Category Archives: horizontal

Move on, no crisis to see here

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It seems that there’s a concerted effort at the level of the nation state and the transnational institution to assert that the status quo is assured. The European Central Bank has written a blank check for the Euro, pollsters are predicting a win for Obama and stock markets are back to 2008 levels. The wrinkle comes from Quebec, where forty years of organizing has laid the background for the election of the new Parti Quebecois government, committed to abolishing the tuition hike and the noxious Loi 78.

Mario Draghi, head of the ECB, announced yesterday that it would buy bonds from member nations in unlimited quantities. His action was designed to forestall all rumors that the Eurozone might break up, by restoring liquidity to nation states. For the inflation-shy German central bank this action was held to be

tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes.

And indeed it is. Against neo-liberal economics, Draghi and other central bankers assume that there will be no inflation because consumer demand and wages alike continue to be depressed.

Across the world we see the reasons why. The US economy added no more than a rounding error of jobs last month. The battered Greek welfare state is about to undergo another $11.5 billion in cuts. Portugal increase its social security tax from 11 to 18%. Like all the other money poured by government into banks, none of this will find its way out to people.

Meanwhile, in the NAFTA-zone, Mexico is set to return to the institutional rule of the PRI and Canada remains under the oil-first government of the Liberals. The 538 blog (now hosted by the New York Times gives Obama a 77% chance of victory, which is good news in terms of preventing further neo-liberal and culture wars insanity by the Republicans. Given the low chance of the Democrats taking the House, it will nonetheless mean the continuance of gridlock, with continued impunity for banksters and no risk to the one per cent.

The exception to all the gloom comes from Quebec. After the narrow election win by the Parti Québécois, they smartly decided they did not want to be saddled with the Liberals’ baggage:

“We had a call from the PQ assuring us they will cancel the tuition increase and Bill 78,” said Martine Desjardins, president of the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, noting students will also meet with Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois. “They said they will reimburse any students who have already paid.”

 

CLASSE have indicated that the national demonstration of September 22 will go ahead, in the absence of an actual repeal, and in support of their claim for a student grant increase. It will most likely have the feel of a victory party.

There are no doubt questions as to what happens next in Quebec. For now, let’s note their successul formula so far

  • building a radical community over an extended period of time
  • working in alliances, even with groups with whom you have distinct differences, towards specific goals
  • great messaging and symbolism, together with resolute direct action
  • keeping it local.

These tactics resonate with those used by the horizontal and popular movements in the Southern half of the hemisphere. They did not back down, even in the full force of law, and have made a real difference. There’s really something to see there.

“We Are All Children of Algeria”

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This is the name of an online multi-media project that I made in collaboration with design intellectuals Craig Dietrich and Erik Loyer that went live today. The project looks at how to decolonize visuality; or, to put it affirmatively, how to visualize a society after colonialism. It uses the central example of Algeria and its decolonial struggle from 1954 to the Arab Spring. Here I want to talk a bit about how this project both laid the ground for my involvement with the Occupy movement and for the shape that Occupy 2012 has taken since. While this is a tad narcissistic, this is a blog a) and b) there might be relevance for other people thinking of taking on similar work.

In this project, “Algeria” is also a metaphor for the contested border between North and South in the formation of financial globalization and thus exists in many places other than the geographic space known in English as Algeria, in French as Alger and in Arabic as al-Djazair. In the book, I wove a tight narrative that tried to hold these pieces together across about forty pages. When I came to make this section into a digital project, I thought it would be a simple task: cut the text into pieces and add the films, photographs and other images.

At the first meeting I had in LA with the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, which designed the software used for “We Are All Children of Algeria, they asked me a  question that threw all that out of the window: how did I want to design the project? What was the concept? I didn’t think I had one but I found myself saying that it was about a demonstration. Or what is called a march in the US. This was, it turned out, what you might call a retrospective realization about where the work was actually going.

