Category Archives: Occupy

Another Brain Is Possible

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Immaterial labor, the knowledge economy, service-based industries, call them what you will but they depend on the brain, in the same way that factory labor depends on the body. It is, then, a symptom of the suicidal autoimmune capitalism that has been forged in the past thirty years that fish, the single food most associated with improving the brain, actually kills it. Our brains ourselves demand a new global system as the precondition for our survival.

Nearly all varieties of fish, long exalted as brain food, contain significant quantities of mercury. The mercury arrives in the ocean as a by-product of coal, used above all in power stations. Washed out of the air into rivers by rain, it accumulates in the sea. It is absorbed by fish and more particularly by carnivorous fish. So the higher up the food chain you go the worse the problem becomes, because fish that eat other carnivorous fish get more concentrated doses. By the time you get to top-end carnivores like tuna, shark, marlin and swordfish, the levels are very noticeable.

But there’s no such thing as a “safe” level. Mercury doesn’t simply harm the brain–it makes it disappear. Here’s a video from the University of Calgary that shows how brain neurons wither and disappear in the presence of mercury–at 2 mins 30 if you want to skip ahead

So let’s say you don’t really worry about rising temperatures, drought and the other indices of climate change: do you care that you’re killing your brain by what you eat?

The dots are easy to join. A fossil fuel based energy economy puts increasing amounts of mercury into the biosphere, which concentrate in the bodies of fish. This toxicity makes the flesh of humanity’s last remaining wild food source unambiguously hazardous for consumption. It threatens the very possibility of human creativity itself. This problem is easy to describe but cannot be solved in the present economic system. Increasingly the choice is between sustaining the greatest number of human lives or the largest profit. The change for the former cannot be achieved by policy, by interstate treaty or by the market. It will either happen post-catastrophe or by systemic change.

Surely this is the usual alarmist stuff from environmentalists we have become so adept at ignoring? Last year Time journalist Bryan Walsh had himself tested for mercury–and found his levels at twice the government recommended limit. He bizarrely adds that this is not a problem for men, presumably because they don’t use their brains. Under heavy pressure from fossil fuel industry and fishing alike, government has simply caved and designated mercury a risk for women and children only.

Still not bothered? Now studies are showing that sharks and other top predator fish are contaminated with BMAA, a neurotoxin related to cyanide that accumulate in human flesh:

A growing body of research suggests there may be a connection between exposure to the toxin and the development of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The bacteria that cause the toxin are naturally occurring: perhaps it’s just an indication that we did not evolve expecting to eat sharks and other animals with extensive rows of teeth that live in the open ocean.

Who eats shark anyway?

Shark fins, second row from the top, China Town NYC

Lots of people, that’s who, mostly as shark fin soup, which now stands revealed as the ultimate autoimmune dish. The fins are, even by shark standards, intensely concentrated sources of mercury and BMAA. The soup is eaten to celebrate special occasions or as a luxury item, mostly by Chinese people. I’m not even going to get into the practice of harvesting fins from sharks that are then thrown back into the ocean to die.

Let’s not get a frisson of superiority here if we don’t eat such soups but restrict our choices to more “sensible” fish. So many “forage” fish, the small fish humans don’t eat but larger fish do, have been fished that the species now face serious risk of extinction. What happens to them? Fish farms grind them up and feed them to their animals–what better way could be imagined to intensify the concentration of mercury and BMAA in the food chain? Your reasoned choice for a farmed salmon or whatever else is just as implicated in the collapse of world fish stocks and the toxicity of top-end fish as shark’s fin soup, just in different ways.

As usual, it’s Africans, least involved in any of this, who are paying the highest visible price. Off the coasts of West Africa, huge quantities of forage fish are gathered by European Union supertrawlers that freeze the fish on board. As such fish constitute a vital food source for Africans, the risks of overfishing are literally life and death for subaltern populations. Yet the European fishing industry is more concerned about Chinese boats than the sustaining of local people. Once again, threats to profit are taken more seriously than threats to people.

