Category Archives: space

Space, Observation and Strike Debt

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In the past weeks since the Debt Assemblies began and led to the formation of the Strike Debt campaign, my relationship to this writing project and to OWS has begun to shift. For a long time, I wrote from the participant observer position. I was there, in the room, often in the square or on the march. But I was not taking decisions or influencing people very much, although I might make the odd comment here and there. Honestly, Occupy and direct democracy were quite a steep learning curve for an academic.

It’s also a somewhat comfortable position, of course, allowing the writer to perhaps imply criticism, although I have always tried to do the harder thing of trying to look for the optimistic or hopeful outcome. Over the past few months since I’ve begun working more closely with Occupy Theory and now Strike Debt, that safety barrier is gone. I find myself questioning whether I have the right to report certain discussions or issues, Or better put, whether I should, not from the point of view of this writing but from the point of view of the movement.

It’s not that I’m party to any secret decisions or that I’m in any way, shape or form a “leader” because there really are no leaders. It’s that I’m not sure exactly what my role is now. Some other writers I know call this “observant participation.” Key here is the acknowledgement that you are writing about the movement as you are also active in it. Unlike most of these people, I’m writing about things as they happen, more or less, rather than for a dissertation, article or book project. It’s not a moral question, although I do respect security culture within the movement and I don’t name people who have not made their writing public. It’s a writerly question: what’s my perspective on this now?

Two other developments impinge on this repositioning. One is that there are fewer people active on a day-to-day basis in OWS now than there were at May Day. A good deal of this is the summer diaspora from New York, and with the climate-changed 97 degrees it was today, no wonder. There are students back home or doing research travel and activists. Others have dropped out, burned out or moved on. So it’s easier to get a sense of the movement than it was when it seemed to be limitless. Perhaps that’s also a coming-to-terms with the sheer difficulty of actually changing this deeply entrenched system.

Finally, it’s the debt campaign itself, which is a re-orienting of my own position. We are all “in” debt, or I certainly am. Mortgage, credit cards, refinanced mortgage. It’s a place of some shame and embarrassment: isn’t a middle-aged, more or less successful person (in their field) supposed to be past all that? Maybe, but I’m not, given a commuting work situation that requires two households in one of the world’s most expensive regions. I assumed getting “out” of debt was a combination of personal discipline and professional success, a Houdini-like escape trick that has eluded me so far.

Now I can see that getting “out” of debt requires getting into public space. It means striking debt so that if a corporation is a person and must be bailed out, guess what, I’m a person as well. It’s realizing that if there are 5 million households still under threat of foreclosure, 27% of student debtors behind or in default, and $800 billion of revolving credit card debt, there’s a massive debt strike already taking place. We just haven’t dared to admit it. You are not a loan.

Local Space, Local Bodies

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Where and what is the local? We spend a good deal of time worrying about the global but the local seems obvious. Occupy is intriguingly showing that not to be the case.There are many ways in which physical localities can be configured, as we saw first with the encampments and more recently with anti-foreclosure and anti-school closings activism in the movement. Yet the concept perhaps begins with the most local space of all: our bodies.

At a meeting in New York today, Aaron Bady who has been active with Occupy Oakland discussed the clear differences between OWS and OO. In fact, locally Occupy Oakland is known as the Oakland Commune, not as Occupy. Most notable was his demonstration that OO operates in a media desert, where even the local “newspaper” the Oakland Tribune is simply assembled from press releases. So when OO activists participate in City Council meetings and tweet the proceedings, they are meeting a real journalistic need.

Bady further talked of his own personal experience and suggested that OO had made him feel like an Oakland resident for the first time, despite having lived there for four years. His account resonated with me. OWS has made me revise my psychogeography of New York in so many ways. In the interstices of a city that appears to be nothing but nail salons, banks and pharmacies, I have found my way to trade union halls, churches, artist-run spaces, and other spaces that are not usually imagined as being part of “New York.” It comes to seem as if the commercialized New York has been imposed on top of this other New York, sometimes squashing it altogether as in the transformation of the old CBGB’s into a fashion boutique.

At the same meeting, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg spoke of dis/ability activism, reminding us again of how central non-normative embodiment and self-actualization is to whatever it is that is Occupy. On March 17 at the re-occupation and re-eviction of Zuccotti Park, activists from the Disabilities Working Group were present throughout, some in chairs and one person using a ventilator apparatus. They were absolutely unintimidated by the cops.

Ginsburg showed a remarkable video made in 2007 by Amanda Baggs, in which she is shown first making movements and sounds characteristic of a person on the autism spectrum. Then the video moves to a “translation” into sub-titled and machine-generated English, in which Baggs explains that in her view she experiences the environment in a very different and  more extensive spectrum of feelings and connections. She scoffed at “expert” suggestions that other people “must” have made the video and reeled off a long list of software and equipment that she had used to a Wired journalist. The inevitable Internet sites that call her a “fraud” miss her whole point: it’s not that there are no differences but there are far more differences than is normally–and that’s the mot juste here–recognized.

In 2007, Baggs wrote about wishing there were an equivalent to the queer liberation movement for people with autism. Her video was part of the accomplishment of that goal. She now writes as a “political” or “ethical” blogger and has expressed balanced support for the Occupy movement:

most people (and therefore most people involved in this movement) fundamentally don’t grasp that disabled people are people. They’ll deny it, and they may believe they think we’re people, but their actions treat us differently than their words do. Even people who are against capitalist greed in theory, have usually not worked out that part of capitalism is valuing people differently based on the kind and amount of work they do, and the creation of a system that figures that if it can’t manage to exploit disabled people then we’re basically trash….I absolutely support the general idea of the movement…. but I also know that without disabled people’s voices getting heard the outcomes could still be quite bad for us even if their goals are totally met otherwise.

