Category Archives: Occupy

Anniversary Week: Atocha M-11

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Yesterday began a key week of anniversaries: on March 11,  2004, known as M-11, the response to the Atocha Station bombing prefigured the indignados. March 17 is the six-month anniversary of OWS. And March 18 is the 142nd anniversary of the Paris Commune, which in some sense began it all. So this week I’ll think about these moments and some conceptual links between them.

The Atocha Statioo, March 11, 2004

To refresh the memory–several trains in or approaching the Atocha train station in Madrid were bombed simultaneously, causing 191 deaths and approximately 1800 injured. The atrocity occurred three days before national elections, in which José María Aznar’s conservative Popular Party were hoping for re-election despite their unpopular involvement of Spain in Iraq. Aznar held the Basque separatist group ETA responsible for the attack. However, it quickly became clear that an al-Qai’da inspired group had in fact carried it out. In the face of mass demonstrations, Aznar was defeated and the “socialist” PSOE were returned to office.

For Amador Fernández-Savater, the events of M-11 represented:

the emergence of a new form of politicisation which, summing up:

– does not necessarily have its meaning in the left/right dichotomy

– does not find its strength in ideology, so much as in first-hand feelings

– does not delegate representation or let others accumulate power at its expense

– thinks with its body and asks questions about meaning

– produces its own knowledge

– makes no attempt at cohesion, but at recreating the communal: an open, all-inclusive and joyful ‘we,

– transforms the map of what is possible

– does not declare another possible world, but fights to stop the destruction of the only one there is (We were all on that train).

The prefiguration of the indignados of 2011 and the related project of Occupy is striking. Equally significant, however, was the strength and speed of the popular refusal of the official explanation, drawing on the long experience of anti-fascism in Spain and the pervasive anxiety post-1975 about the possible return of dictatorship.

In very different vein, the young American writer Ben Lerner recently published his first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). A quick plot summary: a latter-day Holden Caulfield wins a literary fellowship to Madrid after leaving Brown, where he seeks literary, sexual and artistic experience without success, despite being present during M-11.

The writing is intensely self-reflexive, doubling back on its every reference. There are extended passages close to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a somewhat redundant interspersal of photographs in the manner of W. G. Sebald, while the political events are kept adjacent to the narrative in the classic manner of Stendhal. Even the title is a reference to a 1962 poem of the same name by John Ashbery that famously resists attempts to give its pictorial style meaning. It’s the kind of book that adapts the author’s own critical essay on Ashbery for several jarring pages.

Unsurprisingly, the narrator Adam Gordon wonders about applying for literature PhD programs: it’s really the other way around, this is a book designed to have dissertations written about it. At the same time, it’s engagingly written and the anti-hero “portrait of the artist as a young man [abroad]” works well in this endlessly referential context.

Without pretending to review the book as a whole, what I was wanting from it was some account of M-11. One of Adam’s love interests, Teresa, was an active participant but he himself spends more time online, taking anti-anxiety medication and sleeping during the decisive days. Here the book wants to have it both ways, like similar “year abroad” first novels such as Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel and Prague (actually about Budapest) by Arthur Phillips.

Each wants to reference major political events, which Lerner ironically calls “History,” while maintaining a suitable distance. Lerner has Adam give a talk in which he says: “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it.” It says something about the book that I felt I had to Google the sentence to be sure it was not a quote from somebody else. For all the arch knowingness, it’s a very old-fashioned reflection theory at work here–that “art” reflects “the real” but cannot engage with it directly.

For all that, I came to think that this failure to engage was precisely what we can learn from Lerner (pun intended). That is to say, during the Iraq war so much Anglophone political discourse was centered on the Bush-Blair axis that many of us missed the importance of M-11 as a long-term rethinking of the political. While my own Watching Babylon, finished in May 2004, was revised to take account of the Abu Ghraib photographs released in April of that year, I only referenced the Spanish events. On the one hand, we were too convinced of the importance of the photographs as “evidence” that might convict the entire war project and, on the other, our “context” was still too focused on the Anglophone.

Occupy has, by contrast, repeatedly tried to learn from Argentina, Spain, Greece, Egypt and other forms of planetary resistance to the crisis–imperfectly, no doubt, but as the Spanish example shows, new forms of politics in the widest sense used by Rancière and Fernández-Savater, are built over decades not weeks.

On this anniversary, let us not forget that the crisis continues to intensify in Spain, despite huge swathes of cheap money deluging the banks and bond markets from the European Central Bank. From a recent report by Reuters, here are a few details:

street cleaners, nurses, teachers and job trainers are struggling to get by as cash-strapped local authorities withhold wages….In more than 1.5 million Spanish households, not one family member has a job. Almost half of adults under 25 are unemployed. Close to a third of the 17-nation euro zone’s jobless live in Spain….Spain’s 17 autonomous regions are laden with around 30 billion euros in deficit — 3 percent of the country’s economic output

The Financial Times has called this renewed austerity on top of recession “insanity” in the sense that doing the same failed action over and over again must be insane. Half a million people went to the streets on February 24 to protest this nonsense.

The M-11 and M-15 movements are not done yet. This is an anniversary, not a memorial.

 

Sketches of Spain: From the Everyday to Every Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X-marks

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For all its success, Occupy has had conceptual failures as well. So far, the movement has been aware of the need to address indigenous issues but–at least in New York–we have not got very far with it. By the same token, while people are aware of climate change, it’s been hard to turn it into an action agenda item. It could be that the accelerating disaster of the Keystone XL pipeline serves as the catalyst to bring these crucial questions to the forefront.

