Category Archives: democracy

A-Anti-Anticapitalista! Welcome to the Resistance

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In people’s comments about M17, the six-month anniversary of OWS, you can see a broad agreement that there’s a new feel to the movement. It’s epitomized by the gradual shift in chant preference from “We Are the 99 Per Cent!” to “A-Anti-Anti-Capitalista!” The former is a statement. The latter expresses the new resistance.

AAAC–as we’ll call it–is also inherently danceable with a 1-2 2-2-3 rhythm built in. It helps that it’s in Spanish, it feels global and properly hemispheric. Not that anyone has consciously thought this out I suspect. On Saturday at Liberty, when hundreds were celebrating what felt like the re-occupation by singing AAAC, a young woman leaned over towards me and asked “What does it mean?” When I told her she smiled in a way that indicated both pleasure and relief–it was what she thought it was and that felt good.

At the General Strike panel at Left Forum, Mike Andrews–one of the leading figures in the May Day planning group–told a similar story. He described how he had seen a group of teenagers jumping up and down shouting “General Strike!” As he said, it’s unlikely that any of the events remembered by left archivists, whether Seattle in 1919 or Britain in 1926 were in their minds. It’s possible that they didn’t even really know what general strikes have been in the past. Right now, as Mike put it, it means for them: “Fuck my shitty job”–and the desire for something better. Some were clearly surprised by this choice of words but it rang true to this precarious generation.

Natasha Lennard, writing for Salon, also turned to this theme:

There’s no adequate explanation for why, for example, on Saturday, it was beautiful to go back to one of the dreariest slabs of concrete that lower Manhattan has to offer and find nearly a thousand other bodies — dancing, chanting “a-anti-anti-capitalista,” catching up and dashing off into spontaneous street marches.

It’s that “magic” feel of Occupy, the sense of making something different, something resistant to commodification that is the distinguishing factor here, especially from the shouting soap-box orators of the traditional left.

To add my own story, a couple of weeks ago I was in Arizona to give a talk at Arizona State, a place where the University President is aggressively neo-liberal and has hiked tuition dramatically. My hosts were very nervous about the attendance, expecting they said perhaps 12, maybe 20. Much to their surprise, about 150 people showed up for the talk because the word “Occupy” was in the title. After the traditional academic introduction, I looked at this group and said, “Hi, my name is Nick and I’m part of Occupy Wall Street.” The whole room smiled–not for me, of course, but for the idea of Occupy. So we consensed to occupy the room for the next hour and a half.

What you can feel here is the pleasure of resistance, not simply refusing to move on, but claiming the right to look at what there is to see here. Look back at September 2011 and there was of course plenty of outrage at the banks and at Wall Street–which is why, after all, it was Occupy Wall Street and not Occupy Lincoln Center. Some of the ideas being floated back then by Adbusters and others included reintroducing the Glass-Steagall Act, creating a one per cent tax on financial transactions and so on. You don’t hear much about those kind of ideas now, although they would have been sensible reforms.

In China Miéville’s photo-essay London’s Overthrow [by the way, the New York Times excerpt cut out all the politics, big surprise, read it online}, he writes

The lion looks out from its apocalypse at the scrag-end of 2011. London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliché than a truism. This place is pre-something.

Pre-figuring is going on all day, all week. Here’s the logo from Occupy the Movie, currently being advertised online:

Occupy The Movie

The parody of Emmanuel Leutze’s corny Washington Crossing the Delaware was well-timed. This morning the Metropolitan Museum of Art used the painting for a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating their corporate sponsors, including all the usual criminals from Goldman to Citibank and Bank of America.

They don’t get it. Do you? Do you feel the change?

99 Per Cent Sovereignty

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Looking back over the six-month history of Occupy, it’s surprising to me that one aspect of its project has been understated. The concept of the 99 per cent has been taken to be newly inclusive–and perhaps it is, compared to class warfare of the Stalinist or Republican kind. As a theory of sovereignty, however, it is in fact surprisingly radical.

As the name suggests, sovereignty is the theory of the sovereign, the authorization of the ability to operate power. Its fundamental operation in European modernity has been to produce a singular sovereign, whether a person, a nation or a people. Hardt and Negri call this the “sovereignty machine,” the means by which

The multitude is in every moment transformed into an ordered totality.

[Empire, 87]

Whether the state declares itself democratic or not, modern sovereignty always tends to a single form of power.

