Category Archives: democracy

Greece, Slavery and the General Strike

Posted on by

Today the Greek parliament met to approve the deliberately humiliating terms of the German-backed bond rescue plan (aka the bailout). In the streets, it is more precisely defined as slavery. The response is, as it has long been, to organize the general strike. For globalized neo-liberalism this is the moment to bring an “end” to 2011, a year after their man in Egypt, Mubarak, had to step down.

Estimates suggest 50,000 people in the street in Athens, perhaps as many as 100,000 with thousands more elsewhere, and many buildings occupied. The inevitable riot police and tear gas have been deployed. Exarchia, the radical district resounded to explosions. As fires burned, allegations circulated that the police had started them or ignored them. (Watch on Livestream here.)

Athens 2 12 12

The scenes were extraordinary–Starbucks on fire, smoke bombs, riot police–with the word “chaos” on every Greek website.

General Strike in Greece

The troika-installed Prime Minister Papademos–whose name seems to evoke a patriarchal “father of the people”–pushed the market line about debt refusal:

It would create conditions of uncontrolled economic chaos and social explosion. The country would be drawn into a vortex of recession, instability, unemployment and protracted misery.

Such remarks fly in the face of existing reality, in which those are already the prevailing conditions. Official unemployment exceeds 20%. Reports have suggested people returning to family farms in the countryside and islands from the cities in order to survive. The Church feeds 250,000 people a day in a country of 11 million people. Homelessness has increased by 25% (although the absolute numbers are low by U. S. standards. The official EU statistics agency Eurostat reports that one-third of the country is living in poverty. And yet Papademos called for more “sacrifice.”

Nonetheless, even this is not enough for the one percent: “The promises from Greece aren’t enough for us any more,” the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, said in an interview published in the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. When the vote is passed, the minimum wage will be cut by over 20%, pensions will be reduced and the already ruined state will cut back still further. The graffiti in the streets calls this slavery.

"We Should Not Live as Slaves"

“We should not live as slaves,” it reads [Na men zesoume san douloi]. Evocatively, the word “doulos” is used for “slave,” the same term used by Aristotle in his Politics to approve the institution of slavery. His meditation on slavery is in fact one of governance, which manifests itself as the necessity of dominance. I’m going to quote at some length because it is the inability to “reason” according the “logic” of the markets that is being used to justify Greek slavery today. It’s also important to read this to realize how thoroughgoing and long-lasting the Western commitment to slavery has been.It is also a passage that contains within it so many of today’s critical concerns from the human/nonhuman, to the “soul at work” (Bifo), governmentality, Rancière’s division of the sensible, and the persistence of slavery. Let us note this is not a coincidence:

for that some should govern, and others be governed, is not only necessary but useful, and from the hour of their birth some are marked out for those purposes, and others for the other, and there are many species of both sorts….Those men therefore who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul, are to be thus disposed of, as the proper use of them is their bodies, in which their excellence consists; … they are slaves by nature, and it is advantageous to them to be always under government. He then is by nature formed a slave who is qualified to become the chattel of another person, and on that account is so, and who has just reason enough to know that there is such a faculty, without being indued with the use of it; for other animals have no perception of reason, but are entirely guided by appetite, and indeed they vary very little in their use from each other; for the advantage which we receive, both from slaves and tame animals, arises from their bodily strength administering to our necessities; for it is the intention of nature to make the bodies of slaves and freemen different from each other {1254b-1255a}

The present rhetoric of the “lazy” Greeks, shiftlessly avoiding tax payments and demanding state support defines people driven entirely by appetite. They must therefore become the chattel of the troika, despite the likelihood that the cuts will still worsen the economy and necessitate yet more support for the external bond markets. What matters is that the Greeks be made an example: “Can’t pay! Won’t pay!” is reworked into “Can’t pay? Become a slave.”

In Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that the enslaved had ended chattel slavery themselves by mass migration from South to North at the beginning of the Civil War, long before the Emancipation Proclamation:

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.

The result of the strike was an abolition democracy, whose participatory process centered on education and the capacity to be self-sustaining. The measures have passed. The occupations have been ended. It’s up to us to keep this present, to remain in the moment, to be present.

 

Civil Disability

Posted on by

If there is to be a new eugenics, it will return to a hierarchy of citizenship, in which some citizens are fully empowered members of the public and many others are not.  In English jurisprudence, this latter condition is known as “civil disability.” It has kept those perceived as not equal to the standards of citizenship from enjoying the right to vote or even the right to appear as a witness in a law case.  It has applied to the enslaved, Jews and women. It still applies to minors and those designated insane. In the current optic of power, civil disability permits corporations to have the standing of people, while individual people are the objects of kettling, spraying, scanning and other forms of classification.

