Category Archives: Occupy

Occupy: an annotated concordance

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I have often noticed how well the word “occupy” seems to go with other words, whether nouns or verbs. So I looked it up in a historical dictionary and saw that it was for centuries a term designating power, especially colonial and patriarchal power, and the use of capital. The word has been appropriated and subjected to détournement by those such power would subjugate. As such, it should be made one of Raymond Williams’ keywords.

The colonial force of occupy comes through in the etymology:

 Irregularly < Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French occuper to take possession of, seize (1306), to fill a certain space (1314), to employ (c1360), to hold possession of (late 14th cent.), to inhabit (1530), to exercise (an employment) (1530), to fill time (1530), also reflexive, to busy oneself with (c1330) < classical Latin occupāre to seize (by force), take possession of, get hold of, to take up, fill, occupy (time or space), to employ, invest (money)

There are many senses of the English word before we get to the modern Occupy.

I: to employ, make use of

1. trans. To keep busy, engage, employ (a person, or the mind, attention, etc.)

There are a number of early modern examples:

  • 1500  (1413)    Pilgrimage of Soul (Egerton) i. xxi. f. 16v,   He hath occupied so my wittes with othir thinges.

Then, once we enter the Tudor period, a host of colonial and violent examples:

  • 1555    R. Eden tr. Peter Martyr of Angleria Decades of Newe Worlde iii. ix. f. 136v,   They occupyed them selues in the searchinge of particular tractes and coastes.
  • 1568    Haddington Corr. 270   Traitouris, quhais lwnatick branes ar continewalie occupeit with this thair poysoun. [read in a Scottish accent]
  • 1604   E. Grimeston tr. J. de Acosta Nat. & Morall Hist. Indies iii. i. 117   Then shall he truly occupie himselfe in the studie of Philosophie.

The philosophical sense returns to the metropole:

  • 1782    W. Cowper Conversation in Poems 215   Whatever subject occupy discourse.

And becomes political:

  • 1928    H. T. Lane Talks to Parents & Teachers 189   The citizens are occupied chiefly with earning a living.

2. To employ oneself in, engage in, practise, perform; to follow or ply as one’s business or occupation.

Early on, you occupy a trade or profession but again with imperial and colonial connotations:

  • 1535    Bible (Coverdale) Psalms cvi[i.] 23   They that go downe to the see in shippes, & occupie their busynesse in greate waters.

In the intransitive sense, this meaning conveys being busy with something, leading to anachronistic puns:

  • 1847    J. P. Lawson Bk. Perth 171   Permitting their servants to occupy on the Sabbath-day, as well as on the rest of the week.

Skipping one obsolete sense we get an interesting use:

4. a. trans. To employ (money or capital) in trading; to lay out, invest, trade with; to deal in.

Now also obsolete, this sense means that it was capital that occupied first: all our occupations are, then, un-occupations. This sense persists right up to the emergence of modern capital, in Dr Johnson’s Letters:

  • 1773    Johnson Let. 17 May II. 32   Upon ten thousand pounds diligently occupied they may live in great plenty.

No doubt.

II. To be in, to take possession of.

The older versions are all about state power, as in this early example:

  • c1440  (1400)    Morte Arthure 98   Myne ancestres ware emperours. They ocupyede [th]e empyre aughte score wynnttyrs.

More modern uses spread the sense of domination and power across society by means of law:

  • 1883    Law Times 20 Oct. 410/2   A married woman is now to occupy the same position as her Saxon ancestress.

Now we are getting warmer:

b. trans. To live in and use (a place) as its tenant or regular inhabitant; to inhabit; to stay or lodge in.

From Blackstone’s famous law commentaries of the 18th century to Cardinal Newman’s History of the Turks and lesser known genealogies, to occupy is to be landed power but also destructive of the environment and, once again, colonizers:

  • 1767    W. Blackstone Comm. Laws Eng. II. i. 7   By constantly occupying the same individual spot, the fruits of the earth were consumed.
  • 1854    J. H. Newman Lect. Hist. Turks i. i. 2   This tract is at present occupied by civilized communities.
  • 1881    J. Russell Haigs of Bemersyde 5   Bemersyde House has been occupied by the Haigs for more than seven centuries.

In the variant “to take possession of,” Sir Walter Raleigh, pirate and colonizer, favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, was quite clear what was meant:

  • 1614    W. Raleigh Hist. World i. v. i. §2. 317   Which done, they occupied the Citie, Lands, Goods, and Wiues, of those, whom they had murdered

From here, it is a short step to the meaning “To take possession of (a place), esp. by force,” as in the example from the historian MacCauley:

  • 1849    T. B. Macaulay Hist. Eng. II. x. 582   The Dutch had occupied Chelsea and Kensington.

Only after all that colonizing, patriarchy and despoliation do we get to the occupy of Occupy, a relatively recent meaning in official English, cited here only in journalism (although it’s likely to be of much older vernacular use, as we shall see):

trans. To gain access to and remain in (a building, etc.) or on (a piece of land), without authority, as a form of protest.

