Category Archives: duration

Movement Time

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I’m revising two pieces that I’ve done about Occupy, one from last October, the other from January. It’s odd how long ago they seem to have been written, while at the same time making me realize how short a moment this really has been. Movement time is like that: it extends the present, makes new pasts available and yet questions the future.

Raqs Media Collective "Strike" (2011)

I began thinking about this when I illustrated the piece about Sarai with the Raqs Media Collective’s work “Strike.” On a sheet of stainless steel is written: “IT IS THE MOMENT TO STRIKE AT TIME.” The slogan seems entirely conventional until the last two words: how do we strike at time? Who are the strikers and who would be their target? There have been many strikes about time, usually time to be worked in exchange for a wage. There are those Spanish Civil War anarchists, evoked by Benjamin, who shot at the clocks that made their alienated labor measurable. Back in the 19th century, people had to be taught how to regulate their lives by the clock, that they could not sleep in “work time,” let alone drink.

Then there’s the steel, shiny enough to be reflective but, at least in the photo, not without distortion. Perhaps surprisingly, there’s a formal resemblance to Anish Kapoor’s work here. It made me think of the complexities of steel as a form of labor. I’ve been following the strike and occupation by steelworkers at the ArcelorMittal in Florange, France. Last Friday, 17 workers from the plant completed a symbolic walk from Florange to the Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris and modernity, built from Lorraine steel. Everyone knows this is going to end with them being made redundant but officialdom continues to prevaricate until the elections are over. New polls show the National Front winning among young people. Meanwhile, as covered before,  Kapoor is creating a new monument for the 2012 Olympics paid for by Lakshmi Mittal in London, the Eiffel Tower for autoimmune capital.

Raqs also have another piece referencing steel and shipyards. The elegiac image above shows cranes being dismantled in the famous Swan Hunter shipyards of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England, prior to being sent to India. The enigmatic title of the seven-screen installation “For the Knots That Bind Are the Knots That Fray” has been proved right recently, when the purchaser of the cranes, Bharati Shipyard in Bangalore itself appeared to face bankruptcy, unable to pay its debts.

Behind such iconic modern forms lies a long history of the strike. On Glasgow’s Clydeside, the steel and shipyards formed the heart of the British labor movement. In a 1917 pamphlet called Industrial Unionism, the Industrial Workers of Great Britain visualized their situation as a battlefront.

The Class Battlefront

The Working Class and Master Class were mirror opposites, as if anticipating the shiny reflection of Strike. The IWGB was a branch of the IWW, and called for the abolition of wages, direct action, rent strikes and eventually in 1926 Red Clydeside was a key player in the General Strike of 1926.

Fast forward to 1971: after fifty years of class struggle, the workers at the Upper Clyde Shipyards on Clydeside faced redundancy as the government sought to close the yards in what can now be seen as the first wave of neo-liberalism. Instead of the expected traditional strike, which would have led to a lockout and acceleration of job losses, the unions occupied the shipyard, did no damage, and in the famous words of Communist shop steward Jimmy Reid, there was “no hooliganism, no vandalism and no bevvying (drinking).”

1971 Glasgow: Upper Clyde Shipyards Occupation

A placard in this photograph prefigures the 1984-5 miners’ strike that would be the turning point of Thatcherism: the “Jobs Not Dole” slogan on the far right clearly anticipates the later “Coal Not Dole.” The shipyard workers staged a march of 80,000 people, gained worldwide support, including that of John Lennon and used public opinion to save thousands of jobs. With the possibility of Scottish independence on the horizon with the referendum of 2014, and as jobs disappear at the behest of the bankers, such histories seem newly meaningful. Yet while two shipyards were saved, the departure of heavy industry from the U. K. and the construction of a permanent underclass was just delayed.

But none of the imagined futures in these strikes against time have quite come to pass. While the 1926 General Strike was repressed, its victors were themselves defeated when the 1945 Labour Government implemented the welfare state. Its creation of free state higher education, for example, lasted over fifty years. Nor do the Indian capitalists who dismantled the Swan Hunter yard look so clever now, a mere two years later.