So I took the title from chants used at French anti-fascist marches that I had been on as a student in Paris back in the 1980s. As part of solidarity, crowds chanted “Nous sommes tous enfants d’immigrés” or “We are all children of immigrants.” French anti-fascism was not notional: then and now the National Front were racist and violent. Their targets were “Algerians,” meaning any person who is from or descended from North Africa–or in any way sympathetic to them.

When I began the project in the summer and autumn of 2010, I felt that I needed to justify the very idea of marching, or simply putting bodies into public space, as not being totally outmoded. Now of course it seems that this tactic, far from being redundant, has been key first to the extraordinary movements in North Africa and the Middle East and now to Occupy. So that in and of itself seemed to prepare me for Occupy and to be part of the movement.

Although I got involved fairly early, I at first felt that I did not want to make academic work about Occupy at all. When I decided that as part of a strategy to develop my own sense of commitment and understanding that I did want to write about it, I took the performative or artistic model of the durational project, rather than just say “I’m writing [yet another] book about Occupy.” I wouldn’t have done that before thinking how to make a digital project.

It’s also enabled me to do something to the way that I write, which, when it works, seems now to be able to speak to both activists and academics. Again, I say this not to claim some spurious status for myself but to encourage other, younger artists, writers, performers and intellectuals to embrace the challenges of such cross-platform projects. As this way of thinking and imagining is so much more familiar to you, you will do far more exciting and ground-breaking things than I can conceive.

There’s so much lazy reluctance in academia to be involved with either the intellectual or political forms of the present moment. I can count the other (full-time tenure track) faculty that I see at Occupy events or meetings where they are not speaking–well, let’s just say easily. On the other hand, the design and programming group involved in ANVC are all in different ways productive intellectuals and engaged activists. Enough said.

 

The Whites and the Whale

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Why are there white people in the Americas? One way to answer that question would be: fish. Cod and other fish drew early visitors here, especially to Newfoundland. Later sailors reached Massachusetts, where the cod were so plentiful that to catch them you only had to throw a bucket over the side of the ship. They called the place Cape Cod. All those fish are gone.

We are now in the midst of what scientists call the sixth Great Extinction. Unlike earlier disappearances, this one has a single cause. Human actions in the pursuit of industrial capitalism have put at least 20,000 species on the high-risk “Red List” for extinction. Yet when the New York Times ran an op-ed on this today, the biologist Richard Pearson felt the need to render this as an economic problem:

the total economic value of pollination by insects worldwide was in the ballpark of $200 billion in 2005. More generally, efforts to tally the global monetary worth of the many different benefits provided by ecosystems come up with astronomically high numbers, measured in tens of trillions of dollars.

If we cannot find better ways to imagine why the total eradication of tens of thousands of living creatures should be prevented, we make the case for our own disappearance. That “we” hides something, though: those that did this from the industrialized nations, mostly “white,” are visiting this on the entire planet, mostly not “white.”

Over the course of the visual culture conference, the visualizations that stayed with me most were two videos presented by the performance artist Patty Chang. In 2011, Chang had a residency on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, one of the most Easterly places in the Americas. It was for a long time home to a major fishing fleet but as a result of overfishing, that’s all but gone. Instead, tourism and, of all things, art are being promoted as alternatives.

Fogo is a place that is also known for its whale populations.

St Brendan saying mass on a whale near Newfoundland

On her visit, Chang walked to the far side of the island, where she encountered the beached corpse of a sperm whale. The body was white, which she later revealed was due to decomposition. Nonetheless, she went into the shallow water where it was lying and washed it, a ritual for the dead common to many religions. From the place where she shot the video the whale seemed at once whole, uncanny and spectral. The performance was riveting.