 

  • 1920    Times 2 Sept. 9/2   The men have occupied the works in those cases where the masters have declined to run the works at a loss.
  • 1968    Newsweek 6 May 43/1   The university’s Hamilton Hall was the first successful target of the revolutionaries, and it was seized and occupied Tuesday.

The final acknowledgement of this meaning derives I suspect from a much earlier usage.

The learned dictionary has a long lacuna: Throughout the 17th and most of the 18th cent., there seems to have been a general tendency to avoid this word, probably as a result of use of the word in sense 8,

 

a sexualised sense. in Henry IV part 1, Shakespeare complained:

A captaine? Gods light these villaines wil make the word as odious as the word occupy, which was an excellent good worde before it was il[l] sorted.

 

Bloomberg might agree. Ben Johnson went further yet:

Many, out of their owne obscene Apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words; as occupie, nature, and the like.

 

Nature? we’ll have to look that up too.

So, using this sense, now we have a slogan that even Chris Hedges might not mind:

Occupy the Police.

 

 

 

 

 

The look of love

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In the first paragraph of The Right to Look, I wrote:

The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at the personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other or it fails. As such it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: “the right to look. The invention of the other.”

I didn’t say much more about love in the book, partly because I wanted to avoid the imputation of voyeurism and all the other issues to do with the gaze. It was also hard to configure the narrative around the politics of autonomy with the questions raised by the look of love.

While the difficulty of narrative remains, I now think it was a mistake to underplay the power of the exchange of looks that is love. It resonates with audiences when I give this as a talk because it is something with which many are familiar and it makes sense of the difficulties of representing that exchange.

With the hindsight of Occupy, two further ways of expressing the right to look in and as love should have been developed: the hierarchies of patriarchy that prevent visualized expression of love; and the interface of poverty and love that produces the desire for democracy.

The phrase “the right to look” is my translation of Derrida’s droit de regards, often (oddly) translated as “rights of inspection.” Derrida was responding to the complex relations of looking at work in the photographs of Marie-Françoise Plissart.

Droit de regards

The cover shown here is from a recent reissue. Plissart’s images show two women in pursuit of each other, making love, escaping from men. Derrida’s suggestion is perhaps that in the context of 1983, eight years after Laura Mulvey had first published “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” it was between women that it might be possible to allude to the right to look. For a man looking at a woman would too easily become the other translation: the law of the gaze. The photographs seem a little dated now. Would that we could say the same about patriarchy.

Both Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri develop the relationship of democracy to desire. For Rancière, the palpable “hatred of democracy,” which he describes in his book of the same name, in Western culture is motivated above all by the detesting of “the limitless desire of individuals in modern society.” By contrast, “good” democracy is about controlling and restraining both the extent of democracy and the passions of the individual. Thus the revisionist interpretation of the 1968 revolution is that it “really” expressed a desire for consumption. One could push this to it conclusion: a revolution is the love for democracy, a direct democracy between people that does not defer to representation.

This is precisely the move made by Negri in his poetic and philosophical text Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitude (translated in a volume called Time for Revolution). This is not the kind of writing one can easily summarize, building layer upon layer and allusion to allusion. The kairos, the instant, is something like the time of the right to look: always now, always predicated to the future to come. The “poor,”  or “those most exposed to the immeasurable” are the “biopolitical subject.” For unlike the emphasis on population or bare life in other readings of biopoltics, Negri stresses that it is “poverty that has always represented the common name of the human.”

The Kairos of the poor is love:

so what is “politics” today? It is the activity of production of the common name between poverty and love.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Autoimmunity

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The current destabilization of the political situation by Israel risks the resurgence of the post 9-11 double-bind of “autoimmunity,” in which the very system designed to make you secure undermines your viability. By setting in motion such reversible definitions, the domestic project of  Occupy can be reconfigured as “insurgency.” To occupy is to place a body-that-thinks into space where it not supposed to be. If that body makes certain choices of action, some are now willing to see that body as out of control, no longer thinking but simply acting. Against such bodies there must be what the Israeli government has termed a “zone of immunity.”

Both in practice and theory this immunity is proving hard to define. It sometimes seems to refer to an “immunity zone” that Iran might acquire, allowing it to develop a nuclear weapon and thereby become in some ways immune to Western threats. It also appears to designate a “zone of immunity” that Israel feels it must have from external threat. It is very difficult to determine exactly what Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, meant because the Israeli media are so full of debates about immunity insofar as it pertains to members of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament. The recent involvement of an Arab Israeli MK in the Gaza flotilla has led to demands for the legal immunity of representatives to be lifted, even as the papers are also full of corruption and bribery scandals that result from this immunity.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reapplied his earlier use of the term “autoimmunity” to the complexities of the situation in which U.S.-trained operatives (using a deliberately bland and neutral term) had attacked their former patrons. Derrida reminded us that

an autoimmunitary process is that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity.

