Category Archives: Occupy

Capital and the Drought

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From the Guardian

There is devastating drought across about half of the US, caused by fossil fuel capitalism. The drought and resulting food shortages, price rises in basic foodstuffs and resulting inflation is likely to intensify the crisis of capitalism. There will be food riots in places where incomes are low and mostly spent on food. That may include parts of the fossil fuel intensive world, as well as the domain of the wretched of the earth. All the anxiety about the technicalities from CDOs to LIBOR may pale beside the fundamental crisis in producing food for humans and animals, should the drought continue.

The photograph above makes it clear that this set of circumstances is the product of a certain form of financial capital. The ostensible subject of the picture is the wizened corn, so dry that farmers would be delighted to salvage a third of the crop. Any neutral person is also going to want to know about that sign.

It indicates that the corn being grown is not “natural” but a proprietary product of Croplan by Winfield, number 6125VT3. This varietal is intended especially for use in the West. One of its alleged benefits is being drought-resistant:

Hybrids are selected for strong drought tolerance, even when planted at a high plant population. This is important in the western Corn Belt where low plant population is used as a hedge against drought.

Oops. Now you might think that this would lead to farmers not using these crops next year. But it’s not that simple. The seed always belongs to the supplier and contracts lock you in. The particular varietal shown drooping above is a test variant being tried out in various locations. According to a farmers’ chat site, Croplan

source their germ plasm from Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer, Mycogen

meaning the major GMO food monopolists. Croplan is part of WinField Solutions, the third largest seed company and number 1 pesticide outlet in the country. Both are owned by Land O’ Lakes, the dairy conglomerate, itself part of Dean Foods. As a result of these interfaces, Croplan is very keen on corn that is pesticide tolerant.

Again, the supposed benefit to the farmer is plants absorbing more moisture and nutrient.

So farmers have paid for expensive drought-resistant seed that didn’t deliver when really tested. The ramifications of this failure go in many directions. There are vast numbers of genetically modified varietals interacting with the existing seed population to unknown effect. It’s an article of faith among dog owners that GMO corn makes dogs allergic. What does it do to us? Food is becoming more expensive with food prices officially rising 4.8% in 2011 and likely to be much higher again in 2012. An economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas explains:

The impact of higher food prices is felt disproportionately by poorer Americans, Mr. Henderson said. For Americans in the bottom 20% of income, food typically takes up more than a quarter of household income, compared with about 10% for wealthier Americans.

So if food rises 10% in price over two years, you can be sure that the wages and salaries in the lower half of the economy have not risen to match. While the poorer will do worse, the corporate fear is that food will ignite inflation and reduce profits. Dean Foods, owner of the whole chain of corn and milk we’ve been discussing is down 22% in the stock market. I wonder if capital can survive another shock of this size, despite what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine.” If the largest monopolies are struggling, who can take them over?

La Via Campesina in action

So climate change is not “just” a disaster caused by capitalism, which it is; but it’s also a disaster for capitalism. Last week, Via Campesina, the international land-use and peasants’ movement, concluded a successful conference in Indonesia. The Governor of West Sumatra returned expired land use contracts from corporations to ulayat (indigenous peoples/community rights). The final declaration called for the movement:

to incorporate other peoples who are threatened by the same current phenomena, including urban dwellers threatened with impoverishment and with eviction to make way for real estate speculation; peoples who live under military occupation; consumers who face ever higher prices for food of ever worsening quality; communities facing eviction by extractive industries; and rural and urban workers.

I would say that sounds like an agenda I can agree with, wouldn’t you? More than that, it sounds like the agenda we need.

 

Occupy Outside OWS

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For people in OWS one of the most annoying media memes is “Occupy is over.” When there’s so much going on, it seems almost perverse to those of us on the inside. Now that I’ve spent a whole week without going in person to an OWS event for the first time in quite a while, I get a better sense of why it seems reasonable to say so. While Occupy certainly continues, from the outside OWS can seem sealed, even hermetic.