Yesterday two votes in the Senate showed that the Keystone advocates continue to gain ground. A proposal to void the requirement for a federal permit to cross the US-Canada border won by 56-42, falling only on the filibuster rule. That means that eleven “Democrats” voted for the pipeline and with two Republicans absent, Big Oil needs only two more votes to get this passed. While the White House is oddly touting this as a victory, a quick look at the list of pro-pipeline Democrats reveals a major overlap with seats the party needs to retain to hold the Senate. Translation: expect a “compromise” soon.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben has become a convert to direct action. Yesterday he wrote:

we need to stop just playing defense against bad projects and go on the offense. The next clear target is subsidies for fossil fuels–why are we paying the richest industry on earth billions in taxpayer dollars?

The Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, along with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, have already passed legislation against the Keystone XL oil pipeline and have adopted the Cochabamba Mother Earth Accord. Debra White Plume explains why in this video.

Now Oglala Lakota people from Pine Ridge in South Dakota have started to take direct action against the pipeline by placing their bodies in the way of trucks carrying its equipment. This Monday 5 March, as Brenda Norrell’s blog Censored News reports:

Lakotas Alex White Plume, Debra White Plume, Andrew Ironshell, Sam Long Black Cat and Don Iron Shell, were arrested at a blockade of tar sands pipeline trucks. Debra White Plume, released from jail in Kyle, South Dakota, said Monday night: “We formed a blockade to stop tar sands oil mine equipment from passing our lands. The truckers told us the corporation office from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the State of South Dakota made a deal to save the truckers $50,000 per truck, there were two trucks, from having to pay $100,000,” Debra White Plume told Censored News. “There were about 50 to 75 people on the blockade at the village of Wanbli in Eagle Nest District on the northern side of the Pine Ridge rez.” Debra White Plume said the trucks were coming from Texas and going to Alberta, Canada to the tar sands oil mine. “They each carried a ‘treater vessel’ which is used to separate gas and oil and other elements.”

The protestors were, ironically enough, arrested by Tribal Police for disorderly conduct, the catch-all offense that has been widely used by the NYPD.

No doubt it was entirely a coincidence that the next day the New York Times ran one of those long social issue pieces about alcoholism in indigenous populations: on the very same Pine Ridge reservation. This is not to minimize the issue but there was no mention of the Keystone action, the questions of sovereignty and Treaty observance that it raises.

I’m reminded of Scott Richard Lyons’s work on the signing of those treaties and the x-marks that were used to designate native signers:

The x-mark is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and a lack of power, agency and a lack of agency.

Lyon suggests that all the Indian nations are in effect x-marks. It might be interesting to think of Occupy sites as x-marks as well, places where we try to do what we want under conditions that are not of own making. And then get evicted whenever they want. One of those conditions is that we occupy land that is already occupied and cannot do otherwise.

Decolonize Wall St

This problem was and is recognized but has been hard to address. An issue like Keystone allows us to demonstrate actual solidarity with First Nation peoples in Canada and indigenous peoples in the US, creating a new space between Occupy and Un-Occupy that could be where we should go next, a horizontal action against the inequality that is constitutive of the settler colony.

 

To strike horizontally against inequality

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After comparing the first two Communiqués in the OWS theory journal Tidal, today I’m reading the essays by Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Marina Sitrin. I see here an emerging concept of Occupy as the horizontal strike against inequality.

"True Democracy Is in the Streets"--Argentinian graffiti

First let’s applaud both the editorial team at Tidal and the authors for this mutual engagement: very few established publications could command such writers for their debut issues and it’s to the credit of these much-in-demand figures that they have prioritized writing for Tidal.

In two essays, Butler develops her approach from an initial stress on the “call for justice” in December to today’s key

claim that capitalism relies upon, and reproduces, social and economic inequalities [that]…are becoming greater, assuming new and devastating forms and [that] this accelerated process of inequality remains unchecked by existing state and global authorities.

If the earlier stress was on the “precariousness” that the global financial crisis has produced, as it were, by accident, Butler now suggests that capital is operating in such a way that labor has become a “disposable population.” We might recall that whereas it once took approximately eighty per cent of the workforce simply to generate sufficient food, contemporary agri-business can do so with only two per cent.

Any small adjustment in the current organization of society would not, then, address “the reproduction of inequality” that can be seen as the intended consequence of neo-liberalism. Here we recall Butler’s evocation in Tidal 1 of the cheering Tea Party crowd when invited to imagine a person without health insurance dying. Or the new waves of hate against people using contraception, marrying each other, or otherwise organizing to defend their equality.

Volumes have been written about the ways in which capitalism has always exacerbated inequality, and treated colonized and enslaved populations as disposable–and it’s safe to assume that Butler, of all people, has read most of them. What she is articulating here is a theory of resistance, and of the means to challenge the legitimacy of such a system. Interestingly, the counterinsurgency promoted by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan was centered on creating just such a legitimacy.

The counterinsurgency theory of legitimacy 2005

This combination of neo-liberal “economic pluralism” with militarized governance is precisely what is presently in crisis. As David Graeber might say, there is an inherent resistance to such notions, based on his demonstration that “communism is the basis of all human sociability.” By communism, he does not mean in any way the oddity of the Soviet system. It is a general theory of the possibility of society and a particular refutation of the neo-liberal fetish of “self-sufficiency as a moral ideal” (Butler).