Consequently, the authorizing form of the “people,” which is in theory limitless, has in practice been highly circumscribed. When the Declaration of “We, the People” was made in 1776, more people were excluded than included in that frame–the indigenous populations, the enslaved, women and children. The nationalist claim of the “people,” as in the obligatory invocation of “the American people,” is similarly exclusive.

Nonetheless, the constant accusation against democracy as a system of sovereignty has been that it is limitless and places too few constraints on its constituents. In Rancière’s pithy formulation

democracy=limitlessness=society.

The anxiety at work here is that the open-ended nature of “the people” might serve to derail the sovereignty machine in its perfect equation of law with property.

For Hardt and Negri, the “people” that must be reduced to what Hobbes called “one will” is always already distinguished from the “multitude”:

The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogeneous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it [103].

The concept of the multitude has been much criticized for this apparent vagueness. However, theological and apocalyptic theories of sovereignty have been received with open arms, as if the use of Latin terms is enough to bring us back to the Church.

Is the 99 per cent, then, the multitude? Unlike the “people,” the 99 per cent does not claim to be fully inclusive or limitless. It claims a right to authority without producing “one will,” and indeed expects to curtail the perfect mirror relation between law and property. The importance of this rupture far exceeds any quarrel with the limit that has been suggested. It is a theory of sovereignty, not of the practice of direct democracy. That is to say, it is not to be expected that 99 per cent consensus will be, or should be, achieved in all assemblies.

At the same time, this articulation of the divide between the multitude and capital in relation to sovereignty is itself a mirror of the new contempt that capital has for its human agents. The fantasy of a market based on Adam Smith’s “self-love” has been replaced by a slasher capitalism that wants to “rip the eyes out” of its own customers, whom it perceives as “Muppets,” according to the so-called scandalous revelation of Goldman Sachs’ internal culture.

This palpable disconnect renders the “image” component of the nation state’s “imagined community” highly problematic. As all the language of mirroring and specularity suggests, the image of the imagined community operates as a supplement: “I am like the nation and the nation is like me.” Only it isn’t. For “white” America, the impossible choice between the one per cent candidate they are told to want, and the image of the Confederacy they actually want, is playing out as farce, which is not say that it is not dangerous, as supplements always are.

For the 99 per cent, there is a genuinely new task: how to image and imagine multiplicity without producing another version of “one will.”

 

 

To strike horizontally against inequality

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After comparing the first two Communiqués in the OWS theory journal Tidal, today I’m reading the essays by Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Marina Sitrin. I see here an emerging concept of Occupy as the horizontal strike against inequality.

"True Democracy Is in the Streets"--Argentinian graffiti

First let’s applaud both the editorial team at Tidal and the authors for this mutual engagement: very few established publications could command such writers for their debut issues and it’s to the credit of these much-in-demand figures that they have prioritized writing for Tidal.

In two essays, Butler develops her approach from an initial stress on the “call for justice” in December to today’s key

claim that capitalism relies upon, and reproduces, social and economic inequalities [that]…are becoming greater, assuming new and devastating forms and [that] this accelerated process of inequality remains unchecked by existing state and global authorities.

If the earlier stress was on the “precariousness” that the global financial crisis has produced, as it were, by accident, Butler now suggests that capital is operating in such a way that labor has become a “disposable population.” We might recall that whereas it once took approximately eighty per cent of the workforce simply to generate sufficient food, contemporary agri-business can do so with only two per cent.

Any small adjustment in the current organization of society would not, then, address “the reproduction of inequality” that can be seen as the intended consequence of neo-liberalism. Here we recall Butler’s evocation in Tidal 1 of the cheering Tea Party crowd when invited to imagine a person without health insurance dying. Or the new waves of hate against people using contraception, marrying each other, or otherwise organizing to defend their equality.

Volumes have been written about the ways in which capitalism has always exacerbated inequality, and treated colonized and enslaved populations as disposable–and it’s safe to assume that Butler, of all people, has read most of them. What she is articulating here is a theory of resistance, and of the means to challenge the legitimacy of such a system. Interestingly, the counterinsurgency promoted by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan was centered on creating just such a legitimacy.