Here in Long Island there’s plenty of need for Occupy and a decent level of activity. Suffolk County has been hard hit by the mortgage crisis. House prices went stupidly high around 2008 and have now gone into deep decline. As many as 10% of local homes are in foreclosure, leading Suffolk to be one of the counties considering using eminent domain to resell properties to occupants at what they are now worth. From the Long Island Railroad, you can see people living in the bushes by the side of the tracks. White resentment and racism has been directed at the Latin@ workers who do most of the manual labor, leading to regular Tea Party demonstrations.

However, there’s also an Occupy presence. A week ago, 150 people protested a fundraiser held by the billionaire Koch brothers for Romney in the moneyed Hamptons.

Occupy activists have taken over a storefront in Ronkonkoma, where weekly meetings are held. They have a “Unity Days” action coming up on July 28th for example. There are other Occupy encampments still going around the country in Delaware, Tampa and Santa Rosa (thanks Astra!).

If these actions seem to add up to less of a network these days, perhaps that’s to do with the way in which the communications and messaging of the dispersed Occupy groups has operated. In dispersing into a thousand Google groups, listservs, email threads, Facebook pages and so on, these actions can seem closed to “outsiders,” meaning people who are not yet involved. People have been saying this for a while, I’m aware.

It’s only now that I myself start to be away more from NYC that I’m seeing how it works. It’s not deliberate. It’s the result of a smaller group of people keeping up a ridiculous amount of volunteer work. Messages become telegraphic, or refer to issues, discussions or events that it’s assumed the reader is aware of but may not be. Catching up is hard and it deters former activists from resuming in the movement.

There’s such a sense of urgency, and rightly so, that maybe actions and campaigns are being somewhat rushed into being. The fear is that if we slow down we disappear. The risk is that if we don’t, what we do does not have the purchase it should.

 

The Minera, Melisma and the Miners

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For today, I want to take eight minutes of your time that you might normally spend reading this site for watching and listening. Go to this video of the flamenco singer Rocío Márquez Límon performing a minera in a striking coal mine on July 5 this year. (Thanks to Matthew Bain for posting this on Facebook, where I saw it). Ignore the ad at the front of the piece.

The miners had been underground for 45 days at this point. The austerity regime of conservative prime minister Rajoy has withdrawn all financial subsidy from the mines in Asturia and Leon. As a result, the coal will become unprofitable and the mines will close, putting thousands out of work. They have walked from their homes 250 miles to Madrid to protest to be greeted with riot police. Over 100,000 people assembled in Madrid this week in further protest at yet more cuts demanded by the “markets” otherwise known as Germany.

If you’re my age, from where I come from, you’ve seen this before with the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, which brought the world the delights of Billy Elliot. In the real world, people lost their jobs, communities were devastated and, just as she intended, Mrs Thatcher consolidated her neo-liberal regime. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out that way this time.

OK, now really do watch the video. Watch the way the singer’s performance changes the faces of the strikers from defeat through grief to a renewed engagement. The faces are extraordinary, reminiscent of Ribera or other Spanish painters of the period–which is to say, one of the few moments in Western art when the faces of actual people could appear in representation.

Ribera

The trace of Arab culture is audible in flamenco, five hundred years after the Reconquista, in the melisma that echoes the quarter tones of Arabic music. In recent years, this evocative sound has been reduced to an audible cliché by its compulsive overuse in pop music of the American Idol variety. There it speaks to the simulacrum of emotion, the unreal reality of Reality TV that is increasingly indistinguishable from mainstream political and cultural discourse.

It’s not that Límon has access to a “real real” that media can’t depict because we are, after all, watching it on video made available by El Pais, a major Spanish newspaper. My point is that the minera is a song form about the hardship of the mining life that is able to create a connection between these people based on common experience that has history behind it and a sense of purpose other than the circulation of commodities. You might find all these qualifications a bit tiresome and academic but the market has so capitalized even the expression of human emotion that they are, I think needed, at least in words.

But if you watched and listened you already know what I mean.

