In
response to OWS’s plans to reassemble on its anniversary (#S17) to shut down
Wall Street, the forces of order took the unimaginative step of quite literally
walling the street. Mikey B is a no nonsense kind of guy. Zuccotti Park and the
Stock Exchange are now enclosed by lines of concrete, aluminum, and steel; atop
some of these formations perches an NYPD observation post. Humorous
preparations for a movement declared long dead, no doubt.
The
enclosure of Zuccotti is intriguing for the light it sheds on the processes by
which social symbols are formed. No doubt there are tactical reasons that
motivated the police to enclose Zuccotti—a rare open space downtown, it is an
ideal convergence point for mass actions. But there are others in the vicinity,
others that OWS will be using on Monday. It’s clear, I think, that the
social-symbolic role of Zuccotti exceeds its possible tactical function. To be
sure, the becoming-symbol of the park does not mean that it utterly abstracts
or detaches itself from the non-symbolic. Rather, the symbol of the park always
refers us back to tactics, to struggle and antagonism: this symbol is the
sedimentation of past and projected/future social confrontations. The tactical
and the symbolic, the material and the discursive co-constitute one another, interpenetrate:
the wall around Zuccotti is both a wall and something-more, but this excess of
meaning is not separable from the wall’s construction in the first place.
Discourse moves matter, matter moves discourse, each movement indexing the
intensification of social antagonisms. I’m interested, here, in how the wall
attempts policing—policing in a broad sense of an entire material-discursive
coding apparatus—and thus re-coding this antagonism, and re-coding it is
non-antagonistic.
First
reading: The construction of the wall amounts to a tactical-symbolic inversion of the intentions of OWS.
Looking at the wall, one gets a sense that the police are keeping the plebes of
Occupy from accessing a space reserved for powerful patricians. This is no
doubt true, as we will see. But the concrete-symbolic practice of keeping-out
inverts the deeper structure of the intentionality of OWS and of the police.
Simply put, OWS does not want to inscribe itself into a space of power, it does
not want to enter capitalism—rather, it wants to force an exit, to detach
itself from capitalism, to separate itself utterly and completely from power.
It is rather the state that wishes to keep us inside of capital, immanent to
the relations of command that constitute it. The construction of the wall and
the social choreography that the wall invites—demonstrators clamoring to get
inside of the park, as they entered it last night at the end of a march, as
they sat in it tonight, after filing in one by one, for a Rosh Hashanah
celebration—inverts the orientation and directionality of the antagonism.
Second
reading: The construction of the wall amounts to a tactical-symbolic ironization of the intentions of OWS.
Looking at the space enclosed by the wall, one gets a sense that there is no
there there—that conquering this space would not be worth the fight, and any
attempt to seize this space would simply be the result of a few bad eggs
bloc’ed up and looking for a confrontation. The empty space enclosed by the
wall nullifies and expresses the nullity of the desires of OWS; the desire of
the plebes to enter the park seems devoid of content, as empty as the empty
park they would try to occupy. The wall, in short, encloses a non-target; the
intentionality of OWS is non-targeted, its aims at best contrarian, purely
formal and reactive to a Power that says No, You Can’t Enter Here. The
construction of the park as a targeted non-target de-positivizes the telos of
OWS.
The
wall, then, attempts two coding operations: On one hand, it accords a substantive
rationality to radical intentionality, but it attempts to conduct it, to
transform the directionality of struggle: the will to flee capital reappears as
the will to get inside it. On the other hand, by constructing the park as a
targetable and targeted non-target, it declares the intentionality of OWS to be
merely formal and reactive: OWS would not know what it wanted if the walls
disappeared. If the state said, sure, okay, have the park, pitch a tent if you
want, then OWS would be revealed to lack an aim. The police, with their wall,
are both directors of and actors in an insubstantial social drama,
self-consciously constructing the possibility of a drama, but a drama about
nothing, with no stakes, in which to win is to display the insubstantiality of
the victory. In aiming for the park, OWS either aims for capital or for
nothing.
Let’s note one bizarre and frightening effect
of this ambidextrous coding operation. This concrete repressive apparatus of
the police radiates the claim that it is repressing nothing. It redirects
and conforms our aims with the dominant or
it exposes the utter non-positivity of our aims—but repress? No way. Oddly,
this understanding of police has percolated through the movement; when police
repression is discussed, it is addressed on a level of pure formality, as the
police’s violation of liberal-democratic rights—to gather and assemble, to
speak and to express oneself collectively. We become more concerned about the
violation of constitutional principles than about the violation of ourselves,
of activists gathered-there-together. And so, in effect, the intentionality of
Occupy is conducted toward liberal capitalism, its rights guarantees and its
constitutional state; and so, in effect, Occupy events seem increasingly to be merely
reactive to a power that willfully and eagerly oversteps legal restraints, a
power to which we cry “shame shame shame” and “who do you protect” etc as if
that were the full point of the action. The aim of our actions, in short,
becomes staging situations in which it becomes proper to demand that the
liberal-capitalist state and its constitutional guarantees protect us from its
armed minions.
The Wall Effect, then: it encourages us to
place our faith in constituted, constitutional power. Even as we’re cynical about
the intentions of that power, demanding and petitioning become the sole modes
of self-help available to us: “Mr Bloomberg, tear down this wall…” We thus
ignore the extent to which the wall, the entire material-discursive apparatus
of the police, does in fact repress
something: our substantive and virtual potential, our constitutive and
constituent power that, in its extensive and intensive mobility, exceeds the
formalism of constituted Power, its mechanisms of control, capture, and reform.
It represses us from moving into that time-space just before us, a field of
potential that was once named Liberty Square.
And, so, a third reading, one that adopts the
antagonistic perspective of constituted versus constituent power, of Power
(calcified and senescent) versus power—mobile and youthful, filled with
potential: The wall is just a fucking wall, a contraption of metal and concrete
designed to inhibit the construction and realization of alternative modalities
of being in the world. It is the vulgarity and stupidity of power, the
concretion of the sheer barbarism and brutality required to keep people in
their places. It’s not a sign of anything; it is repression, violence, and another brick in the wall of a whole
state apparatus. Dividing us from our world-making force, just a fucking wall.
Smashing it would almost accord it too high an
honor.
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