As Butler now argues, this contestation of legitimacy is the moment at which Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the general strike becomes so important. She understands the strike as “a collectivity of disenfranchised citizens,” in which citizenship is not a formal case of documentation, so much as the index of membership of a given society. After giving a precis of the various forms of general strike from Du Bois to Gandhi and Luxemburg, Spivak provocatively suggests

[I]n the “Occupy Wall Street” movement the spirit of the General Strike has come into its own and joined forces with the American tradition of civil disobedience: citizens against an unregulated capitalist state, not against an individual and his [or her] regime.

The “spirit” of the General Strike is the specter haunting neo-liberalism. It is not the specter of state-centered command economies. It is a gesture towards the justice that cannot be deconstructed.

Writing with the collapse of Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacist uprising fresh in his mind, Walter Benjamin, whose spirit pervades Tidal 2, defined the general strike as the event that

takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not
so much causes as consummates.

In its “American” form, taking America to refer to the hemisphere, Marina Sitrin sees such a strike as something

we are discovering together, as we create, which is also how we create: together, horizontally and with affect. What we are doing and how we are doing it are inextricably linked, and both are part of this prefigurative movement.

What we do imagines, forms and creates what there will be next in place of this present disaster, if there is anything. Sitrin warns, based on her experience in Argentina after the crisis of 2001, against two potential distractions. First, the movement may be distracted from this project by already existing left or centrist parties seeking to use its energy. Secondly, and this will be a real issue once the Republicans decide which puppet best suits their Super PACs, we must guard against the electoral distraction: “vote? not vote? organize against the candidates?” In place of such vacillation, Sitrin offers the powerful slogan

With, Against and Beyond the State.

Which is to say, yes, vote in November as a tactical measure, but organize against the state that continues to be the agent of neo-liberal legitimacy. Above all, imagine and create a practice that is beyond the state.

The Tidal theory of Occupy as a horizontal general strike against inequality is moving and dynamic. It suggests two motifs for the present and some for the near future.

First, all Occupy action is a general strike. We should not get drawn into the numbers game that only a massive shut down of all services and industries would count as such a strike. There has been such a strike in North America since September 17, 2011 and in the Americas since the first indigenous revolt against the settlers and the first uprising by the enslaved. MayDay 2012 is a celebration of the return of this spirit of the general strike, not its coming into being. It grows as it turns, yes, but no one instance will be transcendent.

Next and by corollary, the state against which we strike is strong and weak at the same instant, which Negri has called “the porcelain effect.” Porcelain is both very resilient and breakable at once. It endures right up until the moment that it does not, as we saw most recently in Egypt. This is why it cannot be reformed: you cannot recast porcelain once it has been fired, you either use it or discard it.

For the future: Tidal can and should drive this debate, becoming the locus of a new discourse on the horizontal strike against inequality that prefigures what we are creating. There are questions in the spirit of the general strike as to the practice of direct democracy, the recognition of climate injustice and the rights of the non-human in the midst of what has been called the Great Extinction.

For the time being, let’s salute the work already done and the impetus it gives to us all.

What is Occupy Theory Now?

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The impetus towards this project began with a piece I called “Occupy Theory,” written last October, about what the Occupy movement was doing to theory. In keeping with the moment, I kept any resolution under suspension: “Occupy theory is what you do as you occupy.” I went on to discuss Judith Butler’s talk at OWS that she later expanded and published in the first issue of Tidal, the Occupy Theory journal, under the title “For and Against Precarity.”

Those days seem strangely far away now. Here to cheer us up is the second issue of Tidal with its subtitle: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. It was launched yesterday to an exuberant crowd off Grand Street in Brooklyn, where it was claimed that the interaction of theory with Occupy was one of the distinctive features of the movement. That’s an interesting idea–in many ways this project is about how you might use all the discursive practice assembled under the name “theory” for the past twenty years in the new context.

Tidal is a testament to the energies of the new movement. It’s thirty-two pages long, full color, free and 60,000 copies have been printed. Yesterday I saw people all over downtown distributing them. Inside are essays by Butler, Spivak, and Marina Sitrin, as well as by as key figures from the movement, writing collectively and individually. In this and following posts, I’m going to read the two issues against each other, measuring differences and transformations, as we gather breath for a new moment this Spring. Let’s say out loud in the affectless context of the Internet that I love Tidal, it’s a great project.

First issue of Tidal

You know that there’s a difference by looking at the front covers. On the first edition (above), a panoramic montage of Occupiers at Liberty (top) and on the Brooklyn Bridge (bottom). At bottom left we can see two arrests, one woman raising her head to shout or scream. But there are photographers recording this, three we can see plus whoever took the image we’re looking at. Inside the cover, a sign reads: “I still can’t eat GDP but I can see climate change out my window.” That’s the clarity of Occupy.

Cover of Tidal Issue 2

The new cover is a single shot of the D17 action when OWS tried to set up a new site at Duarte Street but were thwarted by the police and the church. Almost everyone in the photograph is either a cop or taking a picture. Only a handful of people are pressing the fence that divides the image and appears to be at the point of collapse. You wonder now if a few more people had put the cameras down and pushed, what might have happened? Inside, we see a line of Spanish police with multi-colored paint on their riot shields.

In both issues, the journal opens with a “Communiqué,” a title that unusually seems to pay homage to the Weather Underground, but it may just be a coincidence. In the first edition, the Communiqué used the language of the spectacle to render the unreality of Wall Street:

We were born into a world of ghosts and illusions that have haunted our minds our entire lives…We have no clear idea how life should really feel…We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual.