 

Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on

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Reconstruction in the US after abolition was, whether it knew it or not, following the pattern established by Haiti during its revolution. So it seemed like a good time to take a look and see how reconstruction after the disastrous earthquake of 2010 has been going. The headlines are bad: multinational sweatshops and mining are moving in, very little of the promised aid has been disbursed, debt continues to be a burden. The glimmer of hope comes from the literally grassroots work of the Haitian peasant movement. It is as if nothing has happened since 1801: capital wants to see a restoration of the plantation, while the peasants want land, water and sustainable employment.

The Haitian revolution was long and violent. By 1801, it was clear that the formerly enslaved would win. Toussaint Louverture issued a constitution, which intensely disappointed his own side. For Toussaint, large scale cash-crop agriculture was vital both to the formation of a nation-state in general and to repaying his loans to the United States in particular. The formerly enslaved were to work as laborers for a wage.

The subaltern rank-and-file revolted against their own revolution, in search of small plots of land they could farm collectively and create a long-term guarantee against re-enslavement, whether as chattel or wage slaves. Toussaint felt compelled to repress the revolt, and even assassinated his own nephew Moïse who was its leader. The Trinidad radical C. L. R. James later saw this as the defining failure of the revolution in his classic The Black Jacobins (1938, reissued 1968).

CLR James

Although Pétion, later President of Haiti, did indeed begin an experiment with land redistribution, until the imposition of a massive indemnity on the country by France in 1825 did away with it. The indemnity of 150 million French francs is widely held to have decimated Haiti’s nascent recovery from the revolutionary wars and pushed it towards the poverty with which it is now synonymous. At the time of the disastrous earthquake in 2010, Haiti had once again accumulated extensive external debt of about $1.8 billion, mostly due to the antics of the U. S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship. Although the IMF and World Bank were pressured into cancelling about $250 million of that debt, the bulk remains.

A group of intellectuals, led by Etienne Balibar and Noam Chomsky, reiterated in 2010 the call made by former President Jean-Baptiste Aristide in 2003, for French reparations to Haiti. Needless to say, given that Sarkozy was then President of France, this did not happen. But finally, two centuries after the citizens of Haiti had done so, the op-ed intellectuals began to call for small-scale sustainable agriculture as the way ahead for the country.

At the Rio+20 summit, some information did emerge about what has happened since 2010. The UN has come to be seen as a neo-liberal occupation force. Mining companies have moved in. The Guardian reports:

More than a third of Haiti’s north – at least 1,500 sq km – is under licence to US and Canadian companies.

It’s such a small country, but there is allegedly copper, silver and gold up there and very little of the environmental legislation that is so bothersome to mining elsewhere.

Map of Caracol from the NY Times

The one major financial investment to date is by a South Korean company who intend to create a maquiladora site in Coracel. Needless to say, the plant will use heavy fuel oil for electricity generation (built by the US) and is situated on prime farm land and at a key watershed.

Jean Anil Louis-Juste (1957-2010)

There are glimmers of hope, even if one of most effective intellectual advocates for change, sociology professor Jean Anil Louis-Juste was mysteriously assassinated just prior to the earthquake. He created reading groups like the Gramsci Circle at the State University’s School of Human Sciences and Ethnology, where he taught. He wrote and taught in Kréyol, the local language that emerged out of slavery. Anil had advocated for a $5 a day minimum wage, especially at his university, and for an a new environmentally-centered education program and citizenship. He noted that the ecological disaster in Haiti has accelerated, rather than improved:

In the 1920s, we had 20% of the country covered with forest. In the 1990s,we had less than 2%. We are about 60% short of the land we would need to live in equilibrium with the environment.

The Mouvement paysan de Papaye (Peasant Movement of Papaye) are another. They advocate for sustainable agriculture, health care, education and a self-supporting Haiti.  MPP’s website appears to be down at the moment but others report on their work educating farmers how to conserve water through the dry period and to create irrigation. However, this is slow work, 60 peasants at a time.

But the multinationals won’t stay once the easy money from the Clinton foundation dries up.

The MPP have been working on this for two hundred years.

Occupy is ten months old today.