We like to say another world is possible. Another one is actively being made right now in which wild species of fish will be close to extinction with their few remaining specimens will be too toxic to eat. Human brains and bodies are suffering. Another world is necessary.

 

Take 2: Activist Research

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It seems that  my title “activism is the new theory” was somewhat misunderstood–or better, open to misunderstanding. I’ve had interesting comments via FB, email and word of mouth that made it seem worth following up the post today (by the way, if you feel nervous about posting a comment to the blog, you can email a comment to me and I can post it anonymously). If you’re not nervous do leave comments where everyone can see them:)

Objection one: isn’t “activist theory” just praxis by another name? Perhaps; but with a couple of caveats. Praxis is often described as something like the interaction of theory and practice, often with an able-ist quote of the “theory without practice is blind” variety attached. Or you can cite Marx: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world–the point, however, is to change it.”

For all that, the philosophy of praxis has tended to be more philosophy than praxis, especially in university contexts. On the other hand, I think it is perhaps the moment to leave philosophy to the philosophers. By suggesting that activism is the new theory, I didn’t mean it should replace theory. In rather compressed fashion, I meant that the highly privileged space afforded to “theory” in the academy might be replaced by activism, providing we take that to mean the “interface where we ‘do’ theory.”

Objection two: isn’t this is all wildly optimistic? Again, perhaps so. But if you look at the posts on debt, especially student debt, I am doubtful that you’ll find me so starry-eyed. I have spent my entire working life under the rhetorical shadow of crisis, from Thatcherism to the War on Terror and now the global financial crisis. I’ve been in left and social democratic political parties, pressure groups and even did some work for the Obama campaign.

I think this moment is different. The crisis is such that even as neoliberal austerity is clearly failing, a growth policy would only exacerbate climate change that is setting drought and temperature records daily. I’m still not pessimistic, because the global movement of which Occupy is a part has had more torque than anything I’ve seen. The very violence unleashed by the cops from coast to coast suggests that this movement gets under their skin in a different way. Once we give in to the pleasures of pessimism, though, it’s easy to read this as a “moment,” perhaps a transition. Since things started to move during the Arab Spring, it’s seemed to me that this is it–either there is change now or there isn’t for some long time to come.

I don’t pretend that this is all my idea. The 16 Beaver Group today circulated a very interesting text from 2005, a response from the Argentine Colectivo Situaciones to a set of questions from the Madrid-based Precarias a la Deriva, Precarious Women in the Dérive (Drift). Note that they were writing after the great wave of militancy in 2001 had passed. The Colectivo outlined their strategy of “research militancy” situated in tension with the “‘sad militant'” and the “detached, unchangeable ‘university researcher.'” Their goal:

a practice capable of articulating involvement and thought.

In a time when the phantasmagoria of common ground has dispersed, idealization of all kinds is problematic:

We think that the labor of research militancy is linked to the construction of a new perception.

This is precisely the project of my own work in all arenas. At the same time–because this project is after all not (yet) a collective one–I also agree with the Precarias

We consider as a primary problem to ‘start from oneself,’ as one among many, in order to ‘get out of oneself’ (both of the individual ego and the radical group to which one belongs) and encounter with any other resisting people [in order to] politicize life from within.

Research radicalism, a feminist politics of immediate experience, the necessity of a certain commitment, the awareness of the an-archive of refusal, all in a moment where uncertainty creates opportunity for new ways of thinking and doing–that’s what I mean by “activism is the new theory.” Call it what you like.

Activism is the New Theory

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Can we say that activism is the new theory? Not the replacement for theory, not the subject of theory but the interface where we “do” theory. As this project is today one quarter complete, a look around seems in order. I feel change, everywhere. I feel it most where I try to think, wherever that is: that place in the twilight of the shadow city where things look different.

I’m thinking back to Ruth Gilmore saying in her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association that “policy is the new theory.” She did mean “replacement for” (in part at least), I suspect. However, given the paralysis of the existing political process that began in November 2010 with the Republican takeover of the House and many state legislatures, such a move has not seemed promising.

