Category Archives: Occupy

Stand With Occupy

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If you’re reading this, you have some sympathy for the Occupy movement. You might not agree with everything it’s done and that would make you just like everyone else in the movement. You might feel that you personally have done what you can. There’s an amazing opportunity coming up this coming weekend to remind the world why there was an Occupy movement in the first place. Please consider joining us in person if you can or signing a letter of solidarity if you are not able to be in New York or at one of the many other events.

As you know, on September 15-17th in New York City, OWS is organizing three days of education, celebration and resistance to economic injustice with a full slate of permitted convergences, family friendly assemblies, a big concert, and mass civil disobedience on that Monday in the heart of the financial district. The evolving schedule as well as detailed information can be found at s17nyc.org. Outside New York, there are events all over the country and indeed the world. There’s always space for more: a speak-out in a park or outside on a college campus, an Occupy Rosh Hashanah event, whatever.

Time is short and it’s a busy time of year. So if these options are not open, please consider signing the letter of solidarity with Occupy from artists and intellectuals. Here’s an excerpt from the letter that’s already been signed by a crowd of people ranging from the “big names” of Butler, Rancière, Zizek and West to those artists, academics, writers and members of the New Academic Majority who do day-to-day work in Occupy and for S17: Andrew Ross, Pamela Brown, Astra Taylor, Yates McKee, and many others.

Here’s the letter:

It’s time for those who are privileged enough to think and write and create and teach for a living—particularly those of us with full-time faculty positions or secure careers—to step up and be counted. We have earned academic and cultural capital from espousing radical positions. Now is the time to lend our support in visible ways to the commitment shown by the Occupy movement and to help it grow and evolve.

The letter gives you a list of things you can do over the weekend and beyond, if you want to get involved whether it’s for the first time or once again. You can donate some money if you’re so minded, any contribution would be fabulously useful.

But what would be really great would be if everyone would post the link:

http://standwithoccupy.org/

on all your social media, email it to people that don’t use social media and generally make this thing go viral.
Thanks.

Life After Debt

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So I have my ups and my downs with my Occupy life. Today was one of those days where I love this movement. In a day of rolling events in East River State Park in Brooklyn, a tight plan for S17 emerged, Strike Debt consensed on its actions for the weekend and then we held the Life After Debt action.

East River State Park is a patch of grass with a few benches that runs down to the East River, offering a spectacular view of Manhattan. I got there via brunchtime Willamsburg, a picture-perfect cliché of hipster Brooklyn, all oversize glasses, plaid shorts and undersized tops: and that was just the men. There was a resolutely apolitical vibe. In the park, sunbathing, picnics and in the corner, a group of intensely discussing people.

After three hours, the direct action people had set aside some personal disagreements and finally devised a workable and compelling plan for S17. Details will be forthcoming but what struck me across today was the effectiveness of focused collective intelligence. It’s like rehearsing a play. There can be all kinds of mess, sometimes you need for the whole thing to get to the verge of falling apart and then all of a sudden it palpably clicks into shape.

That happened with Strike Debt today. It’s a disparate group with plenty of personality and some divergence as to tactics and goals. When you get the Occupy process right, though–an agreed agenda, timekeeping, tight facilitation, temperature checks and bottom lining–it’s surprising how the group can rise above that in a way that I have (almost) never seen in academia, for instance. I could give you the decisions but that’s not the point. On a micro scale you learn how a horizontal democratic process grounded in trust and política afectiva actually works.

And then we enacted it. The first Strike Debt action called people together to refuse their debt by describing their debt situation and then symbolically burning their debt. We gathered in a circle facing the river with some new Strike Debt banners. It happened to be a gorgeous day, clear and sunny–there’s going to be some great pictures of the event but I was too busy to take any, sorry.

As people stepped up to speak it seemed to grow quiet even in this very public place. We heard people talk about suddenly diagnosed medical conditions that are not covered by insurance, but might be life-threatening, plunging a life into chaos–and debt. How a piece of bad advice from a union about unemployment benefit led to a contingent faculty member being sued. And many times about the craziness of student debt. To speak in this assembly was at first upsetting but then affirming. Debt is no abstraction. It destroys lives. We’re trying to take them back.

