Category Archives: Occupy

The Aesthetics of Occupy

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If it seems surprising to talk about the aesthetics of Occupy, it shouldn’t. This is a movement that uses the term “beautiful” as one of high praise in a non-ironic way. Nonetheless, this is not the beauty so prized by the art world. Occupy has made an aesthetic from being out of place that has come to have a noticeable affect in the run up to May Day.

I’m describing Occupy as aesthetic in the sense of Rancière and, as he would say, the Greeks. Rather than signifying beauty, as it would for Kant, he intends

an “aesthetics” at the core of politics …as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.

That is to say, if politics is the determination of relations between the visible and the sayable, there are certain forms that determine what can be “seen” and what is kept out of sight; between what may be said and what cannot; between what is said and understood, and said and not understood; and, finally, how we determine what it is to call something visible and sayable.

It is, then, not for nothing that the sign became Occupy’s first and perhaps most noticeable form. The classic Occupy sign is made on cardboard torn from a box and not bought specially from an art shop. It’s written in felt tip or Sharpie. The point is that it says something distinctive and interesting. One of my favorites:

This sign expresses what many were feeling at the time of the Liberty Plaza occupation and does so with wit and intelligence: it makes you smile and it makes you think. For some art world people, this is a “hand-made” aesthetic, perhaps a little past its sell-by date. My guess is that the person who made this is utterly unaware of that narrative and if they were, they could care less. This object was made to be seen but not displayed, let alone sold.

To really understand the aesthetics of Occupy, you have to get into what it means to say, for example, that the OWS library was beautiful.

OWS Library October 2011

Which it most certainly was. In part, that’s because it was a library that did not discipline its readers. It knew what it had, and what it had lent, but no one was under obligation to return a book if they liked it. There were no fines or people telling you to be quiet. More even than that, there was a sense that this was beautiful because it was out of place, unlikely and untypical. It challenged our sense of “what there is to see there” and, like all the Occupy sites, turned drab anonymous space into a place that had a certain magic to it.

You need to have felt that magic, which I’ve discussed before as being the gift economy of Occupy that worked even though it wasn’t supposed to do so, to get the varied ways that May Day has been imagined. On the lovely Occuprint May Day site, there are noticeably no Social Realist images, other than a few clenched fists, mostly from Oakland, where there is a historical tradition of radicalism and Black Power. More typical is this popular poster in NYC at the moment by Ethan Heitner (by the way, I don’t know any of these artists):

The hand-drawn image of kite-flying in a park on a sunny day nicely sets off the crisp graphic. It’s not whimsical, though. It’s after that “magic” that the aesthetics of Occupy offered: you shouldn’t be in the park flying a kite–an odd American insult is “go fly a kite”–you should be doing one of those things you’ve decided not to do for one day.

The image chosen for the most widely disseminated May 1 leaflet shares this aesthetic:

Detail of Nina Montenegro's poster

In this image, Nina Montenegro turns the “daily grind” into a visual image out of which new shoots of Spring are growing. The received image of the general strike, whether from Seattle on 1919 or Russia in 1905, could not be more different than such feminist imagery. It says a lot about what OWS thinks itself to be that it was selected.

Last, and perhaps by a short head my favorite, is one I’ve already posted but here it is again:

Elizabeth Knafo and MPA

Elizabeth Knafo and MPA have created a visualization of a theme that I’ve often discussed here–the sense of “movement time,” the way in which we’re reclaiming our time, both day to day, hour to hour and in general. The combination of a simple hand painted sun eclipsing the clock by which our lives are dictated and bringing a warm yellow light to a mass direct action: “Whose Time? Our Time.”

The posters tell a story of a movement that has indeed moved: seeds, flowers, women, the sun, kites, machinery only as the past, clenched fists to recall past actions. I’d rather see no fists at all, true, but it’s only been six months.

After Striking

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For the first time at OWS you can hear the words “After May Day.” It seems almost surreal after so much planning for this day. When the events of May are over, it’s a fair bet that the global social movements will once again have the world’s attention. What will we do with this second chance? It’s time to begin imagining how to connect our issues.

So as not to lay this on anybody else, I’m going to explore this by means of the most popular topic in my own project–namely student debt–and the least, which would be climate change. How can we avoid being co-opted on the former and ignoring the latter?  No answers, no demands, just questions for the Spring.

Student debt has become a viral topic in the past four months. Barely mentioned in the media until recently, it was theme of the week in the presidential and congressional elections. And what was until this week a mostly OWS slogan is now in the mix:

Romney Super PAC ad

Yes, Mitt Romney’s Super PAC called American Crossroads has used the Occupy Student Debt slogan in an attack ad against Obama. The quote marks in this still I made from their video suggest that they even know where it comes from. The theme of the ad is that while Obama is off being a “celebrity,” real problems have been mounting for American young people.

