Category Archives: imagination

“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.

Decolonizing the Imagination

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How can we develop David Graeber’s insights into the importance of the imagination as a tool of resistance? Regular readers with good memories may recall a discussion about the Charter of the Forest (1217) that came out of my reading of Hardt and Negri’s Declaration. What gives me some pause about this intersection is that, while the Charter did inscribe some freedoms, it does so in the context of feudalism. While that might ironically be congenial to the present-day neo-feudalism of rents and debts, it’s not a platform for the current global social movement.

On the other hand, I have long thought, in the tradition of Tony Benn and Christopher Hill, that the Diggers do have something to offer here. So on a quiet day, I thought I might develop the thought for what it’s worth. It turns out to pose some interesting questions about the tension between the direct and the representation.

During the English Revolution (1642-49), a range of radical sects saw the end of Charles I’s monarchy as the beginning of new era and the end of slavery. Their goals were exemplified by the Diggers, inspired and led by Gerrard Winstanley (1609-76), a sometime Baptist and itinerant preacher. Winstanley was working as a cow-hand when he felt himself called upon:

As I was in a trance not long since, divers matters were present to my sight, which must not here be related. Likewise I heard these words, Worke together. Eat bread together; declare all this abroad.

If Winstanley understood this as inspiration, it is also what we would now call imagination, a vision of collectivity at a time of social, economic and political crisis, following the execution of the king. He was inspired to send a letter to General Fairfax, the army commander, asking

Whether all Lawes that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all, but respecting persons, ought not to be cut off with the King’s head? We affirm they ought.

This remarkable radicality was typical of his style, which insisted on following through first principles, all of which can be derived from the first sentence of his first pamphlet, written as his small group were beginning to reclaim the common and waste land on St George’s Hill, Surrey:

In the beginning of time, the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common treasury for all.

It’s worth looking closely at this sentence. Divinity was expressed as rationality, present in each individual, not as an external deity, as the forces of “vision, voice and revelation,” a trinity of the imagination. “Earth,” or land, is assumed to be the common property of all, the treasury of a land without a state. Notably, Winstanley wrote “common” not “the commons.” Having experienced the Absolutist monarchy of Charles I, he would have been very aware of the hierarchical ordering of feudalism and the setting aside of certain spaces as “the commons” did not satisfy his understanding of all land as common.

His vision was a relay of divine inspiration, internal rights, and righteousness to be grounded in a common sense of equality. Although the Diggers claimed to be restoring justice to its condition before the Fall of Man, their actions were practical and modern. By cultivating land on an equal basis and denying the possibility of exclusive ownership of the land, Winstanley envisaged sustainable small-scale cultivation as the basis of social life. His non-violent form of resistance was to advocate that workers refuse to labor for others, a refusal of the wage system at its beginnings. Historian Christopher Hill called this action the first general strike. Indeed, in a manner familiar to present-day social movements, Winstanley declared: “Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”

It was in response to such theories of radical direct democracy that Thomas Hobbes defined the state as Leviathan (1651). The Leviathan was the figure of the commonwealth, the social contract by which individuals arrogate their right of governance to the sovereign. Of the three possible modes of commonwealth—monarchy, aristocracy and democracy—Hobbes was convinced that monarchy was by far the most effective.

Frontispiece to Leviathan

So the figure seen in the famous frontispiece to his book represents the monarchy as a living form of the social contract. The body of the King is composed of hundreds of other bodies, his subjects, combined to make the whole known as Leviathan. Hobbes imagined the Leviathan as a demi-god, like Hercules and other creatures of legend. He was interested in such “compound creatures” as he called them, as a special instance of the power of imagination, or Fancy. This was not simply an artistic or creative attribute:

whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe, from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the workmanship of Fancy.

Representational images are created by this “fancy” meaning:

 any representation of one thing by another.

So for all the fact that his Leviathan was filled with little people, Hobbes was civilized because he adhered to the principles of representation, whereas the “savage” believes in the direct, whether in democracy or image making. So Hobbes places a challenge: all representation is colonial.