Reconstruction at Work

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What would we have to reconstruct after abolition? How might we think about the relations between the gender and sexuality expressed in finance with the exploration of  new forms of living? The abolition of debt and the refusal of heroes was and is mediated by land. Land is a way to think our relation to the biosphere extinction. It’s at the root of the ongoing disaster of personal debt via mortgages (details tomorrow), just as it was key to the possibility of a post-slavery Reconstruction.

I can’t as yet make this all come out neatly. But here are the things circulating in my mind. The 1868 Constitutional Convention in South Carolina was pre-occupied with debt and identity. A proposal was made to ban the words “negro, nigger and Yankee” but it was voted down at once. There was a debate whether to outlaw discrimination by “race or color.” Many of the freed wanted to keep the word “color” out of the new Constitution. Others feared that without an explicit ban, Democrats would find a way to  divide people by “race,” as indeed they did. Very late in the Convention there was an unsuccessful proposal to enfranchise women, who did so much of the work of abolition and reconstruction.

The true division of the sensible that was the ongoing class war in South Carolina in 1868, as it had been since 1863, was over land. The freed wanted above all to have some land, as means to form autonomous communities. They saw that the altermative was poverty and/or the penitentiary, as Angela Davis has so often reminded us.

Richard H. Cain

The minister Richard Harvey Cain, who later served two terms in Congress as a Republican, proposed a solution: the Convention would apply to Congress for a $1 million loan in order to buy land for re-sale to the freed and poor whites. The ensuing debate was the nastiest of the Convention and made it clear to the African American delegates that the Confederates still believed that a “negro would never own a foot of land” in the state.

In the Convention, Cain put his proposal to sell plots of land over a five-year period like this:

We want these large tracts of land cut up…What we need is a system of small farms…I believe there are hundreds of persons in the jail and penitentiary cracking rock today who have all the instincts of honesty, and who, has they the opportunity of making a living would never have been found in such a place.

Reconstruction was made to fail by means of the emergent prison-industrial complex, from the determination of planters to offer only starvation wages to make share-cropping seem preferable to the use of all state apparatus to confound efforts to buy land.

The resolution to request a loan from the Bureau of Freedmen passed but was ignored in Washington. In 1869, the state established its own Land Commission to buy and resell land. The freed made all efforts they could.

South Carolina Land Commission Records

You can see here that the land was selling for $1.50 an acre, compared to the planters’ (starvation) wages of $5 a month. A woman called Lucy Singleton bought a 30 acre plot, as did Charlotte Johnson with her spouse or relative Toby. For the most part, these ventures did not end well. The repayments proved beyond them, as the Wall Street crash of 1873 depressed prices for all produce. The very short repayment window was not a great idea.

Some did succeed. Cain himself established a settlement called Lincolnville with six others, which they selected because it was next to the railroad tracks. The town is still there today. Others survived in what had long been liminal spaces on the coast. If you’re of a certain age you might remember the intersection of Carrie Mae Weems and Julie Dash’s work on the Sea Islands twenty years ago.

Carrie Mae Weems, “Ebo Island”

This was the first time I had heard of the self-killing of the enslaved–it happened often in fact, because in their world-view death would later be followed a re-birth in Africa.

Her photograph of the site of Ibo Landing had no caption. It still gives me the creeps today. Released at the same time, Julie Dash’s now classic film Daughters of the Dust (1991) visualized the hyperlinked time of Reconstruction between past and present. Set in 1902, the film shimmies between African pasts and futures in the Sea Islands. Dash explicitly wanted her viewers to think about the beginning and end(s) of the twentieth century, a task that we perhaps have to revive for the new century that is upon us.

None of this provides a simple set of “to do” items that will resolve these interfaces of the economic, with identity, history and temporalities. I would say, though, that those interfaces are exactly what I have taken Occupy to be. It’s not of course that Reconstruction alone pre-figures Occupy. But once you think of a lineage that includes Du Bois, Angela Davis, feminist and African American arts and culture, alternative economics and food provision, you do have something you can work with.

“Debt, debt, debt!”