With the wholesale conversion of the judicial branch to political theater, as evidenced by the ludicrous Supreme Court “hearings” on health care, the old stand-by of legal activism also seems foreclosed. Let’s pause to dwell on the rank misogyny of Scalia and his ilk, insisting that, like a bad mother, the government might force real men to eat broccoli. The legal and economic ripostes are beside the point–health care makes men into wimps, according to the Stand Your Ground right.

So in saying that activism might be the new theory, I’m not saying something as simple as “we can only learn in the streets.” I am suggesting that a certain kind of High Theory, so privileged over the past two decades, and so masculine in its exaltation of rigor, is demonstrably (as it were) not the way to get to grips with the crisis. For example, the widespread suggestion amongst theorists of a certain kind that we should read St. Paul–really? I’m just not going to do that.

For Jack Halberstam, the alternative is “low theory,” an approach that he sees as a mix of Stuart Hall’s Gramscian concept of theory as a “detour en route to something else,” the Benjaminian stroll and the Situationist dérive. Add to this Rancière’s concept of education as emancipation, learning what it is that we need to learn, and there’s a very dynamic way of thinking to hand. Unsurprisingly, these approaches have also featured widely across Occupy 2012.

What is surprising to an extent is the new viability of anarchist approaches in the critical context. When I was writing The Right to Look, I spent a good deal of time worrying about whether I could discuss anarchist interpretations of history, the general strike, Rosa Luxemburg and so on and be taken “seriously.” I wonder why I worried now. On the one hand, who cares if the seriousness police mark you down as one of them? On the other, the reason those ideas seemed important was a mark of the crisis in which we were already immersed. The an-archive is newly open for thinking.

At the same time, I’d be surprised if anyone who has been reading frequently here thinks of this as a theory project as such. I think of it as having a series of threads, one of which might be labelled “theory,” but which would not, as it were, hold up on its own. It gets energy from, and is sustained by, the interaction with a set of activities that can be designated “activism.”

The funny thing about being an activist is no-one really thinks of themselves as being one. Those that do probably get paid to do so, which is not quite what I have in mind. I think there’s a distinction between “being an activist” and learning from activism. In this sense, the current form of activism takes all of the activities and actions that we do every day as being the site of a new politics and a new invitation to theorize.

This invitation is about making connections, finding histories, creating tools, and hearing new voices. It is also about refusing: refusing the market view of the world, refusing to “move on, there’s nothing to see here,” refusing to give up, refusing to just accept that in the end it’s all about the [Democratic/Labor/Socialist/whatever] Party.

It’s not about being the cleverest kid in the class, showing how much we know, upstaging or undercutting others with ideas. For me, it was enabled by Occupy but it is not in any way limited to that frame. In some ways, it’s already moved out of the encampments into the networks and beyond the control of all the police trying to contain it.  I’m looking forward to seeing what the next nine months will bring.

Local Space, Local Bodies

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Where and what is the local? We spend a good deal of time worrying about the global but the local seems obvious. Occupy is intriguingly showing that not to be the case.There are many ways in which physical localities can be configured, as we saw first with the encampments and more recently with anti-foreclosure and anti-school closings activism in the movement. Yet the concept perhaps begins with the most local space of all: our bodies.

At a meeting in New York today, Aaron Bady who has been active with Occupy Oakland discussed the clear differences between OWS and OO. In fact, locally Occupy Oakland is known as the Oakland Commune, not as Occupy. Most notable was his demonstration that OO operates in a media desert, where even the local “newspaper” the Oakland Tribune is simply assembled from press releases. So when OO activists participate in City Council meetings and tweet the proceedings, they are meeting a real journalistic need.

