Category Archives: media

Police Strategy to Silence globalNoise

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There were 13O globalNoise events yesterday in at least 42 cities that I know about, ranging from North and South America, East Asia, and across Europe to Iceland and no doubt many other places. There were naked protests in Madrid and Lisbon, thousands on the streets, with poetry, art, music, banners and so on. The chances are, though, that unless you follow social media, you wouldn’t even know. I don’t think there’s a media conspiracy but I do think there’s a set of police tactics that helps produce their desired result: “nothing to see here.”

So just for the record, here’s Madrid:

Madrid 13O

To be fair, organizers did say the crowd was smaller than they had hoped, but still. On to Lisbon, where crowds were substantial:

Portugal dismembered by the Troika

You can almost imagine the organizers thinking “the media can’t ignore this.” But they did for the most part. The relatively small media coverage was not altogether unexpected. Many events, like our own in New York, began at 6pm when most newsrooms are essentially deserted on a Saturday night. I was, perhaps naively, more surprised that the global coordination of the protests was not considered important or interesting, especially as it could have been written in advance. To be fair, there was strong coverage in social media and on the web, which is where most global social movement people probably get their news.

What there was everywhere was cops. In Paris, for example, a crowd of hundreds, diminished by the pouring rain, was everywhere paraded by riot police.

From the accounts of participants, what happened was that the police entirely surrounded the marchers on all sides, preventing them from distributing literature and even from being seen. Unaccustomed to being policed as insurgents, French activists were outraged. It’s hard not to suspect that this was a deliberate, and perhaps co-ordinated, strategy as similar reports came in from across Europe and Japan. Here’s what the demonstration in Tokyo against the IMF meeting looked like:

The men in hats are police and the demonstration is effectively shielded from view. Low-level banners are being carried but can’t be seen.

Something similar resulted in New York, where police on motorbikes cordoned off protestors from the public but couldn’t prevent some fun exchanges into shops, hotels and restaurants. While people were pleased yesterday that there were no arrests, in the light of day it seemed puzzling. Officer Winsky, the long-term OWS super-cop, was beside himself on various occasions but none of the usual random arrests followed. Officers did not carry their usual bundle of plastic zip-tie cuffs. Presumably, there had been a decision not to make arrests. Certainly S17 had shown that even a few arrests make the papers, while none of the more imaginative or creative actions were mentioned.

So between a set of co-ordinated police tactics to keep events invisible and not generate documentable arrests, and the low level of media attention on a weekend evening: nothing to see here. At the same time, all this strategizing can’t help but make me wonder if there isn’t a little nervousness out there as well. In any event, global coordination of protest events is set to continue. Now we have to make sure there’s something to see.

OWS and the Press

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Two new journalistic takes on OWS and the September 17 anniversary day of action are causing some waves in the movement. It’s interesting to look at them and see how two journalists can talk to much the same set of people and generate very different interpretations. It raises the question of what a social movement wants from the media, as well as the more discussed question of what it gets.

The pieces in question are in very different publications. In the Village Voice, house journal of the NYC counterculture, Nick Pinto has a long take on “Occupy Wall Street, Year Two.” Many people are greeting this as the best piece on OWS for a long time, which I take to mean closest to how OWS views itself. On the other hand, there’s Max Abelson’s piece for Bloomberg News, entitled “Occupy Sets Wall Street Tie-up as Protestors Face Burn Out.” While Abelson seems not unsympathetic to the movement, look at who he’s writing for: so it’s no surprise that the piece feels more critical. Internally, people have been disappointed because he did spend a long time talking with leading figures.

Let’s walk through the pieces quickly. Pinto begins with the standard observation that the very diversity of OWS opinion makes it hard to create and sustain consensus. However, he then suggests:

The factionalism that for so long seemed to threaten to tear the movement apart seems increasingly manageable. After a year of precisely these sorts of arguments, anarchists, liberals, and union stalwarts all know the contours of their disagreements, but they’re also better than they’ve ever been at pushing through them.

They’re also increasingly confident that whatever this thing is that binds them together, that keeps them coming back to the next meeting, the next hard-won consensus, whatever they call that shared project, it has a future beyond this first anniversary.