We walked down to the river in procession, took the ashes of the debt papers people had burned and cast them into the water. It wasn’t sad, it was calming and beautiful.

Speaking only for myself, I don’t expect any transformation in the macro-situation in regards to debt any time soon. Finding these alternative ways to live as if there was a life after debt makes that otherwise devastating prospect bearable. And someone had made a cake.

 

To Walk Asking Questions

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This is the theme of a fascinating new book, Occupying Language, by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series. The authors situate the present Occupy movement in the context of the insurgent movements in Latin America over the past quarter of a century. From this perspective, to occupy is to walk asking questions. And it’s ok to get lost.

Cover of Occupying Language

The authors develop their project in the colonial context suggested by the original meaning of occupation:

Language is not neutral, and words transport and express concepts and ways of thinking. They can consolidate and perpetuate hierarchies, domination and control just as they can underline equality and strengthen consciousness. Latin American struggles for dignity, freedom and liberation are rooted in more than five hundred years of resistance. Language derived from their struggles comes with historical antecedents.

The book goes on to describe concepts like Territory, Assembly and Rupture that translate easily, as well as more elusive and perhaps productive forms, such as política afectiva (≈affective politics), poder popular (≈popular power) and autogestión (≈collective democratic self management).

Each term is “openly defined” in a short sentence and then given living form in a piece of reportage of the authors own experience with the concept. The rest of the entry analyzes the use and meaning of the term.

Such fascination with language was a commonplace in the early days of Occupy. The word “occupy” was odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.And so it proved, with the citation arguing

It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word.

In this project I also undertook a decolonial genealogy of the word. So it’s renewing to see how much energy can still be generated by an attention to the politics of language, now that everyone is “over” Occupy and wishes we would just go away.

Sitrin and Azzellini’s book reinforces some of my own thoughts about our present direction. We know, for example, that many mainstream reporters will declare S17 a failure because there will not have been a new Occupation, even though we no longer intend to do so. Sitrin and Azzellini point out that the global movements have all gone through

a process of reterritorialization…after a few months….Thus, around the world there has been a shift into neighborhoods and workplaces, to focus on local needs yet at the same time come together to co-ordinate.

Whether because of anxieties about the Presidential election, or because people still harbored hopes for a more thorough-going transformation, we’ve not paid enough attention to this process and not given it a high enough value. For Sitrin and Azzellini, the project is one of

Caminar Preguntando (To walk asking questions)….[M]ultiple histories that help create multiple open-ended paths.

This walk leads us into what Benjamin called “a secret rendezvous between past generations and our own.” For Anglo readers, we might understand this as a decentering and decolonial vantage point on the history of the present as understood by those who have been colonized for five centuries.

There are many moments that resonate in this slim volume. One that caught my eye was the discussion of política afectiva. The term came out of the post-2000 autonomous movements in Argentina, meaning “a movement based in love.” This was no easy sell in a place like Buenos Aires, as Toty Flores from the Unemployed Workers Movement recalls:

Imagine being in a neighborhood like La Matanza, which is full of really tough men, men who have lived, and still live, a violent macho life, and we’re talking about new loving relationships. No, it isn’t easy, not even to talk about, let alone practice. This is part of our changing culture, and as we change, we notice how much we really need to.

I was reminded of a visit I had the chance to make to FOMMA, a performance space and center in San Cristobal, Chiapas, where Maya women have used performance to educate their community about domestic violence. Such spaces are amazingly empowering and inspiring, however local their project.

Sitrin and Azzellini remind us that too often such transformative projects are written off as being “identity” or “gender” issues, unlike the “real” economic or class issues. They riposte:

Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya

Responsibility for the other and solidarity are basic conditions of a future society not grounded in capitalist principles.

OWS once knew that very well. There are days where I worry that the focus on confrontational direct action, arrests and civil disobedience seemingly for its own sake rather than as an articulation of a wider idea, has allowed us to forget it somewhat.

