"...have you not forgot to wind up the clock?"

I began writing this before the eviction. Tenses are screwy. I'm letting it stand. I don't want to talk about Dilworth in the past tense yet. Hopefully I'll never have to do so.

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Occupy Philly’s continued occupation of Dilworth Plaza has generated a number of pseudo-leftist critiques from people concerned with “labor” and “job creation.” For those of you who do not know, the rationale behind Occupy Philly’s eviction is that a 50 million dollar building project has been slated to begin at the site of the occupation since November 15. The city gets a skating rink; the unemployed can look forward to 800 or so jobs. Aren’t jobs what Occupy wants? How, ask liberal conservatives, conservative liberals, and (my favorite crowd, insofar as they expose the political bankruptcy of Maddow-watching "progressive" Democrats) conservative conservatives, can a left-wing social movement impede job creation? Of course, as they will acknowledge, these jobs will be temporary; 800 workers won’t be employed all at once. But isn’t something better than nothing? “In this economy?” (A lovely phrase that imagines “the economy” as an object susceptible to deictic indication…)

The answer, of course, is no. Such right-liberal criticisms routinize the precarity of employment; indeed, they show how well neoliberalism and flexible accumulation practices have altered normative understandings of work. Not only are we to take exploitation in the form of surplus extraction as the way of the world; now we are to be positively grateful when—happy chance!—a charitable capitalist consents to exploit us at all. Precarity and the exposure to contingency have become the nomos of the contemporary—the way in which the present divides itself. This round of struggle does not pit the proletariat against capitalists, but the precariat against the existentially secure. Of course, the language of the mid-nineteenth century continues to map onto the present: the precarious proletariat, as Marx would always state, were vogelfrei, free as birds, free to starve if they couldn’t secure, say, a low-paying job building a skating rink at Dilworth, while Mssrs Moneybags could shut down the shop for a year and still eat heartily, growing their jowls if not their capitals. But Occupy, I think, has foregrounded the issue of precarity, that the norm now is exposure to contingency, and it’s along these lines that the current cycle of struggle should be thought. They’ve brought this issue to the fore in two ways: negatively, by not making demands for jobs their primary concern, and, positively, by fashioning sites of occupation as havens from precarity and contingency. We might say: An Occupy camp is that place where members of the precariat meet and, through the mutuality of care, free one another from exposure to existential contingency. Even as Occupy thrives on contingency of all kinds—chance encounters, the openness to creative accident, and even bodily contiguity—it has cut a spatial division between the world of precarity and a world of care. In so doing, it has taken over the role of the state: to shield citizens from exposure to unwilled, unintended, contingent forces.

Occupy forces us to think the political from the perspective of precarity. Materially and ideologically, Occupy constructs itself from fragments, conjoined bric-a-brac: “homes” patched together with multiple pieces of cardboard and plywood, flimsy tents lashed to trees, flimsier consensus built through grueling hours and days of argument. (I’m recalling now the one woman who had an indescribable collection of stuff on display, first by the west-facing steps, then on the north side: some radical papers, odd toys, records with no apparent political import, dead flowers, chipped vases…) And, of course, the Occupiers themselves, the precariat, left with nowhere to go but to one another. All of these gatherings, collections, conjoinings were susceptible to interruption. Consider, for instance, the concerns about the coming cold, the weather: we’re actually talking about a political movement, a polis, so precarious that snow could destroy it—and, indeed, by literally destroying people, exposed bodies. Even as it empowered itself in its contingent coming-together, precarity, exposure, and bad contingency persistently threatened Occupy. The substrate of the potential world we would make is the ontological fragility of the world we inhabit.

I take finitude—and thus precarity—to be an ontological fact. So does any economics (it’s a science of finitude), and for this reason economic discourse is always inches away from serving as an ontological discourse. We might say that economics is a technology for negotiating the facticity of finitude, of precarity. It thus risks a certain callous positivism: scarcity is the way of the world. The proper ethico-ontological question concealed within economic thought is: how is finitude, precarity, our given exposure to contingency, to be negotiated, reckoned with, handled? How do we care about our contingent being-here-together?