The counterinsurgency theory of legitimacy 2005

This combination of neo-liberal “economic pluralism” with militarized governance is precisely what is presently in crisis. As David Graeber might say, there is an inherent resistance to such notions, based on his demonstration that “communism is the basis of all human sociability.” By communism, he does not mean in any way the oddity of the Soviet system. It is a general theory of the possibility of society and a particular refutation of the neo-liberal fetish of “self-sufficiency as a moral ideal” (Butler).

As Butler now argues, this contestation of legitimacy is the moment at which Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the general strike becomes so important. She understands the strike as “a collectivity of disenfranchised citizens,” in which citizenship is not a formal case of documentation, so much as the index of membership of a given society. After giving a precis of the various forms of general strike from Du Bois to Gandhi and Luxemburg, Spivak provocatively suggests

[I]n the “Occupy Wall Street” movement the spirit of the General Strike has come into its own and joined forces with the American tradition of civil disobedience: citizens against an unregulated capitalist state, not against an individual and his [or her] regime.

The “spirit” of the General Strike is the specter haunting neo-liberalism. It is not the specter of state-centered command economies. It is a gesture towards the justice that cannot be deconstructed.

Writing with the collapse of Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacist uprising fresh in his mind, Walter Benjamin, whose spirit pervades Tidal 2, defined the general strike as the event that

takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not
so much causes as consummates.

In its “American” form, taking America to refer to the hemisphere, Marina Sitrin sees such a strike as something

we are discovering together, as we create, which is also how we create: together, horizontally and with affect. What we are doing and how we are doing it are inextricably linked, and both are part of this prefigurative movement.

What we do imagines, forms and creates what there will be next in place of this present disaster, if there is anything. Sitrin warns, based on her experience in Argentina after the crisis of 2001, against two potential distractions. First, the movement may be distracted from this project by already existing left or centrist parties seeking to use its energy. Secondly, and this will be a real issue once the Republicans decide which puppet best suits their Super PACs, we must guard against the electoral distraction: “vote? not vote? organize against the candidates?” In place of such vacillation, Sitrin offers the powerful slogan

With, Against and Beyond the State.

Which is to say, yes, vote in November as a tactical measure, but organize against the state that continues to be the agent of neo-liberal legitimacy. Above all, imagine and create a practice that is beyond the state.

The Tidal theory of Occupy as a horizontal general strike against inequality is moving and dynamic. It suggests two motifs for the present and some for the near future.

First, all Occupy action is a general strike. We should not get drawn into the numbers game that only a massive shut down of all services and industries would count as such a strike. There has been such a strike in North America since September 17, 2011 and in the Americas since the first indigenous revolt against the settlers and the first uprising by the enslaved. MayDay 2012 is a celebration of the return of this spirit of the general strike, not its coming into being. It grows as it turns, yes, but no one instance will be transcendent.

Next and by corollary, the state against which we strike is strong and weak at the same instant, which Negri has called “the porcelain effect.” Porcelain is both very resilient and breakable at once. It endures right up until the moment that it does not, as we saw most recently in Egypt. This is why it cannot be reformed: you cannot recast porcelain once it has been fired, you either use it or discard it.

For the future: Tidal can and should drive this debate, becoming the locus of a new discourse on the horizontal strike against inequality that prefigures what we are creating. There are questions in the spirit of the general strike as to the practice of direct democracy, the recognition of climate injustice and the rights of the non-human in the midst of what has been called the Great Extinction.

For the time being, let’s salute the work already done and the impetus it gives to us all.

Abolition (Free, Open) Education

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If debt refusal becomes a point of self-affirmation, what then happens to education? The tactical answer is the common sharing of education in non-hierarchical institutions, as part of the strategic goal of creating free public education from pre-K to PhD. Yet this goal of abolition education since Reconstruction has always been undermined by debt. What’s so important, I think, is the emerging possibility of discussing this as a collective failure rather than as a set of individual problems.

Abolition education was forged by Reconstruction. Du Bois highlighted the complementary actions of the newly elected South Carolina Convention in ending imprisonment for debt and creating free, public education. While they complained mightily about their “loss” from the abolition of slavery

usury laws had been repealed by the planters in 1866, and interest rates rose to 25 and 30 per cent. Banks commonly charged from 18 to 24 per cent.

Nonetheless, South Carolina committed itself to creating public education by means of an annual levy on all property and a poll tax. The reason was clear: for the first time, those without property were making decisions. Twenty-three out of 47 white delegates and fifty-nine of the 74 African-American delegates paid no income tax. In our own time of millionaire representatives and billionaire financing, this seems scarcely credible.