When we talk of Democracia Real Ya! that is what we mean. Anti-capitalism, this book reminds us, is a politics of walking and of love.

Sometimes, as Rebecca Solnit has taught us, when you walk you get lost. And she suggests that’s a good thing, a way to let go of our hyper-disciplined OCD selves and wandering to wonder. That might be where we are now.


Get Up! Get Down! Events for OWS Anniversary

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As people come back to school and start thinking about what’s next, it seems like a good opportunity to remind everyone about the activities over the weekend of September 15-17 and beyond for the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. There was a three-month run up to May Day but the summer holiday and the Presidential election campaign has made it harder to keep people focused. Here’s a moment when the world’s attention will be back on OWS and it’s a great chance to show that, whatever you think Occupy is or should be, the energy of the movement is still here and still needs to be heard.

The full program is constantly being updated and is available at the S17 website.

These are my personal highlights:

 Saturday 15 September: Education

12.30-4pm Assembly

The weekend begins with a thematic assembly in Washington Square Park. You can hear about what the different working groups of the movement are engaged in and participate in open-ended facilitated discussions about the key themes of the weekend, such as debt, the environmental crisis, political corruption, as well as long-term themes of the movement. The assembly ends with a re-convergence to discuss the future.

7.30pm Launch of The Debt Resistors Operations Manual, Judson Church

A collective publication by Strike Debt, The Debt Resistors Operations Manual offers debtors practical advice and information on debt of all kinds and how to resist it. Published for the weekend, this launch event includes teach-ins, video screenings and the chance to share stories.

Sunday 16 September: Celebration

7.30 pm Occupy Rosh Hashanah, Zucotti Park/Liberty Plaza. The Jewish New Year begins at sunset on the night preceding the anniversary. Following from the amazing Occupy Yom Kippur last year, Occupy Judaism and others are creating an nondeminational holiday service and potluck dinner. There will be echoes of the alliances during the Civil Rights Movement between Jewish progressives and African Americans, it’s a great prelude to S17 itself.

Monday 17 September: Liberation

Early morning from 7am: The People’s Wall will block access to Wall Street by closing down key intersections. ACT UP, 350.org and Housing Works are among those joining OWS in this action. It’s a non-violent civil disobedience so be prepared by doing a training on Saturday or Sunday.

Also early: The 99 Revolutions, mobile actions by affinity groups across downtown (as in the poster above).

Strike Debt will also have actions during the course of the day. More details closer to the time.

These actions are being finalized over the next week but everything will depend on how the day goes. There is already a large pile of NYPD barricade blocks at Zucotti Park, so it may be that it’s the police that shut down Wall Street for us.

6pm: The Emma Goldman Assembly, 55 Water Street. Perhaps the most enticing event is the gathering of the “movement of movements” that Occupy has become to plan ahead. The Assembly is not a decision making body but a place to share, discuss and learn. There are plans to make this a regular event going forward.

September 18-22: Free University

The fabulous Free University has a week-long series of events in the works following S17, to build on the action and take the energy into Year Two. Most meetings in Madison Square Park, as on May Day.

There’s so much more going on and I’ll be returning to this often in the run-up to the day. For the time being, the thing to do is get the word out. See you in the streets.

“The Will to Justice”

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In her essay in the new Tidal, Gayatri Spivak encourages us to develop what she calls the “will to justice.” This ethical and incremental approach is at odds with what I might call the palpable “will for hierarchy” within certain sectors of the movement. The desire for “wins” sometimes risks overshadowing the very radicality of Occupy’s challenge. For  to be theoretically anti-hierarchy is always and already an organizational imperative–“be the change that you want to see.”

Gayatri Spivak

Spivak’s call reworks Nietzsche’s famous phrase “the will to power” that was so significant for thinkers like Michel Foucault. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, Nietzsche defines

our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will–namely, of the will to power.

Such power, Foucault argued, is not owned or controlled but simply used. It was a challenge to then-dominant ideas about the “conquest of state power” because power would continue to be instrumental, regardless of who was directing it. Spivak also turns away from such “vanguardist” approaches, as she calls them, in favor of

the general nurturing of the will to justice among the people.