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These were the opening words of the performance lecture conceived by Ida Daniel and myself in the undergroundzero festival still ongoing in New York. I’m going to describe the performance as a whole today and give a version of the spoken text tomorrow, so as not to go on too long. It’s a bit narcissistic, perhaps, but this is what I’ve been doing in Occupy recently and that’s what this project is about, after all.

Ida, who works as a director in Bulgaria, and I were paired by the festival. She comes from a theatre family. Her grandfather was an influential Brechtian director, as we saw during the performances, when Bulgarian theatre types would approach her reverentially, as might Americans meeting Stanislavsky’s grand-daughter.

Ida attended a Strike Debt assembly in Washington Square Park and became active for the duration of her visit in a working group as well as the assembly. We talked about a format and arrived at a formula whereby the point of the performance would be to undo the idea that we can change the debt situation by means of a more perfect analysis. We wanted to explore the associations of debt with shame and the forms of personal transformation that getting past those connections would entail.

So I went off and wrote some bits and Ida worked with the actors when they could coordinate their schedules. When we started working together it became clear that this was really going to be a performative lecture, not just a lecture with performance around it. Which made me more than a little nervous.

The actors were: Amanda Boekelheide, Darcy Cadman and Tracy Everett, all very gifted and well-trained, all working multiple paying jobs–including preparing apartments to be sprayed for bed bugs–as well as engaging in multiple (often non-paying) acting work. The usual combination of factors meant that they weren’t paid for this performance either, which, for what it’s worth, I did point out to the audience each night (I wasn’t paid of course, but I have a job, so I don’t need to be). The performance was free to the audience as well, though.

The space was a small black-box theatre in the Clemente Soto Veléz Cultural and Education Center on Suffolk Street. There were three lights that operated as on or off so no  fade-in or out was possible, let alone any other theater technology. Somehow, whether because the building is an old school, or because so many performances have taken place there before, it has a very welcoming feel nonetheless. I could imagine a small audience feeling perfectly comfortable there in a way that sometimes you don’t.

The actors opened with a nonsense song that finally converged on a chant of “Debt, Debt, Debt” in the tune of “Frère Jacques.” I emerged from behind a curtain into the space and they carried me in. I was The Expert and they were to be The Assistants. At work here was a combination of Brecht’s theory of the gesture, in which what is not said is as important as what is; with Kafka’s bureaucratic vision in which the not-quite-human Assistants are the only people in whom we can have hope. Ida later told us that she is committed to a theater that thinks, and encourages its audience to think, in body and mind, a very OWS paradigm.

So I introduce the topic of debt, which kept changing as I worked more with the actors, until we got to a point where we engaged in a word association game with the audience. I asked them first to call out how much they were in debt. Then why they were in debt. How it made them feel. And what they wanted to do about it. The Assistants shouted out the answers, wrote them down on the walls of the space and on the floor and gradually created a cacophony of responses. The noise was ended when Amanda picked up Tracy, pushed her against the wall and used her body to erase what was written. She then did the same on the other side with Darcy and he then picked her up to clean off the remaining writing. Meanwhile Tracy used water to clean away any writing on the stage. This was all very funny but we were directed to take it seriously, as our work as The Expert and The Assistants.

In the second half, then, having given up on the idea of a pure analysis, I talked about the curious associations of debt with shame and thought about how we might claim an abolition of debt that we will have to do ourselves. At a certain point in this discussion, the Assistants revived themselves and began a complicated and funny game of exchanging clothing with each other and myself. This game was halted only when I brought out a cake to share–an example I use in the lecture part to show why we will always have debt as a form of social obligation, even if monetary debt disappears.

We distributed the cake to the audience and each performer shared a story about their own experience with debt. We then invited the audience to share stories as well. As I mentioned, Occupy people, who are used to this, took up the offer with alacrity. The second night, when we had performers from other shows in the festival as our main audience, there was surprisingly less willingness to share, even though many people came up to us afterwards and told stories or hinted at them. Debt is so destructive, so hard to discuss.

Debt, debt, debt.