The very diversity and dis/ability of Occupy—even if widely considered insufficient within the movement—appears to add to the vengeful force of the reassertion of authority. Such bodies are not supposed to be able to make political choices but only to be the grateful recipients of Lifetime made-for-TV movies and to supply “meaningful” roles for able-bodied actors to win Oscars. It is as if authority says, if you will not accept the ways we disable you once, then we will do it again. That is to say, disability is not a physical condition but a social one: it is the lack of accommodations that makes a person in a chair have difficulty negotiating space not an inherent incapacity. This disabling is now extended to all suspect bodies: which is often everyone.

I have not flown since Occupy began, unusually for someone who travels a lot. Today I had to submit to being kettled by the TSA at JFK airport in order to wait for the privilege of partially undressing and then being scanned while standing with my hands raised over my head by who knows what purportedly safe form of radiation. It was presumably designed to make people feel powerless and it does. While hygiene was the key to the original eugenics and still plays a significant role, the new eugenics takes its energy from the discourses of safety.

Later in the overcrowded container called “coach,” a fellow passenger was harangued by a flight attendant because the straps of his backpack, which he was forced to stow “under the seat in front” because no other space was available, intruded by a matter of two inches into our seating space. If we had to evacuate, we were told, we might get entangled. I rearranged my feet and the emergency was over because we had displayed sufficient passivity. As the Italian cruise ship disaster showed, actual safety has nothing to do with any of this—passengers were sent back to their cabins as the boat took on water.

In such situations, any challenge to the “move on” authority of the police results in immediate arrest, deportation or deplaning. (By the way, is there an uglier world than “deplane”? One candidate would the use of the term “designated receptacle” to mean bin.)  The demonstrators at Move In Day in Oakland were repeatedly hailed to “submit to arrest.” That is, it is not enough that you be arrested. You must submit to it, accept the authority by which you are arrested and reconfigure your own practice from civil disobedience to crime.

Traditional eugenics and civil disability were not at all interested in what the disabled citizen thought of themselves because by definition their thoughts were not important. If it matters so much to the new agents of civil disability that we submit to being “disabled” by them, it is because they have learned their trade from counterinsurgency.  Under the Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency, it was not enough for the occupying power to be able to dominate the population. That population must “actively and passively” consent to being ruled. So you must not only go through the security checkpoint, you must accept that the checkpoint is there for your security and is therefore right. It doesn’t work and what’s more it has never worked.

Interestingly, the military themselves have abandoned the counterinsurgent fantasy. They are withdrawing regular troops from Afghanistan, having abandoned Iraq to pick  things up where they left off in about 2007. Now ubiquitous anti-terrorism is the goal, with targeted missions being carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles or special operations troops. Just as the brief triumph of counterinsurgency rested on the apparent success of the “surge” in Iraq, so is this new paradigm clearly based on the bin Laden assassination. The administration is impervious to anxieties about the lack of due process of those targeted or even the “collateral damage” done to the by-standers. All of these people, whether by virtue of being insurgents or failing to remove themselves from proximity to insurgents, are under the prescription of civil disability.

Just so, a TSA agent said to us a while ago, “you have no rights here.” Just so, police launch a “surge” in the Wind City Reservation to reduce crime statistics. Just so, you may be evicted from public space because you are not considered part of the public or expelled from federal space because you are not a fully-fledged citizen. Buttressing the entire process is the longest-running process of civil disability in the United States, the mass incarceration of African-American and minority populations. Over two million people are part of the prison-industrial system that so patently discriminates by ethnicity that Michele Alexander has called it “the new Jim Crow.” More exactly, one might say it was the old Jim Crow. As Angela Davis has shown, the penitentiary and work-lease systems were devised as part of As “felons,” many of the released lose civil rights.

Shots Heard Round the World

Posted on by

In his classic 1997 novel Underworld, Don Delillo visualized the Cold War by the coincidence of finding on the front cover of one newspaper in 1951 of the first Soviet atomic weapons test and the “shot heard around the world,” the victory by the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers. More recently, W. J. T. Mitchell was struck that the front cover of the New York Times for September 11, 2001 had a lead story about cloning, leading to his book Cloning Terror, a visualization of the Bush era. Ironically, Delillo’s novel had André Kertesz’s somewhat sinister photograph of the World Trade Center on its front cover, seeming to foretell Bush’s post 9-11 “crusade.”

