Unfinished Conversations Part Two

The second remarkable video I saw yesterday in Liverpool, after Unfinished Conversation, was not so celebrated by the Biennial. I had to find it at the end of a dark corridor in the Cunard Building. Unlike the large space in Bluecoat where Unfinished Conversation was showing, there were three chairs available to watch Marat/Sade, Bohnice directed by Althea Thauberger.

As you can see above, it depicted a restaging of Peter Weiss’ 1963 classic play Marat/Sade in an actual asylum in Prague, now capital of the Czech Republic. Weiss’s play reflects on the costs of revolution, the tension between the imagination (represented by the Marquis de Sade) and the needs of the impoverished for rapid change (represented by Jean-Paul Marat). Weiss set his play in the new (as in new in 1791) lunatic asylum of Charenton. The restaging in Bohnice physically resembled it but was an active institution and the audience (shown below) were Czech psychiatric patients.

The context of the performance was the perceived failure of the “Velvet Revolution,” by which the-then Czechoslovakia overturned Soviet-style Communism in 1989. Video of the drama was intercut with interviews with the director of the institution, residents and staff.

The director and some staff had had high hopes in 1989 that now they would be able to create a model, modern institution. Now they had debated whether to even accept the play because it might mitigate the sense of failure around the hospital. As Weiss’s highly stylized play unfolded, we learned that Bohnice houses some highly unusual treatments. It has a program in existential psychiatry, centered on the inevitability of death that seems almost parodically Central European.

It also has an active program in sexology. On the one hand, this seems geared towards an understanding of the workings of desire. On the other, they literally castrate people. With their consent, so they say. Another speaker dryly described how he was part of the EU investigation into whether the hospital was committing acts of torture, including the very act of preventive detention.

One of the staff described his involvement with the 1989 revolution as  a form of delusion. Clearly, he had hoped for so much more.

This bitterness was enhanced by a discussion with a translator who had worked for Havel, Reagan and Mrs Thatcher and was now a patient. His sardonic cynicism seemed very familiar and anything but insane.

Most notably, a woman called Sarka Kapkova, also an inmate, provided a searing critique of the disciplinary apparatus and the pharmacological regime that could have been by a well-versed anti-psychiatry graduate student. She also ventured that it was the post-Soviet “freedom” that had first caused what she nonetheless described as her “illness.” That is to say, the free market had driven her into an insane asylum.

So across this film echo the accumulated discontents of 1789, 1968, 1989 and the present with a seasoning of Kafka to allude to the horrendous mid-twentieth century in Europe. The audience for the play, as presented, watched quietly for the most part. They enjoyed the rendition of the Internationale with which the play began and they liked the music in general. Finally, at the end, a character spoke in Czech and they broke out in relief: someone was saying something they could understand.

Sarka Kapkova and another unnamed resident began to dance in a highly stylized fashion (above). I cannot reduce all this to a simple meaning. It opens up so many wounds and avenues of exploration. The film itself did not end but continued in a permanent loop back past what I take to be the opening title (as above). But perhaps the true beginning is somewhere else. Where we consider what the relations of desire, freedom and revolution might be, should be and can be allowed to be.

I Fought The Law

Today is the seven-month anniversary of OWS. It coincides with a remarkable ratcheting up of pressure on Occupy from authorities of all kinds–personal, police, professional. At the place where these three roads meet is the Law, saying: “enough, time to concede.” The reply is given: “I prefer not to.” But it’s getting much harder.

Now some of my friends  and colleagues give me a look: “Occupy? Still?” As if you had just discovered deconstruction. So, yes, I am a bit obsessed. Since when was that a bad thing in professional life? and it’s been seven months, not years.

Federal Hall. Credit @mollyknefel

By unrelenting hostility and willingness to improvise the terms of the law, the police do now have the upper hand in the streets. The NYPD yesterday determined that you may not have “moveable property” on the sidewalk in New York– and that did apparently include a dog that one of the occupiers had on Wall Street. The primary target of the police is the cardboard sign, now that the tent has been outlawed. The revived “sleepful protest” has  been driven onto the steps of the Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights was first introduced. It is supposed to feel like a last stand. While I don’t think it is, I feel the pressure.