So we might want to look into “direct” forms of acting and making, as we have of course been doing, “Direct” imaging might include photography, video, performance and other media where there has been a question about whether it is “mechanical,” or “simply” imitative or other phrases that tend in the direction of the colonial critique like “slavish” (as in imitation) or “apeing” as in copying but also as in simians.

Does this mean we must jettison all media that represent? Certainly not–but we do have to think about how to decolonize them, to disadhere them from the elite privilege they have long held, and, yes, I am thinking about painting here.

For the state colonized the land but also the faculty of imagination itself as representation. It designated sovereignty and colonial authority in and as the power to represent. Representation was a matter of sign formation, for Hobbes distinguished the mark, which is recognizable only to its maker, and the sign, which is legible to others. The opposite of authority was not, then, the primitive pre-social contract condition of the fictional “war of all against all” but the opposite of representation, which is to say, direct democracy. These ideas became equated with madness, which Michel Foucault called the “colonizing reason” of the West. By 1660 the British monarchy was restored and the first law code for the enslaved was published in the British colony of Barbados in 1661. Winstanley had called the revolution, the “world turned upside down.” Plantation monarchy restored it. Nonetheless, the common had preceded it.

Striking New Relationships

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Why do we strike on May Day? What is that strike? We strike in solidarity with global labor, our own histories and with each other. The action of striking is not just a withdrawal of labor but what Marina Sitrin calls “striking new relationships.” The actions of refusal to play the part expected of us, in whatever way we can, and imagining other ways of relating to each other are what will constitute a day of generally striking, a striking day.

Let’s review the call for a Day Without the 99 percent:

  • No Work: for many there is no need to respond because they have no work. For others, refusing to work is legally impossible or would endanger them too greatly. Those of us who can do so will withdraw our labor in solidarity with the precarity and dangers suffered by those who cannot.

  • No School: in Bloombergistan, only 13% of African-American and Latin@ students graduate high school ready for college. Those who make it find that the ticket to employment literally comes with a mortgage: one million people now have student debt of over $100,000 or more. We leave school to insist it is a right not a privilege and, for a day, those of us who can will offer classes freely to all who care to attend to prefigure the learning that is to come.
  • No Housework: domestic labor continues to make the world liveable, and as harmonious and possible as it can. The women, children and (some) men who perform that labor have to endure the insult of one percenters like Ann Romney claiming their dignity. We will not engage in this invisible labor for one day in order to reclaim it and to show solidarity with those who are compelled by neoliberalism to act as full-time carers without support, whether for elders, children, the dis/abled or  others in need.
  • No Banking: here we refuse to participate in the system of financial distribution and exchange that has so impoverished us all and yet has been allowed to carry on as if nothing happened. The financialization of everything and everyone has made it difficult to withdraw entirely from the banking system, as many used to be able to do. We can plan to move our money to credit unions and other co-operatives.
  • No Shopping: consumers dictate the success or failure of the one percent. By refusing to shop for things that we do not need, we can show how the concept of permanent growth is unsustainable.

What we will do is more important than what we will not do. We will share ideas, skills, food, music, art, friendship, solidarity and space. We will assert that striking new relationships is living, while working for life is not. Over the course of four months of planning, Occupy has become the autonomous, decentralized movement that was promised in September 2011. The combination of mutual aid, direct action, direct democracy, affinity groups and the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, enabled and facilitated by digital technologies, has changed many lives already. This “internal” process of transformation is now ready to reach out to many others.

Will capitalism fall on May 1? No. But it’s doing a good job of collapsing on its own at the moment. The more we refuse to come to its aid, the quicker that moment may come.

Will cities grind to a halt on May 1? No. Transport workers are not on strike, so that people can easily get to the events and so that those who have no choice but to work can do so.

Will there be more life, more laughter, more music, more creativity, more confrontation, more raising of awareness, more solidarity: in short, more love? Yes, she said, yes, yes, yes.