Kertesz, WTC, 1972

Today’s webpages have accounts of the shooting of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx by the NYPD and the continued upheaval in Egypt after the death of 75 football [soccer if you must] fans. The apparently contingent association resonates powerfully in the fashion of Delillo and Mitchell (and all good Surrealists). The connection here is the overreach of autocratic power, a countervisualization to their assertion “move on, nothing to see here.”

Since 9-11 the New York City police department have had a free hand to act as they choose, bolstered by their reputation as heroes on the day of the attacks and the decline in the crime rate. Most notably in the latter category, street crime of the kind for which New York was once notorious has notably declined, albeit not as much as you might think. The murder rate, according to official statistics declined precipitously from 2,016 in 1994 to 924 in 1998. It’s fallen further in the past decade but not that much: 866 murders were reported in 2010.

It looks as if Bloomberg has nonetheless decided to cut his police commissioner loose after this latest scandal. This week alone, three people have been shot and killed by police with Ramarley’s death simply the most egregious of the group. In an article that appeared in today’s New York Times with the evident approval of the mayor–because one detail that he disagreed with was noted–it is noted that

There has been a stunning rise in so-called stop-and-frisks — 601,055 in 2010, compared with 97,296 in 2002

This ethnically-discriminatory practice has been highlighted by activists for years, so it’s curious to see that it happens to make the One Per Cent Times front cover at this moment of scandal. The target is Police Commissioner Kelly, perhaps the one person in New York with whom Bloomberg  feels he has to share power. If Bloomberg succeeds in pushing Kelly into retirement, his regime will be truly autocratic.

In Egypt the scandalous connivance of the police and the military government in fomenting a riot between football Ultras in Port Said, leading to over 70 deaths, has been missed by nobody. Whether it was lighting that  mysteriously failed, or a gate that somehow was opened, it’s clear that Cairo believes its football Ultras, who held the line in Tahrir against Mubarak’s camels a year ago today, were being targeted in revenge.

Rather than launch attacks on the immediate perpetrators, the Cairo street has turned against the military government. The film clip below from Mosireen shows the demolition of the wall built by the military to protect the Interior Ministry, home of the police, from Tahrir.

The Ultras and their allies have done the unexpected and surprised the new autocrat Tantawi and his forces. At the same time, these events show that the casual analysis of the Egyptian elections, which would suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood won because they were better integrated into the Egyptian masses, missed the mark.

Even as we were digesting this interface, Washington DC police moved in on Occupy DC, whose encampment had remained in place under federal park regulations, until House Republican Darrell Issa targeted these protections last week. Ever fearful of Republican attacks–and the Park Service have been a long-term obsession for the right–the law was simply ignored.

This is not what democracy looks like

The fragmentation of the rule of law produced by the global crisis has generated a set of unequal and competing autocracies. This may not end well.

Sally Out Against Passive Recreation

Posted on by

From the middle ranks of the Occupy movement, I have come to hear “occupy” as a question. The question is being put as to when and how I might be able to change. it sounds somewhere between portentous and new-age, I’m aware. It is nonetheless something that I go and practice–in the sense of perform and try out. I spent today at a workshop run by the amazing Lisa Fithian, called “Shutting Things Down to Open Things Up.”

As is now something of an Occupy cliche, change begins with yourself but it also has to be put into some form of practice: which is to say, it’s personal and it’s political. Hence my monstrous hybrid of a title. In the Areopagitica (1644), his great defense of freedom of the press, the poet John Milton declaimed:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.

So it’s one thing, whether good or not, to write about Occupy but you have to go and do it in the face of the adversary as well. And so the second half of the phrase comes from the regulations devised by Brookfield Properties for the appropriate use of Zuccotti Park: “passive recreation.” It is in its bureaucratic, unlovely way, a motto for the service sector of global neo-liberalism that the U. S. has become.

I am painfully aware of my own limitations in this context. The events I have organized or helped organize are details in a much broader picture. I am and will remain a university person. It is, however, one of those times in which you need to test the ideas you circulate by putting them into a form of practice because this is how we learn what to try and think next. Sometimes this is done text to text. Now it’s time for sallying out and seeing what happens, even if the result is another period of reflection.

The performative workshop is a very useful tool for measuring this sense of change and here I want to reflect on two such experiences that I’ve had recently: today’s exercise in taking space, and an earlier theatre of the oppressed workshop, based on the work of Agosto Boal, that I participated in at 16 Beaver. Both were very productive in making us think of ourselves as bodies in space with choices to make that might change the outcome of events. The comparison might help to highlight some tensions in Occupy’s relations to what we might call internal and external repression.