That’s what I meant when I said that the piece reflects the internal discourse of OWS. Pinto continues to describe the combination of police violence and the “dominant media narrative” that there’s “nothing to see here.”

Acknowledging that, for many occupiers, it’s how things get done as much as what the immediate results are that matters, Pinto talks about the projects like Strike Debt, Occupy Homes, and Foreclose the Banks that get activists excited and have emerged or grown significantly since May 1. Perhaps it’s in part because Pinto quotes a lot of people that I happen to know or have met but this piece does convey my own sense of OWS right now. The acknowledgement that May Day was not a complete success. The recognition that there won’t be another occupation. The determination to continue.

It’s that last that Max Abelson doesn’t see. The emphasis for him is on dysfunction and burnout:

Organizers said there has been more fatigue than fresh thinking this year. Occupy’s New York City General Assembly, which oversaw planning by consensus, ceased functioning in April because of infighting, ineffectiveness and low turnout, according to organizers and minutes of meetings. The group’s funds were frozen to preserve money for bail, ending most cash distributions, they said.

While the unnamed organizers are correct, for most of us April is an age ago. It’s hard to find people who still regret the passing of the GA, although there are occasional calls for a central decision making body. As the piece continues, the emphasis remains on “burnout,” “calcification,” “ossify”–a movement past its prime.

The Abelson piece reads as if it has been edited hard from a longer essay, as quotes float in and out without discussion or context. Subheads like “Venemous Forums” or “Anarchist Core” catch the eye but aren’t the writer’s fault. He does place a lot of emphasis on what I can only think was a throw-away comment about making citizens’ arrests on September 17, which runs counter to most people’s sense of what OWS is about.

In the end, then, what we have is a nice snapshot in a friendly media outlet and a not terrible but not great, slightly sensationalist piece in a very hostile outlet. Why is that no good? Why do we so often want to have a “celebrity” endorse a cause or an action, just like every other media-directed project? In part I’m thinking back to a job search we did last year in my department for someone working on media activism. The overwhelming impression I was left with was how hard such activism is in the face of the corporate behemoths. Now that even the New York Times has taken to calling Republican media statements “lies,” perhaps the gap is closing.

If Occupy is trying to build a new world in the shell of the old, what would its media look like? Projects like Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, whose third issue is just out; or Occupy! the OWS-Inspired Gazette (new edition due September 15) are trying to do that work. It’s very hard: questions of funding, printing and distribution have to be solved by the same people doing the editing, writing and commissioning.

These publications are not, as some might say, preaching to the converted. They are given away free, often to the curious people standing on the edge of a meeting or a rally who wants to know more but isn’t ready to get involved. In a city of 19 million people, working like this takes time. That’s OK. At certain moments, like last September 17, new possibilities emerge. What we’ve all been doing ever since is to try and keep that possibility open for as long as we can.

Mediating truAmerica

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Like many New Yorkers, I’m in the middle of my summer exodus, a retreat to leafier and quiet parts of the state that many people still seem to manage for a while. It’s an unconscious homage to the former Jewish exodus to the Catskills, a legacy so apparently unappealing that the Catskills are trying to rebrand as the South Adirondacks. One of the things I do is see more broadcast media than usual. It’s not pretty. But you do get to see truAmerica, the country that brought you truTV.

Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters

In Woody Allen’s 1986 classic Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow plays Frederick a misanthropic artist. He too spends an evening watching television and describes it to Lee (Barbara Hershey): “Can you imagine the level of the mind that watches wrestling?” While funny, any good cultural studies undergrad can take this apart: wrestling is known to be “fixed,” so the pleasure for the viewer comes in a knowing engagement with the parodic violence that is not violent and so on, and so on, as Zizek would say.

There’s another form of inauthentic television now, which is what I call truAmerica. Let’s try and imagine the kind of mind that would watch golf. Yesterday at a spacious Long Island gym, I was confronted by a large flat-screen showing the British Open golf. It’s amazingly well-executed TV, with cameras tracking the tiny white balls through the air and an editor cutting live from one scene to the next so you’re always watching action. In between come repeated ads, clearly targeting middle-aged white men. There’s hair color, pills for erections and cars of course. Notably, there were also a lot of financial ads.