The Federal pen

As mentioned yesterday, the academic left continues to ratchet up its critique of Occupy. Jodi Dean posted a talk on her website yesterday, which is at once supportive of the movement for creating a new political subject, and wants to see it regulated by the Holy Trinity of Badiou, Lacan and Zizek. Here’s her summary:

Bluntly put, some of the ideas that most galvanized people in the fall—those associated with autonomy, horizontality, and leaderlessness—have also come to be faulted for conflicts and disillusionment within the movement.

I haven’t heard this criticism, except in what you might call the academic wing of the movement, but there you hear it all the time.

I can’t get into a full analysis of this paper because she asks us not to cite it, so you’ll have to read it yourself. In short, she argues that Occupy should accept its own condition of “lack” in relation to the “lack” it has identified in the political system (The Big Other) and thereby set about representing the overlap created. While I’m not fully sure what to make of this, I take it to mean that if Occupy is to create a form of collectivity, it has to respect the laws of kinship or disintegrate. Occupy should thus negate its own negation of the political system. I can’t help but feel that it would no longer be Occupy were that to happen and in considerable part that transformation would come from a reassertion of the traditional authority of the Law, as Lacan would have had it. Not to mention the law as the cops have it. What we could gain by the strategy is opaque to me.

Is this Law unchallengeable? By chance, I’ve been reading Judith Butler’s lectures on Antigone, where she discusses the possibility of a “post-structuralist” form of kinship that would not be dependent on the Law of the Oedipus complex. She notes that in Oedipus at Colonnus, none other than Oedipus himself berates Antigone and her sister for being out of place, even as they take care of him instead of their brothers, “in their place.” Even Oedipus gets to castigate Antigone for asserting a willingness to “live out of doors.” His curse on his children/siblings is the re-assertion of the necessity of staying in place. That is to say, anyone transgressing their alotted role will be punished. The place one must be is the place where three roads meet and Oedipal destiny is enacted.

What if the incest taboo is not the only form of establishing kinship? What if kinship is not destiny? As the results of incest, Antigone and her siblings all embody the failure of the Law and, while they are punished for this, they also claim glory and honor of their own. Butler interestingly footnotes here the enfant terrible of anthropology Pierre Clastres. Like Sahlins, Clastres refused to equate power with kinship. Clastres asserts that the kinship system tells us almost nothing about the social life of a people. He further argued that the Amazonian peoples he studied were determined to prevent the emergence of permanent inequality by means of careful safeguards.

These arguments have been developed by David Graeber, who also notes that Clastres’ romantic over-investment with the Amazon prevented him from discussing the widespread use of sexual violence in these same “egalitarian” societies. He astutely concludes

Perhaps Amazonian men understand what arbitrary, unquestionable power, backed by force, would be like because they themselves wield that power over their wives and daughters.

The point of the Antigone myth and the Amazonian egalitarians is, then, not that we want to be like them, but that these moments show cases where the “universal” Law does not apply, and is therefore not universal at all, but particular and backed by force of various kinds.

That’s why “I Fought The Law” is a counterculture classic: not because it celebrates a victory–the law won–but because it discovers that, unlike Bartleby who negates himself in the end, you can fight the law. And, yes, you can lose.

Self-killing and (the) Depression

The subprime Depression of 2008 to the present has entailed a notable wave of personal depression. At the same time, neoliberal austerity presents itself as a required correction from the superego for the excessive “exuberance,” as Alan Greenspan notoriously called it, of the boom. Yet the formerly exuberant are not the depressed: we are. Depressed about debt, climate change, unemployment, you name it. All efforts to mobilize a political response, even the irreversible step of self-killing, have to be discredited in order to maintain the regime of credit. It is in every sense unsustainable.

A memorial for Dimitris Christoulas

These thoughts were prompted by the observation that the suicide of a 77-year-old man in Syntagma Square on April 4 has now provoked a wave of mitigating journalism. Feeling unable to survive on his austerity-reduced pension, Dimitris Christoulas left a suicide note that was a call to action (I don’t wish to edit this, so the quote is long):

The Tsolakoglou [1940s Nazi-collaborationist] occupation government literally nullified my ability to survive on a decent pension, for which I had already paid (without government aid) for 35 years. I am of an age that prevents me from offering a decent individual response (without of course ruling out the possibility of being the second person to take arms, should one person decide to do so), I find no solution other than a dignified end, before resorting to going through garbage in order to cover my nutritional needs. One day, I believe, the youth with no future will take up arms and hang the national traitors at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did with Mussolini in 1945 [at Milan’s Piazzale Loreto[.