The “free common school system” was in place by 1868 and made permanent in 1870. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, Wall Street financiers refused to back South Carolina bonds in 1868. Finally, with interest rates of between 15 and 20 per cent, bonds were issued, driving South Carolina into over $20 million of debt by 1871, at least half of which was payment of interest, a situation enabled, wrote Du Bois, by the

financial graft of Wall Street and its agents, made possible by the slander and reaction of the planters.

Debt has never been a separate question to public education in these not-so-United States.

On my way downtown for an Occupy meeting today, I looked up at the subway ads–no less than four for-profit “colleges” were advertised at my end of the car. These institutions like ASA College, Professional Business College and the Grace Institute are outside the research universities discussion about humanities versus STEM subjects: all degrees are vocational. That does not mean they are cheap: ASA expects tuition to be about $12,000 a year and total costs to be about $30,000 a year, according to its own website.

While this debt is, then, being imposed on people as a structural requirement for work, we still can’t ask people to renounce the formal structures of education: it’s going to be a process. Much of that might involve rethinking how we got here in the first place. Today I saw a discussion between the artist Deborah Kass and the young artist Amy Lincoln that highlights these issues:

Ms. Lincoln: …I don’t like the stereotype, the bohemian idea. We’re definitely very career-oriented. You have to be serious about spending time in the studio. You have no free time. You never have the day off…I know a lot of people who have to work a lot because they’re paying off a $30,000 student loan.

Ms. Kass: I didn’t get an MFA. I didn’t have a student loan. We expected our parents to pay for college.

Ms. Lincoln: We all got MFAs and the art market was booming. You could get picked up by a gallery at a student show. We had really high expectations. Now, there is so much angst over, “I want to be showing at such-and-such gallery, and this curator called but then I never heard back….”

Ms. Kass:I didn’t have any expectations. What you expected didn’t exist yet.

For all her debt, Lincoln sells work for between $300-700 in Bushwick where she lives. There’s no disgrace in that, far from it, and it’s interesting that in the short discussion, Lincoln doesn’t question her choices.

By contrast, J, the PhD student who I mentioned yesterday as being saddled with scary debt, wrote to me:

I used to have trouble sleeping at night because I was afraid that they would bring back debtors prisons … and hating myself for having taken out loans. It’s taken me a while to wrap my head around it and to decouple the value and necessity of education from the burden of the debt, and to see that debt structurally.

Here we see the full wisdom of the OWS slogan highlighted by McKenzie Wark: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”

Interim tactics: consider learning, or teaching, at free, open institutions like The Public School, OWS’s own OccU, or following courses by using free syllabi provided by institutions like MIT. If you teach, allow people to audit, sit in, podcast and live-stream. If you write, make it available free by open access means (you can publish it as well, of course, if you can find a press that will give you rights to your own work: and good luck with that).

I know people can’t learn how to be doctors like this and that’s why this is a tactic. Let’s also remember actions like those of the South African Students Movement in 1976, who refused to participate in the apartheid school system and set in motion the collapse of the regime. At the same time, many individuals deprived themselves of education to make things better for others.

So it is heartening to see the success of Chile’s high school students who did not walk out but occupied their schools:

“The assembly is the control center,” Cristóbal explains. “All students participate and at times it’s open to teachers. We have watch duty and volunteers come in to make meals. Teachers teach, but they also learn from the students. At the beginning we had classes subject by subject, but later we saw that parceling out knowledge wasn’t the real way to learn, and we all got together for each subject.”

The high school system is the key to an abolition education in the Americas. Here in New York the high schools are more segregated than they were before official desegregation. There was official celebration last week when admissions to the city’s selective high schools produced a class that is 6% African American and 8% Latin@–in a majority minority city. Behind that failure lies the still-greater disaster of data-driven quantification of education as a standardized test score result.

From Chile to South Africa and South Carolina, the impetus to a free, open public education is clear and elusive at once. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Arizona has banned the teaching of Paulo Freire’s classic The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We might want to begin by re-reading it, assigning it, making free copies of it, and discussing it at Occupies everywhere.