This one from Merrill Lynch, which you can watch in entirety on their YouTube channel, seems designed to provoke a snort of ironic scorn. Of course, it’s called “Belief,” knowing that the very last thing that anyone with actual knowledge of financial markets would have in Merrill Lynch is belief. It’s like a restaurant that indicates on its signs that it serves “Authentic Cuisine,” telling anyone with any sense that the food is utterly inauthentic and homogenized for truAmerican taste. Indeed, Merrill Lynch are forced to note at the end in a subtitle that they are now part of “Bank of America Corporation.” Perhaps the point of the ad is just to remind people that, despite all their corporate crime, Merrill Lynch did not go under.

Next up was an ad for AIG. Yes, that AIG. It was trying to sell the idea that an AIG policy was a good way to provide security for “your” family, using a graphic of a white roof over four little figures representing the traditional heteronormative family with one boy child and one girl.  Again, no-one aware of the events of the past five years would think that AIG would be a good place to get life insurance. This advertising targets people who think that they are, or hope to be, in the one percent but are not even close. The sales manager who thinks he’s getting ahead (no ads I saw were directed at women) and wants to make investments to show it but doesn’t know how. It’s malicious and deceptive advertising.

If this form tries to define the upper levels of what used to be called the middle-class, there’s far more to define the exclusion at the lower levels. Later, while scanning channels I found one called truTV. On the basis of the “authenticity” paradigm, we can say that nothing on truTV is true, as conventionally understood. Perhaps truTV is a mediated version of Colbert’s “truthiness,” showing the world the “America” that the politicians claim to believe in and speak for. The place where gun massacres are not the time for discussion of gun control is truAmerica.

I discovered here an episode of the hit reality show Hardcore Pawn, which I refer to in my debt talks but have never seen. Apparently, it just started a new series. It’s set in a big box pawn store called American Jewelry and Loan in Detroit. There are three plot scenarios used. First, staff fight among themselves or against the customers. Second, a customer tries to pawn something that is worthless. Third, someone brings in something interesting or valuable that the store wants to get. That’s about it.

The viewer is encouraged to identify with the store staff and to despise the clients, whether African American or (from the show’s truPoint-of-View) poor white “trash.” A typical segment shows a gay man trying to pawn a TV for $400 so he can move out from his violent partner’s apartment back to his mother. The store will only offer him $50. The character then acts out a parody of African American queer camp. Or a heavy-set white guy tries to pawn a much-worn computer with missing keys for $1000 and uses a tirade of obscenities at the long-suffering staff. “We” are supposed to laugh at “them” because were are in truAmerica, while they are not. The acting is transparent, the performances are wooden and the laziness ubiquituous: as is typical of the format, any quote with “bite” is seen over and over again.

Hardcore Pawn is a “breakout hit” for truTV, with 2.5 million viewers, close to the best numbers for Mad Men and many times higher than shows like Treme. The pleasure of measuring yourself against the desperate and seeing your higher status is clearly on the rise.

If this is the context, a self deceptive and highly mediated “middle class” that nonetheless knows that truAmerica is not real, why are we surprised when a sad, lonely man identifies himself as a superhero and acts out the Dark Knight message of one man against the world, dressed in a fantasy costume of black armor and a gas mask? Does he even understand that he’s not in truAmerica when he does this? Increasingly I think that the social movements’ mantra shouldn’t be “Another World Is Possible” so much as “You Need to Come and Live in this World, Not the One in Your Head.”

In short, the fantasy is not that there is an alternative. The fantasy is the world in which financial markets operate for the customer’s benefit, there’s a bold line between the middle class and the underclass, and it’s perfectly sensible to allow people to buy as many guns and ammunition as they want.

 

On message, on messaging

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“We interrupt this writing project to bring you this message.” How our relationship to advertising (or messaging) has changed. When I began a course in visual culture or media studies, one of the exercises I used to perform would be to ask people in the group: who felt that they were influenced by advertising? Normally, hardly anyone raised their hand. Then I would ask who felt that other people or “ordinary people” were influenced by advertising and everyone would raise their hand. It was supposed to be learning moment. When I have tried this exercise since the rise of social networks, the mask has fallen. Everyone raised their hand and accepted that they were influenced by ads.