The disciplinary institution this Communiqué seemed most aimed at was the university. Projects for “People’s Dissertations” and an opening of higher education to community and educationally marginalized groups argued for a proliferation of educational action:

To liberate our education must include, then, expropriating our ideas from systemic hierarchical misevaluation.

By contrast, the new edition opens with the experience of jail, police violence and a sense of breach of the social contract:

When you’re sitting in jail, the topic of justice can’t help but come up.

Jail is that which, without knowing it, we had already demanded. The figurative language is closer to Benjamin here than Debord, although no citations are given. In discussing the unnamed Thing (system or apparatus) to which we have apparently consigned ourselves in some Terms and Conditions clause, Tidal write:

The Thing resembles a ship that we’re all on together. Not a cruise ship exactly, but more of a steam ship/trawler. We have a captain who steers while we shovel coal and swab decks. …The captain stares at the impending doom on the horizon and grins ecstatically.

Here is an Ahab for the world of finance capital, one without a White Whale to hunt. Unseeing, “he uses his eyes offensively to project what he wants to see on the world.” In the academic world, this is what I have called “visuality,” the way that power visualizes history for itself and convinces us that it is right.

We might extend the figure. Moby-Dick has often been used as a metaphor for industrial capitalism with the wretched whales being dismembered to serve the modern need for light. It’s often forgotten that the most destructive whale hunting was done after Second World War, not by the sail ships, but by nations in search of cheap calories to feed war-damaged populations. The whales, social and language-using animals like ourselves, were invisible to the military-industrial machine.

The Caribbean radical intellectual C. L. R. James wrote a wonderful study of Moby-Dick, while imprisoned at Ellis Island by immigration officials. Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1952) initiated a way of seeing ships both as the epitome of capitalist hierarchy, and as the site for potential and actual rebellion. It is worth remembering in this context that the very word “strike” comes from the maritime world, meaning to take down sail as a mutiny. The sailing ship was the first modern institution where the command line was instrumentalized: a highly specific technical language initiated changes in the function of the machine. Unless it crashed. Or was taken over by pirates.

The interface with present-day digital technologies is clear. As Tidal put it:

In our age, the capacity for connection, self-education and self-cooperation has exploded. This offers a window of opportunity with its unspoken, unresolved question: who will take and shape the bulk of the resulting potential?…The window will not remain open long before being overwhelmed by claims from those in power.

Here, then, is a different countervisualizing that might be possible for those of us in “jail cells, in city squares, on Wall Street, from every space we occupy,” a look out of the window, created in part by the connectivity enabled by, but not limited to, digital spaces and machines.

What might we see there?

May Day poster

  • No work
  • No chores
  • No banking
  • No shopping
  • No school

MayDay 2012.

Next: demands and horizontalism.

 

 

 

The Out of Control Society

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The disciplinary society of enclosed spaces known as school, army or work has largely collapsed under the assaults of neo-liberalism. What is becoming clear is that the society of control that was imagined to be its replacement is getting out of control.

Permanent school in the form of life-long training was the society of control: now we have debt out of control, and machines to do the labor. Permanent prison was to replace the panopticon but society can no longer afford it. The permanent counterinsurgency has collapsed into a brutal necropolitics–the right to determine who shall be killed.

Debt was today discussed in genteel terms on the New York Times editorial page. The Times found it “welcome” that Mount Holyoke has frozen its price of attendance at a trifling $53,000. Sewanee, the University of the South, has reduced costs to “lure” students with a mere $44,600 charge, to be kept constant for four years.

On the facing letters column, the President of Sarah Lawrence, the most expensive school in the country, suggests that with grant aid her institution can be an “affordable choice” if “educational value” is factored in. In short, financial aid is another form of privilege. It’s been widely noted that for many students Harvard can be less expensive than the California State system, which was designed to cater to working- and middle-class students.

Less well-heeled institutions have stopped bothering to pretend. The University of North Iowa Regents today approved cuts, reported to involve closing its Physics department, among several others, as well as a Lab School and its museum. 30 tenured and tenure track faculty will be dismissed.

Yesterday came a spectacular declaration of the collapse of global counterinsurgency into sovereign assertion of the right to kill. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed:

Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces,” Mr. Holder said. “This is simply not accurate.”

This is, to the contrary, by any standard out of control. If the Bush administration had said this, we would all have gone crazy–and maybe run for President on the idea of restoring the rule of law.

Let’s consider how Deleuze defined the society of control in 1990:

The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

It is possible, then, to claim that the rapid change of direction we are seeing is simply an intensification of the society of the control. Deleuze did note that universities would abandon research and education would become corporate throughout. However, it seems now to read better as

Debt is continuous and without limit.

It was striking for ,e to see how often the closing phrase of my preceding post on debt was cited on Facebook and elsewhere:

The most dangerous idea now might be this: it’s not worth paying for college because there are no jobs anyway and no job that you want would pay you enough to service the debt.

As I reflect on this context, it seems that being dangerous means taking the fact that everything is out of control as a starting point.

In the era of the emerging disciplinary society, such people were called visionaries or prophets, like the Digger Gerard Winstanley, who saw that the “earth was a common treasury for all” in a 1649 vision during the English Revolution. So he and some companions went and occupied St George’s Hill in Surrey. They called for what has been called a “general strike” against waged labor and for communal living. The Army and the gentry soon put an end to all that. Their heir was the far better-remembered “prophet against Empire,” William Blake, who railed against “One King, one God, one Law.”