It seems that this “autoimmunity” is precisely what Israel is engaged in: by attacking it will not only lay itself open to other attacks but may lose the immunity from criticism that it currently enjoys with its own “head,” the United States. Derrida shows that the beginnings of this autoimmunity were in the Cold War, whose ending reconfigured the body politic. Autocratic leaders in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose apparent immunity depended on their place in the Cold War, or its surrogate the war on terror, found that instead they had ultimately destroyed themselves.

W. J. T. Mitchell has called this reverse effect the “bipolar” character of the autoimmune, “a situation in which there is no literal meaning.” Interestingly, the immune system itself is now understood to be capable of “cognitive abilities,” in that it learn how to recognize specific antigens and remembers them. Autoimmunity is unable to make such distinctions. Yet the result is not simply a destabilization but the reverse of what was intended, as Derrida specifies:

repression in both its psychoanalytic sense and its political sense–whether it be through the police, the military or the economy–ends up producing, reproducing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm.

The gambit of counterinsurgency was to attempt to permanently produce insurgency and yet manage it as a form of governance at the same time. As economic and police repression has escaped control from Greece to Egypt, to speak only of the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel appears to be doubling down on military repression.

Counterinsurgency has long been willing to move the boundaries between the policed  zone of authority and where we the policed are to be contained. The extraordinary Israeli tactic of the mobile checkpoint, literally manifesting the border in different places from one day to the next, epitomizes this disregard for consistency. Indeed the legalizing of the Israeli occupation itself, as Eyal Press relates, worked by

adopting an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire.

The Israelis thus repurposed this archaic imperial law to create a cover for legal transformation of occupation into settlement.

If the “reversible” effect of this counterinsurgency now moves into the global frame proposed by its theorists, Occupy can be rendered into a target of militarization. Note the way New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins–quoted by Mitchell as the epigraph to his chapter on autoimmunity–characterizes insurgency:

American and Iraqi officials agree on the essential character of the Iraqi insurgency: it is horizontal as opposed to hierarchical, and ad hoc as opposed to unified.

As such, the insurgency was hard to defeat. However in the present context, with a little editing this could be taken for a casual description of Occupy. Perhaps Chris Hedges somehow confused the now-favored “Black Ops” of counterinsurgency with the purportedly violent black bloc anarchists of Occupy? You will say that doesn’t make sense–read his article again: it doesn’t make sense. It’s bipolar and has no literal meaning.

The militarized reversibility being put into motion by Israel risks more than an internal argument for Occupy: it risks redefining autonomy as insurgency. The problem of perceived “violence” in the movement is, then, the displaced affect caused by this return of the repressed. That does not mean that there is not a real issue here. We have to continue to claim our right to look, that is, to invent each other and consent to being invented by that other as part of our direct democracy. And we claim the right to be seen in the spaces and times of our choosing, whether that right is recognized by the current state of the force of law or not. Indeed, the worth of claiming that right is, as it was for non-violent campaigners from Mary Wollstonecraft to Gandhi and Rosa Parks, that the law forbids us from having it.

Pathologizing and Privatizing Occupy

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This week we’ve seen a very public attempt to pathologize Occupy and purported violence within the movement, even as I happened to see a very private closure of an Occupy in Pittsburgh. I’ve been reading Elisabeth Roudinesco’s history of the committed French intellectual, Philosophy in Troubled Times. She begins with Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s adviser and the author of the classic The Normal and the Pathological. Canguilhem had to abandon the pacifism he adopted in the aftermath of World War 1 when confronted with fascism. In 1943, he defended his thesis defining the modern formation of the normal as that which was not pathological, while active in the Resistance. My point is not that these were real choices compared to ours but that it was every bit as difficult to make them, even though they now seem so clear.

In Pittsburgh, there was a privatized eviction of Occupy Pittsburgh by BNY Mellon. In New York, the NYPD cleared Zuccotti for Brookfield who now place rent-a-cops in the space. In Pittsburgh, the bank did it. Here’s the sign they posted:

Evicting Occupy Pittsburgh

It is now the bank that occupies the park and anyone else who might remain is a trespasser. As befits this activism, BNY Mellon has a Political Action Committee:

Our PAC makes contributions to U.S. federal candidates, a limited number of state and local candidates, and campaign committees and other PACs. When making specific contribution decisions, the PAC considers a number of factors, including the candidates’ positions on issues related to our business, their leadership positions, legislative committees and communities they represent.

According to their filing with the Federal Elections Commission, BNY Mellon raised about $112,000 in the second half of 2011. None was spent on any specific election and will presumably be used this year, for which data is not yet available. Any wild guesses as to how it might be spent? All such information is, under current law, private.

In public, some leading figures in Occupy have decided to attack each other rather than engage with these or similar actions. Financial journalist Chris Hedges, who might have been able to shed light on the matter, this week decided instead to pronounce that the so-called “black bloc” are a “cancer in the Occupy movement.”  Hedges, who has covered Occupy widely, published a long, rather rambling attack on the anarchist “black bloc” as being a direct attack on the “organized left.”