There are three distinct threads interwoven in this phrase. Spivak’s mind is so supple that you can visibly see her thinking on multiple levels simultaneously as she speaks. Here she mixes Rousseau, Derrida, feminism and Marxism.

From Rousseau, we get the concept of the “general will,” the base on which social order can be constructed. Nick Couldry and Natalie Fenton have shown that

The Occupy movement is an attempt to form the general will in new ways. As such, it is a potentially fundamental contribution to resolving the contemporary crisis of democracy….as a part of saying yes to the possibility of thinking differently about the political consequences of global markets

That is to say, the “counter-democracy” of saying no–to Republicans, to war, to neo-liberalism–has been joined by a means of saying “yes” to new forms of community and democracy. “Nothing can be harder than this,” caution Couldry and Fenton.

Yet Spivak gives the process an optimistic tinge. She links Rousseau to Derrida’s concept of “justice” as that which cannot be deconstructed. Which is not to say it is a simple thing. As the global movement knows, Derrida’s justice

doesn’t wait. It is that which must not wait.

But at the same time,

justice is an experience of the impossible.

Otherwise known as the impossible demand. The will to justice is the deconstruction of the force of law. It is the right to look.

Because the right to look is a consenting exchange between two (or more) it is by definition non-hierarchical. It is also, as Spivak stresses, the responsibility to nurture and care for the other: what we call mutual aid. Emphasizing the feminism of the will to justice, Spivak recasts its imaginative horizon from war or struggle to care and nurture.

With all these concepts in action, Spivak is able to re-energize the much-abused formula of “the people.” It’s important to note that she does so in a planetary framework that emphasizes how neo-liberalism relies on global hierarchy to function:

For financial globalization to work, the world must remain unevenly divided between the global South and the global North, so that there can be constantly fluctuating differences in the value of hard currency and soft currency, so that financialization can operate.

It’s crucial, then, not to replicate this hierarchical “world-making” in our own organization. In addition to this theoretical caution, we also need to be careful that a strategy that produces gains in the global North does not do so at the expense of the South.

It’s easy to be solipsistic here and say, for example, “a win for the Democrats is a win for the South,” even though it’s simply marginally less bad. Take the case of the Marikana platinum miners. While we want to support their claim for a living wage, it must also in the long run be better that they not have to work as miners, both because the labor is so hard and destructive; and because that would mean fewer cars were being built, as platinum is mostly used for catalytic converters. But were that to happen overnight, the result would just be more poverty.

For as Suzayn Ibrahimian puts it on the facing page of Tidal:

We have fundamentally understimated our ability to recreate our own oppression.

She sees the widely-circulating concern with “wins” as a short-term viewpoint that reinforces the “hierarchy of stability.” And so people more or less openly call for vanguardist approaches in OWS, or what are euphemistically called “decision-making bodies.” Of course this could be done and then we would be one more lefty pressure group, hoping that for some reason the Democratic Party might finally change its mind.

It seems that “Occupy” is about to splinter into a coalition of broadly autonomous campaigns like Strike Debt, Occupy Our Homes and Foreclose The Banks that come together for symbolic days of action like S17. If this means of organizing preserves the will to justice that was so visible a year ago, rather than creating new hierarchies, then let’s make it happen.

To return to Spivak, it is only the

building up of a will to social justice

that matters, not the name under which it is done.

 

 

 

 

OWS and the Press

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Two new journalistic takes on OWS and the September 17 anniversary day of action are causing some waves in the movement. It’s interesting to look at them and see how two journalists can talk to much the same set of people and generate very different interpretations. It raises the question of what a social movement wants from the media, as well as the more discussed question of what it gets.

The pieces in question are in very different publications. In the Village Voice, house journal of the NYC counterculture, Nick Pinto has a long take on “Occupy Wall Street, Year Two.” Many people are greeting this as the best piece on OWS for a long time, which I take to mean closest to how OWS views itself. On the other hand, there’s Max Abelson’s piece for Bloomberg News, entitled “Occupy Sets Wall Street Tie-up as Protestors Face Burn Out.” While Abelson seems not unsympathetic to the movement, look at who he’s writing for: so it’s no surprise that the piece feels more critical. Internally, people have been disappointed because he did spend a long time talking with leading figures.