One index of this change has been the shift in “must-see” TV for media studies people. While The Wire had its day (2002-8), complexity, urban politics, crime and long-form narrative seemed to have migrated from 1970s cinema to the television drama. The past five years have belonged to Mad Men, a TV show about advertising relying on advertising revenues, in which the sexiest moment is “the pitch.”

That is to say, the moment when Don Draper (Jon Hamm) presents his narrative of a commercial seduction to the clients. There’s much more in the pitch than the ad itself. While the series is soap-like in its narrative format, these moments are lingered over lovingly. Half of the last series hinged around the pitch to Jaguar cars, for which one character prostitutes herself, another commits suicide, still a third comes to existential crisis, while a fourth quits the company.

What was this magical tag line: “At last. Something beautiful you can truly own.”

Don Draper pitches to Jaguar

This kind of message has a weird form of overlap with Occupy messaging. It uses a direct address to the viewer and it claims beauty. While Occupy would never associate beauty with a one percent commodity like this car, the interface should not be denied. After all, the Mad Men screenwriters have 2012 mentalities.

Compare an actual 1968 Jaguar ad:

Jaguar ad from 1968

“Finally,” it says. “The kind of car you dream about owning.” In 1968, year of global revolution, a tweedy self-satisfied young man looks at the viewer in the ecstasy of ownership. The motif of sexualized domination is there but subliminal. The ad addresses men as men without referencing unavailability. In 2012, a year of global social movements, that element needs to be foregrounded to give “nostalgic” satisfaction. So successful has this “pitch” moment been that AMC have commissioned a reality to follow Mad Men called The Pitch, featuring two advertising companies competing for a client.

Against this layered moment of actual messaging with faux-sophistication–sexism in the 1960s is supposed to show “we’ve come a long way, baby” while also indulging the presumed male viewer in its pleasures–how can a social movement address those it would like to participate? Most seem to think that simplicity and directness are the key. Certainly, the “We Are the 99%” meme moved Occupy to the front of media attention.

The difficulty is that we don’t want people to buy something but to do something. Recently I sat next to a friend watching TV when one of the NY State anti-smoking ads came on, featuring people with horrific post-surgical disabilities caused by smoking. She shied away from watching, which I presumed was revulsion at what might happen to her as a smoker. But in fact it was because any ad that mentioned smoking made her want to smoke and she’s trying to quit. Here of course the State gets to have the best of both worlds: it can claim a public health campaign that looks effective to the non-smoker, while encouraging its smokers to consume and thereby raise state tax revenues.

What made “We Are the 99%” so effective was, then, precisely that it did not have content. Each person could decide how it worked for them, just like any effective message. What happens once a tag has circulated endlessly across a show-me-the-money culture for over a year? On September 17, we’ll find out. We may be surprised.

 

Debt, (new) media and academia

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Now! Visual Culture spent a day thinking about the intersection of debt, academic knowledge, old and new media in the anti-disciplinary frame of visual culture.

A very well-attended first session on debt and academic labor set the tone. Magda Szczesniak (University of Warsaw) told us that the corporatization of university practice is developing  in Poland but students there are not yet in debt, while not being well-funded. She noted that the university system is still in effect “feudal,” depending on personal influence and obligation. Can the so-called deficiencies of this system be made into a virtue? For example, the failure of Polish academic publishing to generate any profit might make it easier to introduce open-source publishing.

Pamela Brown from the Occupy Student Debt Campaign outlined the terrifying statistics, generating despairing laughter. She explained the corporate structures that underpin the debt machine: 94% of elected officials have won their campaigns by being the most efficient fund-raiser, mostly coming from the financial industries. No fewer than four bills reforming bankruptcy laws have failed. The current debt forgiveness proposal in Congress is rated as having a one percent chance of success.