As if to remind us that this is no longer the age of prophecy, Mark Butterworth’s play Jerusalem has been running on both sides of the Atlantic since 2009, although it opened in New York in 2011. The play is a lament for the passing of a certain possibility, shrouded in mythic Englishness by being set on St George’s Day in rural Wiltshire with a lead character called Byron. Johnny Byron. Johnny occupies a patch of common land, like a latter-day Digger, except that he deals in drugs and his trailer acts as a hang-out for the local marginal population.

Mark Rylance as Johnny Byron in "Jerusalem"

His encampment was an Occupy in all but name and the action begins when it becomes one, because a local real estate developer plans to turn the land into a sub-division (in US terms), so Rooster (as he is known) is served an eviction notice. These themes, like the English flag and the song “Jerusalem,” are not without clear overtones of white nostalgia for empire. The play ends in such a way that you either have to assume that Rooster is sleeping with a teenager or that her brother has been abusing her. It’s the dangerous supplement to the good old Oedipus complex that has been the stuff of drama for so long.

What Jerusalem was not was a revival of the prophetic voice–most critics talked about Shakespeare not Blake, lat alone the poet Byron, a reference they all seemed to miss. Nor did it in fact prophesy Occupy because the overwhelming majority of sites were urban, not rural, such as the long-lasting Occupy Bristol, closest to Wiltshire.

What’s dangerous about rejecting even the out of control society is very clear to people–that you risk giving up the one chance you might have, however attenuated, to break out of your social strata. US social mobility is amongst the lowest in the overdeveloped countries. At the same time, the chance of being perceived as a prophet, as opposed to an out of control homeless person, is too low to mention. In Terence Malick’s odd film Tree of Life, the only prophet that could be evoked was Job, whose sufferings at the hand of an apparently malign deity ring somewhat truer than stories of redemption.

The religiosity is the problem. Where messianism once offered a counterpoint to law, it scarcely does today in the evangelical US, where being Christian is a requirement for office every bit as strict as the shariah of Iran.

It’s the anarchic streak implied by “out of control” that now rings true from Rosa Luxemburg to Winstanley and Occupy–“no god, no master.” It’s perhaps the least commented on feature of the movement and it’s most dangerous one: not just out of control but a rejection of the desire to be controlled.

 

 

Order? Or Chaos? Love Rosa

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Rosa Luxemburg as Cindy Sherman

Today is the birthday of (radical, disabled, Jewish) Rosa Luxemburg. She’s 141. Her idea for the mass (or general) strike is going strong. In 1906 she wrote:

The overthrow of absolutism is a long, continuous social process, and its solution demands a complete undermining of the soil of society; the uppermost part be placed lowest and the lowermost part placed highest; the apparent “order” must be changed to a “chaos,” and the apparently anarchistic chaos must be changed into a new order.

It was expressions like that which once got her expelled from the canon of orthodoxy but make her seem all the more relevant today. Substitute “globalization” for “absolutism” and it reads like something from an Occupy pamphlet.

Let’s once again try and make visible the chaos of financial globalization that undermines its own substrate, the oceans by which it delivers its goods in steel containers. Their purported order is creating natural and social chaos.

Design for the Olympic monument: the AcelorMittal "Orbit" by Anish Kapoor

The monument above is Anish Kapoor’s “Orbit,” designed to be the symbol of the London 2012 Olympics. It is being financed by ArcelorMittal and their chair Lakshmi Mittal, held to be the wealthiest man in Britain at about $23 billion or so. Readers of O2012 will remember this firm as one whose blast furnaces in France are currently under occupation by a threatened workforce.

Kapoor’s peculiar construct appears to be a capitalized deformation of Tatlin’s monument to the Third International, designed in 1919, the very year of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder at the hands of the forces of “order.” For Tatlin, steel was a modern material, forging a new way to see and understand the international.

Tatlin "Monument for the Third International" 1919

For Kapoor, it appears now to be a means to visualize planetary networks, as if seen from orbit, but rendered as a perhaps unintentionally revealing chaos. The point perhaps is to show how steel, the epitome of “strength,” can also be rendered flexible, neo-liberalism’s favorite word. “Flexible” means lower wages, higher profits, lower corporate taxes, longer hours and lower benefits.

And it also means flexible interpretations of data and what, in a naive way, one might call the truth. In this form of flexibility, steel furnaces are renewable energy now, once again at the behest of our friends ArcelorMittal:

AK Steel of Middletown wants to build a $310 million power plant that would use the foul gases from its blast furnace as a fuel rather than a waste gas that it must by law now flare. ArcelorMittal in Cleveland is interested in the technology, said a spokeswoman. AK Steel has already won a $30 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for this first-of-its-kind U.S. power generator…The proposal also has the blessing of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because it would produce something of value from a dangerous waste gas. The company therefore has asked lawmakers to amend Ohio’s green energy law and classify the electricity generated with blast furnace gases as “renewable energy,” even though the blast furnace itself is fueled with coke, a substance made from coal.

Coke by-products are now “renewable energy,” steel companies are getting “green” grants and their order is chaos.

Today a review essay in Science examines the dramatic acidification of the ocean as a result of the continued acceleration of CO2 emissions like, say, blast furnace waste gases. The process they describe is literally chaotic in the scientific sense of multiply interacting strands of causation. It’s visualized like this:

Diagram of Occean acidification

To follow the diagram: black is reduced carbon. Yellow represents reduced alkalinity. whereas blue is increases in alkanization offsetting acidification. Red is increased acidity. Simply put, the vastly increased CO2 in the air overwhelms all the feedback loops and acidifies the sea to a dramatic extent.