Let’s walk through the pieces quickly. Pinto begins with the standard observation that the very diversity of OWS opinion makes it hard to create and sustain consensus. However, he then suggests:

The factionalism that for so long seemed to threaten to tear the movement apart seems increasingly manageable. After a year of precisely these sorts of arguments, anarchists, liberals, and union stalwarts all know the contours of their disagreements, but they’re also better than they’ve ever been at pushing through them.

They’re also increasingly confident that whatever this thing is that binds them together, that keeps them coming back to the next meeting, the next hard-won consensus, whatever they call that shared project, it has a future beyond this first anniversary.

That’s what I meant when I said that the piece reflects the internal discourse of OWS. Pinto continues to describe the combination of police violence and the “dominant media narrative” that there’s “nothing to see here.”

Acknowledging that, for many occupiers, it’s how things get done as much as what the immediate results are that matters, Pinto talks about the projects like Strike Debt, Occupy Homes, and Foreclose the Banks that get activists excited and have emerged or grown significantly since May 1. Perhaps it’s in part because Pinto quotes a lot of people that I happen to know or have met but this piece does convey my own sense of OWS right now. The acknowledgement that May Day was not a complete success. The recognition that there won’t be another occupation. The determination to continue.

It’s that last that Max Abelson doesn’t see. The emphasis for him is on dysfunction and burnout:

Organizers said there has been more fatigue than fresh thinking this year. Occupy’s New York City General Assembly, which oversaw planning by consensus, ceased functioning in April because of infighting, ineffectiveness and low turnout, according to organizers and minutes of meetings. The group’s funds were frozen to preserve money for bail, ending most cash distributions, they said.

While the unnamed organizers are correct, for most of us April is an age ago. It’s hard to find people who still regret the passing of the GA, although there are occasional calls for a central decision making body. As the piece continues, the emphasis remains on “burnout,” “calcification,” “ossify”–a movement past its prime.

The Abelson piece reads as if it has been edited hard from a longer essay, as quotes float in and out without discussion or context. Subheads like “Venemous Forums” or “Anarchist Core” catch the eye but aren’t the writer’s fault. He does place a lot of emphasis on what I can only think was a throw-away comment about making citizens’ arrests on September 17, which runs counter to most people’s sense of what OWS is about.

In the end, then, what we have is a nice snapshot in a friendly media outlet and a not terrible but not great, slightly sensationalist piece in a very hostile outlet. Why is that no good? Why do we so often want to have a “celebrity” endorse a cause or an action, just like every other media-directed project? In part I’m thinking back to a job search we did last year in my department for someone working on media activism. The overwhelming impression I was left with was how hard such activism is in the face of the corporate behemoths. Now that even the New York Times has taken to calling Republican media statements “lies,” perhaps the gap is closing.

If Occupy is trying to build a new world in the shell of the old, what would its media look like? Projects like Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, whose third issue is just out; or Occupy! the OWS-Inspired Gazette (new edition due September 15) are trying to do that work. It’s very hard: questions of funding, printing and distribution have to be solved by the same people doing the editing, writing and commissioning.

These publications are not, as some might say, preaching to the converted. They are given away free, often to the curious people standing on the edge of a meeting or a rally who wants to know more but isn’t ready to get involved. In a city of 19 million people, working like this takes time. That’s OK. At certain moments, like last September 17, new possibilities emerge. What we’ve all been doing ever since is to try and keep that possibility open for as long as we can.

Turning the World Upside Down

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Occupy Sydney

How does Occupy look from the other side of the world? A few days ago, I walked into Gleebooks, the excellent alternative bookstore in Glebe, Sydney, and asked for books on Occupy. The well-informed staff person, who had tracked down my literary interests without difficulty, was thrown. There were some things on the American Occupy, she said, but nothing on Australia. Throughout my visit I encountered this polite bafflement.