She recalled a debt-strike in Co-Op City in the Bronx during 1976, when 15,000 people refused payment for over a year because they felt they were supporting the debt burden of the management corporation. However, there are no indexed images of the event online, indicating a structural absence in the collective image bank and the beginnings of an explanation for the insistence that debt refusal is immoral and unprecedented. It also suggests an important research opporunity.

Ashley Dawson argued that student debt is itself a crisis of visuality. It is hard to visualize, unlike foreclosure, for example. In particular, how do we visualize the underlying moral contract? There have been attempts to represent the size of the debt, or the de facto indenture of student loans, but credit itself is hard to visualize. He recalled the history of the establishment of the open admission and free tuition policy by direct action in the 1970s at CUNY, where he teaches. President Nixon was afraid of the production of an “educational proletariat” and Republicans used the bankruptcy of the city in 1977 to end free tuition. CUNY was a harbinger for the casualization of the academic workforce, which is now half the size of its 1975 benchmark. Columbia is the third largest employer in New York but is tax exempt.

McKenzie Wark pointed out that activists often make the best researchers, citing David Graeber. He also noted that this isn’t capitalism “it’s something worse.” There is now a problem of representation in general because the mechanisms of capital are so abstract. The humanities should now be doing this kind of important work rather than sticking to the tried-and-testd because it would both make a contribution and be more likely to generate employment.

In the next session on new media publishing, Tara McPherson argued that we can’t visualize just the screen, we need to understand the machine. Databases normalize data and abstract them from that which they index. That point reflects back on the questions of economic visualization discussed earlier. For example, the graph itself was created in synchronization with the idea of the market as part of eighteenth century mercantilism. As many people observed in the debt panel, these forms don’t tend to be convincing when you’re arguing against neo-liberalism. In this context that becomes less surprising. Graphs abstract people into a positivist database. As McPherson put it, “technological systems are weighted in favor of positivism and control,” but they don’t have to be. We need to actively engage the form not just receive the content.

The insistence from the student debt campaign on naming and identifying debt as a personal and political issue rather than as an abstract data point is, then, a countervisuality to the dominance of the “market.” Talking to people about debt is in itself a form of resistance and politicization. The same point can be made in relation to digital media studies. Humanities scholars have embraced digital technology as a form of very large data analysis, a move away from affect. By contrast, Occupy Student Debt links data to narrative. Paradoxically, certain sectors of humanities new media scholarship might be as much part of the problem as part of the solution.

Deborah Levine’s extraordinary Scalar project called Demonstrating ACT UP (not yet open access) uses the affinity groups of ACT UP as an organizing strategy. By tagging individuals, the tag cloud allows you to visualize a vast database of ACT UP materials at a human and personal level. Because it relies on the affinity groups that drove the project, this organizational strategy is both horizontal and political.

In the afternoon, members of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, who made some key films for the Occupy movement in its earliest days, talked about collective film making.

This seven-minute film was edited in ten hours, moved from conception to release online in ten days–compared to the average edit of seven minutes in two weeks. It was so widely seen that it came to have a life of its own as a guide to Occupy.

BFC actively try to challenge the hierarchical structures of the industry and its mantra: FILMMAKING IS A BUSINESS, focusing instead on passion projects. “Collective” here means everything from close working together to a community of filmmakers meeting together and sharing work for collective criticism in a weekly critique workshop. Their films are very different in form, production and content.

The film Spoils deals with dumpster diving in Brooklyn, a central part of Freegan culture. Here the film was made in fairly traditional way with a director in charge.

Welcome to Pine Hill on the other hand was collectively made and produced in a non-budget context, meaning time and materials were donated. The film has won prizes all over the place, including at Sundance, so it’s no hindrance to the reception of the film. In a similar fashion, the Meerkat Media Collective work non-hierarchically, share tasks and make sure that people get experience in tasks that are new to them. They reminded me of Mosireen from Cairo, who have been working in similar ways.

Academia is still uncertain about these new ways of working. Horizontal ways of working and thinking are still emerging and still contested. As the weekend continues, it’ll be interesting to bookend conclusions tomorrow with the Occupy Theory Debt and Education Assembly in Washington Square Park on Sunday.