Obama has indeed done little to mitigate the student debt crisis, although the subject was one of his most reliable applause lines in 2008. Romney has no solution at all, certainly not the one proposed by OSDC: free public education. He knows Obama won’t argue for anything like that. If this meme goes viral across the Right, we risk losing one of the most effective OWS projects.

On the other hand, from micro to macro, climate change is  dropping out of sight in Occupy. When I post about it, as I noticed when I did finally look at the stats before going to Madison, readership plummets. In the Occupy global action week coming up in mid-May, climate is not mentioned at all, no doubt for fear of this alienating effect.

A news item this week seemed to encapsulate this dilemma. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, workers at a French steel plant owned by the multinational giant ArcelorMittal  have been occupying it to try and prevent its closure. However, an article in Le Monde this week clarified why the plant is not opened or closed.

This is a bit complicated, so here’s the takeaway: the steel producers are using climate change carbon credits to make a load of money for doing nothing. In more detail: under the terms of the European Union carbon trading agreement, companies were given a “free” level of pollution in 2005. Emissions would have to be paid for if they exceeded this level but a credit could be achieved by reducing them below it. ArcelorMittal has “reduced” its emissions by simply closing its plants. While some of its credits have been stored, others have been cashed in, allowing them to make $140 million in 2010: for doing nothing at all.

So if François Hollande wins the presidential election and gives ArcelorMittal an incentive to reopen the plant, it will have to be sufficiently large to exceed this free money and all the costs of actually producing. That’s not allowed by the “market,” the same market that gave all these credits to ArcelorMittal in the first place. They can cash them in, or hold the French government to ransom for a few jobs, with any actual steel production being carried out in India without tiresome regulations.

Here we see the pincer movement of financialized capital. The most widely accepted solution to the financial crisis from the Paul Krugman wing of the Democratic Party to the left is economic growth. For the green left, however, growth means more carbon emissions and accelerated climate change. For anarchists, it’s now taken as read that the current permanent expansion of capitalism must collapse because there are not infinite resources to exploit.

However, if you can capitalize total inactivity at technically an infinite rate of profit–and don’t forget all those tax deductions for the declining hardware and the savings on salary–this implosion may allow for a continued rate of profit even if there is widespread climate change.

I don’t have a simple answer to these dilemmas. I do think it suggests that a new form of affinity group is going to have to think how to cross the lines of the existing working groups to imagine a form of systemic critique that goes beyond the perhaps self-evident anti-capitalism. And that’s precisely as not simple as it sounds. The upside is that the space created by the activism of May gives enough time to get on it.

Striking New Relationships

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Why do we strike on May Day? What is that strike? We strike in solidarity with global labor, our own histories and with each other. The action of striking is not just a withdrawal of labor but what Marina Sitrin calls “striking new relationships.” The actions of refusal to play the part expected of us, in whatever way we can, and imagining other ways of relating to each other are what will constitute a day of generally striking, a striking day.

Let’s review the call for a Day Without the 99 percent:

  • No Work: for many there is no need to respond because they have no work. For others, refusing to work is legally impossible or would endanger them too greatly. Those of us who can do so will withdraw our labor in solidarity with the precarity and dangers suffered by those who cannot.

  • No School: in Bloombergistan, only 13% of African-American and Latin@ students graduate high school ready for college. Those who make it find that the ticket to employment literally comes with a mortgage: one million people now have student debt of over $100,000 or more. We leave school to insist it is a right not a privilege and, for a day, those of us who can will offer classes freely to all who care to attend to prefigure the learning that is to come.
  • No Housework: domestic labor continues to make the world liveable, and as harmonious and possible as it can. The women, children and (some) men who perform that labor have to endure the insult of one percenters like Ann Romney claiming their dignity. We will not engage in this invisible labor for one day in order to reclaim it and to show solidarity with those who are compelled by neoliberalism to act as full-time carers without support, whether for elders, children, the dis/abled or  others in need.
  • No Banking: here we refuse to participate in the system of financial distribution and exchange that has so impoverished us all and yet has been allowed to carry on as if nothing happened. The financialization of everything and everyone has made it difficult to withdraw entirely from the banking system, as many used to be able to do. We can plan to move our money to credit unions and other co-operatives.
  • No Shopping: consumers dictate the success or failure of the one percent. By refusing to shop for things that we do not need, we can show how the concept of permanent growth is unsustainable.

What we will do is more important than what we will not do. We will share ideas, skills, food, music, art, friendship, solidarity and space. We will assert that striking new relationships is living, while working for life is not. Over the course of four months of planning, Occupy has become the autonomous, decentralized movement that was promised in September 2011. The combination of mutual aid, direct action, direct democracy, affinity groups and the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, enabled and facilitated by digital technologies, has changed many lives already. This “internal” process of transformation is now ready to reach out to many others.