For Hedges, the  “criminal…hypermasculinity…[and] inchoate rage” of the black bloc are linked to the violence of the First World War via Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 classic All Quiet on the Western Front. It would be just a few years after the novel was published that Canguilhem set aside his pacifism in response to the rise of the Nazis. I’m not saying we face a rise of Nazism now: I’m worried that the parallel is not helpful.

David Graeber has written a detailed reply to Hedges that makes the violence inherent in referring to people as “cancer” very clear. In Canguilhem’s terms, a cancer is the pathology of all pathologies. We cut it out, bombard it with radiation, saturate it with toxic chemicals. Very often it wins anyway. Like many people, I know this at first hand. You don’t do this, or make a verbal parallel, because people engage in the “shouting of insulting messages to the police,” as Hedges has it. That would have made all of ACT UP part of the Black Bloc, as Jodi Dean points out. To be exact, it makes almost everyone I know part of the Black Bloc.

It is no doubt not worth worrying about this too much at the level of its logic, except that it looks very much like a high-profile supporter preparing to abandon the movement. There was also an attempt this week to create concern that the Direct Action working group of OWS were abandoning non-violence. It was a bad misreading of their proposal to the General Assembly but it suggests that a range of people are ready to end their involvement with Occupy.

What we’re finding is that the state may be succeeding in turning Occupy into an occupation. In the Occupied Territories, it is always, in the joint view of the U.S-Israel government, the responsibility of the occupied to renounce all violence in all its forms. The precise nature of the violence to be renounced can be modified to meet given needs. Now that Israel has decided that there must be a “zone of immunity” in Iran, for instance, the US is scrambling to respond. Using the logics of counterinsurgent biopolitics, such discourse renders the body politic of Israel “normal” and that of Iran “pathological.” Only a zone of immunity–which has no meaning–can protect the good normal body from the pathological one. The immune system has exteriorized itself in this image into a wall of separation.

If part of Occupy is a cancer, then the “organized left” will need to declare a “zone of immunity.” It will heed the (meaningless) claim of the Oakland police that activists used “Improvised Explosive Devices,” the signature weapon of asymmetric insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “normal” will have to extirpate the pathological in order to survive. Let’s not go there.

Occupy Godot

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The signs posted to evict Occupy Pittsburgh were simple white board with black lettering. They reminded me of something and it bugged me all day. Then I remembered:

"Waiting for Godot" in New Orleans

It’s the stage directions for Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as staged by Paul Chan in New Orleans after Katrina. His 2007 production was prompted by Chan’s own sense that the devastated city reminded him of something. When he remembered the scenario for Godot, the New Orleans streets now seemed to him to call for a production of the play. Audiences flocked to see it and the endless waiting of the “tramps” made sense to people in post-Katrina New Orleans because of their own interminable delays with FEMA and other governmental authority.

The Lower Ninth Ward

The play was performed first in the Lower Ninth Ward and then in Gentilly. The board above is now placed in the street by what are known as “the Brad Pitt houses,” a series of modern, flood-resistant buildings that constitute a permanent architectural exhibition by the banks of the Industrial Canal that flooded so disastrously in 2005. Tourists go by in buses and gaze on the scene. We wandered about and took photos. No one seemed to mind.

The three rivers that meet in Pittsburgh run into the Ohio river and from there into the Mississippi, down on to New Orleans. There’s a connection at work here. We could play with this is in a number of registers. Perhaps the “tramps” that have nowhere else to go have been evicted by Godot, who no longer wants them to wait. Perhaps Vladimir and Estragon have decided that they have had enough of being tramps and have occupied the country road: Occupy Godot. Perhaps Lucky disrupts their General Assembly.

Chain of associations: in the original French production of En Attendant Godot, Lucky was played by Jean Martin, a former member of the French Resistance, as indeed was Beckett.

Left Jean Martin as Lucky

A decade later, Martin would play the paratroop colonel Mathieu in the classic revolutionary film The Battle of Algiers (1966). The only professional actor in the film, Martin had been blacklisted for signing the petition of the Cent Vingt et Un (121) in 1960, a statement by artists and intellectuals protesting the Algerian war.

Think of this:

Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

We are paused, vehemently.

Pausing is to dwell in the moment, to extend the moment. That is what Occupy is: an extension of the moment in which it has been possible to challenge authority, to claim autonomy and to refuse to “move on.”

Pause.

Banks, Steel and Empire

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In what has become a sorry tale of repetition with the closure of Occupy sites, today we had a first: an Occupy encampment shut down by direct order of a bank.