The rhythm of the global movement

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The new wave of global protest is inventing public space in global cities. Global capital likes space to be isomorphic and consistent–like a McDonalds hamburger, it should look, taste and feel the same wherever you actually happen to find yourself. In this world-view, there is no such thing as public space in global cities. The global precariat–meaning precarious workers, or everyone who doesn’t benefit from capital investment– is inventing it. It’s a globally mediated combination of certain sounds and certain actions. The “movement” is about learning how that goes and what to do about it.

Since 2011 we’ve seen a wave of efforts to reimagine bodies, spaces and lives resistant to, or outside of, the flows of finance capital. The first tactic was “take the squares,” a specific effort to reinvent the space of circulation into one of belonging. It flowed from Tahrir to Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti, St Paul’s, Pershing and many more. Zuccotti was the exception that proved the rule, a fragment of striated space in the frictionless smooth zones of hyperpoliced finance capital’s capital. Otherwise these spaces were well-known locations in historic centers of power. As such, they were in many cases all too easy for determined police to retake with the obvious exception of Tahrir. Indeed, since the revolution, the military regime has isolated the revolution “in” Tahrir, that is to say, the conceptual space of the movement.

So when we say that the movement is about “bodies in space,” we’re saying a set of interrelated things that we’re learning to understand as we go along:

  1. That the body is any body, not one (un)marked by codes of ethnicity, race, gender, able-ism, sexual orientation etc.
  2. That this body “moves,” both literally in the ways that it can depending on its age, capacities and desires, and also conceptually in that it refuses to stay in its “place,” the place allocated to it by authority.
  3. That this movement, which is also a refusal to “move on” as the police want us to do, invents mediated public space that did not previously exist, whether by occupying, marching, dancing, or displaying.
  4. That this movement is not any movement whatever but has a rhythm, one that is altogether different to the metronomic beat of capital’s 1-2-3-4.
  5. That this rhythm reclaims and invents the time that gives the new public space dimension.
  6. That these interactions are disseminated globally by video/photo/MP3 using social media and that this mediation is constitutive of resistant global space.
  7. It is unlimited/illimité/ilimitado.

In this video from Montréal that everyone loves, you can see this process at work. Filmed two days ago, edited yesterday, a global talking point today:

What if you don’t happen to have a thousand people available? Since 2008, the Spanish anti-capitalist activist collective flo6x8 have been reterritorializing the “any space whatever” of global capital. They use Spanish regional music and dance to disrupt its smooth flow with rhythms and sounds that cannot help but recall their North African origin.

Yesterday they intervened at a branch of Bankia, the nationalized amalgam of savings banks (thanks to Matthew Bain for pointing this one out to me).  Bankia announced that the 11 billion euro bail out they need is more like 19 billion. While this sum may seem minimal to those of us accustomed to the staggering amounts handed over to US and UK banks, in Spain, caught as it is between falling revenues due to the crisis and European Union-mandated austerity, this is a real number.  flo6x8 adapt a flamenco to lament this and to draw bank customers into their dance:

Here, just for fun, is an action from February this year in Barcelona, where the bank customers really get into it:

OWS is starting to work in this frame. It’s important to point out that the Spanish actions have roots in the long anti-fascist struggle and the depth of Spain’s financial crisis since 2008. Canadian organizers have been pointing out that their student strike is the result of two years hard work and the historical situation of Quebec.

The “New York” that is imagined as the epicenter of neo-liberal finance capital has visualized itself outside of historical space and time since its neo-liberal reinvention in the 1980s. Activist movements have been localized and divided. So OWS was, as many have pointed out, enabled in considerable part by the global experience and diversity of its activists. We still have much to learn.

Starting today, OWS is holding Summer Disobedience School at a variety of locations in Manhattan, combining non-violent direct action training with skill shares and teach-ins.

I’m going to go even though I don’t do many of the disruptive direct actions because what the rhythm of the movement from Montreal to Mexico City is teaching me is simply that we have a lot to learn.

The Media and the State of Exception

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You won’t be reading this in the mainstream media but there are social movements challenging the status quo from Canada to Mexico–the North American Free Trade Association is kicking back. In Mexico, the media are directly the target of the movement. In Canada, you’ll get a completely different story depending on whether you’re Francophone or Anglophone. And in the US, silence reigns.