Endebt and Punish

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William Hogarth, "The Rake's Progress"--in the Fleet Prison for debt

Yesterday the M1 student march in New York stopped for personal and institutional histories. On three occasions people I’m working with at undergraduate, MA and PhD level recounted how debt has deformed their lives. I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

The accounts moved from an angry and articulate sophomore via an MA, who is teaching three adjunct jobs to keep up her payments, to a PhD candidate looking at 30 years of repaying $800-1000 a month. Hearing such stories one after another made it seem structural: the further one advances, the greater the debt and so the greater the pressure to conform.

The graduate students both spoke about wanting to stay in education, while not being sure that they could afford the profession. It’s the contemporary Student’s Progress, which, like a modernization of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, does not so much end in debtor’s prison as begin there–only it’s the “soul” that is imprisoned, not the body.

I started to think that debt was parallel to the transformation of the legal system over time. If Foucault taught us to think of early modern corporal punishment being transformed into modern discipline in the nineteenth century, Angela Davis has supplemented that analysis with her description of the prison-industrial system. Thus the penitentiary was instituted in the aftermath of abolition both to control and contain the free African population and to create lend-lease minimal cost labor to replace chattel slavery. The binary turns out not to be as simple as we had thought.

So we might think to map a parallel and intertwined structure for debt. In the early modern period, common people were hanged or otherwise punished for minor debt and theft. Those of higher social rank might find themselves incarcerated in the Fleet prison–bankrupts and those charged with contempt of the courts of Chancery, Exchequer and common pleas were not the working classes. Violent crime and theft was the province of the Court of the King’s Bench and the Assizes. The Fleet therefore usually contained only about 300 inmates, many of whom were well-known. It was closed in 1844, while imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1869.

This apparently Foucauldian pattern needs complicating. As David Graeber points out in his brilliant Debt, the violent punishments against debt crime were rarely enforced in the late Middle Ages, which is not to say there was no bad feeling:

the criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and a borrower….[C]ommunities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love will also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion.

The innovation of the “market” in the late eighteenth century was to challenge the possibility of such intertwined community by creating a new self-love, to quote the most famous passage of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love.

Graeber shows that the concept of self-love, or self interest, creates a new hybrid: a singular “self” that owes nothing except to itself; and “interest” that is paid to that self, now registered as “love.”

We might see Bentham’s Panopticon as a machine for the production of such self-interested operatives. For it was intended to function as well for the manufactures, or factories, as it did for the prison or asylum. Writing in the Panopticon Letters (1788) a decade after Smith, Bentham noted of Panoptic surveillance: “Each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time.” If I follow Graeber’s suggestions correctly, we should as much stress the singularity as the permanence: it is the process of breaking up mutually-endebted communities and the subsequent production of self-interested individuals with singular debts.

With the end of the reforming Panopticon around the same time as the resurgence of financialization (c.1975-81) has come a new configuration: the individual is “locked into” debt from the earliest age. If this debt is centered around education, it is more likely to apply to middle and upper-middle class children, who may have college savings plans created for them at birth or before. This debt is now the largest sector of consumer debt in the US economy at about $1 trillion, and it is regarded as highly secure because you cannot declare bankruptcy on student debt and agencies can even garner debtors’ Social Security.

What has further changed is the transformation of the equation of interest and love into what I think we want to call hate. It’s not enough to make sure most graduates have their lives locked into debt before they even graduate. Everyone has to suffer.

When I was in Arizona recently, I heard about a proposal from the Arizona State legislature to require even students who have full scholarships or grants to pay at least $2000 in tuition. Here’s the legalese (in blue block capitals on their site):

each student who is a full‑time student enrolled at a university under the jurisdiction of the Arizona board of regents in fiscal year 2012‑2013 shall personally contribute at least two thousand dollars during the academic year for tuition.  A student may not use any other source of public or private funding, including grants, gifts, scholarships or tuition benefits or other types of funding administered by or through a university or an affiliate of a university, to reduce or eliminate that student’s contribution.

What is the motive of this “personal contribution”? Last night I happened to see a production of Brecht’s classic play Galileo. It begins by stressing Galileo’s debt. His need to repay his debt leads him to leave Venice and venture into the monk-controlled regions of Italy. When his decentering astronomical discoveries imply a different social order than the Bible-sanctioned control of the nobles, he recants under the threat of the Inquisition’s torture, ending his days in a physically comfortable prison of the soul. He ends as he begins, locked into a system that only debt can supply.

If debt is a means to teach you to hate yourself, it is also and equally true that the imagination is dangerous. Ideas can overturn social order. The most dangerous idea now might be this: it’s not worth paying for college because there are no jobs anyway and no job that you want would pay you enough to service the debt.