Bady further talked of his own personal experience and suggested that OO had made him feel like an Oakland resident for the first time, despite having lived there for four years. His account resonated with me. OWS has made me revise my psychogeography of New York in so many ways. In the interstices of a city that appears to be nothing but nail salons, banks and pharmacies, I have found my way to trade union halls, churches, artist-run spaces, and other spaces that are not usually imagined as being part of “New York.” It comes to seem as if the commercialized New York has been imposed on top of this other New York, sometimes squashing it altogether as in the transformation of the old CBGB’s into a fashion boutique.

At the same meeting, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg spoke of dis/ability activism, reminding us again of how central non-normative embodiment and self-actualization is to whatever it is that is Occupy. On March 17 at the re-occupation and re-eviction of Zuccotti Park, activists from the Disabilities Working Group were present throughout, some in chairs and one person using a ventilator apparatus. They were absolutely unintimidated by the cops.

Ginsburg showed a remarkable video made in 2007 by Amanda Baggs, in which she is shown first making movements and sounds characteristic of a person on the autism spectrum. Then the video moves to a “translation” into sub-titled and machine-generated English, in which Baggs explains that in her view she experiences the environment in a very different and  more extensive spectrum of feelings and connections. She scoffed at “expert” suggestions that other people “must” have made the video and reeled off a long list of software and equipment that she had used to a Wired journalist. The inevitable Internet sites that call her a “fraud” miss her whole point: it’s not that there are no differences but there are far more differences than is normally–and that’s the mot juste here–recognized.

In 2007, Baggs wrote about wishing there were an equivalent to the queer liberation movement for people with autism. Her video was part of the accomplishment of that goal. She now writes as a “political” or “ethical” blogger and has expressed balanced support for the Occupy movement:

most people (and therefore most people involved in this movement) fundamentally don’t grasp that disabled people are people. They’ll deny it, and they may believe they think we’re people, but their actions treat us differently than their words do. Even people who are against capitalist greed in theory, have usually not worked out that part of capitalism is valuing people differently based on the kind and amount of work they do, and the creation of a system that figures that if it can’t manage to exploit disabled people then we’re basically trash….I absolutely support the general idea of the movement…. but I also know that without disabled people’s voices getting heard the outcomes could still be quite bad for us even if their goals are totally met otherwise.

So while it has become quite popular, even standard practice, to say that the movements for recognition distracted from the struggle against capitalism, it’s starting to seem like the opposite: that a set of localized distinctions and claims is precisely what is forming the possibility of imagining a world without capitalism, something that many had come to think impossible.

 

Creative Refusal

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The new strategy of creative refusal of impoverishment by austerity continues to unfold. After some different strategies in New York, today’s countrywide general strike in Spain made it clear that the crisis in the eurozone shows no sign of being over. Tonight in New York, David Graeber urged an overflow crowd to extend our historical as well as geographic understandings of creative refusal.

With the Greek elections ahead, new cuts promised across Europe and recessions now official from the UK to Portugal, refusal is just beginning. The electricity surcharge strike in Greece has been joined by a tax strike in Ireland with a rally planned for Saturday after only 23% of taxpayers have consented to the new austerity tax.

In Spain today, the general strike shut down the auto industry, heavy industry, the trains and the airports. Electricity use, the new index of strike action, was down 25%. Should there be any news reports here, they will no doubt show the small fire in Barcelona. Much more impressive were the direct actions. Here’s the Atocha Station, site of the bombings whose anniversary just passed, closed by the strike:

The Atocha Station closed by strike action

For the edification of Chris Hedges, here’s what Black bloc actually does–it shut down a major highway in Barcelona this morning and this took personal courage:

Students block Diagonal Avenue, Barcelona

And then this evening, Spanish time, a rally of impressive proportions in Puerta del Sol:

It was against this, shall we say, striking background that David Graeber spoke of creative refusal. As is his wont, he expanded our horizons in time and space. The true radicality here is to see the so-called modern with its obsession with self-interest and its invention of the market as the exception to a far longer human history concerned with very different cosmologies.There’s a real intellectual liberation at work here.