Commonwealth Bank, Sydney, opposite Occupy Sydney

Although everyone used the past tense about Occupy, Occupy Sydney still has a street presence in Martin Place. This is a canyon of colonial era banks, like Commonwealth Bank. The Bank epitomizes the transformation of imperial capital into financial globalization. Created as a colonial government enterprise in 1911, it was privatized beginning in 1991. Commonwealth introduced credit cards to Australia and has holdings in banks all over Australasia and now China. It generated some $6 billion in profits in 2011. Despite its Harry Potter-like teller windows with brass bars, Commonwealth is an aggressive globalizing institution. Surrounding it are extensive holdings of Fairfax Media, owned by mining magnate Gina Reinhardt, Australia’s richest individual. Need I go on?

In the midst of all this was what’s left of Occupy Sydney. It’s a table with literature, sign-up sheets, and a handy on-going collection of global Occupy actions. The people staffing the Occupation appear to be homeless and with other unmet needs, which suggested why people discreetly asked me about “improving the aesthetics” of Occupy.

In a new collection of essays called Left Turn, Australian activist Jeff Sparrow summarizes what he considers to be the strengths of Occupy

In Australia, the protests expressed, more than anything, a general alienation from the political process–but they extended as far as embracing the issues of Indigenous people, for whom discussions about occupation had a particular resonance.

Note the past tense.

Perhaps the difference stems from the relative sense of prosperity (or lack of it) in Australia and the US. Australia’s mining-driven boom has sustained high property prices, a very strong exchange rate and a palpable sense of big money for the usual suspects.

On the eve of Occupy Wall Street, the Wall Street Journal reported

The income of a household considered to be at the statistical middle fell 2.3% to an inflation-adjusted $49,445 in 2010, which is 7.1% below its 1999 peak.

In Australia, by contrast, according to a similarly one percent-oriented source:

The median or middle gross household income is about $68,600 p.a. There are only an estimated 473,200 households (or 5.6% of the population) with gross incomes in excess of $208,000 p.a.

Australia’s dollar is worth a little over one US dollar so the numerical difference is smaller than the actual one. Income disparities are less glaring than in the US (the top 10% makes four times as much as the lower 90, compared to 11 times as much in the US) but, according to government statistics, the gap is growing:

the net worth of low economic resource households had not increased significantly since 2003-04, while the average net worth across all other households had increased by 29%.

That’s 23% of the population falling behind the others. Without scoring points, it’s easy to see why the Occupy message might have resonated with those on the underside of the boom. What happens now that the mining boom is over and Chinese economy, engine of global growth, is slowing?

If you look back to last September, the suggestions being made would have been relatively easy for the neo-liberals to accept, I’ve often thought. A Presidential commission, Ad Busters wanted. Or the Glass-Steagall Act restored. So Paul Krugman, so little difference it would have made. Of course, they were too greedy, too self-satisfied. Next time, it won’t be so simple.

 

Another World: for slow politics

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Today a symposium at Artspace, Sydney, called Another World drew together art practice and activism. The talk ranged from Sydney to Germany, New York and elsewhere. There was a notable retreat, I’m glad to say, from such terms as “global art” towards questions of politics, debt, ecology and situatedness. We learned about time, to take our time, that this is our time and it is, of course, past time.

Zanny Begg, poster for Lucern

An artists panel in the morning featured an interesting contrast of global and local. Zanny Begg talked about her video with Oliver Ressler What Would It Take to Win? (2008)–the link leads to the entire piece. It covered the global justice movement protests in Heiligendamm (June 2007). What was interesting from the current perspective was to see the force of making no demands: wanting “wins” undermined the global justice movement. Whereas Occupy has been able to reclaim space and, crucially, time.

In that long time that it takes us to get anything done, an aesthetic relation is created between the people doing the action, whatever it may be. A project like the Rolling Jubilee, to buy and abolish debt in the name of OWS, might be an art work. Indeed, the curator Tom Polo mentioned a work in his show There’s a Hole in the Sky, now on in Campbelltown called “Commerce.” The artist purchased items from local bankrupt people, using his art budget, is currently displaying them and will give them away at the end of the show. There’s something very evocative about that action, in a part of Western Sydney that is known for high levels of bankruptcy.

