Anniversary Week: Atocha M-11

Yesterday began a key week of anniversaries: on March 11,  2004, known as M-11, the response to the Atocha Station bombing prefigured the indignados. March 17 is the six-month anniversary of OWS. And March 18 is the 142nd anniversary of the Paris Commune, which in some sense began it all. So this week I’ll think about these moments and some conceptual links between them.

The Atocha Statioo, March 11, 2004

To refresh the memory–several trains in or approaching the Atocha train station in Madrid were bombed simultaneously, causing 191 deaths and approximately 1800 injured. The atrocity occurred three days before national elections, in which José María Aznar’s conservative Popular Party were hoping for re-election despite their unpopular involvement of Spain in Iraq. Aznar held the Basque separatist group ETA responsible for the attack. However, it quickly became clear that an al-Qai’da inspired group had in fact carried it out. In the face of mass demonstrations, Aznar was defeated and the “socialist” PSOE were returned to office.

For Amador Fernández-Savater, the events of M-11 represented:

the emergence of a new form of politicisation which, summing up:

– does not necessarily have its meaning in the left/right dichotomy

– does not find its strength in ideology, so much as in first-hand feelings

– does not delegate representation or let others accumulate power at its expense

– thinks with its body and asks questions about meaning

– produces its own knowledge

– makes no attempt at cohesion, but at recreating the communal: an open, all-inclusive and joyful ‘we,

– transforms the map of what is possible

– does not declare another possible world, but fights to stop the destruction of the only one there is (We were all on that train).

The prefiguration of the indignados of 2011 and the related project of Occupy is striking. Equally significant, however, was the strength and speed of the popular refusal of the official explanation, drawing on the long experience of anti-fascism in Spain and the pervasive anxiety post-1975 about the possible return of dictatorship.

In very different vein, the young American writer Ben Lerner recently published his first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). A quick plot summary: a latter-day Holden Caulfield wins a literary fellowship to Madrid after leaving Brown, where he seeks literary, sexual and artistic experience without success, despite being present during M-11.

The writing is intensely self-reflexive, doubling back on its every reference. There are extended passages close to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a somewhat redundant interspersal of photographs in the manner of W. G. Sebald, while the political events are kept adjacent to the narrative in the classic manner of Stendhal. Even the title is a reference to a 1962 poem of the same name by John Ashbery that famously resists attempts to give its pictorial style meaning. It’s the kind of book that adapts the author’s own critical essay on Ashbery for several jarring pages.

Unsurprisingly, the narrator Adam Gordon wonders about applying for literature PhD programs: it’s really the other way around, this is a book designed to have dissertations written about it. At the same time, it’s engagingly written and the anti-hero “portrait of the artist as a young man [abroad]” works well in this endlessly referential context.

Without pretending to review the book as a whole, what I was wanting from it was some account of M-11. One of Adam’s love interests, Teresa, was an active participant but he himself spends more time online, taking anti-anxiety medication and sleeping during the decisive days. Here the book wants to have it both ways, like similar “year abroad” first novels such as Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel and Prague (actually about Budapest) by Arthur Phillips.

Each wants to reference major political events, which Lerner ironically calls “History,” while maintaining a suitable distance. Lerner has Adam give a talk in which he says: “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it.” It says something about the book that I felt I had to Google the sentence to be sure it was not a quote from somebody else. For all the arch knowingness, it’s a very old-fashioned reflection theory at work here–that “art” reflects “the real” but cannot engage with it directly.

For all that, I came to think that this failure to engage was precisely what we can learn from Lerner (pun intended). That is to say, during the Iraq war so much Anglophone political discourse was centered on the Bush-Blair axis that many of us missed the importance of M-11 as a long-term rethinking of the political. While my own Watching Babylon, finished in May 2004, was revised to take account of the Abu Ghraib photographs released in April of that year, I only referenced the Spanish events. On the one hand, we were too convinced of the importance of the photographs as “evidence” that might convict the entire war project and, on the other, our “context” was still too focused on the Anglophone.

Occupy has, by contrast, repeatedly tried to learn from Argentina, Spain, Greece, Egypt and other forms of planetary resistance to the crisis–imperfectly, no doubt, but as the Spanish example shows, new forms of politics in the widest sense used by Rancière and Fernández-Savater, are built over decades not weeks.