These new relationships will reconfigure our relationship to U. S. history and to the rest of the world. It was in Chicago in 1886 that May Day strikers called for the eight-hour working day. The demonstration ended with a bomb being thrown that culminated in the notorious Haymarket Affair and the execution of four people, none of whom had been shown to be responsible for throwing the mysterious bomb.

From that event, May Day has become the global festival of labor. For many years, unions in this country have refused to participate in May Day events for fear of being labeled Communists. Now, more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, labor, immigrants and Occupy activists are coming together to act in solidarity with the global 99%.

Why post this today rather than May 1? Because I will be striking on May 1 in whatever ways I can and it’s not too late for you to think of some way in which you can as well. Please join us.

OWS Spring Training

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After spending a somewhat dreary week in academic salons, being told that there was no song and dance at Occupy or that there was no point to the General Strike, I chose to skip another round of conferences and head downtown for OWS Spring Training. These weekly Friday sessions have been happening since March but, for one reason or another, this was the first one I could attend.

Photo credit: Eva Destruction

It was an energizing relief after all the talk to be doing something. I was at once impressed with how much things have moved along in the street organizing. Following the influence of the excellent +Brigades, there’s a good deal of co-ordination, tactics and wit back in the actions. Extra energy came from last night’s successful Sleep to Protest, in which about a hundred people managed to sleep overnight on Wall St itself, despite the sudden desire of the city to clean sections of the street for hours on end. There were also lots of “new people,” by which I mean faces I didn’t recognize, and a noticeably wider age range.

After some tactical training by the +Brigades, we set off for a set of Bank of America branches where supporters were planning to close their accounts. Along the way, despite my academic colleagues, a nice range of old and new songs and chants kept the mood light. Protestors have identified the short-tempered white-shirt police officer assigned to OWS marches and when he appears, they set up a drawn-out mocking chant of his name. He didn’t seem to like it. OWS organizers were making sure that the marchers took up no more than half the sidewalk to deny police the pretext for arrests. The obvious good humor of the event and the interest of many downtown passers-by mitigated the chance for mass arrests.

When we arrived at the banks, those who closed their accounts were hoisted shoulder-high and spoke via people’s mic about how hard BoA made it to do so. After properly denouncing the vampire squid, they then ceremonially cut their debit cards in half to loud cheers. One closer was a Democratic official of some kind.

Then we dispersed in order to make our own way to the Stock Exchange. Just as well, because the police had placed a checkpoint at the Broadway entrance to Wall Street, permitting only those with workplace IDs to enter. Luckily downtown has many byways and it was a simple matter for those who wanted to do so to congregate on the steps of the Federal Hall National Memorial. At a signal, we congregated into a large cluster and sounded the People’s Gong, closing the Stock Exchange for violations against the people. Proceedings were closed with an exuberant chant of A-Anti-AntiCapitalista, with a new twist: after a couple of choruses, we went quieter and quieter, lower and lower, jumping up at the end in full voice.

All quite silly in some ways but it prevented Mr White Shirt from the mass arrest he was clearly itching to orchestrate by catching a lot of public attention and not being demonstrably an offense, as no signs were displayed. There were just a lot of people there at the same time doing the same things. Needless to say, perhaps half-a-dozen were arrested for no apparent reason.This exercise has been going on for a few weeks now. It’s creating new energy, new songs, new ways of being in space. So much for academia.

 

Militant Research–Madrid

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It is one thing to call for activist research, it’s altogether something else to carry it out. There are a number of interesting existing models. They seem to have in common a willingness to work outside the formal structures of the university, to work on projects, rather than within disciplines, and to publish their work freely and open source on and offline.

One example is the Madrid collective Observatorio Metropolitano [OM from now on]. Their work was presented last night at 16 Beaver by Ana Méndez de Andés, an architect and urban planner who teaches Urban Design at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. In the announcement for the event, OM were described as:

a militant research group that utilizes investigations and counter-mapping to look into the metropolitan processes of precarious workers, migrants, and militants taking place in Madrid, brought on by crisis, gentrification, speculation and displacement.