In his afternoon talk, art historian Terry Smith contrasted different approaches to evoking the planetary. He called on Jorge Macchi’s work Blue Planet currently being used as the emblem for the Sydney Biennale as exemplary such refiguration. Macchi creates a “figure of the planetary” (Spivak) by emphasizing the oceans over the continents.

Macchi, “Blue Planet”

Elsewhere in in the Biennale, Smith found little to like with the exception of several projects, such as Jananne Al-Ali’s video project Shadow Sites II (2010) [see below],

a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and manmade activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures.

By comparison, Smith suggested that Documenta 13 in Kassel stresses the multiple temporalities of the contemporary. One claim caught my attention: that being on stage (I would say in public) actually creates time. The exhibition includes historical artifacts on this theme, like Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?,  her immensely powerful treatment of National Socialism.

Salomon, “Life? Or Theater?”

I do worry a bit about this, about always using National Socialism as “history” but the exhibition is in Germany and does feature work describing Kassel during the Third Reich.

The center of the show, according to Smith, is an installation called The Brain, centering on works impacted directly by war:

objects like two wonderful Giuseppe Penone stones, small Bactrian princess figures (2500 b. C.), six Giorgio Morandi still lifes, damaged objects from the National Museum of Beirut, a towel stolen in 1945 from the apartment of Adolf Hitler or masks made from iPad wrappings by Judith Hopf.

They even had a token Occupy space, a segment of the Documenta grounds turned over to a small encampment.

Together with the Berlin Biennale use of Occupy as a sideshow, this represents a clear, if not terribly important, attempt to co-opt the “cachet” of Occupy to render an art exhibition “political.” An occupation that is limited in time and space is just a zoo.

What did I take away? Moving past the politics of the “win” to a politics of transformation is a slow politics. It moves paradoxically quickly but it consumes time, takes time away from labor and leisure time alike. More pertinently, it tries to abolish that distinction. For the artist or the writer, there is no greater pleasure than “working.” A slow politics would allow that privilege to all.

All Roads Lead to Wall Street

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What is this? It’s the new poster for the day of action on the OWS anniversary, September 17, 2012. It’s a call for a convergence on Wall Street, still the epicenter of the financial, political and environmental crisis, where still no one has gone to jail. They gave up even trying to bring charges against Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid, the bank so evil it gave capitalists pause. No charges. It’s a restatement of the fundamental reasons that the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” made so many people reply “Hell, yeah.”

It’s more than that. It’s the emergence of three clear priorities within the Occupy movement. They represent our impossible demands. OWS demands an end to corruption in politics. Of course, that would mean overturning the jaw-dropping Supreme Court fix known as Citizens United; it would mean abolishing the endlessly corrupt interface between corporations and legislators; it would mean regulating advertising and reinventing government by the people. So in the present system, to even make this demand is impossible.

We demand debt abolition. Debt is the engine of financial capitalism from the payday loan, the high interest store card and the pawn shop that prey on the low- or unwaged, via the exploding disaster of mortgages and student loans, to the debt vultures who generate spectacular profit on debt. It is unthinkable to abolish debt in the present system, just as it was once unthinkable to abolish slavery. At the same time, it is increasingly clear that the current rate of exploitation cannot be sustained.

Nowhere is that more self-evident than in the crisis of life, the environmental crisis. When you watch little kids play on the beach on a cloudy day in broad-brimmed hats, as in now standard practice in Australia to protect from the UV radiation, you know this has gone too far already. Our bodies feel out of sorts with the weather and strange new patterns. Crops dies in the fields for want of rain in one part of the world, while floods devastate elsewhere.

For thirty or more years, the forces we call “Wall Street” have devastated the social, cultural and biological worlds with their theory of rational actors. In short, all actions are economic at heart and are calculated by each person for their maximum economic benefit. It is this theory of the rational that Occupy challenges as being patently false. It is irrational to sell politics to the most corrupt. It is irrational to have debt collectors pursuing one in seven Americans. It is suicidally irrational to treat the biological resources available to us as infinite.