Abolition Democracy–Visualizing Occupy

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As part of the build-up to May 1 and beyond, I’m going to devote a series of posts to the concept of the general strike and abolition democracy as the means by which we might visualize Occupy. Over the next few weeks, I want to delineate a genealogy that draws its energies from the abolition crisis in the Atlantic world (1861-77), triangulated by the abolition of US slavery, the Paris Commune and Reconstruction. In a moment where we are so often told it is impossible to imagine the end of capitalism, let’s draw energy from the overthrow of a much longer-lasting means of production–chattel slavery.

While these events are of course remote from present-day concerns, the unexpunged energy of that moment can inform and illuminate our own. Just as Walter Benjamin looked back to the formation of Empire from 1830-71 to understand its crisis in the moment of European fascism (1923-45), so too might we imagine the resistance to the present crisis of the military-industrial complex by considering the resistance to the crisis of the plantation complex. In short, this is the work that an intellectual and historical materialism can contribute to visualizing Occupy as a movement in and across time as well as space.

In affiliation with W. E. B. Du Bois and Angela Y. Davis, I think of abolition democracy as the radical transformation of democracy both so that all have a part in its process and so that social institutions designed to exclude designated sectors of the population from that process should be abolished. In his 1935 classic Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois saw that “the true significance of slavery” was the question of democracy:

What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black and white, became free, were given schools and the right to vote, what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men [sic] regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship would rule, and how would property and privilege be protected?

If Occupy has a signature issue it is economic justice, but its signature as a movement is the commitment to a renewed democracy that reopens such questions. The force of abolition democracy is its capacity to at once visualize what needs to be transformed and what might result from that transformation. It is therefore realist in the sense that it envisages the real difficulties of the present, that which must be made sense of, but also is aware of real possibilities for future alternatives.

In the nineteenth century, the dynamics of abolition, colonization and revolution formed a new realism that I call “abolition realism.” Abolition realism brought together the general strike and the Jubilee (the end of slavery and debt) in order to forge a refusal of slavery, such that abolition was observable, and capable of being represented and sustained. Consequently, it needed to be legible to others as “real,” as well as to those involved in making it.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx summarized the dilemma of revolutionary change as “the creation of something which does not yet exist.” Such creation took two forms. First it was necessary to name what was being created and then to give it visualizable and recognizable form. In short, this was a task of imagination.

Timothy O'Sullivan, Untitled (former 'slaves', nr. Beaufort, S. Carolina), 1862

The enslaved in the United States engaged in this representative labor immediately at the outbreak of the Civil War. As soon as hostilities commenced, the Sea Islands of South Carolina were captured by Union forces in 1861, causing the plantation owners to flee in disarray. With the Emancipation Proclamation still two years off, the status of the enslaved Africans left behind was unresolved, in a kind of juridical no-man’s-land or interregnum. It was clear to many African Americans that this kind of freedom was better than none and many made their way there. We can now say that they occupied the Sea Islands.

For Du Bois, this mass migration was not a casual activity but a general strike of the enslaved, a decisive move to end forced labor:

This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps half a million people.

Even today one can read historical accounts by Ivy League historians claiming that the abolition of slavery had been inevitable since 1776, as the logical end point of the Declaration of Independence. Du Bois and many others, insisted to the contrary that slavery was ended by the enslaved themselves.

Timothy O’Sullivan, who later became famous for his photographs of the American West, captured the “general strike” against slavery as official photographer for the Army of the Potomac. At the Old Fort Plantation, Beaufort, O’Sullivan took a group photograph of well over a hundred African Americans (above). The group represented a mix of those on the move during the war and those to whom the war had suddenly arrived where they were already located.

There were African Americans illegally volunteering for the Union army, known as “contrabands,” wearing soldier’s caps (most clearly at extreme left, third row back.) The term was a legal fiction, reinforcing the paradox that these soldiers fighting for freedom were not free and had “stolen” themselves. The camera was placed high up on the roof of a former slave cabin in order to get everyone into the shot in a bright, sharp light that produced some strong contrasts leaving some faces in “white-out,” others too dark to see. Others moved before the exposure was complete, creating a “ghost” at the left edge and many blurred expressions.