Not unlike Stéphane Hessel, the former French Resistance activist turned writer, Christoulas saw a parallel between the fascist occupation of Greece in the 1940s and the current decimation of social life by the Troika.

In the days following, pieces from Ireland to Italy, Jakarta and now New York have created a new syntagm “suicide by economic crisis,” traveling from newspaper to newspaper. The verb-less fragment gives agency to the economic crisis as the means of self-killing, just as one might say “suicide by hanging.” In today’s New York Times piece, Christoulas is neither named nor quoted. Instead, the lead goes to a debt-destroyed Italian contractor named Giovanni Schiavon with a more familiar message

Sorry, I cannot take it any more.

This “acceptable” message (for those not acquainted or related to the self-killer) is the regime of truth around depression, bipolar conditions and self-killing: it is an individual “tragedy,” which could and should be prevented by medication.

Yet the self-killing to provoke social change has a long history. It was a resistance to empire, as in the suicides of the enslaved, and also its tool in episodes like the suicidal attacks of the First World War. Recently it has been the weapon of asymmetric warfare, most notably on 9-11,  and the last resort of the oppressed, such as the self-immolation of Mohammed Bou’azizi in Tunisia in December 2010. Christoulas was clearly hoping to provide a similar inspiration to that of Bou’azizi and it remains to be seen what may yet happen in Greece.

Earlier in this project, I thought about Antigone as a figure for resistance. She might be said to have suicided by state, in the same way that people today are said to choose “suicide by cop” when they get shot by the police. For she knew that to bury her brother was to incur death at the hands of Creon, and she welcomes it as a path to what she calls “glory” in Sophocles’ play.

In Judith Butler’s telling analysis, Antigone’s story reveals that the carefully policed distinction between the social and the symbolic cannot hold. In the present crisis, it is notable how Antigone welcomes the grave as a “deep-dug home to be guarded forever,” as if suiciding wards off symbolic and social foreclosure. Butler concludes that what Antigone

draws into crisis is the very representative function itself, the very horizon of intelligibility.

Butler notes that those who disagree that the “law” (here as much the psychoanalytic law of the Oedipus complex as state law) must hold accuse her of “radical anarchy.”

Perhaps it’s time to embrace that anarchy rather than foreclose it. Perhaps the crisis of the representative engenders a new horizon-tal, making intelligible what it would be to live in a sustainable social world of degrowth and chosen kinship. For Antigone’s choice puts pressure on all norms of gender, as she challenges the “manly” place of sovereignty. It is telling that all the people said to be affected by debt and depression in this recent flood of articles are men. It seems that the old binary that men work, while women care is still in circulation.

I do not wish to minimize the actual experience of depression and its cognate diseases. Each year there are said to be 30,000 suicides by bi-polar people in the US and an estimated one million attempts. For Franco “Bifo” Bifardi and others in the radical psychiatry movement known as “schizoanalysis,” these conditions are not random but actively produced by a regime that insists on the pure rationality of a market that is nonetheless out of control. Bifo sees a “bipolar economy” that insists on more and more stimulus, leading to the inevitable crash. Even the Harvard Business Review now accepts that there is no “invisible hand” guiding the market, which does not attain the mythical “general equilibrium.” Now it’s generally on Lithium.

What would be the resolution for those so depressed today? It would be literally to get outside, outside the depression but also into different spaces, as Félix Guattari puts it

to get out of their repetitive impasses and in a certain way to resingularize themselves.

As I said on Friday, being at Occupy makes me less depressed. I am certainly aware that the kind of unmet need that the Occupy encampments did much to reveal is not going to dealt with so easily. However, the statistics on suicide make it just as clear that the psycho-pharmaceutical regime isn’t working any better. The desire not “to be a statistic,” as the euphemism for suicide goes, is suggestive. It expresses a hope for the resingularizing of people as non-normatized individuals with a right to the pursuit of happiness that is not measured in consumption patterns.