So while it has become quite popular, even standard practice, to say that the movements for recognition distracted from the struggle against capitalism, it’s starting to seem like the opposite: that a set of localized distinctions and claims is precisely what is forming the possibility of imagining a world without capitalism, something that many had come to think impossible.

 

Occupy Godot

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

"Waiting for Godot" in New Orleans

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

The Lower Ninth Ward

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

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

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

Left Jean Martin as Lucky

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

Think of this:

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

We are paused, vehemently.

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

Pause.

Visualizing the Square: Space

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Alexis. A Greek Tragedy

If Occupy is a “square,” as I discussed yesterday, what does that space contain? How is the boundary marked? And should it be? These sound like philosophical questions and so they are: but the scandal of occupy, wherever it happens, is the appropriation of such legislative process by those who should stay in their place. This projects a series of questions ahead about bodies in space, the history of the anonymous, their self-visualization in past and present crises and the embodied experience of self-visualizing in the space of Occupy. We’ll walk through these in the week(s) ahead.

To begin with, the very practical and tactical choices about where and how to occupy have pushed the question of public space into widespread discussion. A few months ago, few of us were aware that there were such things as privately owned public spaces (POPS), such as Zuccotti Park and the Atrium of 60 Wall Street where most of the business of OWS takes place. Intended as a sop to the notion of the public, POPS have become a key tactical resource in New York. Meetings are now taking place in such unlikely sites as the Atrium of Trump Tower, where the Donald is unlikely to be in attendance.

It is not the case that POPS are a diminished form of the public. Rather they offer a space of ambivalence that the public never did, permitting the possibility of Occupy. We could do this by theory but here’s an anecdote. There is an Institute for the Humanities downtown, full of people from the universities and the New York Review of Books, all self-designated public intellectuals. Once a friend was speaking and invited me to come. No sooner had I opened the door than a genteel gatekeeper was asking me who I was and why I was there: in this view, the public know who they are and why they should be there. The rest of us should keep out. The POPS are in fact much more the space of public intellectual thought than such enclaves ever were.

Quietly, governments are moving to eradicate such ambivalent spaces. The Danish government recently attempted to resolve the contradiction of the squatter city Christiania, after nearly 40 years of occupation. They forced the occupiers to buy the land where they were living: the residents responded by a campaign to “buy it free.” They stopped by OWS last October, and apparently sold $10 of shares at the New York Stock Exchange. This was seen as being ridiculous but the resulting publicity generated enough support to buy the land. Residents now see themselves as “carers” of the shares, not owners. More informal arrangements are being targeted in the UK, where the neo-liberal Coalition government added a last-minute amendment to unrelated proposed legislation, criminalizing all squatting, even of vacant buildings–which number 700,000 at present.

While such legal loopholes are certainly necessary, the Occupy sites are not simply vacant space in which people have pitched tents, like new typing in a blank document. By interfacing the attention economy of the spectacle with the historical built environment, the space of Occupy is an unpredictable and volatile combination. The Greek neighborhood of Exarchia, where Alexis was set, is evidence of that interface. It gains a certain energy from being adjacent to the Polytechnic, the leading university in Athens where students resisted the military dictatorship in 1973. The gates knocked down by military vehicles back then are preserved as a memorial. Gradually reclaiming the streets, Exarchia became accustomed to a form of autonomy within the system, like Christiania, only for Alexis’s shooting to make visible how fragile that autonomy actually was. That sudden awareness, combined with the rapidly disseminated news of the tragedy, brought people out onto the streets without having been told to do so by any organization. It is as if the spectacle and historical experience are two layers of space, co-existing but not usually coming into contact. A disruption like Alexis’s death brings them into contact, a clinamen of atomized modern experience, producing a catalytic force.

The occupation of Zuccotti Park and its transformation into Liberty Plaza are the subject of two long journalistic essays this week in Vanity Fair and Harper’s [paywall]. Both are interesting first-person accounts–the former is a weaving of many voices, while the latter is told by blogger Nathan Schneider. Each nonetheless misses the opportunity to explain the key phenomenon that made OWS different from so many other attempts to create alternative space in New York: people came. David Graeber, the anthropologist and a leading light of OWS, recalls:

I was thinking, Oh, it’s a couple hundred people. This is O.K. I was feeling a little disappointed, but then more and more people started streaming in, and a lot of them were from out of town. They obviously had no place to stay. So they had to occupy something one way or the other.

As Graeber notes below, they had not all come intending to do so. Many had simply intended to protest and came to decide to occupy. If there were a thousand people, then there are probably a thousand individual reasons why they chose to do that. But in their different ways, each person had learned about OWS, mostly via the Internet or in some cases a personal communication with the relatively small organizing group and thought, “I have to do this.”

OWS had, and continues to have, that spontaneous coming-to-action form such as that which brought Exarchia into the street. It did not have a history to draw on–no one had occupied Wall Street before. But now they have, and the Occupiers (meaning the people who camped) refer to Liberty as “our home.” It has reconfigured the “map” of New York and created a place of fragile autonomy, which is still perhaps stronger than Exarchia was when it took on the colonels. The very density of attention around “New York” guarantees that.

At the same time, there’s a curious invisibility, a “move on, there’s nothing to see here” about the Financial District. If we know where the Stock Exchange is, and the awful bull sculpture on Broadway attracts a crowd of tourists with cameras, who knew who Brookfield Properties were before September 17, 2011? One of the most intriguing new developments in OWS is the organization of a series of Occupy walking tours of downtown, visiting POPS, pointing out the locations of the various now-infamous financial institutions, and de-anonymizing (if that’s a word) the capitalist towers. As the police seek to enclose everything, Occupy moves away from its “home” to visualize the mechanics and spectacle of that enclosure.