 

Occupy Theatre

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A note to holdover the writing project as a daily endeavor. Today was dominated by three and a half hours on the Long Island Railroad in and out of an insanely hot New York. All worth it though, for the pleasure of working with great actors and engaging with a generous audience who braved the hottest day I can remember to fill the little space for our second and final performance of “Yours In Debt!”

Yesterday we were playing to a largely Occupy-friendly audience, meaning a group of people involved in Occupy and others familiar with its process. So when we called out for audience questions, comments and sharing, they knew exactly what we meant. Tonight was an audience drawn more from theatre, with the exception of my OWS affinity group on Politics and Visual Culture. Collectively, then, this audience wanted more from us in a way but also allowed us to perform a little more, which the real actors in the group appreciated. They were less responsive in the discussion although that was certainly also heat-related.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of a curtain call for a performative lecture on debt, except to thank people for their generosity. I am left with a sense that orchestrating the Occupy project around debt does allow us to reach people in a different way and to reach different people. It most certainly will not be a simple process and it is unlikely to be fast. But on a day when Gayatri Spivak sat out in Washington Square Park and discussed debt with a crowd of Summer Disobedience School students and we worked with a crowd of Eastern European theatre people, perhaps you get that little Occupy shiver, when you do think that another world is possible.

Many years ago I had ambitions to be an actor, only for the realities of trying it to prove very clearly that this was not a path open to me. It’s one of the odder aspects of Occupy’s culture of mutual aid to offer people a second chance like this,  but it’s a memory I will be grateful for. I’ll actually describe what was said and performed later today but for now that’s all folks.

Performing Occupy

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We drove into Manhattan on yet another sizzling day for the “Yours In Debt!” debut and the first thing we saw was a Banksy mural on the Lower East Side, which seemed like a good omen. Then I got a big piece of red felt at a fabric store to make red squares for ten bucks, even better.

The Lower East Side has so changed. A lifetime ago I used to come down to Delancey to get salsa records when I was a DJ. Chi-chi it was not but it had a great vibe and I still have some of those records. Now there’s an organic juice place on every corner–the one opposite where we are working on Suffolk has the most expensive juice I’ve ever seen. It’s good–but $9 for a small container? The old jewish shop signs still survive but under them there are art galleries, hat shops, feminist sex toy stores and all the other paraphrenalia of hipsterdom.

I’ll write something about the content of the piece later but for now I’ll just reflect on this performance of Occupy. Last September and October, the performance was all about process, the mechanics of direct democracy. For those of us who had not had much experience of the global justice movement it was at once fascinating and liberating. OWS was about everything it seemed.

There’s less simple optimism now but more purpose. I was moved to see the front row of the performance filled with Strike Debt comrades, who have all heard me say this stuff before and anyway know just as much about it. When the lights came up I was somewhat embarrassed–and also delighted– to see David Graeber sitting right in the back, as is his wont. My role in the performance is The Expert, who talks about debt. So it was a little bizarre realize that I had done it in front of the real expert in the field.

Sometimes people say Occupy is inward-looking and perhaps there’s some truth to that, as there is in any organization. There’s also real solidarity, as I saw tonight watching people leave in sweat-drenched shirts from the black box space, whose low-rent A/C was not up to the challenge of 95 degrees.

It’ll be interesting to see if events like these and the direction taken over this summer mark a turn to Occupy having a clearer sense of its political targets and self-identity. These will probably be needed if the watch-words “disperse/strike” are to have purpose. Can Occupy consense to consense? So far, I’d say yes.

Phase Two, in rehearsal

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A final day of rehearsals for our debt performance piece “Yours In Debt!” I know people who always practice their talks ahead of time and I’ve done this when I have time. It’s always worth it. Workshopping a set of discussions like this with people skilled in performance has been very interesting. They have been gentle with me and very careful to be subtle about pushing me in a different direction. Over the course of the brief time that we’ve been able to work on the talks, they have notably changed nonetheless.