We can’t unwork this fact of sheer exposure. No one can determine, before birth, if they are to be born into the secured-wealthy or the growing precariat. We’re thrown into our positions—we could call this contingent distribution of security and precarity a “birthright lottery,” with Ayelet Shachar. But, if we can’t control the underlying heteronomy that determines the modality of our being, the contingent assignment to a life free from or exposed to further contingencies, we can make a world that controls the effects of such contingent assignment, that cares for the fact of our unintended thrownness. (Once more: this is what the state used to do, at least normatively.) I’m recalling now the opening lines of Tristram Shandy, a “novel” at the origins of a literary tradition that, we are told, brought into the world the autistic and autarkic liberal subject. But, as we see, exposure to contingency, to an unwilled determination of one’s being, stands at the very origins of this subjectivity:

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me…”

Tristram’s origins are tainted by nonreflexivity—the way his parents refuse to consider the effects of their actions, as they were duty bound. Contingency undoes everything in Tristram’s life-course, from his name to his nose. But, as Tristram knows, the origins are unassailable, he is factically in the world as he is, and what remains is to manage effects, to negotiate his unwilled presence in the world.

There are better and worse ways of managing the fact of precarity, of exposure to contingency. But it cannot be annulled. Liberals would have us think that the 800 people securing jobs at Dilworth will be freed from contingency, from exposure to bodily undoing. But the precariat cannot be freed from precarity through labor. Precarity will return, months later, jobs gone, skating rink complete. Neoliberalism’s valorization of labor—as an expression of self-responsibility, self-care, and as a modality of freeing oneself from contingency—enables us to ignore the fact that precarity can’t be un- or over-worked. It’s labor’s ontological presupposition.

The 800 people needing labor are precarious anyhow. Far more precarious is the thought of precarity itself. The struggle now consists in showing the insistent, non-transcendable fact of precarity, in showing how we are differentially exposed to contingency, and in developing a modality of sociality that does not seek to annul (through labor, through ideologies of freedom, or both) precarity, but continually (re)organizes social being to negotiate fragility, finitude. The struggle consists, in other words, in showing how a village of cardboard, plywood, and plastic offers members a greater freedom from precarity by insistently recognizing its own, and their, fragility. A fragility that no kind and no amount of labor—not even 800 jobs—can un-work.

A Plea: Colleagues, Come to City Hall at 5pm

Occupy Philadelphia faces eviction tonight. Its permit expires at 5:00pm. Most likely, police enforcement of the eviction will take place after 11:00pm. Many Occupiers plan to stay there, to remain in the commons that their co-presence produces. You should join them—us, I mean.

I make this request in particular to those of you who cannot stand behind the politics that Occupy seems to endorse—who do not feel represented by Occupy, who do not feel as if the issues that motivate you are represented by Occupy. At this moment, the politics of Occupy—its varied ideologies, desires, and aims—are less important than the question of the political itself. And it is in the name of fidelity to the political, of a receptivity to a futurity that has been breached but might be closed, that I ask you to come to City Hall tonight.

Most of us cannot recall a time at which the private has not enclosed, diminished, and ultimately dissolved the political. Two years after I was born, a British halfwit declared, “They’re casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” The sociality of the political was cast as a mis-citation, a fantasy, a mystifying dream. Just individuals and families, mommy-daddy-me. Meaningful sociality was reduced to whom one fucks (heteronomatively), the relations between mommy-daddy and the human product of their fucking (making genealogy, and thus race, a substrate of neoliberal sociology), and one’s self-responsible interactions with other self-responsible actors (a subjectivity derived from normative models of market sociality). That’s it. Three ways of being social. Nothing else could fit into the epistemic coordinates of neoliberalism, and we’ve been subjectivated to take this impoverishment of being-with as being real: “And, you know, there is no such thing…” Sure we do, Marge. Neoliberal realism codes any figuration of the social that exceeds the scope of these impoverished hermeneutics as merely ideological, merely cultural, an interested mystification of the real forces at work. In so doing, it reduces real antagonisms to administrative problems.