So if the victory of the “Master Class” is shorter now, there’s also a longer rhythm at play, in which the anarcho-syndicalist demands of the IWGB for the abolition of the wage-system by direct action once again feels right. The proper lesson, then, is the future will be seen as the future precisely when something happens that we don’t expect or anticipate. To that extent, the future is always ours, not theirs, because the way it happens now is how they feel it always ought to be.

Sketches of Spain: From the Everyday to Every Day

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So I decided to step back for the weekend, meaning that I missed the visit of the Spanish activist Amador Fernández-Savater from the May 15 movement to OWS. As I read the wonderful materials provided, I found that in January Fernández-Savater had suggested that there were fewer people attending M-15 events because “people have returned to making their lives.” I want to explore what this phrase might mean.

If the encampments (whether in Spain or New York) were an exception to the crisis, it is nonetheless “difficult to live in an exception,” if you cannot devote your life to it as an activist. At the same time, Fernández-Savater follows the thought through to a consideration of how the crisis “forces us to constantly make and remake everything.” I think we can see a periodization emerge here: out the crisis of the 1970s emerged both neo-liberalism and its everyday ideology, and the counterpointed politics of the everyday. The present crisis has transformed neo-liberalism into an ideology of inequality and calls for politics every day in response.

Fernández-Savater locates the formation of a consensus in Spain to the Moncloa Agreements of 1977, two years after the end of the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco:

the culture that was imposed on the defeat of the dreams of emancipation and communism in the 1970s. Culture in the strong sense of the word: a configuration of sensitivity that decisively structures the play of politics, universities, the media, the production of work and our very perception of things.

I’ve recently been re-reading an evocation of that defeat in the detective novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Murder in the Central Committee, originally published in 1981. By means of an investigation into a classic “closed room” murder mystery, Montalbán was able to create a portrait of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. As befits the noir genre, there’s a certain romantic nostalgia–together with, it has to be said, some sad sexism and homophobia.

In one passage, however, Carmela, a PCE cadre, complains precisely of the difficulties of reconciling activism and making a life in terms that are familiar to many of us:

“In the end I’ve got to work, function in the Party, do the shopping, keep house and be a mother–which is the least of my worries. And if you complain some old comrades come round and tell you a life-story that makes your hair stand on end….There are more and more who cook in order to forget.”

When the detective Carvalho asks her what she’s trying to forget, Carmela answers: “That there’s been reform but no political break.”

In this period, a new activism of the everyday chose to celebrate such activities as cooking as in themselves a form of resistance. So de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, with his emphasis on cooking as one element of that practice, was formed in the aftermath of May 68, while British cultural studies were part of the response to what Stuart Hall called “the great moving right show.”

The neo-liberal consensus on everyday life is familiar to us all as the boilerplate of every mainstream politician: work, homeowning, health care, college and pension provision. Within that consensus the technocratic discussion has been about the allocation of state and so-called “market” provision. It need hardly be pointed out that all these aspects of the everyday (aka the “American dream”) are rapidly moving out of reach. Further, the current Troika and market consensus is that people don’t deserve these things unless they can afford them.

So we find ourselves in the situation of “precariousness,” an awkward word for an awkward situation. It means finding that even if you have health insurance, your plan no longer covers a drug you use and the cost is $248, as recently happened to me. It means that if you did what the consensus told you to do and “saved” for college tuition, the amount saved has reduced in absolute terms and the costs are anyway so far higher than predicted that it is pointless to try and catch up. It means discovering that as people live longer, there is a new duty of care for elders to which the state is indifferent because these people are no longer economically active. And so on.

Living precariously is a struggle every day, and it is not in the least everyday. Although I did not know this when I started, it is why I do this project every day. It is part of the collective struggle to find a way to combat inequality every day.

On Duration

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

Hsieh "Outside Piece (1981-2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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