The simplest way to describe this shift is one away from a fact-laden analysis towards the emotional and spatial experience of being “in” debt and what it would mean to get “out” of debt. In short, in classic Occupy fashion, it’s starting to feel like an exploration of what it would mean to give people permission to view these issues with something other than shame and subjection.

One indication of how far there is to go came from the only question posed by a Bed-Stuy dwelling, bike-riding alternative theatre person, who watched the tech run: “What about people who do pay their debts?” So we talked about how it was likely that many if not most people would not be happy with the bank or other creditor and might well think that they deserved more favorable terms of repayment. It still seemed clear that the idea of strike debt, let alone a debt strike, was something that made her quite uncomfortable.

Nor did anyone at the theatre who was not part of OWS recognize the red square that I had thought was now widely recognized. I suppose I have naive assumptions that alternative arts people are necessarily aware of political issues, like my friends in OWS and at places like the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. But then most politics people don’t get what’s going on with performance.

Right now, Occupy Theory has two slogans for Phase Two.

From base to disperse.

From Occupy to strike.

The point is that these are goals, not statements of what has been achieved. It’s a change of approach. Projects like this make me feel both that we have a long way to go and that making progress with it, at least at first, won’t be as hard as you might think.

 

 

 

A Walk on the West Side

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New York is a very parochial city. You tend to stay where you feel comfortable and move in a set of familiar patterns. Today I was out of my comfort zone all over the West side, observing a new corporate district emerging and engaging in some rehearsals for a performance at the end of the week.

Today began with a walk back down the High Line from 30th Street, where I left my car to be fixed with a great group of guys from Côte d’Ivoire. They got a huge kick out of the fact that I speak French, which is apparently not common in their usual clientele of South Asian taxi drivers and New York City officials. It was a place that I fetched up at because of Yelp!  As is not uncommon in global cities of the South, this shop actually fixes things, albeit in an improvised fashion. I usually feel wildly out of place in US car places, where it is really obvious I don’t do mainstream masculinity at all well. Here was fine, we talked about the European soccer championships and made fun of people in French.

The casual improvised feel could not be more removed from the High Line. It has extended Chelsea’s art district north and allows for walkers to see works displayed in non-traditional spaces. So there was a large portrait by JR, the French art-ivist, as he calls himself on the back wall of a house. Usually I love JR’s stuff but one piece by itself seemed out of place, just another commercial display. Even early in the morning, the High Line crawls with people, mostly tourists, all taking extensive photographs.

At the north end, there’s a massive building project going on over the West Side railyards. Two full city blocks are being converted into the usual mix of offices, high-end apartments and retail outlets with one or two affordable places in undesirable locations thrown in as a sop. One site is being developed by our old friends Brookfield Properties. This site, which they are calling Manhattan West was announced on September 2, 2011, just two weeks before OWS moved into Zuccotti Park. It stretches from 31st to 33rd Streets and from 9th to Dyer Avenue. It’s huge. When you see the scale of all this, it’s amazing to think that Occupy has had any impact at all.

From there I had to go up to Columbia University to rehearse for what is being billed as a performative lecture on debt in the series Debt! hosted by undergroundzeronyc, a theater festival. The project brings together directors from Eastern Europe, with performers and lecturers from New York. Our project, “Yours In Debt!“, is being co-ordinated by Ida Daniel, from Bulgaria, whose work, so far as I have seen it, seems very much influenced by Brecht and behind him Kafka. The performance we’re doing has an Expert and Assistants, and the latter were very important characters in Kafka.

Kafka

Just as in Kafka, the Assistants are really in charge of the performance, not because of the way it is structured, so much as because they really are performers. Working on exits and entrances, thinking about cues and so on, you realize how glib the academic use of performative often can be. Applied to ourselves, it means that we do what we do anyway but now with a sexier name. Actually performing feels much harder, even though the topic is one with which I am now only too familiar.

Or is it just rehearsing, trying to work out how to work with people in a space whose dynamics are new? Put like that, it starts to seem more familiar. There is a curious dynamic here by which I began writing about the performativity of Occupy and now I am doing a performance about Occupy. This is what happens if you venture onto the West Side.