I don’t have time to write more right now. I just want to make two claims. First: The event of the political is constituted through the advent of being-with that cannot fit into given modalities of counting the social. The political fucks up the census; it introjects an excessive modalization of subjectivity into the quantified and integral space of administered being. Second: The excessiveness of the political to the given means that it is properly speaking incalculable. It cannot be contained, reined in, or reigned over by given hermeneutics. This includes our own radical practices of reading, our own mechanisms of critique. I’ll take myself as an example. I think that much of Occupy’s discourse is bourgeois-reformist in orientation; its focus on finance capital enables Occupiers to neglect class stratification within the “99%.” But this critique is feckless (at best) and conservative (at worst) if it is not made on site—in this place where one is not not an individual, a family member, etc., but where one is also more than that in an as yet undetermined, incalculable way. Even though Occupy might seem regressive or stupid from a given position (say, my open Marxist position), we have to accept that we can’t outsmart the political, because the emergence of the political puts what makes us “smart” into question. In negative terms, the political will always seem stupid, and this is because the event it marks cannot be contained within given frames of intelligibility. We can only use our pre-given modes of knowing (say, class critique) to help attune us to the incalculable event that comes. But we can’t use our modes of knowing to stifle the event.

There is not one radically oriented academic hermeneutic that does not have a basis in a real social movement—political actions where subjects faced the state and demanded that their complaint be treated as a political problem, a failure of the polity that puts the polity itself in question. The event of the political produces new knowledges, new modalities of reading the social. As academics, we come belatedly to the political—so many owls of Minerva—and transform the political work of others into knowledge. It’s a kind of appropriation; at least, it is a kind of division of labor, a stratification of primary producers (activists) and secondary, value-adding producers (academics). Bring the knowledges you possess, submit Occupy to immanent critique—a critique that quickens, a critique that opens Occupy to its full potential—and come be a primary producer of the political knowledges that will have arrived.

The Police and the Polis

About a week ago, while at the Occupy Philly GA, I witnessed firsthand, and for the first time, the enforcement of Philadelphia’s racist, classist curfew law. (For those of you who do not know about this law: it makes it illegal for minors to be in University City—Penn’s campus—and Center City after certain times. It essentially makes it illegal for young black kids to travel to and through affluent white areas of the city.) It’s actually incorrect to say that I saw its enforcement firsthand, for I didn’t realize what was happening until it was over. I had to perform a cognitive double take, as it were. This is because the violence that I was witnessing was extremely distressing, extremely disorienting. For one, there was the noise: the two police officers grunting orders, shouting at the black kid who was caught between them, their arms crooked between his, his body tugged forward as he shouted back. Moreover, the cops were not in uniform; they only signifier of their office was a red armband that, due to the speed of events, I could not see. The police, in short, did not appear as police; they appeared as private persons in a private dispute, carting a kid away from City Hall for reasons neither they, nor the victim, nor I, nor my co-witnesses, could immediately comprehend. They didn’t act like police, either—that is, their actions did not conform to my ideal-typical understanding of how police action appears. They weren’t cool, they weren’t calm. They were affectively and personally involved in the situation, angry and enraged at the kid who squirmed in their too-tight grip. It seemed as if, at the moment of enforcing the law, the transcendence of the law that they were enforcing was forgotten; all that remained was a kind of nonpurposive, nonreflective violence—a brute desire to dominate this resistant subject, the one right there, right at them, the one they touched and grabbed and grasped. Legal motivations provide the before and after of the event of enforcement, but the event itself seemed to suspend these legalistic concerns. All that remained was force, and their passional investment in enforcing their wills—not the determining will of the law.