At the Boal workshop, facilitated by Eve Silber, the musician and actor, what had been a physically passive space of talking and listening became a very dynamic and open set of possibilities. Using the “image theatre” technique, Silber built up from a single image of direct democracy to an improvised encounter between protagonist and antagonist. The scenario involved an experience of trying to get access to an OWS Spokes Council, site of some of the most difficult personal interactions in the movement.

One woman present (I didn’t know her name) did a very convincing performance of such disruptions. She was as scary and confusing as the actual performances of such “blocks” and Joe N., playing the facilitator, did what I probably would have done–he played it for laughs, making fun of the rhetorics of facilitation. Afterwards in the discussion, I wondered if we’d missed a moment: instead of trying to work through the hardest place of internal dynamics, we’d stepped outside by being ironical.

Today in Fithian’s workshop, participants were again encouraged to visualize the space otherwise. This time, sets of bodily movement tactics were deployed to see if one set of people, playing protestors, could get past another, playing the police. The goal was to see if space could be taken, even symbolically. For most of those present, this was not an entirely abstract idea, because everyone has been on a demonstration where the police try and prevent you from going where you want.

Nonetheless, on the first effort, a pile of bodies resulted in the middle of the room. The “protestors” felt we had been successful in recovering someone the “police” had tried to arrest, until Fithian reminded us that the point was to get past them to the end of the room. The next sally went better, aided by the protestors numerical superiority and the absence of batons, helmets, shields and pepper spray that routinely appear in New York whenever police are deployed. Just yesterday an unarmed eighteen-year-old, Ramarley Graham, was shot and killed in the Bronx by the NYPD over alleged possession of some marijuana.

So the final venture, co-ordinated by Fithian rather than by us, had the protestors march up to the police and then suddenly sit down. There was a palpable moment of surprise from the “cops.” In that instant, a variety of options for claiming space would have become available. Then the cops recovered themselves and pepper-sprayed the seated demonstrators.

Doing what is not expected turned out to be the best resource, finding ways not to fulfill how power anticipates that we will perform. Fithian showed video of a trans group marching at the demonstrations against the G8 in Rostock, Germany and the complete bafflement of the police they confronted. Another group demonstrated nude.

In September 2011, physical encampments in public space were a brilliantly unexpected move: now the police regard tents as contraband. The difference would not have been that the police did not know an occupation was planned, as New York is now one of the most policed spaces in the world. Today at Penn Station in the shopping area between the subway and the Long Island Rail Road I saw five police officers and two soldiers. The occupation happened because the state did not believe it could be sustained. Paradoxically, the very sense that they have that Occupy is over could be its most useful asset come Spring.

 

Event? Performance? Or Theatre?

Posted on by

In these observations from the ranks of the Occupy movement, I have often been driven to think about the performative and theatrical dimensions of Occupy. It seems to be catching on.

In a recent essay in the SSCR series “Possible Futures,” Yale philosopher Matthew Noah Smith takes a generally positive view of the movement but disagrees extensively with its tactics and strategies. He argues:

OWS is not a movement—at least not in any sense that we would use the term to refer to other movements. OWS was, first and foremost, an event more than an organization.

That would certainly come as a surprise to many in Occupy who refer to it precisely as the “movement.” Their sense is a widespread turning away from one set of goals and aspirations to another way of understanding being in the world. Rather than define what a movement might be, Smith goes on to claim:

Because OWS was no more than an event, it always had to be located in a determinate place. This is why the evictions from Zucotti and the various other OWS sites were seen as existential threats. A performance needs a theater, and if the theater closes, then the performance ends. Organizations, on the other hand, are abstract entities and so can coalesce anywhere they choose.

For all that Smith is a philosopher, we might be surprised at the lack of precision in his language here: is this a performance in the sense of Austin, Butler, Derrida, or J. Jack Halberstam? It seems that there is a certain tautology at work here: a performance is what happens in a theatre, which is a place where performances happen. At the most literal level, however, performances have mostly not taken place in theatres. Scripted plays may be performed there, but no one is proposing Occupy as following a script.

To be concrete where Smith prefers the abstract: yesterday, there was a call to demonstrate in support of Occupy Oakland and against police brutality. It appeared on NYCGA.net and was disseminated on Facebook and Twitter. Later I saw leaflets at Washington Square Park. I don’t know who did that. I still decided to go. For Smith, this is evidence that OWS is organized but not an organization.