Will capitalism fall on May 1? No. But it’s doing a good job of collapsing on its own at the moment. The more we refuse to come to its aid, the quicker that moment may come.

Will cities grind to a halt on May 1? No. Transport workers are not on strike, so that people can easily get to the events and so that those who have no choice but to work can do so.

Will there be more life, more laughter, more music, more creativity, more confrontation, more raising of awareness, more solidarity: in short, more love? Yes, she said, yes, yes, yes.

These new relationships will reconfigure our relationship to U. S. history and to the rest of the world. It was in Chicago in 1886 that May Day strikers called for the eight-hour working day. The demonstration ended with a bomb being thrown that culminated in the notorious Haymarket Affair and the execution of four people, none of whom had been shown to be responsible for throwing the mysterious bomb.

From that event, May Day has become the global festival of labor. For many years, unions in this country have refused to participate in May Day events for fear of being labeled Communists. Now, more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, labor, immigrants and Occupy activists are coming together to act in solidarity with the global 99%.

Why post this today rather than May 1? Because I will be striking on May 1 in whatever ways I can and it’s not too late for you to think of some way in which you can as well. Please join us.

1T Day: Waiting for the Debt Jubilee

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At the time I began writing this, I should have been at the Occupy Student Debt march to mark 1T Day, the day when student debt crossed the one trillion dollar mark. Instead I was in an airport waiting room, watching cable TV and thinking about the Jubilee. It turned out to be a good place to spend 1T Day after all.

According the Wall Street Journal, a trillion dollars of student debt may have happened as early as February. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York put student debt at $870 billion in December 2011, so it must be close. But no-one really knows.

Instead of participating in this day of action, I was waiting for a delayed plane that was at first said to need “cleaning.” This process went on and on, until United admitted that they could not clean the plane. It became clear that a vast malfunction of the toilet system had, well, covered the plane in shit.

Sitting there with my copy of David Graeber’s Debt, it seemed to me that this plane was a metaphor for the financial crisis itself. This system, in which our duties are to “sit back and relax,” while under the restraint of keeping your “seatbelt securely fastened,” promised to function invisibly, magically shrinking distance at ever-reduced cost. Instead, fossil fuel use has destroyed the atmosphere, corporations cannot successfully manage to privatize what should be a public system, and we have all been literally and metaphorically sprayed with their effluent.

In my waiting room haze, I mused that this spray was given literal form by the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, which has recently been shown to be caused by the oil company’s excessive greed for profits, in the just the way that you always knew it had been. The repellent John Brown, former CEO of BP, ordered his staff to

Go to the limit. If we go too far, we can always pull back later.

So that’s all right then. Browne then went on to cover himself in further glory by heading the Browne Review of higher education in the UK, which argued for the end of limits to tuition fees. The result has been that education that was provided to me freely is now being charged for at £9000 a year (about $16,000)–reasonable by some US standards perhaps but the upward acceleration is so dramatic, you have to wonder where it ends. Corporate profligacy is rewarded by the ability to recommend individual austerity. Or simply put, big oil creates student debt.

As I waited, I heard the phrase “student debt” from the TV. CNN was covering Obama speaking today at the University of Iowa. He revealed that he and Michele had only managed to pay off their own student debt in 2004, at the time he became a US Senator. The students cheered wildly, although I’m not sure why: because Obama was therefore like them? Or because they could imagine emerging from their indebtedness to become a Senator or a President? It’s telling that Obama made this speech at a land-grant public university. Until very recently, such institutions would have been low-cost or free, especially for in-state students. The University of Wisconsin, where I was just visiting, had a 5% tuition raise this year as the icing on the cake of another round of serious cuts amounting to $250 million.

Obama gave a good soundbite but the change he is advocating for is trivial. He is calling for interest on Federal Stafford loans to remain at 3.4%, rather than doubling to 6.8% as they are set to do this July. As the money comes from the Federal Reserve, whose prime rate is next to zero, this still represents substantial exploitation of students and their families. Indeed the objection is the “loss” of revenue, entirely notional in any event, which amounts to a rounding error in the Pentagon budget. It’s not going to happen in a Republican-dominated Congress anyway, it’s just a bit of electoral theatre.

As Graber says at the end of his book, what we need is a debt jubilee, meaning a cancellation of debt, as called for by the Bible, which is always right in America, except when it benefits those who need debt. Sitting there in the airport, I reflected that like most airlines, United has been through bankruptcy, as American Airlines currently is doing. Unlike personal bankruptcy, such corporate bankruptcy is very rewarding. The company gets to restructure its debt, reduce its obligations to its workforce, and increase costs for its customers. These bankruptcies brought you things like baggage check charges and no food on planes, while reducing salary, benefits and pensions for airline workers, putting them, no doubt, in debt.