I offer this scene of disorientation, of confusion, as a hermeneutic for reading the spread of police violence against Occupy that we have witnessed in the past week. We’re all familiar with these acts of violence, from NYC to UC Davis. What is most shocking about this violence is that it continues. Many are asking: How, given the fact that police know that someone is filming them, that thousands of cameras expose the rightlessness of their actions, is it possible that police continue to use batons, gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets? The scene of enforcement, however, is one in which futurity does not matter, in which questions of legitimation and right are suspended. This is not because scenes of enforcement are states of exception, paralegal spaces in which the law produces zones of exteriority in which it renders itself non-effective. Law may still exercise its grip over these scenes; it may penalize the police for the cruel violence they inflict. The law will remember these scenes, and it is important that we make the law remember these scenes. But these scenes of enforcement are constituted such that, in their taking-place, actors forget the law, forget the transcendent will that they enforce, and substitute the law’s will with their own wills, fully immanent and attuned to the situation, passional and violent. The thesis: In these scenes of enforcement, the wills of the police are not determined by the determining will of law but by the affective composition of the event itself.

If the sovereign has two bodies, the police has but one—and it’s always right there, fully involved in and immanent to the event. Policing takes place such that the police can never step outside and attain a position of exorbitant reflexivity to the world that their presence convenes. We can’t be misled, then, by the seeming impersonality of cops in riot gear—the uniformity of their dress, the invisibilization of defining and personalizing features, the bodies too sleek and shiny to be striated by particularity. Abstraction here—the abstractness of the individual bodies allegorizing the abstractness of the state—is not a uniform but a costume, a disguise. What remains important is the embodied singularity beneath the drag of abstraction, of uniformity, of impersonality. For an impersonal abstraction is not affected by affect, and it is affective pulsations—frustration, rage, perhaps even sadistic pleasure—that choreograph the movement of a decidedly non-abstract baton-wielding hand in the arc that completes itself on a protestor’s head. Abstract force, the state itself, only becomes concrete through the contingent conduits of affected singularities—and, in the moment of this concretion, abstraction is entirely forgotten, suspended. The scene of police violence is in the world of the contingent concrete, of force undetermined by an unaffected will.

It’s probably shocking to no one that police are not good Kantians, that their will is always involved and interested in the situation in which they find themselves. But I think that this goes a little distance in explaining how apparently unmotivated acts of police violence against non-violent subjects (such as the pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis) are possible. Because the will of the police is undetermined by legalistic reflexivity, non-violent protest in such situations does not signify as demonstrators legally exercising a set of rights (including, in the event of an illegal action, the right of due process). It is the affected and non-rational will of the police that matters, that participates in the shaping of these events. Any resistance—violent or “non-violent”—signifies as a violation of the police’s (not the law’s) will. Indeed, non-violent protest (e.g., the refusal to move at the police’s command) affectively determines the police as frustrated, as temporarily feckless, and produces a state in which the police will use whatever means are available to enforce their irrational will. Ultimately, the aims of the police have to strike any observer as nonsensical: what is at stake, for instance, in removing these students from this plot of grass? Who cares? I’m assuming that a police officer, off duty, away from the scene, would agree. But in the situation, it is the negation of an affected will—one that cannot achieve a position of exorbitant reflexivity—that matters and that compensates for its negation by brutalizing others.

My point, then, is that these scenes of police violence are scenes of activity whose purposivity is determined by an immanent field of affects. The nonpurposiveness of the democratic polis finds its perverse double in the purposeless violence of the police. It’s an eerie reminder: in these scenes of violence stripped of transcendent reference, in the immanent enfolding of two singularities in a field of affective intensity, it no longer becomes clear who is fighting for what, or what constitutes the difference between the whos. Only the properly political distinction between friends and enemies can, at this point, separate the police and polis—but even this distinction might dissolve in the scene of violence. The police, the polis: Mon semblable,—mon frère!

Please sign this petition urging the DOJ to investigate the UC Davis police actions.