The fineness of this distinction is nonetheless precisely where we disagree. Occupy is a direct democracy between people. The organized democracy that Smith wants to see proposes abstract entities that do the business of what there is to be done: so there is always a House majority and minority leader regardless of who those people actually are. That is the maintenance of authority. It is in the recognition of the other and in allowing that other to invent us that the possibility of autonomy is created. We already have an abstract autonomy, the right to consume. That’s not going so well. We need a real autonomy, and it can only be found in moments of performance.

For Smith, the self gets abstracted in the process of coming to democracy:

One no longer thinks of oneself as a patient or a lone figure in struggle against injustice. Rather, one begins to think of oneself plurally and democratically. That is, one understands oneself as part of a democratic ‘we.’

I’m all for solidarity, I just don’t think it has to be seen outside the event and without a relationship between singularities. Yesterday’s demonstration did not go anywhere in particular, an organized walk to a “specific place.” Rather it made the claim of the right to be seen. So a rabbi walked quietly in the middle of the march, while hundreds danced past Fifth Avenue restaurants singing “A-Anti-Anticapitalista!”

Did they fail because capitalism was not overthrown? Perhaps, unless you think that capitalism is in the process of overthrowing itself anyway. Or you could say that some at least have found a way to articulate their refusal to move on and see nothing. This articulation is the performance of a movement. It proposes a dissensus that allows for the emergence of a politics in which there is no person without part.

The Shock of the Vertical: The University

Posted on by

After a month in which I’ve been able to focus on Occupy, this week has been a blunt return to the vertical: the University. Today I worked on a third-year tenure review, chaired  a PhD proposal orals and participated in the first half of a two-day Mellon-funded open peer-to-peer review process. In short, I spent all day reviewing, or considering how to review, my “peers,” whether we construe that as my equals or those in a feudal relation of dependency. (By the way, a good number of students dropped my class on Politics and Visual Culture: but as many others added it–more follows).

So much time in purported judgment of others: often in fact deferred or displaced but the subject of much real or attributed “fear.” In this afternoon’s discussion, fear meant the worry that many academics feel about using digital media to disseminate their work, as to whether tenure and promotion committees will approve it as “refereed publication.” Employment concerns are entirely valid and real. We also need to recognize that the tenured and tenure-track faculty are a minority in the university teaching workforce and that many would be grateful to have such concerns.

Or we can look at a place like Egypt, where, despite the intense triangular struggle between the secular revolution, the Islamic forces and the Armed Forces, a group like Mosireen, the video collective I often refer to, can state:

The Mosireen workspace is open to everyone, regardless of their level of experience. We see a big part of our role as helping network between a wide variety of initiatives and projects, especially those born out of a spirit of civic engagement.

When we talk of “open” peer review in the quiet world of US academia, or of the “revolutionary” digital humanities, we should step back in respect to those committed to horizontal practice in the midst of a shooting war, exactly the situation often used to justify vanguard leadership.

I don’t intend to take the sanctimonious position that only the decolonial revolution can be in the right. A remarkable action by Occupy Baltimore shows what can be done. Along with many other delegates to the American Studies Association, I visited Occupy Baltimore last November. It was at this point that I felt we really had a national movement going. In a city where there was little media attention to their actions even locally, let alone nationally, a group of Occupiers had set up in a desolate space on the waterfront. They held a GA that lasted from 8 to past 10 when I gave up, feeling cold.

This January, despite the evictions, Occupy Baltimore demonstrated under the slogan “Schools Not Jails” and for good reason:

the Schools Not Jails Occupation took to the streets of Baltimore, brought public attention to the struggle against the State of Maryland’s plan to build a $104 million youth jail in East Baltimore – the budget for which could easily supplement and expand the City of Baltimore’s education funding, and prevent our recreation centers from being closed or privatized. We entered the site of the proposed detention center, and built a little red schoolhouse on the empty lot, to symbolize our desire for a city that prioritizes Schools, not Jails.

It transpired that, after the protest, this item did not in the end appear in the state budget, a horizontal victory for the movement, far from the spotlights of global media attention. All of us who loved The Wire, who use it in education and elsewhere, should be part of this movement.

These kinds of interfaces are perhaps exemplified by the Occupy Archive, who have created an open source, open access set of materials for activists, researchers and current/future scholars:

#Occupy Archive is documenting and saving the digital evidence and stories from the Occupy protests worldwide that began in September 2011 in Lower Manhattan. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) inspired groups to form in small towns and large cities around the world. # Occupy Archive seeks to represent each of those groups with individual collections.

There is a horizontal affiliation between these networked education and empowerment projects that those of us more ensconced in the vertical “research” university would do well to learn from and about in the effort to reconsider what the function of such institutions might be before the inevitable bursting of the education bubble. The tidal wave of one trillion dollars in student debt is about to break and the future is uncertain.