Their conclusions are clear:

the current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 My [ie 300 million years] of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change.

That means a system in which the change cannot be predicted by anything that has happened for three hundred million years. Or so. Their order is creating insane chaos.

What can we learn from Rosa in response to this chaos? Let’s refuse to get depressed: that’s what Big Pharma exists for, to medicate us with its happy pills. Luxemburg wants us to act–through the act comes real education, she says.

No more corporate “order” visualized as giant, phallic monuments. Time for some anarchic “chaos,” from the chaos of the biosphere to those of lived relations. MayDay is coming, Rosa’s day:

 a festival [that] may naturally be raised to a position of honor as the first great demonstration under the aegis of mass struggle.

 

The Empire of No Signs

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In moments of radical transformation, words lose old meanings. New events struggle to be represented and have to be experienced. In the Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes used an avowedly Orientalist fantasy of Japan to generate a sense of the “emptiness of language.” Now we can just look around us. The disconnect between how the world is represented in what we now call the “culture,” and the unfolding realities since 2008, is palpable.

There are a variety of indicators we might notice from “high” and “low” culture alike. This past Friday, the HBO comedian Bill Maher did not need to satirize the remarks of Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh so much as simply repeat them. The Right now inhabits a cultural universe that is laughably unrecognizable to mainstream liberals, let alone radicals.

Television nonetheless continues to represent a world in which comedy means perky young people living in vast apartments, untroubled by debt or unemployment. The dramascape is all cops all the time. In order to even make reference to the Occupy movement, writers have had to resort to bizarre stratagems, such as the recent random insertion into the CBS lawyer soap The Good Wife of a judge being pepper sprayed at an Occupy site (–viewer alert: there’s a tedious 30 second ad before the judge makes his random remark about a minute in).

You might remember that last December Law and Order did build a fake Occupy site in Foley Square for a set, only three weeks after the eviction of Zuccotti/Liberty. Occupy activists quickly installed themselves– and were as quickly re-evicted by the police, leading in turn to a rewrite of the episode, such that Occupy was a brief moment rather than the theme of the episode. The empire now fears even its own simulacra.

Perhaps this what is to be expected of a ratings-obsessed advertising-driven medium like network TV but there isn’t even a cable show that I can imagine taking on the questions posed by Occupy. All the shows that people discuss like Mad Men, Treme, Luck or Boardwalk Empire are set in the past anyway–Shameless might be the only possibility, except that its characters live so deep in the informal economy that crisis is their everyday.

We already had a go at Hollywood cinema–what about “high” culture? In the US, literature has been the site of engagement with the “national question,” especially since the Second World War. California novelist Steve Erickson’s recent These Dreams of You has tried to rework the Great American Novel trope for the Obama years.

It describes how Zan, a former novelist-turned-academic, loses his teaching job, putting his family on the path to foreclosure. The book drifts away from this all-too-realistic scenario into a complex narrative on multicultural adoption, race, history, empire and the legacies of the 1960s that is engaging without sustaining the compelling force of the opening. It’s usually not a good idea, for example, to have David Bowie as a significant fictional character;)

Interestingly, though, Erickson seems to acknowledge the impossibility of what he’s attempted. Towards the end, Zan gives a lecture on the novel in London:

“Maybe this has been going on a while,” says Zan, “but now the arc of the imagination bends back to history because it can’t compete with history.” A black Hawaiian with a swahili name? It’s the sort of history that puts novelists out of business.

Calling that quote out makes the book seem still further from accomplishing its ambitions than I thought it was as I read it, but that’s not my point here. Erickson worries that Obama allowed us to hear the “song” of what he calls America again and

should it fade and be silent, it will never again quite be possible to believe in it….But without such faith, the country–this country in particular–is nothing.

And that is, in my view, probably a good thing. The “song” of “America” is past representing, past meaning–an empire of no signs.

I find myself drawing a parallel with the tension in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time between meaning, memory and forgetting in the political. While one reading of the novel might stress personal involuntary memory (madeleines and all that), another sees the ways in which meaning becomes undone in a stratified, class-ridden, wealth-dominated society by the intrusion of the necessity of political affirmation. That is to say, the snobbish salons frequented by the Narrator fall apart over the Dreyfus Affair.

While aristocratic elitism sides with the Army, using Dreyfus’s jewishness as the index of his guilt, their dominance of language is irretrievably fractured by this assertion. While the Guermantes for the most part remain anti-Dreyfusard, not even all the anti-semitic aristocrats can be convinced by their own argument as it is presented in the Dreyfus Case. For all the drama of these conversions, by the time Dreyfus is exonerated in 1906, society has contrived to forget what it once found so shocking and it requires Proust’s exhaustive hermeneutic investigation to reveal the interwoven layers of anti-semitism, homophobia, nationalism and snobbery that constitute the French empire.

The potential ludicrousness of blogging about Proust will not have escaped you. I have on my shelf the four gilded volumes of the Pléiade edition, bought as part of the whole mid-life crisis thing for a “year of reading Proust.” The volumes are themselves masterpieces of a careful annotated scholarship that is perhaps the polar opposite of this project. And perhaps not.