Occupy Pittsburgh--rally against eviction

Since October 15, Occupy Pittsburgh has had a permanent presence in People’s Park formerly Mellon Park. The space is located downtown in front of BNY Mellon’s towering skyscraper, testament to its $25.9 trillion (yes, trillion) in assets. It is leased from the city on conditions that are in dispute. Investment bank BNY Mellon claims that it is a three season park, closed in the winter, and that they comply with the regulation that at least 20% of the space must be open at all times by making the sidewalk available. Clearly people in Pittsburgh treat the park as open space, as they were using it today for access and a place to smoke even though being there was legally trespassing.

For on February 2, BNY Mellon persuaded the usual compliant judge that they had the right to reclaim the space, remove all the structures and tents, and declare anyone present to be trespassing. That order went into effect today. Posted signs around the park announced that BNY Mellon had declared it illegal to set foot in the space. No mention was made of any other form of state authority.

Indeed BNY Mellon like to make fun of the whole Occupy thing, in the manner of London stockbrokers waving wedges of cash at Occupy London. Here’s their “hilarious” ad for the Financial Follies last year:

Occupying Wall St for 227 years: BNY Mellon

If you can’t read that, it says “We don’t mean to brag but we’ve been Occupying Wall Street for 227 years.”

So, perhaps it’s not so surprising that, unlike in New York or Oakland, there was an apparent reluctance on the part of law enforcement to get involved. Pittsburgh Occupiers I talked to today described how Pittsburgh police had helped them organize marches and had turned on their flashing lights to attract attention to the Occupiers. The reasons for this sympathy are obvious. I took the bus from the University area of Oakland where I’m staying to downtown. You pass one abandoned or derelict building after another with the only visible businesses being bars and gas stations, while the sole sign of life was outside a soup kitchen.

There’s a sense of absence throughout the city from the moment you arrive at the enormous airport, designed by US Air as a hub and now abandoned by them. People even lament losing the US Air call center where 50 people were employed, so tough is it to find a job. And then there are only 800 police in Pittsburgh, compared to the 30,000 in New York. I can’t move in New York without seeing the NYPD but I’ve been here two days without seeing the police although I spent all morning at Occupy.

This is still a steel town. BNY Mellon occupy a skyscraper once owned by the giant US Steel. The United Steel Workers union have an impressive building downtown that has been an important resource for Occupy Pittsburgh.

United Steel Workers Local 3657 in support of Occupy Pittsburgh

And then there are the nineteen steel bridges across the rivers here. From Occupy, I walked across the spectacular Seventh Street Bridge, now renamed the Andy Warhol Bridge, to visit the Andy Warhol Museum.

Outside, the streetscape is bleak and empty with no one passing by. Inside there’s lots of life and energy. I had Campbell’s Tomato Soup for lunch and thus fortified spent some time in the galleries. The Race Riot and Electric Chair series made it clear that Warhol was always aware of politics. The cold reality of the electric chair is difficult to confront even in a screen print. It was Empire that really caught my attention today, though.

Andy Warhol, "Empire"

I came into the screening of Warhol’s eight-hour film of the Empire State Building at a point where it was completely dark. The lights at the top of the building were the only point of illumination and they flared in the lens, giving the illusion of a fire. Thus Empire regards us. It would have us believe that it is a burning bush that never consumes itself but will scorch us should we try to touch, let alone extinguish it.

As I stood in the dark watching Empire burn, uncomfortable questions kept surfacing in my mind. Many of us in the humanities, very much including myself, are direct or indirect beneficiaries of the Mellon empire. Indeed, it seems that almost all new initiatives in the field are funded by the Mellon Foundation. In the face of today’s quasi-legal provocation what should we do? Move on, say nothing, and take the money because it is a repurposing of it for better things? Or try and use our place on the inside to somehow influence BNY Mellon? Or consider whether it might not be better to refuse to collaborate with them? What do you think?

 

Civil Disability

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If there is to be a new eugenics, it will return to a hierarchy of citizenship, in which some citizens are fully empowered members of the public and many others are not.  In English jurisprudence, this latter condition is known as “civil disability.” It has kept those perceived as not equal to the standards of citizenship from enjoying the right to vote or even the right to appear as a witness in a law case.  It has applied to the enslaved, Jews and women. It still applies to minors and those designated insane. In the current optic of power, civil disability permits corporations to have the standing of people, while individual people are the objects of kettling, spraying, scanning and other forms of classification.

The very diversity and dis/ability of Occupy—even if widely considered insufficient within the movement—appears to add to the vengeful force of the reassertion of authority. Such bodies are not supposed to be able to make political choices but only to be the grateful recipients of Lifetime made-for-TV movies and to supply “meaningful” roles for able-bodied actors to win Oscars. It is as if authority says, if you will not accept the ways we disable you once, then we will do it again. That is to say, disability is not a physical condition but a social one: it is the lack of accommodations that makes a person in a chair have difficulty negotiating space not an inherent incapacity. This disabling is now extended to all suspect bodies: which is often everyone.