 

 

 

In sight of the law

So I’m waiting for a Direct Action meeting to begin–probably my single greatest category of time spent at OWS has been waiting. I’m talking to an Occupy friend about the movement, who says something to the effect that it’s been like a relationship–all buzzy and idealistic at first, more complicated and argumentative later. From the media perspective, of course, we’ve broken up already. Perhaps that’s why cultural work that interfaces politics with law and familial structure seems so relevant to me now.

When I saw the Motus refiguring of Antigone (Alexis. A Greek Tragedy), Antigone’s complex defiance of the law and her incredibly complex family were somewhat in the background because the company had spent years exploring Sophocles’s and Brecht’s versions of the theme. Watching Asghar Farhadi’s film A Separation (2011), though, these questions really can’t be avoided. Set in present-day (which is to say post-Green movement) Iran, A Separation shows a complex but open set of events that suggest a new form of spectatorship might be possible.

The opening shot of "A Separation"

The very opening shot establishes this new problematic. At the end of the credits, the screen fills with a man and a woman arguing about a divorce. It becomes clear–as perhaps would be obvious to an Iranian audience–that they are debating in the presence of a judge as to how the divorce might be carried out. Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) cannot agree on their future: she wants to leave the country for an unspecified destination to improve the chances for their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), while he feels obligated to stay and care for his father, who has Alheizmer’s. As we watch the debate, our perspective is that of the judge before whom the hearing is being held, whom we hear but do not see. The screen, then, is the Law. But which law? The state law that requires both parties to agree to a divorce? The law of the (male) gaze that is held to structure narrative cinema? What kind of watching might be possible if legislated on the psychoanalysis that Judith Butler imagines as being derived from Antigone, rather than Oedipus?

Antigone, as Oedipus’s daughter and brother, is decidedly “postoedipal,” as Butler puts it, “caught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within kinship.” Just as Butler shows that Antigone’s position has no singularity, in A Separation everyone tries to do the right thing, only to find that there is no single way to be right, that the law breaks down against itself. To take one resonant example, a subaltern woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) is employed to look after Nadar’s father after Simin leaves him. Perhaps confused by the change of circumstances, the old man soils himself and cannot (or will not) clean up. In her understanding of Islam, Razieh feels unable to look on a naked man other than her husband. She calls an authority–a rather interesting reconfiguration of the deus ex machina–who gives her permission, given the “urgency” of the situation. Here she fears god, her husband and her new employer in equal amounts.

Razieh

The dilemma resonated with me in two ways. I once had a student who refused to look at images of naked bodies in a photography class for religious reasons. It turned out that she was a nurse and when I asked her what she did at work, she said that she imagined the bodies to be objects. Apparently this tactic did not operate in the classroom. Bemused, I found a workaround for her. In another context, we might recall the legend of Ham, cursed by God for seeing Noah’s nakedness. His “punishment” was to become “black.” This purported Biblical story was often used as a post-hoc justification for slavery.

In the context of Antigone, it resonates twice. Oedipus cursed Polyneices that he would not be buried with honor, a curse that further entailed Antigone’s claim to autonomy from law, when she buries her brother’s body, resulting in her own death. Antigone dies for a brother: but which one? In the story of Ham, God is Noah’s father–but also Ham’s, making them in a sense brothers. Ham’s “reckless eyeballing,” to use the Jim Crow term, is the alleged origin of the “social death” of slavery. A farmer named Matt Ingram was convicted of “reckless eyeballing” in North Carolina–in 1951. A white woman had not liked the way he looked at her from the distance of sixty-five feet. In Abu Ghraib prison at the time of the scandals, US guards yelled at the detainees: “Don’t eyeball me.” The law does not like to be looked at, it prefers to look.

Towards the end of A Separation, for reasons that I can’t go into without giving away the whole plot, the middle class family leave Razieh’s house to stare in horror at the screen. A cut shows them inside their car with a smashed windscreen. Suffice to say that all concepts of the law have been challenged by the pervasive interference of the state apparatus, the intransigence of multiple and divergent familial constraints and the uneven but thoroughgoing effects of the financial crisis. In the post-Green movement moment, gently but noticeably referenced in Nadar’s insistence on getting “change,” the final question of the film remains unanswered. It’s not as simple as breaking up, it’s not possible to go back to the way it was. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.