My modest proposal would be that a university program in the humanities would be a place where people might collectively experiment as to what “democracy” might mean for them. I know it’s “unrealistic” but then, how realistic is it to go to university to get a job?

Direct Democracy in the Classroom

Posted on by

There is no more hierarchical place than the university. My graduate course this semester is trying to bring some of the practice and theory of direct democracy into the classroom to see if we can build a different university within the ruins of the old.

I’ve been inspired to do so by the new teaching promoted by digital culture, such as Cathy Davidson’s experiments with peer-to-peer grading and Elizabeth Losh’s use of Twitter as instant feedback. So what might happen if you add the horizontal ethics of direct democracy to the hybrid learning space created by ubiquitous computing?

This will not be easy. The era of the league table, US News and World Report rankings and Research Assessment Exercises mitigates directly against the possibility of free, open, horizontal teaching and research. Let’s not even get into student debt.

Let’s just begin where we did today: at the beginning. I’ve mentioned before the politics of academic language. So I ventured to render the seminar into a workgroup, with a facilitator, not an instructor and an agenda, not a schedule. I distributed this proposal electronically in advance and today we broke down the various items that make up a “syllabus” into agenda items.

The workgroup now has three forms of meeting:

  • actions, where we participate in or actively observe a political event, defined by group members, as long as no one endangers themselves or others.
  • collective readings of key texts, where each person produces notes on a section of text, assembled into a Googledoc that is edited in the meeting to produce a collective in-depth reading
  • thematic discussions–assemblages of readings and visualized materials on a theme for collective discussion.

If this had been an Occupy meeting or an unconference ThatCamp style, the group members would have set the entire agenda, I realize. I didn’t go that far because I was not sure it was fair or appropriate. Instead, I circulated a proposed agenda and a group of other items in each section that I thought were equally worthy of inclusion and invited other proposals. People broke into small groups to decide what they wanted to do and discussed their ideas in an animated manner. The result was a noticeably changed agenda with different themed discussions, key texts and actions. We blurred the distinction between the categories as well: which is sensible, as they are entirely arbitrary.

We then proceeded to consense on a collective agreement (what is usually called requirements). There was agreement on working collectively and forming writing groups within the overall structure. We agreed to table a decision about outcomes. Some students were already thinking about a collective action, others less sure what they wanted to do–it was interesting to see that adbusters today launched their call to #Occupy Chicago in May, just when the project ends. This could get interesting.

It’s worth noting that the entire effort was not helped by the typical cramped post-industrial classroom space that was made available, dominated by a large wooden podium, far grander than the small Dell computer it shields really needs. Doing break out groups in this space required people to sit on the floor.

You will be thinking by now that the implied logic of all this is that I should not be directing matters. Item one on the agenda next week: a proposal to rotate facilitation.

 

J19 History of the Anonymous: Steps to Direct Democracy

Posted on by

Oliver Ressler "We Have A Situation Here" (2011)

To the anonymous, as I’ve often said, the police declaim: “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” To form a subject capable of enacting a different history, the anonymous claim at once the right to look and the right to be seen. When I was writing my book, I found it difficult to even imagine this scenario under the pressure of the neo-liberal state of exception. Now it’s possible to think about breaking that process down into a set of steps.

Take the emblematic case of Mohammed Bouazizi, the fruit-seller whose self-immolation on December 17, 2010, set in motion the Tunisian Revolution and from there the global Occupy movement. He lived in a small town called Sidi Bouzid, the epitome of anonymous for many even inside Tunisia. Some 80,000 people live there, and work centers on huge new olive groves planted by the state (M 15) [for references, see below]

Sidi Bouzid to Gafsa (Tunisia)

About 100 km south-west of Sidi Bouzid is Gafsa, a major phosphate-mining town. In the 1970s, the first cultural dissent against the regime began there, with the formation of an alternative theatre group, including performers like Fadhel Jaziri and Jalila Baccar (M 146). The mining company was given over to members of the ruling clan, specifically relatives of Leila Trabelsi, Ben Ali’s legendarily corrupt wife (G 51). So extreme was the corruption that the entire city rose up on January 5, 2008, protesting unemployment, corruption and repression. Although the occupation lasted for six months, there was a total news blackout. The one journalist who did report it was jailed for four months.