On the way back into my building last night after the solidarity march, I met a neighbor who asked me why I was all dressed in red. So I explained and she was genuinely surprised: a New York Times-reading, PBS-watching liberal with literally no idea this had happened. This morning I checked the online media and there was no mention of events in Quebec in either the Times or the London Guardian, which I tend to think of as more progressive. There was a video deep down on Le Monde‘s website.

So is this a classic case of what Noam Chomsky called “manufacturing consent”? There’s a good deal of that certainly. At the same time, media professionals are consciously following their own sense of what makes news. Underneath these familiar, if frustrating, patterns, something else can be glimpsed–the possibility that this is in fact turning into an exception to the “business as usual” relation between media, elites, and people.

Clearly, media outlets want to cover things as “news,” what’s exceptional from the everyday. Once things become “normal,” even if they are protests at what is taken to be normal, they drop back into the blur of the everyday. So even if journalists believe themselves to be doing a good job of representing the “news,” social movements are going to find it difficult to feature without “victories.”

It’s intriguing that the newest student-led social movement in Mexico is directed precisely against media bias, in the anxiety that media collusion is helping the chances of the PRI to return to power, over a decade after the long-term single party was voted out. Even the Wall Street Journal has noticed:

“The protest movement has already achieved the impossible: forcing Televisa to cover an insurrection by young people,” political analyst Sergio Aguayo wrote on Mexico’s Animal Politico website.

Students drove the PRI candidate out of a university, leading to allegations that they were not really students. 131 students posted their identities to Facebook and as a result the Twitter hashtag is #yosoy132, “I am 132.” The movement’s goal is free elections and equality of information, which would be a social revolution. 50,000 marched in Mexico City this past weekend. Can social media lead a challenge to entrenched broadcast media and political power in the Americas, as well as in North Africa?

Montreal raises the bar still higher. Anglophone media have treated Loi 78 as normal legislation, or at best a Special Law, meaning that the protests against it are not significant. The Francophone media has quite correctly called it a “loi d’exception,” a law of exception. Such a law is, as many emphasized during the second Bush administration, a law that suspends the normal operations of law in order to defend the force of law. That is, those in power see the existing legislation as insufficient to enforce consent and pass a law giving them exceptional powers. The paradox here is that the law of exception reveals the force at work in the “normal” law at the point when people cease to consent to obey it.

The particular force of the Montreal law is that it undercuts the one space of exception left to the dominated. Standard law does not expect or provide for the repeated defiance of a particular piece of legislation. Thus New York public-private spaces were open 24-7 as a hedge against the private owner closing the space for their own purposes. It had not been considered that a group of private citizens might choose to occupy the space 24-7. It was, after a duration of time, intolerable to city authorities, who realized that their ability to enforce consent was being challenged. The evictions were done as sheer force with the flimsiest of justifications.

In Montreal, the repetition has been of the right to strike and the right to march. As the strike continued towards 100 days and the nightly marches reached into the 20s, a form of panic seems to have set in among state government. After the initial outcry, they fell back on the strategy of claiming that the law was in fact “normal” because other cities like New York and London had similar laws. Despite their penchant for violence, the Montreal police do not so far seem inclined to use their new powers. Talk of negotiations has surfaced at once.

It matters a good deal how this ends. If the students agree to some deal that leaves the law of exception in place, the state will have gained notable, if formal, new powers. It will also set a precedent that other cities like New York might look at with interest. That is, it will be said that the law brought about an end to the crisis. Canadian conservatives are claiming that this is now a movement “about nothing” and the law is perfectly reasonable in the main.  A media narrative of the power of the exception is in the making.

On the other hand, the Montreal movement currently has dual power. Unlike, exceptionally, many other such movements globally, it has not yet chosen to exercise that power except in calling for an end to the neo-liberal policies of the Quebec administration. Should they take exception at the way their self-evident mandate is received, that might change. Normally, in North American societies, that doesn’t happen. Whatever this is, it isn’t normal.