Jan 9: Betrayal or Electric?

Betrayed at the beginning

“Banks got bailed out/We got sold out.” This was one of the first slogans of Occupy that suggests it has always been a mature movement that has worked out its first sense of loss. Perhaps some its sustaining force comes from that combination of the knowledge of having been betrayed already, even before anything has been attempted. The real depth come from the awareness that we betrayed ourselves.

In a recent essay on betrayal, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips points out

In psychoanalysis betrayal is called, variously: weaning, the birth of a sibling, the Oedipus complex, and puberty. At each of these developmental stages in the psychoanalytic story, the child suffers what feels like a breach of trust, a loss of entitlement, a diminished specialness.

“We got sold out.” We were betrayed, again, by the person in whom we had placed trust, meaning presumably Obama.

That works to an extent but it’s not quite right. Remember how, the very night he won the election, Obama’s address was something of a disappointment? The best thing about electing Obama seemed to be that it was an end to the Bush-style neo-liberalism. In more optimistic vein, it briefly seemed like a decisive stage in the civil rights movement, a transformation of relations of difference. By 2010 it was clear that none of that was true and that the Republicans, written off two years before, were going to win the mid-term elections. In an interview with Amy Goodman in October 2010, Angela Davis was asked how she viewed Obama:

What really disturbs me is that we have failed…. There are many issues about which we can be critical of Obama, but at the same time, I think we need to be critical of ourselves for not generating the kind of mass pressure to compel the Obama administration to move in a more progressive direction, remembering that the election was, in large part, primarily the result of just such a mass movement that was created by ordinary people all over the country.

Obama didn’t betray us: we betrayed ourselves by assuming that November 4, 2008 marked the end of our participation. Unusually, we got another chance.

In this view, the eight weeks of the encampment at Liberty Plaza were not the rise and fall of Occupy–that had already happened over a long period of time, dating, in Angela Davis’s perspective to the abolition democracy that put an end to formal slavery. You might call it the setting aside of the “hope” that a vertical politics of leaders and the led, whether of left or right, could actually implement “change you can believe in.” Or you could call it the (re)start of a commitment to building within the ruins.  There’s a curious rhythm to Occupy: rise and fall, success and setback, stepping up and stepping back that echoes that pattern. It frustrates the desire of some that the movement should simply go away, even as it also prevents the emergence of “leaders.”

Phillips points to a precedent. In 1966, when Bob Dylan was playing in Manchester, a fan infamously called out “Judas.” Dylan replied: ” I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” He turns to his band and says: “Play it fucking loud.” It being Like A Rolling Stone.

What Phillips doesn’t get, though, is that by calling Dylan “Judas,” the fan figured himself as Christ. It’s a very satisfying subject position, no doubt. In Scorcese’s 2005 documentary No Direction Home, the folkies are still playing the betrayal card: forty years later. That’s what happens when being betrayed becomes a means of identification. All that mourning, all that trauma. Or you can refuse the figuration as either betrayer or betrayed, accept that there’s no going home again, and go electric.

On Shame and Wall Street

The British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen’s new film Shame explores the desires and mentalities of the Wall Street boys, who have so much of the world’s economies at their fingertips.Whether consciously or not, it shows how much their actions revolve around a homoerotics that in its closeted shame displaces desire across the cash nexus. These boys get off when someone gets paid.

Whether consciously or not, McQueen evokes Nan Goldin’s classic photographic project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in his film. His visual technique centers on long still shot, like the opening frame of the movie, below:

Michael Fassbender as Brandon in Shame

This is Goldin’s aesthetic all over: the mix of found color and beauty in the midst of urban sexual counterculture. Look here for the color:

Nan Goldin

Or here from the Ballad, for the off-center framing, the stillness:

Goldin, "Vivienne in the green dress"

The difference, though, is that Goldin was a participant on the scene and, as such, welcome to photograph. Her subjects know she is there. McQueen uses his camera in classic directorial fashion, wowing us with long tracking shots and composition in order to ask us to forget why it’s there at all: classic cinematic realism.