I have not flown since Occupy began, unusually for someone who travels a lot. Today I had to submit to being kettled by the TSA at JFK airport in order to wait for the privilege of partially undressing and then being scanned while standing with my hands raised over my head by who knows what purportedly safe form of radiation. It was presumably designed to make people feel powerless and it does. While hygiene was the key to the original eugenics and still plays a significant role, the new eugenics takes its energy from the discourses of safety.

Later in the overcrowded container called “coach,” a fellow passenger was harangued by a flight attendant because the straps of his backpack, which he was forced to stow “under the seat in front” because no other space was available, intruded by a matter of two inches into our seating space. If we had to evacuate, we were told, we might get entangled. I rearranged my feet and the emergency was over because we had displayed sufficient passivity. As the Italian cruise ship disaster showed, actual safety has nothing to do with any of this—passengers were sent back to their cabins as the boat took on water.

In such situations, any challenge to the “move on” authority of the police results in immediate arrest, deportation or deplaning. (By the way, is there an uglier world than “deplane”? One candidate would the use of the term “designated receptacle” to mean bin.)  The demonstrators at Move In Day in Oakland were repeatedly hailed to “submit to arrest.” That is, it is not enough that you be arrested. You must submit to it, accept the authority by which you are arrested and reconfigure your own practice from civil disobedience to crime.

Traditional eugenics and civil disability were not at all interested in what the disabled citizen thought of themselves because by definition their thoughts were not important. If it matters so much to the new agents of civil disability that we submit to being “disabled” by them, it is because they have learned their trade from counterinsurgency.  Under the Petraeus doctrine of counterinsurgency, it was not enough for the occupying power to be able to dominate the population. That population must “actively and passively” consent to being ruled. So you must not only go through the security checkpoint, you must accept that the checkpoint is there for your security and is therefore right. It doesn’t work and what’s more it has never worked.

Interestingly, the military themselves have abandoned the counterinsurgent fantasy. They are withdrawing regular troops from Afghanistan, having abandoned Iraq to pick  things up where they left off in about 2007. Now ubiquitous anti-terrorism is the goal, with targeted missions being carried out by unmanned aerial vehicles or special operations troops. Just as the brief triumph of counterinsurgency rested on the apparent success of the “surge” in Iraq, so is this new paradigm clearly based on the bin Laden assassination. The administration is impervious to anxieties about the lack of due process of those targeted or even the “collateral damage” done to the by-standers. All of these people, whether by virtue of being insurgents or failing to remove themselves from proximity to insurgents, are under the prescription of civil disability.

Just so, a TSA agent said to us a while ago, “you have no rights here.” Just so, police launch a “surge” in the Wind City Reservation to reduce crime statistics. Just so, you may be evicted from public space because you are not considered part of the public or expelled from federal space because you are not a fully-fledged citizen. Buttressing the entire process is the longest-running process of civil disability in the United States, the mass incarceration of African-American and minority populations. Over two million people are part of the prison-industrial system that so patently discriminates by ethnicity that Michele Alexander has called it “the new Jim Crow.” More exactly, one might say it was the old Jim Crow. As Angela Davis has shown, the penitentiary and work-lease systems were devised as part of As “felons,” many of the released lose civil rights.

Shots Heard Round the World

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In his classic 1997 novel Underworld, Don Delillo visualized the Cold War by the coincidence of finding on the front cover of one newspaper in 1951 of the first Soviet atomic weapons test and the “shot heard around the world,” the victory by the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers. More recently, W. J. T. Mitchell was struck that the front cover of the New York Times for September 11, 2001 had a lead story about cloning, leading to his book Cloning Terror, a visualization of the Bush era. Ironically, Delillo’s novel had André Kertesz’s somewhat sinister photograph of the World Trade Center on its front cover, seeming to foretell Bush’s post 9-11 “crusade.”

Kertesz, WTC, 1972

Today’s webpages have accounts of the shooting of Ramarley Graham in the Bronx by the NYPD and the continued upheaval in Egypt after the death of 75 football [soccer if you must] fans. The apparently contingent association resonates powerfully in the fashion of Delillo and Mitchell (and all good Surrealists). The connection here is the overreach of autocratic power, a countervisualization to their assertion “move on, nothing to see here.”

Since 9-11 the New York City police department have had a free hand to act as they choose, bolstered by their reputation as heroes on the day of the attacks and the decline in the crime rate. Most notably in the latter category, street crime of the kind for which New York was once notorious has notably declined, albeit not as much as you might think. The murder rate, according to official statistics declined precipitously from 2,016 in 1994 to 924 in 1998. It’s fallen further in the past decade but not that much: 866 murders were reported in 2010.

It looks as if Bloomberg has nonetheless decided to cut his police commissioner loose after this latest scandal. This week alone, three people have been shot and killed by police with Ramarley’s death simply the most egregious of the group. In an article that appeared in today’s New York Times with the evident approval of the mayor–because one detail that he disagreed with was noted–it is noted that

There has been a stunning rise in so-called stop-and-frisks — 601,055 in 2010, compared with 97,296 in 2002

This ethnically-discriminatory practice has been highlighted by activists for years, so it’s curious to see that it happens to make the One Per Cent Times front cover at this moment of scandal. The target is Police Commissioner Kelly, perhaps the one person in New York with whom Bloomberg  feels he has to share power. If Bloomberg succeeds in pushing Kelly into retirement, his regime will be truly autocratic.