Cultural studies types of my vintage might think of E. P. Thompson’s eighteenth-century poachers, “stealing” the landlord’s fish or game, as a prototype for creative refusal, leading to de Certeau’s appropriation of “poaching” to mean using office stationery or doing personal tasks on work time. More recently, James Scott and others have talked of the ways that the enslaved and the colonized were deliberately slow at their work, pushing the horizons further back. Graeber wants to take the entire range of known human history as a resource for creative refusal, arguing that it impoverishes us to set so much of it aside. In a bold conceptual move, he called for thinking of history as social movements.

Drawing on his astonishing range of learning, Graeber cited examples from ancient Sumeria to Polynesia and Madagascar. He repeatedly suggested that the outcast and the marginalized might be thought of as choosing such status in order to defend an anti-hierarchical politics. He described, for example, how Madagascar was first permanently settled by slave colonies, whose enslaved revolted and established complex barriers to the establishment of a state.

What’s inspiring is the willingness to see all humans as political actors with mature motives and to assume that humans have always been far more connected than the so-called historical record demonstrates. In thinking about Polynesia, for example, Graeber asked whether it makes sense to assume that the so-called Polynesians reached as far as Easter Island from South-East Asia–and then stopped, never trying to reach South America, as even the shipwrecked sailors of the whaler Essex did in 1820. This assumption is necessary to reinforce the idea of “primitive” isolation so that when Captain Cook and others arrived, they must have been seen as gods with unheard of technologies, like ships.

Finally, he mentioned a Papua New Guinea people who have a consensus-building culture, which, like Occupy, involves endless meetings: only there is an obligation on all speakers to be funny, so the meetings are very popular. Now that’s an idea whose time has come.

 

 

Occupy on Ice

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Air bubbles in Tenaya Lake, Yosemite

Breathe in. Relax. Do it again. You just engaged in time travel. In the air that you inhaled will have been molecules released by melting glaciers, ice sheets and tundra that previously circulated tens of thousands of years ago. There’s neolithic air in your blood, air that never before passed through a human body. A little uncanny, isn’t it?

Our bodies seem intensely singular at one level, uniquely “us.” At a different scale, they are assemblages of cells, microbes and atoms of varying provenance. These non-human “actants” (to use Bruno Latour’s term) engage with each other in ways that do not impinge on our consciousness but are cognitive actions. Think for example of the operations of what we like to call the immune system. White blood cells “remember” whether a virus or other form is a pathogen they have encountered before or not and act accordingly. You don’t know what’s happening but your body does.

Indulge me a moment. Let’s imagine that the previously frozen air and your body cells are talking: what are they saying to each other? Get your headphones now, preferably some good ones.

The ice, as we all know, is melting. Moving or melting ice generates a remarkable set of sounds. Artist Katie Paterson has created an installation that gives us the sound of the melting Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland–scroll to the bottom of the page and click play. It’s a harmless enough and familiar noise, trickling water, the clink of ice.

The Vatnajokull glacier

The voice of the moving, shifting ice is intense–Cheryl Leonard recorded it this winter in Yosemite–listen here but give it a moment to load, it’s a large file. Or listen to the sound of the Antarctic ice sheet posted by Andreas Bick–it’s the WAV file close to the top and make sure to be listening around 40 seconds in. Check out how DJ Spooky brings together the African-American concepts of “chill” and “ice”–Ice Cube, Ice-T–with the disappearing ice, the nation state, and climate change:

You might say that these sounds are pure signified–a cacophony of overlaid meaning about time, duration, space, human/non-human interactions, melting, movement and more. Or you could say: this is what climate change sounds like.

What does it say? It speaks back to the human empire. It has long been held that the colonized “cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” So it might say:

"These Romans are crazy" Here’s Obelix from the Asterix cartoon (done before there were graphic novels) using his catchphrase “These Romans are crazy.” Some people see this as anti-imperialist pure and simple, others think it’s Gaullist, which at least has the merit of being anti-NATO. Let’s say that it represents anti-transnationalism. The ice is just saying, “these humans are crazy.”

What he said

Anglophone culture has a short answer to that.