“Free yourself” means you have the freedom to think for yourself and to do otherwise. S17 is just a day. If you can’t be there or want to start now or want to do something different, that’s all great. These are just some of the threads that comprise the movement. Free your mind, the rest will follow.

Foucault Tourism

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Today to Cockatoo Island: penal colony within the convict colony, industrial reformatory, factory, shipyard, UNESCO World Heritage site and now a venue for the 18th Sydney Biennale. The extraordinary bricolage of colonial punishment, industrial production and knowledge economy cultural production makes for one of those slightly dizzying jet laggy experiences you have only while traveling.

My British forebears did know how and where to build prisons, you have to give them that. The island is isolated in the middle of Sydney harbor, with the prison itself located on top of a steep cliff. Recent excavations have uncovered minute solitary confinement cells, which have a distinctly contemporary look in this Abu Ghraib era. The officials built themselves sandstone residences with a Georgian feel but placed at the highest point to give them a panoptic viewpoint. Grain silos dug into the rock still have chain rings, to which the excavating prisoners were linked while working. The prison was created right at the end of the transportation era in 1849–convicts were not sent to New South Wales after 1850, although they went to Western Australia as late as 1868.

As has often been pointed out, these colonial punishments add a totally different complexion to the idea that European jurisprudence had moved from physical punishment to mental discipline by the early nineteenth century. My view has been that revolutionary action in Europe won workers there a certain (if limited) reprieve from punishment; but colonial punishment intensified in the later nineteenth century as imperialism abandoned all pretension of colonial self-government in favor of direct rule from the metropole. That did not preclude the disciplinary formation of colonized subjects, as the reformatories attest.

In 2000, a group of Aboriginal people occupied the island and claimed it as sovereign territory. You can still see their murals, using the Aboriginal flag as a motif. Using the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, Isabell Coe and others asserted that Britain had never formally claimed the island, a claim rejected by the courts as “inconceivable.” Really? A deserted island on the edge of the harbor? Regardless, Coe created a tent embassy on the island and asserted sovereignty. The occupation of occupied indigenous land and the counterclaim to sovereignty was a powerful performative act.

This, then, is no ordinary post-industrial site to hold an art exhibition. The artists whose work was shown here seemed to be aware of the challenges and many rose to the occasion. I liked Jonathan Jones’s simple approach:

Jones mixed typically British crockery with sea-shells that might be found in an Aboriginal midden in what is now New South Wales. The intermingling is simple but effective.

A more complex approach was taken by Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi in his installation “Nonabel.” You enter a darkened air-raid shelter and see the reflection of a young boy in water projected onto the circular walls. All of a sudden, the image changes dramatically and a montage of Arabic calligraphy and sound installation made me jump, although the phrase being used in the piece apparently means: “if you destroy the image of violence, it will disappear.”

Khaled Sabsabi “Nonabel”

Finally Alec Finlay brought the location of imperial domination up to date with his sound and sculpture installation. To quote his description:

Finlay takes the fluctuations of the stock market and represents them as the ‘buzz’ of Australian honey-bees (recorded by sound-artist Chris Watson), broadcast from 10 multi-storied wooden hives. Each hive stack bears the acronym of a major stock exchange – New York, Toronto, Sao Paulo, London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Sydney – and produces a stream of audio, a buzzing that varies in density and volume in accordance with economic activity.

It was a remarkable sound, rising and falling with the market activity.

Alec Finlay “Swarm ASX”

What made it all the more powerful–although I suspect unintentionally–was that I came upon this piece in the Convict Precinct, just after reading a sign placed by the Sydney Harbor Trust. It described how, when the prison was first established, the prisoners were confined in wooden boxes at night. Is this what the favorite corporate slogan “thinking outside the box” actually means? That if you don’t produce useful ideas, we’ll put you in a box? Bees are said to form colonies. Others describe them as democracies or societies. Finlay also makes nests for “unproductive” wild bees out of books about bees. It’s layered symbolism like this that does important imaginative work, as we would do well to remember in our messaging and imaging in directly political contexts.