In her presentation, Méndez de Andés described how the group had come together in 2007 at the height of the speculative building boom in Madrid to try and discover exactly what was happening in the city. With disarming wit, she commented that it was an advantage that Madrid was seen as a provincial city, lacking the cosmopolitan identity of Barcelona, because it was easier to examine the city’s changes.

The group was intellectual but not academic, interested in carrying out what she called “militant research,” which she distinguished from activism. In their Manifesto for Madrid, OM define this as being [these are my no doubt dreadful translations: do consult the originals before quoting!] :

Militant investigations which will bring the knowledge and policy tools necessary to address these enormous processes of change. To build a communication space between members, technicians and stakeholders, and above all between small projects (or embryonic projects) of militant research already occurring in the city and the social movements.

Méndez de Andés joked that she herself was not very good at organizing events, so she had stuck to analysis. Their research generates both substantial books, 400 pages long, and short, accessible pamphlet-length works available free as PDFs. The Manifesto strikes the signature note for OM projects in its denunciation of

the destruction of the elementary bases, which make possible common life (la vida en común) in a city like Madrid.

Written at the height of the boom, the Manifesto was able to visualize the transformation of Madrid into a global city at the expense of the creation of a marginalized class of people living precariously, the undermining of social provisions for health, environment and education and (as we all now know) spectacular debt.

Banner from Traficantes website

The related open-source copyleft publishing venture, Traficantes de Sueños does not define itself as a publisher:

It is, however, a project, in the sense of ‘commitment’, which aims to map the constituent lines of other forms of life.

Central to this venture is “freedom of access to knowledge.” All publications are available either as downloads or as books. Some people buy all the books as a means of supporting the project, regardless of whether they intend to read them. Publications are generated rapidly so that they can contribute to the ongoing discussion and debate within the social movements, rather than reflect on them later (I was recently asked by contrast to contribute to a collection on OWS, bearing in mind, as the call put it, that Zuccotti Park will be ancient history by the time of publication).

In La crisis que viene (The Coming Crisis) [March, 2011] OM see the the financial crisis as a prelude to the unrelenting privatization of the commons across Europe. For OM, there is:

a constant underlying all measures: interest and financial benefits go first. Although this will cost the immediate and future welfare of entire populations. Although this will involve the dismantling of pension systems and the decline of social rights acquired over decades. Although such policies will cause the whole economy to slide, limping along the path of stagnation. The next decade offers us no more than a new round of privatization of services and social guarantees, a greater decline in wages, and a social crisis which is still known only in its embryonic stage.

By October 2011, this pessimism was offset by the possibilities of the new social movements across Europe. Crisis and Revolution in Europe argues that, to quote the poet Holderlin,

“there grows what also saves.” The antidote has been accompanied by citizens’ movements now extend across most of the continent. This is the 15M, the movement of Greek squares, the French strikers and the indignados in a growing number of countries. It is in this work in progress of political reinvention, where you can find a social outlet to the crisis, in addition to rescuing that which really matters: democracy and European society.

Their analysis is now being translated into Portuguese, English, Greek and Italian in order to create a transEuropean dialogue about the crisis and build towards transEuropean social movements, perhaps even strikes.

No-one yesterday asked the quintessential Anglo question about funding. I took it that there the project was sustained by a mix of commitment, donation and the blanket subscriptions.

While there are many nascent publishing ventures using online and low-cost publishing in the Anglophone world, I don’t think we have anything to quite match this: though I would love to be corrected! Too many of the new digital publishing ventures spend so much time accommodating the demands of tenure, the one per cent of academia, that the online virtues of speed and accessibility get lost. Too much of the Occupy research is about the vicissitudes of Occupy and not the collective issues that brought us into the movement.

That said, where the Spanish have led the way before, we have also followed from the “Take the Square” movement to Occupy Wall Street. Of those who are still reading at this point, I bet many of us are intellectuals of one sort or another. How about it? A collective militant/activist research project(s)?