Dead whale, Fogo Island

Photographed here by the artist Tonja Torgerson, the whale was clearly decaying and Chang said in discussion that it smelled appalling. In her talk, though, she linked this white whale to Moby-Dick and Melville’s great allegory for capitalism. In the conjuncture of fishing and whaling, we might want to break this up, so it reads “the white(s) (and the) whale.” Among many references, she showed the poster for the classic film starring Gregory Peck:

There are so many odd things about this, it’s hard to know where to start. The 1950s were saw mass whale hunting for food and oil that brought many species of cetaceans close to extinction. We think of whaling as a remote form of environmental damage. Rather, it was nuclear. It was A-bomb devastated Japan that turned to whales as food and refuses to abandon them now as a mutant form of decolonial resistance. The caption appears to anticipate that audiences for the 1956 film have already seen Jaws, Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 shark movie. The White Whale is represented as a hybrid between the phallus of the male gaze and the castrating vagina dentata that haunts its dreams. At the same time it proleptically anticipates the creature in Alien (1979) as it emerges from its human host.

Here comes the creature

Alien was haunted by capital (The Company), insurgency and empire. And that form of alienation is about to return as Ridley Scott cranks up the franchise once more with Prometheus.

Chang’s performance ended with another extraordinary visualization. She took a journey across Central Asia, encountering among many other things, a legend that all Uighurs are descended from wolves, like the legend of ancient Rome. All these creatures, these compound beings, were part of Hobbes’ evidence for the representational power of the European colonial imaginary (discussed last week). It seems to have lost control (of itself).

Chang finds herself at the Aral Sea, a formerly immense inland lake that has been turned to desert by engineering projects diverting water for human needs. Just like in Newfoundland, there is symbolic death and the disappearance of a primary food source. Chang showed boats now beached on flat endless sand. Once again, in a powerful repetition, Chang set about washing the boats, mourning the loss of natural environment, human livelihood and unknowable numbers of non-human species.

In this photograph of a similar scene from the Aral Sea, the boats look the same but the sand seems slightly less flat–but you’ll get the idea:

The Russian Empire has followed its Cold War partner into a hallucinatory present that it cannot imagine to itself.

Re: verticality (and horizontality) in academia

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Verticality reverts. It revises and revisits. It is not so much tenacious as insidious. And yet what is so interesting is how the horizontal approaches resurface, refract and resist the vertical. I’m at the end of a three-day contest of the horizontal and the vertical within the frame of the academic event, in particular my Now! Visual Culture participation event. I felt at several points that vertical organization had reasserted itself, perhaps decisively. For the general will of the event pushed back against such ideas as breakout groups or time-allocated agendas, which are central to Occupy.

Yet it seemed that a reversion to the norms so carefully calibrated in the neo-liberal academy was, finally, not so simple. The insistence on practice as the means of articulating politics was resisted. But by means of a triangulation of performative art practice, new media forms of publishing and the direct evocation of Occupy and its “epistemology of anarchy” as WJT Mitchell put it, there was a sense that “make something” was the new prime imperative. As I have argued already here, the refusal to move on, the refusal to accept that there is nothing to see here, the insistence that the authority of visuality should be resisted is that anarchy.

There was old and new, a disciplining by interdisciplinarity and a setting loose by performative practice in new media and artwork. I have missed the midnight deadline for the first time but I am relying on the idea that my “day” is as long as I happen to be awake.

Twitter can act as my flickering memory here:

That was kind of what it was like. A more coherent report tomorrow will compare this event with the Occupy Theory Assembly on debt and education.

Debt, (new) media and academia

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Now! Visual Culture spent a day thinking about the intersection of debt, academic knowledge, old and new media in the anti-disciplinary frame of visual culture.

A very well-attended first session on debt and academic labor set the tone. Magda Szczesniak (University of Warsaw) told us that the corporatization of university practice is developing  in Poland but students there are not yet in debt, while not being well-funded. She noted that the university system is still in effect “feudal,” depending on personal influence and obligation. Can the so-called deficiencies of this system be made into a virtue? For example, the failure of Polish academic publishing to generate any profit might make it easier to introduce open-source publishing.