So Mohammed Bouzazi was unlikely to have been as politically naive as he was often presented. Western reports first claimed that he was an unemployed graduate–like many others–but soon retrenched to saying he was a simple fruit-seller. According to Martine Gozlan’s book on the 2011 revolution, the truth was in-between. Mohammed had dropped out of high school to support his family but did want to go to university. One of those he supported, his sister Leila, was in her third year of university ( G 16). For Gozlan, the family epitomized the clash of the “two Tunisias.” There was a high degree of university training with 34% of the population having a degree. On the other hand, the economic crisis since 2008 had led to price rises in basic necessities, mass unemployment and the withdrawal of state ownership in favor of privatization.

However, one year earlier in the city of Monastir, a young man selling doughnuts had also had enough of the police and immolated himself in front of a state building. Nothing happened (M 40). A year later, Mohammed Bouzazi repeated the act, whether in conscious imitation or not, and Tunisia moved to a revolutionary situation. Hamadi Kaloutcha, who blogs as Sofiane Belhaj, is clear that the difference was simple: the diffusion of Facebook and other forms of peer-to-peer communication (M 31, 41). It’s quite unpopular in digital circles here to make this case but Sofiane is not saying that Facebook caused the revolution, only that it allowed for the dissemination of information.

It’s interesting to see that, as the revolution got under way, some of the signature gestures of Occupy were already being used. On January 9, 2011, striking students at Sousse held a general assembly (G 36). In Tunis four days later, key phrases from the national anthem were repeated across the length of the massive demonstration in the manner we now call the people’s mic (G 43).

Back in Gafsa, the workers occupied the phosphate mines again, creating a tent city,

and there were demonstrations, including Che Guevara banners.

By now we should be learning to be careful to make claims of originality. But the emerging story of the Tunisian revolution suggests the following pattern for the emergence of direct democracy:

  • economic crisis combined with government and corporate indifference and/or corruption
  • a dramatic difference in rhetoric and practice–human rights were taught in all Tunisian schools but not even minimal press freedom existed before 2011
  • state violence to repress dissent
  • peer-to-peer electronic communications to alert people to what’s happening
  • a generalized use of horizontal tools that have been used by a few in specific locations and circumstances

Looking at the list, it’s interesting to see how closely the pattern has been replicated in Western capitalist countries. Let’s hope it does not take more violence for people to want to make a generalized use of direct democracy here.

references:

G: Martine Gozlan, Tunisiee, Algérie, Maroc: La colère des peuples (Paris: L’Archipel, 2011)

M: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Printemps de Tunis: La métamorphose de l’Histoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).

J17: The History of the Anonymous, part 1

Posted on by

For the history of the anonymous to be written, it must first be visualized as something other than an absence. Since Mrs. Thatcher famously declared “there is no alternative” in 1980, neo-liberalism has been devoted to making this task impossible. Such a visualization is neither a history from below or a particular set of images but a reconfiguration of the “cognitive mapping” of the social. More precisely, it is the possibility of such a mapping, the ground against which it would be made and the techniques to be used in its formulation. A year ago this week that process began with the revolution in Tunisia.

From Port-Bou to Tunisia

On a climate-changing rainy day last August, I stood on a Spanish clifftop by the “Passages” memorial to Walter Benjamin, outside the cemetery where he was buried in 1940. It was not far to Barcelona with its neighborhood assemblies and a half-day on the train to Madrid and the indignados. But from the cliffs, you look out to sea, southwest, towards Tunisia, where a fruit-seller named Mohammed Bouazizi immolated himself into history as the person in whose name the Tunisian revolution of 2011 was enacted a year ago this week.  The force of that revolution changed the way that I understood the monument.

From Port-Bou to sea from the "Passages" monument

Designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan and opened in 1994, “Passages” encloses a flight of stone steps running down towards the sea in a rectangular iron frame that encloses the entrance but opens up further down. Towards the bottom, there is a sheet of glass engraved with a shortened version of Benjamin’s aphorism from On the Concept of History (1940):

It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than it is to honor the memory of the famous, the celebrated, not excluding poets and thinkers. The historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous.

The construction of the iron sleeve acts as a projector so that the visitor also sees his or her own image projected, as it were, onto the open sea.

The projection at Port-Bou

In order to visualize a history of the anonymous, then, one has to superimpose Benjamin’s aphoristic writing on this phantasmatic projection of the self. The result of the contact between these layers is the new historical construction.

For a long time, it was hard to see oneself against the imagined background of European fascism, the imperative to never forget overwriting all other presents and futures, turning the projection into a spectre, erased on the always moving waters below. Michael Taussig’s fine essay on the memorial is haunted in this way, overwritten with the memory of 9-11. Like the photograph, always already about death as the Barthes-Sontag tradition has it, the memorial is held to be memento mori. Such is the posture of the angel of history, condemned to look back at the past.