The long exposure time prevented any displays of celebration but the very event of the photograph itself suggests that all the participants were aware of the historical significance of the moment. There was no leader present, or a suggestion of a hierarchy. Men, women and children are gathered together in a collective assertion of their right to look and therefore be seen.

Under slavery, the enslaved were forbidden to “eyeball” the white population as a whole, a law that remained in force in the Carolinas until 1952 and is active in today’s prison system. So the simple act of raising the look to a camera, and engaging with it, constituted a rights claim to a subjectivity that could engage with sense experience. The photograph can be seen, then, as depicting direct democracy, the absence of mastery.

On the Sea Islands, the space between regimes became a space without regime, democracy. Their occupation hails ours across time, one space of temporary autonomy to another. See them.

Horizontal Writing and Abolition Publishing

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Over the course of a long day at CAA, we debated with artists and art historians as to the value of open source, open access digital media projects. For many in the audiences, the question at stake was one of professional development.  Personally, I feel a synergy between the horizontalizing work I have been developing in new media, including on this blog, and the pressure for a direct or abolition democracy in which horizontal process is a central tactic. Merge the two and you might get: abolition publishing.

A horizontal “writing” is always on our side, whether that writing be text, code, or a drawing. It is simple, as in the sign drawn on cardboard, as well as complex. As the technology of the right to look it goes backwards and forwards between its authors and its audiences, constantly affirming consent. It worries about the “author” in “authority” from the place of its claim for autonomy.

This in-between is the place of the spectre, the place of revolt. In terms of today’s discussion, this is the in-between space of “revolt” in the art history of the 1970s and 80s that got me involved in questions of the visual, beginning with feminist questionings of the gaze, moving via a Marxist interrogation of the “popular” image, to an engagement with the social that produced visual culture. More recently, there has been the widely discussed “revolution” of digital humanities, especially in the 2008-9 period, even though many are distancing themselves from these rhetorics now. And now these spectres are confronted by the real revolutions of 2011 and the challenges of 2012.

As I have often observed here, this circulation of information and ideas has been enabled by a public/private interface from the Privately Owned Public Spaces like Zuccotti to the interface of Facebook, Twitter and bodies in space symbolized by Tahrir. It is now time to think about sustaining those exchanges in the common space that we can produce together. As we have seen, we cannot rely on occupying the interstices, the in-between. We need to be bodies in space where they are not supposed to be. Such bodies are writing in places they are not supposed to: in the most vertical of institutions that is the university, the most vertical of all verticalities is publishing. Direct democracy in publishing exists, is needed, and can be whatever we all want it to be. It would be abolition publishing for an abolition democracy.

The need is well-known—debt epitomizes it, whether in the crisis of student debt, university debt for neo-liberal expansion, or the debt presumed to be owed by authors to publishers. Last year, scientific publishers Elsevier generated $3.6bn revenue of which 36% was profit—that’s a billion dollars of profit on academic labor. This isn’t market forces, it’s extortion.

Alternatives exist from the open access publishing of Open Humanities Press to the non-hierarchical multi-media platform Scalar. These formats allow for an exploration of autonomy. I call it non-hierarchical in the formal sense: every entry is equal, whether you think of it as a page, a tag, media or whatever. Thus Scalar is not so much non-linear—because we tend to use it to tell stories, just ones that are recursive and looped—so much as it is non-hierarchical. This is a counter-visuality to the authority which insists on the viewpoint of the hero or great man. So whereas projects like the excellent Vectors were vanguardist, like the Leninist party, Scalar is horizontal like Zapatismo or horizontalidad.

These alternatives can enable us to do what we want. My sense of working within this open-ended project for the past couple of years has been of a reboot consisting of a new openness, a sense of flow, and the thinking of the interactive/interdisciplinary as activity. We learn what we want by doing it, whether in the academic form of horizontal writing, or the horizontal democracy of Occupy. These are not simply equivalents of course: the latter carries a far higher degree of engagement and risk than the former (though the writing is not without professional risk for those in less secure situations than mine). They have been transforming when interactive. Occupy 2012 has by its durational form allowed me to explore and instantiate some of what I think might be meant by solidarity and horizontalidad.

So when David Graeber highlighted the most critical development of 2011 as a transformation of the imagination, how might we apply this to academic and writing contexts? In other words, how does it begin to become possible to visualize a writing in which the economic is not the dominant value?

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. And they would get that by using the products of abolition publishing from the tweet to the long-form text: open-access, open source, live.

 

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.

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.