Occupy and “The Queer Art of Failure”

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In Occupy circles these days, there’s a lot of discussion of success and failure. J. Jack Halberstam’s new book raises the prospect of what he calls “the queer art of failure,” creating a set of intriguing overlaps that I’m going to explore here. Yesterday, Halberstam introduced the book to a packed and boisterous audience in New York (his text will be forthcoming on Bullybloggers with those of the respondents!). So my thoughts are inspired by a combination of being at the panel and reading the book itself.

Failure is a provocative question for Occupy. Of course, the movement was a response to the catastrophic failure of neoliberal capitalism. But to suggest aspects of failure within is to seem disloyal to a project in which so many of us are intensely invested. Halberstam queers that logic by suggesting that in the search “to live otherwise,” it may be that

[u]nder certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing…offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.

In the OWS context, for example, any return to economic “success” by means of traditional growth would in fact be a disaster as it would still further accelerate the processes of climate change. Occupy needs to undo the imperative for “growth” in order to find ways by coexist and indeed to continue to exist.

Halberstam’s project again intersects with the way I have been thinking about these issues in calling not for success but for abolition. Abolition acknowledges that something has failed so utterly that it must be abolished and it is therefore a founding moment. Halberstam quotes one of my favorite essays at this point, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses:

Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society. The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be …uncanny.

[Social Text 79, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer 2004, behind paywall; I’ve extended the quote by a line beyond Halberstam, 114]

Halberstam’s book takes much energy from Benjamin, whose weak messianism can be understood as a form of abolitionism, in keeping with his concept of the general strike as an effort to return only to a radically transformed work, rather than to achieve a specific goal. As everyone should know, Occupy is supporting the call for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more on May Day. Much energy has been wasted, in my view, by trying to define what its success would mean.

For example, in a recent talk at NYU (also published in the Guardian) the philosopher Simon Critchley, very sympathetic to OWS, claimed:

Power is the ability to get things done. Politics is the means to get those things done. Democracy is the name for regimes that believe that power and politics coincide and that power lies with the people.

Thus Occupy would be a success if it “got things done” by means of restoring democracy. There’s much to question here, notably the surprisingly instrumental definition of power that seems to want to forget Foucault. But to continue, things would get done by articulating the:

infinite demand that flows from the perception of an injustice; second, a location where that demand is articulated. There is no politics without location.

The formula combines queer philosopher Judith Butler’s influential call for “impossible demands” with what, following Halberstam, we could call a “straight” insistence on being in one place and one place only. Enter Plato, the opponent of all doubling.

In the Republic, as Rancière reminds us, Plato instructs:

It is right for the shoemaker by nature to make shoes and occupy himself with nothing else.

That is to say, if a person has an allocated role and then they go and occupy somewhere else they are at fault. A person should be “in” the nature which is proposed for them and not “out” of it by being elsewhere. When we occupy, we are in and out at once–in occupation and out of place, in a nature we have chosen and out of the one allocated.

For Halberstam, to be queer is precisely to be out of place, being where one is not supposed to be, refusing normativity. If we follow the spatial implications, to occupy is queer, a way in which we can live otherwise. Certainly the “anti-disciplinary” politics of his project can be thought of as the refusal to conform to the order sought by the police, as the refusal to move on.

What would it mean, then, to think of the queer art of failure in regard to Occupy? One way to respond to this complex question might be to think about the way in which the encampments were considered “home.” This gave Occupy the location from which to articulate its demands and in more practical vein provided a literal place to live to many migrant and unhoused activists, as well as the space to form a community.

It might be suggested that some failures also came from the normatizing effects of making a home. There were persistent allegations of sexual harassment at many Occupy sites, despite the many queer, trans, LGBT and feminist persons involved. Can these incidents be thought through as part of the (hetero)normatizing that might come with making a home, a failure to create a different form of living?

Being based in a single place also makes you a target. It was and is relatively easy for the police to evict Occupy encampments once the decision to do so has been taken. The direct action organizer Lisa Fithian has encouraged Occupy to imagine itself as a shoal of fish, or a herd of animals, or a flight of birds–moving, transitory and fluid ways of living. Halberstam might point us to Chicken Run or the adventure of the Fantastic Mr. Fox or other “radical animations” as the means to imagine such “stopping and going, moving and halting.”