So, like George Costanza, we need to do the opposite: cancel debt for ordinary people. Create more jobs by turning the airlines, subways and railroads into a sustainable, integrated low-cost public transport system. Reduce the retirement age so employers need to hire new staff. All financed by taxes on financial transactions and increasing taxes on capital gains to the same levels as income. Impossible demands? Maybe. But when Occupy Student Debt was established six months ago, we weren’t having a national discussion about reducing student debt and now we are doing. Let’s see where we are in six more months, shall we?

Meta

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At the invitation of an interesting and impressive faculty/student discussion group calling themselves “Aesthetic Relations” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had the slightly unnerving and very meta experience of discussing this project with real, live human beings. Although I do have interactions with readers online, this was the first time that I have talked about it with people other than friends and family. It seemed appropriate to do this in Madison, where the US wing of the global resistance first got going.

I stressed that this is not an “academic” project, or even a digital humanities project, like those I do with Media Commons or the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Such projects are on my academic CV and there is much discussion internally about credentialing and peer review. Occupy 2012 does not have these concerns. It’s a documentation of a process.

This process might be described as the way in which I have tried to measure what commitment might mean in relation to this very different movement. That is to say, if the engagé intellectual of the 1960s had to work out a relation to the “party,” at least in Europe, none of those terms quite applies here. While I’m engaged in the educational side of the movement, like the forthcoming Free University of New York City and the journal Tidal, there’s no operative activist/intellectual distinction in the movement. I do think that’s true, despite the obvious prominence of figures like David Graeber and Judith Butler in their different ways. Perhaps, as I’ve been suggesting over the past couple of days, we might now be in a position to move beyond the 60s paradigms that have dominated discussion and thought ever since.

In this sense, I was glad that the Madison group noticed how I’ve been calling this a durational writing project, a form that’s derived from durational performance art, rather than a blog pure and simple. Of course it uses blogging software and is a blog in format. But the commitment of writing every day makes it much different than the experience of blogging, which I did on and off all of last year. The blogger chooses when to write at will and can polish a post until s/he is completely satisfied with it. Writing every day drives the project in a different rhythm: sometimes I feel in control of it, sometimes it seems in control of me, and sometimes it’s plain out of control.

This stressing of terms of discipline and control comes from a theme that emerged in the discussion last night. One way to measure the present crisis in what I have called visuality, or the way that authority tries to authorize itself, is precisely as the end of a “human” that is dominated by measurement, disciplinary apparatus, techniques for the modification of population and coloniality. In this transition, whether to a new form of authority or a democratized democracy, change has very different forms. So the neoliberal hostility to state-sponsored education, welfare and health can be seen as a move away from governmentality, that concern with the conduct of conduct as registered at the level of population. The claim for autonomy within the global Occupy movement is perhaps another response to the same perceived crisis of governmentality. That leads some to think of autonomy as neoliberal, a means of trying to reassert the viability of existing forms of left critique, rather than trying to engage with what might be distinct and emergent in our own time.

This leads to a second theme of yesterday’s discussion: the question of time. I’ve written a good deal about the way in which I’m trying to stay “in the moment,” to draw out the sense that the culture is no longer stable in a set of authorized forms, and thereby to increase the possibility that such forms might change. I’ve talked also about the importance of duration and what I’ve called, after Derrida, the future present.

The group yesterday wanted to add the perspective of the reader, which entails thinking about the archive and past time. People talked about how posts might be read out of sequence, or re-read after the moment, and how the current software platform does not allow for easy searching. Generously, this difficulty was attributed to my wanting to make it not so simple to dive in and take out whatever you might need. That’s more of an accident. In fact, I’ve been constrained by the very commitment of the project to thinking of it on a day to day basis: what shall I do today? what about tomorrow? This has the intended effect for my own activism of giving me an extra motivation to go to actions, meetings and events that the force of the workday might otherwise tempt me to miss.

So I have not in fact thought about the project as an archive. I realized that there are now about 115 posts, that’s probably something like 85,000 words and a lot of visual material. So the discussion went very meta: what would be the best thing to do with all this, assuming it lasts for a while longer, or that it achieves its goal of every day in 2012? Given the short lifespan of web platforms, another more durable archive form might be needed. Some people suggested a PDF, which I think would have to be a set of PDFs so as not to be too huge:) Others were interested in a possible book, although here I have concerns–even if I donate whatever royalties there might be, is it OK to generate revenue for a publisher with OWS materials? As with all the other questions of this project, I keep this open, while welcoming your thoughts.