History itself, Benjamin liked to remind us, is Janus-faced: it looks both ways. So if there are the anonymous of the past to be remembered, there are also the anonymous of the present to be named, projected by the very memorial itself into a different history than the history of great men. This transitory seawriting is not so much photography as photograffiti, a writing of the self by light that claims the privilege accorded to the name.

In his last preserved writing in 1940, Benjamin noted that in order to preserve the memory of the anonymous, it was necessary that “the epic moment will always be blown apart.” The epic is the account of gods and great men, once memorialized in portraits, now depicted in the ceremonial photograph such as that of Ben Ali, the only portrait photograph seen in public in Tunisia for the past forty years.

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali

Blown apart, which is not the same as blown up in either the photographic or military sense, photograffiti allows for a photographic common that turns hierarchy inside out and visualizes the present as prologue to a differently visualized future, rather than as the repetition of the past.

[part one of a series: this was originally given as a talk called ‘Occupy Visuality.’ It’s gradually evolving into an essay for a collection called ‘After the Global Turn’ edited by Aruna da Souza and Jill Casid.]

J16: Visuality is Slavery

Posted on by

Today is of course Martin Luther King Day. OWS observances included a gathering at the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, followed by a march to Wall Street, where there was a slave market, established in 1709. This was not simply a historical recovery but a reminder that the authority claimed by present day claims to visualize the social derives from the power of the slave-holder.

The slave market on Wall St circled in red

New York was not a marginal place in the history of slavery:

the city contained the largest absolute number of enslaved Africans of any English colonial settlement except Charleston, South Carolina, and held the largest proportion of enslaved Africans of any northern settlement. By the first decade of the 1700’s, forty percent of New York’s households contained at least one enslaved African.

Its slave market was an unimpressive building designed for the rapid circulation of human property.

Print depicting the New York slave market

It is routinely claimed that such histories can safely be consigned to the past. There are three ways in which such claims are invalid.

1. Slavery and Capital

The Caribbean historian and decolonial politician Eric Williams established a key link between capitalism and slavery in his 1944 classic text of that name. In his recent magnum opus Debt, the OWS theorist and occupier David Graeber has shown that debt and money owe their very existence to slavery: “Money, then, begins, as [Phillipe] Rospabé himself puts it ‘as a substitute for life.’ One might call it the recognition of a life-debt” (133). Thus so-called “blood-money” is exactly the same as money that is used to arrange a marriage: money in exchange for a life. The “slave” is the person utterly alienated from life, so that to all intents and purposes they are socially dead.

2. “The New Jim Crow”

This is the name given by legal scholar Michelle Alexander to the extraordinary racialized disparities in the US “justice” system. One in three young African American men are in some way involved in this system. In Washington DC, 3 out of 4 such men will be imprisoned or otherwise subject to penalty, part of the 2 million in the current prison system. Such figures exceed even the ratios generated by the apartheid system in South Africa. As drug use is about the same in white and black communities, the cause is not outlandish substance abuse by African Americans. Alexander shows that:

A huge percentage of [African Americans] are not free to move up at all. It is not that they lack opportunity, attend poor schools, or are plagued by poverty. They are barred by law from doing so…To put the matter starkly: The current system if control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control. (13)

That is to say, the possibility of democracy is permanently impaired by a caste system, itself the direct descendant of slavery, as W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Y. Davis have shown. Any direct democracy must first be an abolition democracy, a democracy that refuses the caste system at a minimum and, Davis would argue, the prison-industrial complex itself.

3. Visuality and Slavery

Visuality is a means of suturing authority to power. Power can be reduced to the means to compel people to act or not act by force. Usually, however, people respect the authority of the state, even when they disagree with it. Authority is a separate category to power. It is derived from the Latin term auctor, meaning the head of a family. As head of this family, the auctor had control over the possible purchases of land, animals and slaves. His patriarchy depended on this power, just as his financial empowerment reinforced his patriarchy. This is why any questioning of authority sooner rather than later generates questions of gender and (in countries where Africans were enslaved) racialized difference.

This analysis still begs the question of why the auctor was held to have such authority. In the Roman historian Livy, authority is distinguished from power (imperium) by the ability to interpret signs. This ability to discern meaning in both the medium and the message generates visuality’s aura of authority. When it is further invested with power, that ability becomes the ability to designate who should serve and who should rule.

The rulers in these histories are the named, those whose genealogies are held to count. Those without part, who do not count, are the anonymous, as incapable of visualizing the social as they are of being themselves visualized. Abolition democracy begins with the history of the anonymous, a project for this week’s posts.