Pamela Brown from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign outlined the terrifying statistics, generating despairing laughter. She explained the corporate structures that underpin the debt machine: 94% of elected officials have won their campaigns by being the most efficient fund-raiser, mostly coming from the financial industries. No fewer than four bills reforming bankruptcy laws have failed. The current debt forgiveness proposal in Congress is rated as having a one percent chance of success.

She recalled a debt-strike in Co-Op City in the Bronx during 1976, when 15,000 people refused payment for over a year because they felt they were supporting the debt burden of the management corporation. However, there are no indexed images of the event online, indicating a structural absence in the collective image bank and the beginnings of an explanation for the insistence that debt refusal is immoral and unprecedented. It also suggests an important research opporunity.

Ashley Dawson argued that student debt is itself a crisis of visuality. It is hard to visualize, unlike foreclosure, for example. In particular, how do we visualize the underlying moral contract? There have been attempts to represent the size of the debt, or the de facto indenture of student loans, but credit itself is hard to visualize. He recalled the history of the establishment of the open admission and free tuition policy by direct action in the 1970s at CUNY, where he teaches. President Nixon was afraid of the production of an “educational proletariat” and Republicans used the bankruptcy of the city in 1977 to end free tuition. CUNY was a harbinger for the casualization of the academic workforce, which is now half the size of its 1975 benchmark. Columbia is the third largest employer in New York but is tax exempt.

McKenzie Wark pointed out that activists often make the best researchers, citing David Graeber. He also noted that this isn’t capitalism “it’s something worse.” There is now a problem of representation in general because the mechanisms of capital are so abstract. The humanities should now be doing this kind of important work rather than sticking to the tried-and-testd because it would both make a contribution and be more likely to generate employment.

In the next session on new media publishing, Tara McPherson argued that we can’t visualize just the screen, we need to understand the machine. Databases normalize data and abstract them from that which they index. That point reflects back on the questions of economic visualization discussed earlier. For example, the graph itself was created in synchronization with the idea of the market as part of eighteenth century mercantilism. As many people observed in the debt panel, these forms don’t tend to be convincing when you’re arguing against neo-liberalism. In this context that becomes less surprising. Graphs abstract people into a positivist database. As McPherson put it, “technological systems are weighted in favor of positivism and control,” but they don’t have to be. We need to actively engage the form not just receive the content.

The insistence from the student debt campaign on naming and identifying debt as a personal and political issue rather than as an abstract data point is, then, a countervisuality to the dominance of the “market.” Talking to people about debt is in itself a form of resistance and politicization. The same point can be made in relation to digital media studies. Humanities scholars have embraced digital technology as a form of very large data analysis, a move away from affect. By contrast, Occupy Student Debt links data to narrative. Paradoxically, certain sectors of humanities new media scholarship might be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.

Deborah Levine’s extraordinary Scalar project called Demonstrating ACT UP (not yet open access) uses the affinity groups of ACT UP as an organizing strategy. By tagging individuals, the tag cloud allows you to visualize a vast database of ACT UP materials at a human and personal level. Because it relies on the affinity groups that drove the project, this organizational strategy is both horizontal and political.

In the afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, who made some key films for the Occupy movement in its earliest days, talked about collective film making.

This seven-minute film was edited in ten hours, moved from conception to release online in ten days–compared to the average edit of seven minutes in two weeks. It was so widely seen that it came to have a life of its own as a guide to Occupy.

BFC actively try to challenge the hierarchical structures of the industry and its mantra: FILMMAKING IS A BUSINESS, focusing instead on passion projects. “Collective” here means everything from close working together to a community of filmmakers meeting together and sharing work for collective criticism in a weekly critique workshop. Their films are very different in form, production and content.

The film Spoils deals with dumpster diving in Brooklyn, a central part of Freegan culture. Here the film was made in fairly traditional way with a director in charge.

Welcome to Pine Hill on the other hand was collectively made and produced in a non-budget context, meaning time and materials were donated. The film has won prizes all over the place, including at Sundance, so it’s no hindrance to the reception of the film. In a similar fashion, the Meerkat Media Collective work non-hierarchically, share tasks and make sure that people get experience in tasks that are new to them. They reminded me of Mosireen from Cairo, who have been working in similar ways.