And here, gentle reader, a message from the Madison group to you: there was a hope that people might share their comments and ideas using the commenting function on the blog, rather than posting them to Facebook or elsewhere. In other words, Facebook is privatizing the Internet and is about to do so with a spectacular creation of profit on all of our labor. The Madison group of readers would like to hear what you’re thinking: so a comment could be thought of as addressing the readership, rather than the writer. There are quite a few of you now–such commenting could form a community of sorts that would give a new impetus to the project. I for one would welcome such a turn.

Diversity of Occupy

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I’m in Madison, Wisconsin, for a few days and finding out the different history of occupation and Occupy in what many people think of as the home of the movement. Here, I’m hearing about the ways in which the legacy of the occupation at the Capital have in fact mitigated the impact of the Occupy movement.

In some ways, what’s happened in Wisconsin is an interesting test case for those looking for demands, structure and leadership from Occupy. When Gov. Scott Walker launched his assault on public sector unions, the Teaching Assistants Association and other unions organized a response that galvanized thousands in February 2011. No one is quite sure how the occupation began–one version was that it originated with a queue to speak. But the energy of that protest has driven an extraordinary campaign that culminated with the ratification of a recall election for the governor and some state senators.

Nonetheless, matters are now poised. Polls show an even divide between Walker and his yet-to-be-decided Democratic opponent. Conversations here are centred around the elections, from Tammy Baldwin’s run for US Senate to the Madison House of Representatives seat currently held by Baldwin, and of course the recall. The difference with the decidedly unconcerned perspective of OWS in regard to the 2012 elections is noticeable and thoroughly understandable. Were I still a Wisconsin resident, as I once was, I would be electorally committed.

Occupy Madison turns against the town mayor Soglin

As a result of this unusual pattern, Occupy Madison is a very different phenomenon than elsewhere. For one thing, it still has an encampment.  The tents stand on a disused parking-lot on the less favored East side of town. The encampment houses about 60 to 100 homeless people. The occupiers-by-choice are no longer part of the movement. While the occupiers have a GA and use the vocabulary of the movement, they are being considered by local authorities as a social services issue, rather than a political one.

Nonetheless, it was a surprise to many in Madison that the local mayor Paul Soglin, a long-tine Madison liberal who has held the office off and on since 1973, evicted Occupy Madison last Friday. His grounds were contractual: he had given a permit to the occupiers until April 30 and their efforts to extend the encampment were in breach of this agreement. From the account in  the Isthmus, the local alternative paper, written by Joe Tarr (4/20/12: 5), the issue came down to how the movement was perceived. For Soglin, the campers were homeless people and Madison feels itself at risk from transient homeless people, who, it is believed, journey to the city from Chicago in search of benefits and other amenities. For others, even in the Common Council, this was a social movement even if the participants happened to be homeless.

So here’s the irony. In Madison, the city that many rightly think of as the origin of the Occupy movement in the US, with its inspiring occupation of the state Capitol, May Day will see the eviction of Occupy Madison, even as 115 other cities are marking a Day Without the 99%. Downtown, you can see shops like “Amsterdam,” better known for its fetish gear, with a window full of Occupy materials, general strike posters and T-shirts recalling the Wisconsin movement.

The stakes here are interesting, considerable and very different to New York. People are hoping to replace a very right-wing governor by means of an electoral coalition that includes all the public sector unions from the students to the police and the corrections officers. Perhaps that’s a viable working model of the 99%. Should that election fail, it may be the end of that model. Or it might be the beginning of a new version of it. Keep an eye on Wisconsin: for once the rhetoric of bell-weather state might be right.

Rancière’s Lesson

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So what happened? While we were expecting a strong showing from the radical left in France, we got an unexpected surge by the racist National Front, and a less-than-predicted turnout for the Left (I exclude the “Socialists”). It seems that some of those who claimed they would vote left actually voted for the Front, because they know that such positions are disgraceful, but they hold to them nonetheless. Somehow, and this is the fallacy, it seems more disappointing from France because of their revolutionary heritage: let’s consider some of that legacy.

So because we don’t have good information on what has happened yet, today seemed like a good day to look at Rancière’s lessons from the contradictory aftermath of 1968, following from the discussion of his interview yesterday. I spent much of the day traveling (I’m on Central time for a few days) and read through several chapters of the recently published translation of his 1974 book Althusser’s Lesson. Rancière’s example shows how the force of a political rupture can change long-held positions: and the risks of such a change.