In discussion yesterday, Halberstam mentioned being intrigued by the way that The Invisible Committee describe the spreading of resistance as being non-linear, a “resonance” that takes on greater density

[t]o the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

This interface of desire, the failure of the “normal,” non-linear ways of moving, new forms of imagining, anti-disciplinarity is perhaps what it might be to occupy the queer art of failure.

 

Welcome to the Twilight Zone

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Twilight is when the shadow city can best be seen and unseen, moving in and out of perception at the corners of our eyes. To see it is to see otherwise, an altervision. You may be called mad. For seeing inside and outside is a way of thinking alien to the police. As Brian Thill writes in his wonderful journal today, describing the scene in Zuccotti Park the day before the confrontations of March 17:

And this was the one thing that struck me most about the nature of the police in this twilight time, as they leaned against their cars or cracked jokes with their co-workers: “the police” is really the name for the conjunction of brute force and the absolute inability to imagine.

The twilight–my favorite time, the noir time of day, linking Baudelaire’s crépescule to The Twilight Zone, a time for imagining.

Let’s try some twilight visualizing, as an exercise in not thinking like the police–whether the disciplinary, thought, political, or what have you police.

In Walter Benjamin’s noir set in Paris, The Arcades Project, the altervisionary was the color-blind engraver and colonial explorer Charles Meryon. His city was cross-hatched, full of revolutionary shadows.

Meryon--The Ministry of the Navy--Fictions and Vows

At the left, jutting into the space, is the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies, with whom Meryon had long disputes following his service. On the ground, horsebacked troops or police, with some footsoldiers, spin in confusion. For above them, there where there should not be anything to see, is an advancing formation of marine creatures.It is a work of artistic revolt–the engraving, like the marine painting, was considered a “minor” genre, irrelevant to the grand work of History painting.

The scene is also one of memory work–the Ministry abuts the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine had done its work. Renamed the Place de la Concorde by the Directory in 1795, it was colonized by Napoleon with the placement of an Egyptian obelisk that he had removed from Luxor. There’s another one in Central Park. In 1858 the Ministry of Navy and Colonies had begun the French colonial venture into Vietnam with what they called the Cochinchina War, leading to the establishment of a fully-fledged colony in 1864 with its capital in Saigon. We know how that turned out.

Meryon’s liminal engraving with its deep cross-hatched shadows visualized the intersection of empire and revolution with its sky-borne multitude, not quite real and yet clearly visible to the ground-bound police. Shortly after he completed this piece, he was interred in the Charenton, a notorious “asylum” for the insane.” He was released only to die.

Cross-hatch a bit further: the Ministry of the Navy was the Kreigsmarine under the German Occupation. I remember standing in the Place in 1984 at an anti-racism rally where a group of outraged French Resistance veterans pointed out the former Gestapo headquarters right next door to the Ministry. One of them was Stéphane Hessel, whose manifesto Indignez-Vous! [Get Mad!] (2010) was a formative influence in the Indignés movement that prefigured Occupy. In short, that’s us, up in the sky in the Meryon.

Cross-hatching was a term adopted by the novelist China Miéville for his noir/science fantasy The City and the City. Two cities co-exist in the same topographical space. Some spaces are total (in one city only), while many others are cross-hatched–partly in one, partly in the other. Citizens learn to negotiate this space by “unseeing,” a willed avoidance of attention.To fail to observe the divide is to “breach,” entailing catastrophic intervention by a mysterious uber-police known only as Breach.

Miéville insists that his work is not an allegory and we’re coming to understand why. Reviewing the book a year ago, Henry Farrell pointed out in the Boston Review:

Middle-class Americans and Europeans commonly unsee the homeless who are around them, affecting not to perceive them except as physical impediments to be circumnavigated. The homeless are recognized by their clothes, their gait, their way of being in the world, and in that act of recognition are dismissed.