In Egypt the scandalous connivance of the police and the military government in fomenting a riot between football Ultras in Port Said, leading to over 70 deaths, has been missed by nobody. Whether it was lighting that  mysteriously failed, or a gate that somehow was opened, it’s clear that Cairo believes its football Ultras, who held the line in Tahrir against Mubarak’s camels a year ago today, were being targeted in revenge.

Rather than launch attacks on the immediate perpetrators, the Cairo street has turned against the military government. The film clip below from Mosireen shows the demolition of the wall built by the military to protect the Interior Ministry, home of the police, from Tahrir.

The Ultras and their allies have done the unexpected and surprised the new autocrat Tantawi and his forces. At the same time, these events show that the casual analysis of the Egyptian elections, which would suggest that the Muslim Brotherhood won because they were better integrated into the Egyptian masses, missed the mark.

Even as we were digesting this interface, Washington DC police moved in on Occupy DC, whose encampment had remained in place under federal park regulations, until House Republican Darrell Issa targeted these protections last week. Ever fearful of Republican attacks–and the Park Service have been a long-term obsession for the right–the law was simply ignored.

This is not what democracy looks like

The fragmentation of the rule of law produced by the global crisis has generated a set of unequal and competing autocracies. This may not end well.

Sally Out Against Passive Recreation

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From the middle ranks of the Occupy movement, I have come to hear “occupy” as a question. The question is being put as to when and how I might be able to change. it sounds somewhere between portentous and new-age, I’m aware. It is nonetheless something that I go and practice–in the sense of perform and try out. I spent today at a workshop run by the amazing Lisa Fithian, called “Shutting Things Down to Open Things Up.”

As is now something of an Occupy cliche, change begins with yourself but it also has to be put into some form of practice: which is to say, it’s personal and it’s political. Hence my monstrous hybrid of a title. In the Areopagitica (1644), his great defense of freedom of the press, the poet John Milton declaimed:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d and unbreath’d that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.

So it’s one thing, whether good or not, to write about Occupy but you have to go and do it in the face of the adversary as well. And so the second half of the phrase comes from the regulations devised by Brookfield Properties for the appropriate use of Zuccotti Park: “passive recreation.” It is in its bureaucratic, unlovely way, a motto for the service sector of global neo-liberalism that the U. S. has become.

I am painfully aware of my own limitations in this context. The events I have organized or helped organize are details in a much broader picture. I am and will remain a university person. It is, however, one of those times in which you need to test the ideas you circulate by putting them into a form of practice because this is how we learn what to try and think next. Sometimes this is done text to text. Now it’s time for sallying out and seeing what happens, even if the result is another period of reflection.

The performative workshop is a very useful tool for measuring this sense of change and here I want to reflect on two such experiences that I’ve had recently: today’s exercise in taking space, and an earlier theatre of the oppressed workshop, based on the work of Agosto Boal, that I participated in at 16 Beaver. Both were very productive in making us think of ourselves as bodies in space with choices to make that might change the outcome of events. The comparison might help to highlight some tensions in Occupy’s relations to what we might call internal and external repression.

At the Boal workshop, facilitated by Eve Silber, the musician and actor, what had been a physically passive space of talking and listening became a very dynamic and open set of possibilities. Using the “image theatre” technique, Silber built up from a single image of direct democracy to an improvised encounter between protagonist and antagonist. The scenario involved an experience of trying to get access to an OWS Spokes Council, site of some of the most difficult personal interactions in the movement.

One woman present (I didn’t know her name) did a very convincing performance of such disruptions. She was as scary and confusing as the actual performances of such “blocks” and Joe N., playing the facilitator, did what I probably would have done–he played it for laughs, making fun of the rhetorics of facilitation. Afterwards in the discussion, I wondered if we’d missed a moment: instead of trying to work through the hardest place of internal dynamics, we’d stepped outside by being ironical.

Today in Fithian’s workshop, participants were again encouraged to visualize the space otherwise. This time, sets of bodily movement tactics were deployed to see if one set of people, playing protestors, could get past another, playing the police. The goal was to see if space could be taken, even symbolically. For most of those present, this was not an entirely abstract idea, because everyone has been on a demonstration where the police try and prevent you from going where you want.

Nonetheless, on the first effort, a pile of bodies resulted in the middle of the room. The “protestors” felt we had been successful in recovering someone the “police” had tried to arrest, until Fithian reminded us that the point was to get past them to the end of the room. The next sally went better, aided by the protestors numerical superiority and the absence of batons, helmets, shields and pepper spray that routinely appear in New York whenever police are deployed. Just yesterday an unarmed eighteen-year-old, Ramarley Graham, was shot and killed in the Bronx by the NYPD over alleged possession of some marijuana.