On this anniversary, let us not forget that the crisis continues to intensify in Spain, despite huge swathes of cheap money deluging the banks and bond markets from the European Central Bank. From a recent report by Reuters, here are a few details:

street cleaners, nurses, teachers and job trainers are struggling to get by as cash-strapped local authorities withhold wages….In more than 1.5 million Spanish households, not one family member has a job. Almost half of adults under 25 are unemployed. Close to a third of the 17-nation euro zone’s jobless live in Spain….Spain’s 17 autonomous regions are laden with around 30 billion euros in deficit — 3 percent of the country’s economic output

The Financial Times has called this renewed austerity on top of recession “insanity” in the sense that doing the same failed action over and over again must be insane. Half a million people went to the streets on February 24 to protest this nonsense.

The M-11 and M-15 movements are not done yet. This is an anniversary, not a memorial.

 

Sketches of Spain: From the Everyday to Every Day

So I decided to step back for the weekend, meaning that I missed the visit of the Spanish activist Amador Fernández-Savater from the May 15 movement to OWS. As I read the wonderful materials provided, I found that in January Fernández-Savater had suggested that there were fewer people attending M-15 events because “people have returned to making their lives.” I want to explore what this phrase might mean.

If the encampments (whether in Spain or New York) were an exception to the crisis, it is nonetheless “difficult to live in an exception,” if you cannot devote your life to it as an activist. At the same time, Fernández-Savater follows the thought through to a consideration of how the crisis “forces us to constantly make and remake everything.” I think we can see a periodization emerge here: out the crisis of the 1970s emerged both neo-liberalism and its everyday ideology, and the counterpointed politics of the everyday. The present crisis has transformed neo-liberalism into an ideology of inequality and calls for politics every day in response.

Fernández-Savater locates the formation of a consensus in Spain to the Moncloa Agreements of 1977, two years after the end of the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco:

the culture that was imposed on the defeat of the dreams of emancipation and communism in the 1970s. Culture in the strong sense of the word: a configuration of sensitivity that decisively structures the play of politics, universities, the media, the production of work and our very perception of things.

I’ve recently been re-reading an evocation of that defeat in the detective novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Murder in the Central Committee, originally published in 1981. By means of an investigation into a classic “closed room” murder mystery, Montalbán was able to create a portrait of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. As befits the noir genre, there’s a certain romantic nostalgia–together with, it has to be said, some sad sexism and homophobia.

In one passage, however, Carmela, a PCE cadre, complains precisely of the difficulties of reconciling activism and making a life in terms that are familiar to many of us:

“In the end I’ve got to work, function in the Party, do the shopping, keep house and be a mother–which is the least of my worries. And if you complain some old comrades come round and tell you a life-story that makes your hair stand on end….There are more and more who cook in order to forget.”

When the detective Carvalho asks her what she’s trying to forget, Carmela answers: “That there’s been reform but no political break.”

In this period, a new activism of the everyday chose to celebrate such activities as cooking as in themselves a form of resistance. So de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, with his emphasis on cooking as one element of that practice, was formed in the aftermath of May 68, while British cultural studies were part of the response to what Stuart Hall called “the great moving right show.”

The neo-liberal consensus on everyday life is familiar to us all as the boilerplate of every mainstream politician: work, homeowning, health care, college and pension provision. Within that consensus the technocratic discussion has been about the allocation of state and so-called “market” provision. It need hardly be pointed out that all these aspects of the everyday (aka the “American dream”) are rapidly moving out of reach. Further, the current Troika and market consensus is that people don’t deserve these things unless they can afford them.

So we find ourselves in the situation of “precariousness,” an awkward word for an awkward situation. It means finding that even if you have health insurance, your plan no longer covers a drug you use and the cost is $248, as recently happened to me. It means that if you did what the consensus told you to do and “saved” for college tuition, the amount saved has reduced in absolute terms and the costs are anyway so far higher than predicted that it is pointless to try and catch up. It means discovering that as people live longer, there is a new duty of care for elders to which the state is indifferent because these people are no longer economically active. And so on.

Living precariously is a struggle every day, and it is not in the least everyday. Although I did not know this when I started, it is why I do this project every day. It is part of the collective struggle to find a way to combat inequality every day.