This book is part Oedipal separation from the bad father, part political testament and (unwittingly) part evidence of how not to deal with a crisis of political belief. Rancière was one of those who worked with Althusser on Reading Capital, published in France in 1966. When the events of 1968 unfolded, Althusser took a now notoriously qualified position, in keeping with that of the French Communist Party (PCF). In 1973, he published a long essay called Reply to John Lewis, a pseudonym used by a writer for the Communist Party of Great Britain in a set of attacks on Althusser published in the Party’s theoretical journal Marxism Today. Althusser’s response reasserted the theoretical position that seemed to have been undermined by 1968 and provoked Rancière to break with his mentor.

As he puts it in the Foreward to the English Edition,

I wrote the book as the efforts to give long-term life to the rupture of 1968 were succumbing to exhaustion and as the resulting disenchantment was taking the form of a radical critique of militantism.

Such critiques were double-edged: there were resistances to “its male and patriarchal forms of power” that most of us would agree with, while others denounced the entire revolutionary tradition in the name of the Stalinist Gulag. The key question for Rancière was not how to revive Marxism but an analysis of

the much broader logic by which subversive thoughts are recuperated for the service of order.

In the original text, he notes that Althusser’s return to orthodoxy came at a moment when post-68 radicals were defending the occupation of the Lip watch factory in Besançon and a union-based assembly against a military base in Larzac.

In the new Foreward, he puts the stakes thus posed unusually bluntly, stating his opposition to the idea that

the dominated are dominated because they are ignorant of the laws of domination….assign[ing] to those who adopt it the exalted task of bringing their science to the blind masses. Eventually, though, this exalted task dissolves into a pure thought of resentment which declares the inability of the ignorant to be cured of their illusions.

Rancière took the opposite approach, which based itself on the

inverse presupposition, that of the capacity of the dominated. It did so at the price of identifying this capacity with the slogans of China’s Cultural Revolution.

So while I can agree with the supposition, it’s sobering to realize that it was done in the name of such Maoism. It’s easy to see why he is now cautious about identifying his work with actually existing radical politics, having made a category error of such disastrous proportions. The important thing is not to throw his work out with the Maoist bathwater but to accept the Benjaminian lesson he draws:

there is no theory of subversion that cannot also serve the cause of oppression.

What does this history imply? It means that it is possible for a group of French voters to agree with a left critique of neo-liberalism: and then respond to the fascist solution. It does not mean they are stupid or puppets, but that we have not yet understood the way they visualize their situation to themselves. It suggests that there are not going to be what Rancière calls “‘heroes’ of theory,” who will solve such issues for us. If, as Rancière reads Marx, it is still possible

to invent a new world through their [the workers] barely perceptible gestures

then our interest is in how such gestures can be felt, seen and understood. And we would say yes to his 1974 claim to

contest the authority of knowledge on a local scale

while wanting to refuse

Cultural Revolution on a global scale.

I’m all for a revolution in culture that results from local contestations of authority. I don’t think we yet know what that means on a global scale, or even what the global scale would be. For Occupy, then, having again managed to reopen the question of authorizing authority, the time of defining a response has not come. Indeed, the longer it is postponed, or even permanently displaced the better, I suspect. It took five years for the 68 movement to become exhausted. Even if we assume that time passes more quickly these days, we’re not done yet.

 

 

 

Occupy (and) 1968

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As the presidential elections get into gear in France and the United States, observers on both sides of the Atlantic are thinking about how Occupy and the Indignés might play a part in those elections. Two very contrasting pieces from veterans of 1968 indicate the pressures that autonomous politics are going to be placed under in the forthcoming months.

If the possibilities from France seem exciting from this side of the Atlantic, a new interview with Jacques Rancière reminds us of the sober realities. For Rancière, Western “democracy” is a compromise between the actual power of the oligarchy (what we might call the one percent) and the potential power of all (the 99%). Further, he insists that representation is itself

an oligarchical principle: those who are thus associated with power represent not a population but the statute or the competence which founds their authority over that population: birth, wealth, knowledge (savoir) or others.

Rancière has insisted that the properly democratic system is not voting but a random allocation of office by lot, on the model of Athenian democracy. In such a system, competency is assumed to be a common characteristic–or more exactly, there is a commons in which all are assumed to be competent to participate. The point of such a system would be to

deny the seizing of power by those who desire it.

Here we can see why Rancière now calls himself an anarchist in the strict sense (rather than being associated with one of the nineteenth century strands of anarchism like that of Kropotkin or Bakunin): like David Graeber, he understands the an-arche of democracy to be a system that impedes the monopolization of power.

The French presidency is, of course, precisely the opposite of such a system. Devised first to end the revolution of 1848 and revived by de Gaulle to circumscribe any possibility of a revolution in 1945, the French president amasses remarkable power that is therefore denied to the people. The use of presidential elections to curb the revolt in 1968 is only the most recent example of this concentration.