In this view, the imperial project brings benefits to all, including the colonized. The muppet known as Rick Santorum has been saying that responding to climate change is wrong because that would be putting earth over humans (ok, he says “man”). For neoliberalism  that would be to put the People’s Front of Judea in charge of the Roman Empire.

Jane Bennet has suggested that a critical “division of the sensible” is the distinction between “life” and “matter,” the latter often qualified as “mere” or “mute” matter. We can no more hear what the ice in our bodies is saying than the Roman senators could interpret the “noise” made by the plebs.

Rome fell, of course. The human empire is teetering. No statistics: I am told that is depressing. Just breathe.

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.

 

 

 

Law? Or Theatre?

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Another day, another few notches out of the right to assembly in Bloombergistan. A march against police violence was broken up  by–guess what? police violence. Learning from these repeated encounters, an action protesting climate change at the U. N. was a theater of the absurd of arrests, in which the cops had to arrest people claiming to be the one percent.

Cops playing their role at Disrupt Dirty Power

If you’re on the right kind of Twitter and Facebook feeds, you’ll have heard about the unnecessary use of force on the police brutality march. The use of some switchbacks by the marchers in NoHo seemed to irritate the police, who were themselves trying to prevent the march from reaching Union Square about a mile to the north. Of course, it’s not illegal to walk to Union Square but since the middle of this week it has suddenly become illegal to have a rally there, according to mysterious new “rules” that popped up overnight.

In a series of arrests was one of Messiah Hamid, a 16 year-old woman with her shirt lifted by the NYPD. Many present and looking at the photographs were reminded of a similar photograph, known as “the woman with the blue bra”, showing her being dragged away by the military in Egypt. I’m choosing not to reproduce the photograph of Hamid’s arrest because she’s a minor but there were many such scuffles (see below).

Just another violent arrest of a minor in NYC

The sustainability action called Disrupt Dirty Power was designed to force police to arrest participants as part of the action. A group dressed as business executives marched onto the grass at the United Nations and started proclaiming their adherence to free market principles and the pursuit of Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Nukes. A ridiculously disproportionate number of police were present and leaped in to make the arrests. However, they had forgotten to bring their van, so the performers had a perfect stage to expound their views to assembled photographers and live streamers.

"The One Percent" address the media

The Disrupt Dirty Power action had a strong narrative to it that was about more than reacting to recent events. It suggested a “join the dots” strategy, in which the connections between social and ecological crisis and the profit-first motif of neoliberalism are visualized. It begins to look as if non-violent civil disobedience with the presumption of arrest is emerging as the next stage of the American Spring. Perhaps it’s better than volunteers who have been trained in civil disobedience should be those arrested than random teenagers. At the same time, is this law? or theatre? If law is a set of agreed principles  y which a society is organized, what’s happening in New York is not the rule of law. It’s an improvised way to maintain law enforcement, which is altogether different.

The contradictions in what the police are doing need to be stressed even in the U. N. action that was designed to involve arrests. For their intervention was so rapid that the second part of the action in which the 99% celebrated the just arrest of the one percent had to be conducted from across First Avenue.

The 99 percent

It’s not even clear under whose authority arrests are made at the U. N. which has autonomy–as anyone who has tried to park in New York knows–but is also subject to local and Federal law. One U. N. security person was present but was about as important as a Vichy cop would have been to the Gestapo. No comparison intended of course.

The action was intended to end with a projection onto the United Nations building by the intrepid OWS projections team. Somehow the police got wind of this and warned organizers that any projection would lead not only to the arrest of those involved but the impounding of the vehicle from which the projections are now done. In what sense is it a crime to project light onto buildings? Vacant buildings at that. By what law do the police get to confiscate expensive equipment and threaten to do so before it is used?

The law is a theatre it is a singularly monotonous one. There is only one line: “order.” The scenes are all the same. So every night at midnight in Union Square when the police put up their new barricade, the Occupiers stage a performance. Tonight: Animal Farm!