want to frame that learned hopelessness in the context of the MIE. What Paul Virilio calls “the admininstration of fear” takes place in the counterpoint between the persistent identification of permanent global and domestic insurgency. Over and again, domestic security tries to frame Occupy as insurgency.

It has nonetheless notably failed to convince people of that equation, even as various security agency engineered “plots” have secured court convictions of their hapless fall guys. For Occupy has been able to generate its own counter-narrative, using the Internet as a mass medium. From countless individual projects like this one, to aggregator sites like Occupied Stories and Occupy.com, to a panoply of Tumblr sites stemming from the iconic We Are the 99 Percent, not to mention all the videos and photographs, Occupy has forged an effective counter-narrative.

The various government efforts to censor the Internet and to monitor web traffic are not unconnected to this movement. Such clumsy stratagems have run into the immense corporate influence of Google and Facebook, causing a stalemate. In the academic context, this is what I have called the crisis of visuality: authority is not fully able to visualize itself in such a way that it appears that its narrative cannot be questioned. In the political context, it means that the Law and Order view of the world, in which the police are always right, has been reduced to its Special Victims Unit, a ritual excoriating of a series of cartoon villains. That is the message of the media: authority is always right. Can the Internet be subjected to that authority? As long as the answer to that question is not clear, there’s a chance for the current wave of global social movements.

 

Meta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working Out Autonomy in the Street

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The emergence of Photography 2.0 is itself now in process. Its “darkroom” is not in a studio but on the street. Its transitional form is so-called “street art,” aka graffiti. Like that precursor, street art may be just a transition to a marketable art form. For the time being, it helps think through the paradox that autonomy eludes representation.

In Tunisia, the French “artivist” (artist/activist) who calls himself JR realized a transformation of photography was happening.  He organized an “inside out” visualization of the people as portrait photographs of random individuals, printed in poster size and posted as graffiti.

A JR poster replaces the portrait of Ben Ali

The project was called “artocracy.” This photographic commons turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past. Working in conjunction with Tunisian bloggers and using all local interlocutors and photographers, the goal was to create a series of one hundred portraits of people who had participated in the revolution.

The photographs were the large-scale head-and-shoulder closeups in black-and-white that have become JR’s signature style. Printed as 90x120cm posters, they were flyposted across four cities in Tunisia, including startling examples in the former secret police commissariat (below)

JR in the Police Commissariat

oron the façade of one of Ben Ali’s former houses (below).

Yet as the documentary posted on JR’s own website indicates, even this open access project was subject to intense criticism in Tunisia. “Why only a hundred?” was the common refrain. For the revolution is widely held to have been the work of the people, not a sub-set of heroes. No-one wants to replace autocracy with artocracy, even as a joke.

In Cairo, the contingency artist Ganzeer—his self-definition—who produced a widely-used PDF pamphlet on how to conduct a protest during the revolution, is now attempting the marathon project of street portraits of all 847 people who died in the revolution, the martyrs.

Ganzeer, "Martyr Portrait"

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who are running Egypt, persist in painting over these memorials so Ganzeer, and his fellow street artists like Keizer  and Sad Panda [more on them tomorrow] are using the Internet as an archive of their work. A Google maps mash-up indicates where and when the work was posted. Users are invited to “like” the link on Twitpic and Flickr but not Facebook, which is now too carefully under surveillance. Ganzeer had only accomplished three of these portraits as of last summer, making it unlikely that his martyrology will ever be accomplished.

The street art process centered on the individual, even when decentred and distributed, taken out of the gallery into the street, is not yet equal to the visualization of autonomy. I have argued that one person cannot convey the right to look: the interface between two or more people as they look at each other and allow the other to invent them even as they invent the other. In his essay that coined the phrase droit de regards, which I translate as “the right to look,” Jacques Derrida, the Algerian, insisted on precisely this incapacity of photography to convey the look into another’s eyes, whether literal or metaphorical. For the autocrat the answer is the same as it has ever been: “they cannot represent themselves: they must be represented.” So SCAF is as determined to push through a “representative” parliamentary democracy as it is to retain effective power.