Change “homeless” to “Occupy” and we have a good assessment of how the mainstream media and citizenry are dealing with the movement by “unseeing” it. If we stir, it is as a “remnant,” a twilight manifestation that is not quite real and should be avoided for fear of “breach.”

China Miéville is now working on a revived 1960s DC comic, Dial H for Hero. In the original comic, anyone who dialed H-E-R-O on the special phone would become a hero. For visualization, this is no ordinary word. Generals began visualizing battlefields in the late eighteenth century and then the idea was (as it were) generalized to “heroes,” Thomas Carlyle’s own fantasy about all-powerful autocrats who alone could “visualize” history (his word). The concepts that leaders have “vision” and that “great men make history” are still central to mainstream notions of authority. Carlyle argued that the modern hero Napoleon first demonstrated his visuality when he turned his artillery on the revolutionary crowd in Paris in 1795. Bloomberg, Kelly and their ilk likewise imagine themselves to be heroes.

Dial H for Hero

In the new twilight of Miéville’s version of the comic, the heroes are just as hostile to the citizenry as Carlyle’s monstrous autocrats. The background of this image seems to be a cross-hatching of psychogeographies, the Situationist way of attaching feeling to space.

Don’t Dial H for Hero. There are none waiting in the shadows. It is us who wait there, unseeing, learning now to unsee our unseeing, and finding that we don’t recognize the twilight zone we have emerged into.

 

The Shadow City

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"Power to the Imagination! We will take, We will Occupy"--N17 sign

There has been a certain melancholic tone adopted recently about Occupy that also contains within it a hint of relief. It suggests that “politics” can now resume, that perhaps we need to be involved with the U. S. election, and that Occupy was just a moment, which could never be carried forward. I feel the force of this but resist it. There is nothing of the politics that interests me in “politics.”

What’s happening in the present awakening is a remapping of the old modernist haunt, the city. The cityscape of New York disappeared behind the facade of the “global city,” a phantasmagoria of the coup of finance capital. This imaginary pushes the long histories of settlement, colonization and internationalization into the shades of the unspeakable. Occupy’s city is returning from the dark corners, where resistance to those processes always lived, to allow for a circulation that is not that of capital.

When Occupy emerged and consolidated itself as a space, the means by which it was incorporated back into the spectacle was as a particular instance of space: Zuccotti Park. In this imagining, Occupy is active only when there are bodies in Zuccotti. There’s some energy to this idea because having the encampment was astonishing. What’s happening now is equally intriguing–a branching out of the first space to other spaces and a re-networking of the resistant cityscape.

As Nato Thompson put it this week:

In essence, the freedom to assemble is now the freedom to occupy the public imagination.

Likewise, David Graeber has been emphasizing the recapturing of imagination as a central process of Occupy. This process does not seem to me to be a liberation of the spaces occupied by capital, so much as the creation of a new space for the imagination to map, explore, desire and create.

In Alain Badiou’s essay on the Commune, this space is what happens when you break with the

parliamentary destiny of popular and worker’s political movements.

He takes this a step further to claim that “the ‘Left'” is that

set of parliamentary political personnel that proclaim that they are the only ones equipped to bear the general consequences of a singular political movement.

That “Left” is certainly articulating this claim in relation to Occupy right now. A “break with the Left”–which would in the U. S. also be the very possibility of a politics–would then open certain spaces to the imagination and not simply occupy one space in downtown.

The Commune was famously described as follows:

One enters, one leaves, one circulates, one gathers….Approach the groups, listen. A whole people entertain profound matters. For the first time workers can be heard exchanging their appreciations on things that hitherto only philosophers had tackled. There is no trace of supervisors; no police agents obstruct the street.

It sounds familiar and not, doesn’t it? The discussions are so Occupy. The entering, leaving and circulating as well, as long as someone stays behind; as for the absence of police, that’s our future imaginary. The barricade theatre at Union Square, the +Brigades, the mobile Occupy Town Square, the circle discussions outside the U. N. yesterday–all of these things occupy this imaginary. The shadow city is tangible now. You feel strange for noticing it and get told that you are extreme for doing so. But it’s there.