In a wonderful parenthesis in his short book Proust and Signs, Deleuze remarks

Few texts constitute a better commentary on Lenin’s remark as to a society’s capacity to replace “the corrupt old prejudices” by new prejudices even more infamous or more stupid.

That’s where Occupy is now (bet you didn’t think I could make a paragraph that included Proust, Lenin, Deleuze and Occupy). The “corrupt old prejudices” in the empire of no signs are now those reformed around the First World War period–anti-communist nationalism, the American century, global capitalism. The new prejudices are those being circulated by the Santorums and Romneys as “culture wars” in the neo-liberal empire of no signs.

By the time a twelve-volume assessment emerges from today’s Ivy League equivalent of the cork-lined room, it will have been too late to have prevented them–although by the same token I do see how I might finally write about Proust. Maybe the Internet is just the place to move away from songs of the nation, or hymns to empire, and consider again the prose of the world.

Abolition (Free, Open) Education

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If debt refusal becomes a point of self-affirmation, what then happens to education? The tactical answer is the common sharing of education in non-hierarchical institutions, as part of the strategic goal of creating free public education from pre-K to PhD. Yet this goal of abolition education since Reconstruction has always been undermined by debt. What’s so important, I think, is the emerging possibility of discussing this as a collective failure rather than as a set of individual problems.

Abolition education was forged by Reconstruction. Du Bois highlighted the complementary actions of the newly elected South Carolina Convention in ending imprisonment for debt and creating free, public education. While they complained mightily about their “loss” from the abolition of slavery

usury laws had been repealed by the planters in 1866, and interest rates rose to 25 and 30 per cent. Banks commonly charged from 18 to 24 per cent.

Nonetheless, South Carolina committed itself to creating public education by means of an annual levy on all property and a poll tax. The reason was clear: for the first time, those without property were making decisions. Twenty-three out of 47 white delegates and fifty-nine of the 74 African-American delegates paid no income tax. In our own time of millionaire representatives and billionaire financing, this seems scarcely credible.

The “free common school system” was in place by 1868 and made permanent in 1870. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, Wall Street financiers refused to back South Carolina bonds in 1868. Finally, with interest rates of between 15 and 20 per cent, bonds were issued, driving South Carolina into over $20 million of debt by 1871, at least half of which was payment of interest, a situation enabled, wrote Du Bois, by the

financial graft of Wall Street and its agents, made possible by the slander and reaction of the planters.

Debt has never been a separate question to public education in these not-so-United States.

On my way downtown for an Occupy meeting today, I looked up at the subway ads–no less than four for-profit “colleges” were advertised at my end of the car. These institutions like ASA College, Professional Business College and the Grace Institute are outside the research universities discussion about humanities versus STEM subjects: all degrees are vocational. That does not mean they are cheap: ASA expects tuition to be about $12,000 a year and total costs to be about $30,000 a year, according to its own website.

While this debt is, then, being imposed on people as a structural requirement for work, we still can’t ask people to renounce the formal structures of education: it’s going to be a process. Much of that might involve rethinking how we got here in the first place. Today I saw a discussion between the artist Deborah Kass and the young artist Amy Lincoln that highlights these issues:

Ms. Lincoln: …I don’t like the stereotype, the bohemian idea. We’re definitely very career-oriented. You have to be serious about spending time in the studio. You have no free time. You never have the day off…I know a lot of people who have to work a lot because they’re paying off a $30,000 student loan.

Ms. Kass: I didn’t get an MFA. I didn’t have a student loan. We expected our parents to pay for college.

Ms. Lincoln: We all got MFAs and the art market was booming. You could get picked up by a gallery at a student show. We had really high expectations. Now, there is so much angst over, “I want to be showing at such-and-such gallery, and this curator called but then I never heard back….”

Ms. Kass:I didn’t have any expectations. What you expected didn’t exist yet.

For all her debt, Lincoln sells work for between $300-700 in Bushwick where she lives. There’s no disgrace in that, far from it, and it’s interesting that in the short discussion, Lincoln doesn’t question her choices.

By contrast, J, the PhD student who I mentioned yesterday as being saddled with scary debt, wrote to me:

I used to have trouble sleeping at night because I was afraid that they would bring back debtors prisons … and hating myself for having taken out loans. It’s taken me a while to wrap my head around it and to decouple the value and necessity of education from the burden of the debt, and to see that debt structurally.

Here we see the full wisdom of the OWS slogan highlighted by McKenzie Wark: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit.”

Interim tactics: consider learning, or teaching, at free, open institutions like The Public School, OWS’s own OccU, or following courses by using free syllabi provided by institutions like MIT. If you teach, allow people to audit, sit in, podcast and live-stream. If you write, make it available free by open access means (you can publish it as well, of course, if you can find a press that will give you rights to your own work: and good luck with that).

I know people can’t learn how to be doctors like this and that’s why this is a tactic. Let’s also remember actions like those of the South African Students Movement in 1976, who refused to participate in the apartheid school system and set in motion the collapse of the regime. At the same time, many individuals deprived themselves of education to make things better for others.

So it is heartening to see the success of Chile’s high school students who did not walk out but occupied their schools:

“The assembly is the control center,” Cristóbal explains. “All students participate and at times it’s open to teachers. We have watch duty and volunteers come in to make meals. Teachers teach, but they also learn from the students. At the beginning we had classes subject by subject, but later we saw that parceling out knowledge wasn’t the real way to learn, and we all got together for each subject.”