In Rancière’s view, the Left Movement candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is “inside and outside” this system at once. In this view,

a true left-wing candidacy would be a denunciation of the presidential system itself. And a radical left would suppose the creation of an autonomous space, with institutions and forms of discussion and action not dependent on official agendas.

He recognizes Occupy as the closest form existing to such a space because it is open to all, regardless of identity. Nonetheless, like so many others, he wonders whether it has the capacity to last, while recognizing how long the creation of a truly autonomous space would need to be.

In the U. S. this understanding of qualification for representative power can help us see why Mitt Romney’s wealth is all that is required to legitimate his claim to the presidency: as one of that class, he will rule in their interests and it is a matter of indifference to them if he throws the right a few anti-women or anti-LGBTQ bones to do so. At the same time, Rancière’s analysis of racism as a top-down government inspired strategy has a certain force in France, where Sarkozy and Le Pen have tried to stir up agitation about halal meat where none existed before. It’s clearly different in the settler colony.

A more familiar view is expressed by Tom Hayden in a long Nation essay about the Port Huron Statement, which, like myself, is 50 years old. Here Hayden wants to claim that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the avatar for Occupy, while disavowing its radicality. The Port Huron Statement itself was

cleansed of ideological infection, with an emphasis on trying to say what people were already thinking but hadn’t put into words.

So, in fact “people” weren’t “thinking” these things but feeling them inarticulately, waiting for the SDS to make words for them. This is precisely the representative function that Rancière warns against.

Hayden is nonetheless pleased to claim the “participatory democracy” of OWS as being the same as that of 1962, while also wanting to emphasize the need, as he sees it, for “radical reform.” He doesn’t take a clear position on Occupy preferring to “wait and see”–presumably to wait and see whether the movement gets involved with electoral or other representative politics. All anarchist–not to mention Marxist because he doesn’t–influence should be set aside in favor of a “progressive majority.” How come the Port Huron group failed to accomplish this 50 years ago? The answer is apparently the assassination of JFK. Oh, and the war in Vietnam. And all the other political killings. And the fact that SDS became quickly more radical than the Port Huron Statement. And so on, this story has been rehearsed many times.

SDS was not really a precursor to Occupy unless you are willing to identify Occupy with Hayden’s concept of participatory democracy. Rancière has a clearer understanding of autonomy and democracy to offer but in typically French fashion, it’s at a level of abstraction. It’s time to try and see if we can get a little further down the road than 68 managed. No disrespect.

 

Vive la Rêve générale

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In 2006 I was stuck. Could you really in that oh-so-sophisticated era of globalization or late capital write about the general strike? That Spring, students and other young people across France went on strike against the “precariousness” of modern life. Anglophone commentators ridiculed the term as showing the absurdity of the French. Somewhere online I saw this photograph:

Rêve générale: general dream

It was a student march in (I think) Marseilles. The banner at the front reads: (on the left): “Avenir: je t’aimais bien“–“Future: I really love you”. And on the right a pun: “gRêve Général(e). You can’t translate this exactly: it means general strike/dream–add or subtract the G and the E at the end to make “strike” or “dream.”

Out of nowhere, as it seemed, the general strike had returned and reimagined itself at once: a general strike, a general dream. It was a challenge to the idea of the future as permanent austerity. It represented the general strike not as a quantitative measure of how many people out of the working population were willing to strike but a qualitative re-imagining of the future.

The idea went viral in French politics and could be seen all over the 2009 demonstrations in the wake of the financial crisis.

General Dream

It was part of a broad-based anti-capitalist imaginary, derived in part from the Situationists and the revolution of 1968.

2009 Paris demo. Credit: HdeC

In this poster, carried by someone who looks so French it’s almost parodic, the call is “Down with the Consumer Society of the Spectacle.”

What does a “general dream” mean? One way to understand it might be to put together Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the general strike and the dream image. Benjamin saw the general strike differing from the standard political strike in that it began

in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that the strike not so much causes as consummates.

These strikes were “general” not because everyone took part but because their aim was a general transformation and renunciation of domination. Benjamin saw this vision of revolt as not being violent but rather as “deep, moral, and genuinely revolutionary.” The right to look. The invention of the other.

That is to say, the general strike dreams the future that is to come (avenir), in what was to become Benjamin’s theory of the dream image. Dream images arise collectively when, says Benjamin,

the new is permeated by the old. These images are wish images; …what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.

Just as the general strike creates “a general image” of social conditions that otherwise struggle to be known and understood, so does the dream image try to

overcome …the inadequacies in the social organization of production.

The general strike is the limit of the dream image, its enactment as social life. Benjamin thought of the “constellation” which these images form as something he called “collective consciousness.” This idea can be thought of as what Virno, appropriating Marx, has called the “general intellect,” a stage of social life “at which mental abstractions are immediately, in themselves, real abstractions.”