So the final venture, co-ordinated by Fithian rather than by us, had the protestors march up to the police and then suddenly sit down. There was a palpable moment of surprise from the “cops.” In that instant, a variety of options for claiming space would have become available. Then the cops recovered themselves and pepper-sprayed the seated demonstrators.

Doing what is not expected turned out to be the best resource, finding ways not to fulfill how power anticipates that we will perform. Fithian showed video of a trans group marching at the demonstrations against the G8 in Rostock, Germany and the complete bafflement of the police they confronted. Another group demonstrated nude.

In September 2011, physical encampments in public space were a brilliantly unexpected move: now the police regard tents as contraband. The difference would not have been that the police did not know an occupation was planned, as New York is now one of the most policed spaces in the world. Today at Penn Station in the shopping area between the subway and the Long Island Rail Road I saw five police officers and two soldiers. The occupation happened because the state did not believe it could be sustained. Paradoxically, the very sense that they have that Occupy is over could be its most useful asset come Spring.

 

Occupy Climate Change (again!)

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If the climate is the economy, then there is a political economy of climate. In the past few days, that politics has become noticeably visible in the U. S., reminding us once again why we occupied Wall Street and not, say, City Hall. The Wall Street Journal has aggressively launched a campaign of absolute climate ignorance–meaning both that they refuse to know what is patently known and also that they are campaigning for us to simply ignore the climate. It is no coincidence that Republicans are again pushing for the disastrous Keystone pipeline–and, big surprise, the Democrats are beginning to cave.

Thanks to the U.K. Guardian, I became aware that the Wall St Journal had launched a manifesto under the unintentionally hilarious title “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27, 2012. Yesterday, scientists published a rebuttal, which, while absolutely right on the substance, once again failed to take the measure of the political economy of climate. Their call is for respect for their expertise. A look at the brazen effrontery of the Journal‘s claims should have made it clear that this is a waste of time.

The piece begins with a long palaver, familiar climate denier rhetoric, that there are a “large and growing number” of scientists that disagree with climate change: in fact 97% of published refereed articles support the diagnosis, making it clearly settled science. The WSJ takes it up a notch by claiming that there is no perceived warming of the planet, flying in the face not just of all data but now of common sense.

However, they are just getting warmed up. Their next move is to go into Michele Bachmann territory:

the fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth.

There is no point in rebutting this kind of argument because it has departed from the norms of public debate, as has so much neo-liberal rhetoric in this election year. However, they have still more to say. Why, they ask are scientists afraid to question global warming, as they call it:

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have detailed how cold war ideology and those promoting it have been co-opted into climate denial. Nonetheless, even by red-baiting standards, this is pretty exceptional stuff.

It might seem that this piece doesn’t matter, it’s just more red meat for the Republican base: but the Tea Party does not read the Wall Street Journal. And this denialism has now produced its own “policy” proposal:

the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now.

That’s right–no controls at all because the “modest” warming will be beneficial anyway and cost-benefit analysis is always right, right?

In the rebuttal, the real climate scientists rightly observe:

most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert

It would be like asking your dentist about cardiology, they say. Forced to waste space rebutting the various allegations, it is only in the last paragraph that the group can hint at an alternative political economy:

In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.

Whether by choice or, more likely from space or editorial restrictions imposed by the Journal, they don’t give specific examples.

The neo-liberals, however, have one: the Keystone XL pipeline. While taking a break from throwing filmmakers out of Congress yesterday, Republicans launched yet another bid to have the pipeline approved. Opposing the pipeline are “hard-left environmentalists,” according to this logic, using the WSJ rhetoric, standing in the way of American jobs and energy security for ideological reasons. Even according to the pipeline’s most enthusiastic proponents, the maximum job creation would be some 20,000 jobs. The reality might be less than half that.

Obama and the Democrats are stuck: having fudged the issue of climate change into so-called energy security and “green” jobs, they have little space to maneuver. Yesterday the Senate Majority leader Harry Reid started talking about a deal. Expect a “sensible” compromise in which the pipeline is routed away from the Sand Hills in Nebraska and there’s some boiler plate about not exporting the oil. None of the politicians will talk about the huge increase in carbon emissions that will result from using this heavy oil. For James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first detected global warming, if we go there, it’s “game over” for efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Pipeline Protest, Nov. 2011

Keystone activists already undertook a successful action of civil disobedience at the White House last November, when 12,000 demonstrated and many were arrested, including Bill McKibben. Now it’s important to realize that “Keystone” has become the symbol of a political economy that actively chooses to ignore all questions of climate. Remember, Transcanada, the promoters of the pipeline, are also the owners of Zuccotti Park. The lesson is that we cannot “demand” the cancellation of the pipeline, we have to make it an impossibility by our own actions.

I’m going to say this again and I’m going to keep saying it: occupy climate change.