The high school system is the key to an abolition education in the Americas. Here in New York the high schools are more segregated than they were before official desegregation. There was official celebration last week when admissions to the city’s selective high schools produced a class that is 6% African American and 8% Latin@–in a majority minority city. Behind that failure lies the still-greater disaster of data-driven quantification of education as a standardized test score result.

From Chile to South Africa and South Carolina, the impetus to a free, open public education is clear and elusive at once. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Arizona has banned the teaching of Paulo Freire’s classic The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We might want to begin by re-reading it, assigning it, making free copies of it, and discussing it at Occupies everywhere.

Endebt and Punish

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William Hogarth, "The Rake's Progress"--in the Fleet Prison for debt

Yesterday the M1 student march in New York stopped for personal and institutional histories. On three occasions people I’m working with at undergraduate, MA and PhD level recounted how debt has deformed their lives. I used to say that in academia one at least did very little harm. Now I feel like a pimp for loan sharks.

The accounts moved from an angry and articulate sophomore via an MA, who is teaching three adjunct jobs to keep up her payments, to a PhD candidate looking at 30 years of repaying $800-1000 a month. Hearing such stories one after another made it seem structural: the further one advances, the greater the debt and so the greater the pressure to conform.

The graduate students both spoke about wanting to stay in education, while not being sure that they could afford the profession. It’s the contemporary Student’s Progress, which, like a modernization of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, does not so much end in debtor’s prison as begin there–only it’s the “soul” that is imprisoned, not the body.

I started to think that debt was parallel to the transformation of the legal system over time. If Foucault taught us to think of early modern corporal punishment being transformed into modern discipline in the nineteenth century, Angela Davis has supplemented that analysis with her description of the prison-industrial system. Thus the penitentiary was instituted in the aftermath of abolition both to control and contain the free African population and to create lend-lease minimal cost labor to replace chattel slavery. The binary turns out not to be as simple as we had thought.

So we might think to map a parallel and intertwined structure for debt. In the early modern period, common people were hanged or otherwise punished for minor debt and theft. Those of higher social rank might find themselves incarcerated in the Fleet prison–bankrupts and those charged with contempt of the courts of Chancery, Exchequer and common pleas were not the working classes. Violent crime and theft was the province of the Court of the King’s Bench and the Assizes. The Fleet therefore usually contained only about 300 inmates, many of whom were well-known. It was closed in 1844, while imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1869.

This apparently Foucauldian pattern needs complicating. As David Graeber points out in his brilliant Debt, the violent punishments against debt crime were rarely enforced in the late Middle Ages, which is not to say there was no bad feeling:

the criminalization of debt was the criminalization of the very basis of human society. It cannot be overemphasized that in a small community, everyone normally was both a lender and a borrower….[C]ommunities, much though they are based on love, in fact because they are based on love will also be full of hatred, rivalry and passion.

The innovation of the “market” in the late eighteenth century was to challenge the possibility of such intertwined community by creating a new self-love, to quote the most famous passage of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love.

Graeber shows that the concept of self-love, or self interest, creates a new hybrid: a singular “self” that owes nothing except to itself; and “interest” that is paid to that self, now registered as “love.”

We might see Bentham’s Panopticon as a machine for the production of such self-interested operatives. For it was intended to function as well for the manufactures, or factories, as it did for the prison or asylum. Writing in the Panopticon Letters (1788) a decade after Smith, Bentham noted of Panoptic surveillance: “Each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time.” If I follow Graeber’s suggestions correctly, we should as much stress the singularity as the permanence: it is the process of breaking up mutually-endebted communities and the subsequent production of self-interested individuals with singular debts.

With the end of the reforming Panopticon around the same time as the resurgence of financialization (c.1975-81) has come a new configuration: the individual is “locked into” debt from the earliest age. If this debt is centered around education, it is more likely to apply to middle and upper-middle class children, who may have college savings plans created for them at birth or before. This debt is now the largest sector of consumer debt in the US economy at about $1 trillion, and it is regarded as highly secure because you cannot declare bankruptcy on student debt and agencies can even garner debtors’ Social Security.

What has further changed is the transformation of the equation of interest and love into what I think we want to call hate. It’s not enough to make sure most graduates have their lives locked into debt before they even graduate. Everyone has to suffer.

When I was in Arizona recently, I heard about a proposal from the Arizona State legislature to require even students who have full scholarships or grants to pay at least $2000 in tuition. Here’s the legalese (in blue block capitals on their site):

each student who is a full‑time student enrolled at a university under the jurisdiction of the Arizona board of regents in fiscal year 2012‑2013 shall personally contribute at least two thousand dollars during the academic year for tuition.  A student may not use any other source of public or private funding, including grants, gifts, scholarships or tuition benefits or other types of funding administered by or through a university or an affiliate of a university, to reduce or eliminate that student’s contribution.

What is the motive of this “personal contribution”? Last night I happened to see a production of Brecht’s classic play Galileo. It begins by stressing Galileo’s debt. His need to repay his debt leads him to leave Venice and venture into the monk-controlled regions of Italy. When his decentering astronomical discoveries imply a different social order than the Bible-sanctioned control of the nobles, he recants under the threat of the Inquisition’s torture, ending his days in a physically comfortable prison of the soul. He ends as he begins, locked into a system that only debt can supply.

If debt is a means to teach you to hate yourself, it is also and equally true that the imagination is dangerous. Ideas can overturn social order. The most dangerous idea now might be this: it’s not worth paying for college because there are no jobs anyway and no job that you want would pay you enough to service the debt.