If Goldin knows what sexual dependency is because she suffered from it, what is the “shame” in McQueen’s film? The overt narrative says that Brandon (Fassbender) is a sex addict who is shamed by his problems and increasingly comes to suffer for them. In order to accept this, we need to buy into–word choice deliberate–the idea that sex is an addiction. The film then proposes a solution: a committed monogamous relationship, somehow predicated as being beyond “sex.” And a punishment: the necessity for Brandon to seek out anonymous sex in a gay bar. While he is thus engaged, his sister Cissy (Casey Milligan) is attempting suicide, just in case the viewer wasn’t sure if it was a bad thing to do. This version is proposed by all the reviews I’ve seen and is supported by McQueen in interviews.

So the manifest content of the film argues that Wall Street is limitless, rampant greed, which is fine. And that same-sex desire epitomizes that relationship at its worst, which is not fine at all, although it certainly reinforces the interface of homophobia and neo-liberalism.

There’s another set of desires and drives at work here, though. In keeping with one set of psychoanalytic readings of the Don Juan complex, it could be said that Brandon’s gay encounter is the pinnacle of his desire, not the abyss of his degradation. In this view, the hyper-heterosexual is constantly acting out a repression of queer desire.

The “Wall Street” part of the film revolves around this displacement. We know it’s Wall Street because we frequently see the Fulton St-Broadway subway station, handy for both OWS and the Street. Brandon’s boss Dave, a rather gormless individual, clearly has what is euphemistically called a “man-crush” on him. He acts this out by sleeping with Cissy minutes after meeting her, much to Brandon’s displeasure. If the film lays on a clumsy aura of incest to this anger, it can’t entirely dispose of the sense that it was Brandon who really wanted to sleep with Dave and vice-versa. Dave is so enamored of Brandon that, even when the latter’s huge stash of porn is discovered on his work computer, the supposedly “high-tech” company is baffled as to who downloaded it.

You could also suggest that the later section of the film isn’t “real” at all. If we go through Brandon’s bad day, he supposedly tries and fails to have sex with the nice girl Marianne, uses the hotel room for commercial sex anyway, then goes out bar hopping, leading to dirty talk and intimate touching at the bar, a fight, the blow-job in the gay bar, culminating with a paid three-way with two women. At the end of all this he finds himself in his bathroom at home, where Cissy has cut her wrists. There’s masses of blood, although when we see the pair in hospital, the cut doesn’t seem that terrible. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud suggests that it’s possible to experience a long fantasy sequence in a brief space of real time if you’ve had the fantasy before. So one interpretation would be that when Brandon discovers Cissy in one of her self-cutting moments in the very bathroom where he so frequently masturbates, it releases the carefully constructed fantasy sequence by which Brandon is “forced” to have gay sex.

I want to be clear that I don’t think that this is the “right” interpretation of Wall Street and that if those bankers would only get in touch with their queer side, everything would be ok. The moments that resonated for me most in the film were the ways in which the cash nexus was so eroticised, such as when a sex worker counts her money early in the film, or when a woman working on a webcam sex-show knows Brandon by name and “what he wants.” It’s not for nothing that the porn industry calls male orgasm in straight porn the “money shot.” I’m not anti-sex or even sex industries but the shame here is the replacement of social life with the cash nexus–and to actually live as if “I’m loving it.”

 

Jan. 5: Sounds Like Fun

Occupy sounds like fun. It has a pleasant, amusing sound. It creates a soundscape that promises better things. It is not a metaphor: it is an analogy, it is analog. Since the days of the Puritans what the capitalist U.S. cannot stand is precisely the thought, let alone the sound, of someone else having fun. Here I’m going to assemble some nodes within that soundscape from memory and experience. Later I’ll try and formulate some more general thoughts about the analog and the digital in Occupy.

*Murmuration

*Yes, I know it’s a noun for birds en masse but I’m appropriating it!
The overall sound of Liberty Plaza or the Atrium at 60 Wall Street, where most of the working groups that I’m involved in meet, was a loud collective murmur. The left usually discourses in a shout, whether addressing a meeting or arguing amongst ourselves. It makes such a nice change.

Mic check

This is the signature gesture of Occupy, which breaks through the murmuration of a meeting or the ambience of public space.

Occupy Wall Street: Mic Check from NYU Local on Vimeo.