The nub of the issue, then, is how, once autonomy has been claimed by the anonymous, they might visualize that autonomy as something that goes beyond transition. Street art has some components right–the value of the project is judged by the “street,” the anonymous. It perhaps overvalues the secrecy of its means of production as an end in itself–“how did s/he tag there?” is a great question under autocracy, less so as a means to autonomy. Its capacity to spontaneously generate new forms, however, is a striking way to think through how these issues are being worked out and worked over.

Continued tomorrow with the work of Sad Panda, Keizer and Ganzeer,

 

Jan 11: Asymmetric Occupation and Citizen Media

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We're back! Liberty Plaza re-occupied 1-10-12

Listening to Egyptian activists yesterday at 16 Beaver, I was reminded how intense and costly their effort had been compared to ours. Yet the paradox of the global spectacle is that the concentration of attention on “New York” means that what happens here has dramatically asymmetric results. How can we leverage it, using citizen media to counter both spectacle and violence?

1. Egypt

The session began with the screening of a video by Mosireen, the remarkable Egyptian video collective that has been practicing horizontal “citizen media,” to use their term, since the beginning of the revolution.

Warning: this is a very graphic video, showing military violence against unarmed citizens.

The Army can be seen here operating with far greater tactical precision and willingness to use deadly force than the police and other security forces could muster to defend Mubarak. By walling off Tahrir, it has become a place of entrapment as well as liberation. Torture is again routine and cameras are targeted during demonstrations. The result of this violence instigated by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has been to reintroduce layers of fear that were set aside during the struggle against Mubarak.

The Egyptian activists emphasized that the Army is also an economic force, controlling about 40% of the Egyptian economy from pasta to real estate. They even suggested: “None of us understood what the regime is”–note the present tense. That is to say, the embedded presence of the Army at all levels of society since 1954 has rendered the militarization of the social “normal.” It was pointed out that the directors of the opera, zoo and national cinema in Cairo are all retired generals, who occupy some 70-80% of all government positions.

They suggested that the recent violence, especially during the November re-occupation of Tahrir, had woken people from the “dream” that “the people and the Army are one hand.” The present situation was described evocatively as “chaos,” with no one knowing who controls what. The three speakers presented very different assessments of the current situation. In response to questions from New York (via Skype), it was fascinating to see that even on the ground, people did not fully understand the flow of the popular movements. Why some calls to action generated response from thousands and others passed by remains unclear, perhaps inevitably–it is the other form of “chaos,” not a breakdown of order, but the formation of a new order from causes so disparate and multiple that they cannot be defined, even in retrospect.

2. Occupy

US made tear gas used in Cairo 1/11

The obvious question was: what can we do? One direct answer was campaign against the American- and UK-made tear gas that is being used in Cairo (and against Occupy). It was heartening to hear that an OWS working group has just been set up on this area. Who has shares in these companies? From past experience, it’s very likely that TIAA-CREF, CALPERS and other pension firms used by academics will do and pressure can be exerted on them.

Think of the asymmetry here: two pepper-spray incidents, one in New York and one in Davis by the cops Bologna and Pike respectively galvanized Occupy into its present position. In Egypt, such events would barely be noticed other than by those unfortunate enough to suffer them. On the other hand, there are more police in New York City than there are in the whole of Greece, so who’s living in the police state?

In Davis, the students turned around the police violence by forming a new relation of the visible and the sayable. They formed a wall of cameras, phones and iPads for the most part, and confronted the police with them. They then raised a chant of “Shame on you.” The combination of being narrowcast and named drove the police back into the welcoming embrace of Chancellor Katehi, a Greek university official who had been the first to accept police on a Greek university campus since the military dictatorship.These interfaces are in no way accidental.

The task ahead is to mobilize and activate–make “live”–these asymmetric connections. Ironically, the very networks of travel, media, communications and education that were intended to prepare subjects for labor in the global economy have made this possible, especially now that finance capital has no use for them. It is, as we used to say, no coincidence that the US Congress is rushing to criminalize such practices on the Internet. It won’t work.