The “general dream” is, then, just such a real abstraction in which the activity of the mind has the value of material fact. A general dream/ strike is the materialization of the potential that is inherent in the (image) of social action not as violence but as means.

The general dream founds the possibility of a new politics. And here we are three years later and a new formation has appeared in French politics. The Front de Gauche, the Left Front, headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon has a program that includes:

a 100% tax on earnings over $475,000; full pensions for all from the age of 60; reduction of work hours; a 20% increase in the minimum wage; and the European Central Bank should lend to European governments at 1%, as it does for the banks.

Now that’s not a dream, but it’s a long way from what you could propose in the Anglophone world. Mélenchon stands at 17% in the last opinion polls before the first round of the Presidential elections this Sunday. He has promised that the Left Front will not enter into coalition with the likely winner, the “Socialist” François Hollande. Hollande has made his intentions clear by saying that his first act if he wins will be to visit Berlin, the capital of Euro-austerity.

From ridicule and street demonstrations in 2006 to being a significant factor in national politics in 2012 by means of the general strike and its dream. It’s something to keep in mind over the next few weeks, as the negative reactions to May Day pour in from all sides.

The Renewal of Occupy

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I began writing every day about the Occupy movement both as a commitment to that movement and to be able to take its measure from my own perspective over time. Whatever anyone else makes of it–and many thanks to those of you who do take the time to read it–it has often surprised me. I find myself again surprised today as I look at the movement renewing itself, as a very different project than when I first published online about it back in October 2011.

Whatever happens on May Day, it’s now clear that on May 2 the movement will be closer to its goal being autonomous, decentralized and, yes, horizontal. Even if, as I suspect may be the case, the police in New York succeed in kettling protest to Union Square and a few other locations, the mobilizing for May Day now appears to have set in motion a transformation. Back in October, we were explaining the hand signals of the global justice movement and thinking about the General Assembly as a model. Now, autonomy is reinventing itself, not as a set of institutions but as “a process without end,” as Bifo has described it. Even ten days ago this pattern wasn’t evident–perhaps because I have not been able to be as active myself in the crunch period of semester–as it now appears to be.

With the continued sleepful protest in the vicinity of the Stock Exchange, the occupation aspect of Occupy has become both more pointed and less complex. It points directly at the scandal of Wall Street’s continued insanity: even Citibank shareholders protested the other day, when they refused to endorse a $15 million base salary for CEO Vikram Pandit. At the same time, it is not so difficult to sustain as the full encampment. It involves a fluid and revolving population of sleeping protestors, who are not required to abandon their political project to support themselves.

This version of occupying has attracted notable sympathy in the city, including from such unlikely sources as the free Metro newspaper.

Since January, the May Day organizing has generated a number of innovative approaches. Most notable, perhaps, is the 4×4 co-ordination of the rally in Union Square and joint march downtown. The four groups present are the trade unions, the Immigrant Workers Coalition. the May 1 Coalition and OWS. The first three groups send delegates. OWS send four spokes and as many May Day working group members as can attend. When a decision needs to be made the OWS delegates consult with the people present and report back the sense of the group. While many might think such a system to be unworkable, it has gone smoothly so far and there has been some interest from trade union rank-and-file as to how they might adopt a similar process.

Mirina Sitrin today reports back from the Brooklyn Court House, where many Occupy people congregated to prevent a series of foreclosure hearings from proceeding:

[W]ith tons of others, preventing foreclosures by singing, well, I have chills and tears from our power, so I am sharing again. I, along with dozens of others did not even get into the courtroom since it was full half an hour early

Such actions make no media waves but do make a real difference in people’s lives, people directly affected by the crisis.

Next, I got a copy today of the OWS Project List, reporting on all the different activities going on around the city. It’s in eight folio-sized pages of three column news and activities, ranging from an oral history project to the Feminist General Assembly and the Stop the Empire Tour. People are working with or without wider attention to create a space that they would like to live in and create new ways of interacting. It all looks like fun.

Finally, there has been much gloom and doom about the General Assembly and how to co-ordinate the movement. This Saturday, there’s a May Day Assembly in Union Square. It’s a way to share all the different things that people have been doing, to give others who have not yet taken on a project a chance to join in and for an open discussion that does not have the burden of taking collective decisions. Volunteers are out leafleting and fly-posting all over the place. As ever, I feel humbled by the amazing energy of the young people in this movement.

I can’t vouch for all these activities because no one person, however busy, could possibly go to them all, let alone be active in them. That’s a very good sign. Obviously, I’m having an “up day” in the whole bi-polar pattern of what it is to be involved with this whole project. In the beginning, there was a hope for decentralized autonomous projects. Now it begins to look like coming to reality. Some are small, some attract national attention. It’s so interesting.