Academia is still uncertain about these new ways of working. Horizontal ways of working and thinking are still emerging and still contested. As the weekend continues, it’ll be interesting to bookend conclusions tomorrow with the Occupy Theory Debt and Education Assembly in Washington Square Park on Sunday.

Horizontal learning: a report back

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One last word from higher education before it’s time for Summer Disobedience camp and other fun activities. Throughout the course of 2012 so far, I’ve been engaged in a variety of endeavors to promote horizontal learning. Always in my mind as I participate in these projects is Augosto Boal’s concept of “thinking as action.” How’s it going?

In January, I posted about the way in which a group of us had set about trying to render a “class” into a workgroup. We set three forms of activity: actions, close readings of selected writings, and thematic weeks. We later added a guest visitor to that agenda. Of the three, clearly actions are most distinct from standard higher education practice, except perhaps in performance practice or tactical media classes, which are hardly standard fields. Perhaps as a result, the weeks where we went on the March 1 education march or May Day events felt most compelling.

The sense of liberation that we had during actions highlighted the constraints of our modern seminar room, a windowless chunk of carpeted square footage dominated by an imposing computer console containing a thoroughly mediocre machine. It wasn’t until we had a meeting outside during the freakishly warm March in New York that we realized that this alienating effect was exaggerated by the way the room made us form a very wide circle: close circles work much better. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference.

One of the most effective choices we made was to have students work in small writing groups. Although the groups were chosen randomly, they came to have very different sensibilities. Each group determined how they would approach the action days, how they would work on a final project (collaboratively or not) and also formed discussion groups within the formal meetings. Increasingly, these groups became the engine room of the project as a whole. That is, after all, what people pay for at the Ivies (that and the one percent networking).

Meeting time was allocated according to a consensed agenda, based on a proposal drawn up by two facilitators. Every group member did this at least once, most twice. Everyone reported some reluctance to do it and then a strong sense of empowerment having carried it out. While the agendas varied notably week by week, as the Spring wore on, it was clear that there was more and more desire to spend time in the smaller groups, so much so that it was hard to get people to stop work and report back to the collective.

So lots of positives. Let’s note also that trying to functional horizontally in a vertical institution is complicated. Some participants felt that they benefited from what I, as the instructor of record, had to say and wished for more of that. I responded that I in turn felt my comments were far more effective once I had a strong sense of where people were with the material and so the usefulness of my interventions was in fact a consequence of the way we were working. We did agree during that discussion, however, to be sure to begin meetings with a conversation about the terms we were going to use that day.

As time wore on and the other non-horizontal classes were gearing up for term papers, the anxiety level notably increased and people stopped referring to their projects and started talking about finals. It took a lot of one-on-one and group interventions to stop the panic. Normally what this means is that people then like my class but write their thesis/dissertation on a topic from a seminar where a long research paper was required. In this instance, I don’t think that will happen (although it’s not an issue for me) because of the wider context in which Occupy and the political are so central.

More pointedly, can there be horizontality when one person is being paid to attend/teach and the others are (mostly) paying to attend/for credits? To pose the question is to answer it: not perfectly, no. In prefiguring a different approach, you can perhaps take steps in the right direction. It helped I think that we had discussed and agreed on the syllabus, so that we didn’t seem to have a week where the topics and materials weren’t of interest. It helped more, again, that many of the group were also active participants in the movement so felt that they had equal standing. There were one or two who felt unsure about this but did feel able to say so.

Now the school year is over. The group has reconstituted itself as an affinity group and we meet in Washington Square Park weekly for discussion, reading, walks and actions. I’m particularly pleased that it’s not just the usual suspects: the most skeptical person in the group is still active. Where does this go? I have no idea. I’m not worried about it either.

The Renewal of Occupy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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