Although it’s now come to be used to challenge politicians and others (usually using amplified sound so they can easily drown out the challenge) the mic check was originally the analog equivalent of tapping the microphone: only much more fun. There’s something very exhilarating about shouting as loud as you can in a public space and having people shout back.

The People’s Mic

Which forms the people’s mic. The call-and-response pattern of OWS discourse has a number of interesting features. Unlike religious or choral patterns, it is not given in advance what people may say. Some people, especially academics, tend to speak for too long before pausing so the crowd has trouble repeating the phrase. A skilled user knows how to break sentences into four to six syllable phrases but also to let conjunctions stand by themselves.

The stress pattern of the People’s Mic changes the dominant demotic speech of the past decade. On the one hand, you can’t use Valley Girl intonation because “Occupy? Wall Street?” is altogether different to “Occupy Wall Street,” let alone “Occupy! Wall Street!,” which is how it has been mostly used.

Nor is it the ironic, hipster tone of more recent years, the Brooklyn-ese of the 2010s. Rather than fall away on the last syllables–as in “what-ever“–People’s Mic uses strong but even stresses that generate a sense of confidence and optimism. When it’s being used, people smile, even when the content is challenging. Or perhaps especially when it’s challenging, the pleasure coming from the disjuncture between content and form.

Noise

Another aspect of the Occupy soundscape is, however, loud noise, whether in the form of drumming, noise makers or musical instruments. At Liberty Plaza, the drummers sat on the West side in a circle, making an almost constant percussion for the first six weeks until negotiations reduced the time slots, at least a little. The noise marked presence in a direct and unavoidable fashion, in intended contrast to the spoken discourse of the East side centered around the steps.

It is not wholly random. For example, the “Noise Demo Against the Prison Industrial Complex, for the Liberation of Political Prisoners & Prisoners Of Wars,” held in front of Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown on New Year’s Eve, noise was used to get the attention of those detained. Then the people’s mic declaimed: “You. Are. Not. Alone.”

Yelly people

On the other hand again, there are the Yelly people. These are people who come to the General Assembly or Spokescouncil–rarely, in my experience, to the working groups–and yell. Often these yellers are permanent occupiers, sleeping in Liberty till the eviction, now in churches and other refuges. They are not easy to talk to and I don’t know many of them personally so I can’t generalize: some people assert that they are police provocateurs. Some yellers, like Nan and Sage, have become sufficient characters that they seem more driven by their role as disrupters and the attention it brings. Right-wing hack Andrew Breitbart is happy to give them as much publicity as they want.

Each person at Occupy is, in the manner of Sabina Spielrein, a “dividual,” yelling to themselves, calling-and-responding internally and externally, trying to work out perhaps the hardest question: are you having fun?

 

Jan 2 “The Talking Cure”

Yesterday I caught up with David Cronenberg’s new movie, A Dangerous Method (2011) about the Freud/Jung divide embodied in their mutual patient Sabina Spielrein.

Keira Knightly as Sabina Spielrein

For all its period film denial of the present, I found it haunted by the “talking cure” practiced by Occupy and the desires that it evinces. What does Occupy want? The answer most often given in relation to the talking cure of consensus governance would be “empowerment.” The trouble with such tactics is that, after the initial break-through, resistance is generated from within and without.

In A Dangerous Method, Freud is obsessed with the resistance to psychoanalysis and subjugates everything to promoting “the sexual theory.”

"Sometimes," Mr Cronenberg, "a cigar is just a cigar"

As a creature of the psychopharmaceutical era–so many people take anti-depressants in New York that the river fish have measurable doses in their bodies– the film finds Freud vile and uncouth and is forced to find in Jung’s favor. It is Spielrein who raises the truly dangerous questions of resistance and the death drive that are now forcing the OWS talking cure to consider a different form of practice.

The film is a palimpsest: based on a 2003 play by Christopher Hampton, derived from a 1995 book by John Kerr, itself inspired by the 1970s and 80s discoveries of Spielrein’s papers. As Michael Billington spotted in his Guardian review, the play always wanted to be a film. What does the film want? It wants us to once again reject the version of the 1960s in which freedom and free love and open sexuality were supposedly equated. Such ideas are traced back to the beginning of psychoanalysis and emphasized by an unlikely stress on the concept of “freedom,” not a very psychoanalytic concept, and the disruptive presence of Otto Gross, played as a mix of Van Gogh in Lust for Life and Abbie Hoffman. You could wonder again at the fascination in English culture with spanking and its odd mix of philo- and anti-semitism. But let’s stick with the talking cure and its object, Sabina Spielrein.

Spielrein is not allowed much presence in the film as an intellectual, compared to the extensive scenes of her in hysterics or sexually involved with Jung. Here it’s worth noting that, as she wrote about the “essential homosexuality” of women, perhaps Jung and his male surrogates have protested too much?

Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender)

In a brief scene, Spielrein presents the idea of her paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” to Freud. The film can’t do much with this, because to acknowledge that Freud cited Spielrein in Beyond the Pleasure Principle would complicate the caricature of his being obsessed by pleasure/sex. Similarly, Spielrein’s own essay is a widely-ranging, hard-to-summarize assemblage of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Wagner, the Talmud and her own case-study of schizophrenia (you can find it on Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing behind a pay-wall).

Within the film, what Spielrein wants is to be married to Jung and this her tragedy–not, as the last intertitle notes, that she was shot by the Nazis in 1942. What she herself wanted is a question beyond my scope here but it’s intriguing to think about a woman that inspired Freud, Jung and Melanie Klein and went on to organize child services for the Third International. And maybe read her letters alongside those of Rosa Luxemberg, recently translated?

What she seems to have known very well is that desire is complicated, indeed articulated by complexes. So to ask, as everyone does, “what does Occupy want?” is to revisit Freud’s least successful question: “what does a woman want?” Here Occupy is figured as the recalcitrant woman, demanding,  but refusing to say what it is precisely that she wants. Such narratives refashion the complex anti-hierarchical and multi-tasking practice of Occupy into inarticulate need. It reduces the layers of feminist thought around Occupy from Arundati Roy, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Naomi Klein and many others to a simple demand line.

The “docile minds” desired by Big Pharma and neo-liberal governance alike supposedly have no such thing as an unconscious. The repressed cannot return, in this view, because there is nowhere for it to go. Spielrein argued otherwise, quoting her patient Martha N:

‘The suspicion can come into being in the real world in order to prove its right to exist.’ I have come to the conclusion that the chief characteristic of an individual is that he is ‘dividual’. The closer we approach our conscious thoughts, the more differentiated our images.

In this view, it’s not so surprising that Occupy has run into resistance as that its initial tactic of talking in groups was so successful. The anti-hierarchical group discussion was a tactic used by anti-psychiatry from Frantz Fanon’s experiments in Algeria and Tunisia to Félix Guattari’s clinic at La Borde, France, just as Deleuze made much of the “dividual.”

In a recent article on Deleuze and Guattari, Adam Shatz has pointed out how Deleuze asserted in an early essay that:

inner life (la vie intérieure)… was a bourgeois delusion: not for nothing did it sound like ‘domestic life’ (la vie d’intérieur).

Is it too semiotic and old-school to wonder if the very act of being outside, refusing interior life in the domestic sense, facilitated transformations in inner life? Again, we might stress the crucial presence of LBGTQI people in the Occupy movement, those unconstrained by what J. Jack Halberstam calls “family time.” The movement has placed a premium on “safe spaces” for discussion, calling out transphobia and able-ism as being every bit as disruptive to that safety as the old mantra of “race, gender, class.”

At the same time, Occupy encampments became spaces for those once offered care, such as the mentally ill, drug and/or alcohol dependent, and homeless people, to find space. The talking cure was stretched to its limits to deal with these “unmet needs.” Recently, at OWS, the General Assembly, and its operations twin the Spokescouncil, have all but ground to a halt thanks to the blockers. That is to say, one key element of consensus is the ability of any person to “block” a proposal on ethical or safety grounds that might cause them to leave the movement. However, some have taken to the block as a permanent tactic to disrupt all governance with the explicit goal of destroying the Spokescouncil.

Where do we go from here? There are proposals for rules, for hierarchy, for demands, for a third party, for links with the Tea Party and so on. The least fashionable, least exciting and different proposal is still the right one: keep talking.