Utopia; or, the Brooklyn Bridge

Occupy Wall Street’s Day of Action on November 17 concluded with a dramatic occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge has an obvious significance within the movement’s internal history: Occupy was galvanized when hundreds of protesters were arrested on the bridge on October 1. But what is it about the Bridge that made it such a cathected site for Occupy in the first place? It is possible that the bridge--any bridge--offers a potent set of symbolics for the movement. We might think of Occupy, for instance, as attempting to bridge that gap between the elites and the plebes. We might think of it as bridging a history of social, political, and economic injustice with a future democracy, a polis to come. We might think of the bridge as symbolizing the peculiar way that Occupy materializes sociality--it convokes a virtual space, a zone of being-with that cannot be localized or demarcated, a place that can always move elsewhere, a site of pure liminality and thus potentiality. Taking a more historical perspective, I suggest that Occupy’s march across the Brooklyn Bridge bridges a gap between utopian socialists of the mid-nineteenth century and social movements today. Indeed, the Brooklyn Bridge is one sedimentation of utopian socialist knowledges and practices that circulated through the Atlantic world in the republic’s first half-century. We might see Occupy’s return to the Bridge as a kind of unconscious homage to their socialist forebears--because, as we know, and as we must always assert, socialism did have a vibrant role in U.S. politics until some silly jackass decided that socialism and class-conscious politics are an impossibility in our always-already utopian land of plenty.

John August Roebling was the chief designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. Born in Germany, Roebling studied architecture and engineering in Berlin; he also attended lectures offered by Hegel. It was in Berlin, and possibly in Hegel’s lecture hall, that he met John Adolphus Etzler. Like Roebling, Etzler was interested in Hegel and engineering. He also had a particular hobbyhorse--emigration from the authoritarian states of Prussia. Indeed, Etzler had been jailed for promoting emigration in 1829. Upon his release in 1830, Etzler and Roebling jointly published A General View of the United States of North America, Together with a Community Plan for Settlement, founded an emigration society, and in 1831 sailed for Philadelphia.

What would this “community plan” have looked like? I have not been able to track down a copy of the text, unfortunately, but “community plans” circulated with a ferocious speed in the Atlantic world and in the Americas during the period. We also have Etzler’s plans for settlements he would attempt to found in the 1840s in the U.S. and Venezuela. A techno-Fourierist, Etzler proposed that communitarians would live in something like a phalanstery. Every member--men and women alike--would have their own room. There would be no marriage; sexual freedom was ensured to all. Materially, the phalanstery would rely on a curious machine called the Satellite--a kind of prototype for modern day tractors that would be self-propulsive, energy efficient, and would drastically increase yields of farm land. Etzler, in short, imagined a technological transcendence of Malthusian subsistence limits; moreover, the hyper-supply of foodstuffs would also spell the death of Ricardian political economy, premised as it was on distributionist class politics. The promise of subsistence would reverse capitalism’s economy of social attention, an economy Etzler neatly glosses: “The poorer man is, the more he is neglected.” It also promised another benefit to the typical working man of Jacksonian America: aside from easy managerial labor--the superintendence of the Satellite--work itself would be abolished. As in Fourier’s Four Movements, Etzler’s New World is one where sociality is freed from privative limits, a world where “[l]ove and affection may there be fostered and enjoyed without any of the obstructions that oppose, diminish, and destroy them in the present common state of men.” Indeed, Etzler shifted the telos of sociality from the satisfaction of need to the mutual intensification of pleasure, “to please and to be pleased…to enjoy life as well as possible by mutual sociality” (Etzler, The Paradise within Reach of All Men, 1833).

Perhaps Etzler’s utopia seemed a little too utopian to Roebling. Dependent as it was on the success of the Satellite, it is possible that the engineering student recognized early on that the machine could never work. The pair had a falling out in 1831, when Roebling suggested that their party of migrants settle land the good old fashioned way and begin a small agrarian community. While it would be organized on something like a “community plan,” it wasn’t radical enough for Etzler. The party split: Roebling founded Saxonburg in Butler County, Pennsylvania, on land snatched from an Indian tribe. Etzler would go on to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Haiti, the British West Indies, Venezuela, and, eventually, my dissertation, leaving in his wake a heap of failed utopias (including my dissertation). Despite their split, Roebling remembered Etzler fondly; as J.A. Robeling’s son would write, Roebling considered Etzler “the greatest genius ever.”

In the split between Etzler and Roebling, we might see a split between two theories of social change: one works within the social, political, and economic limits of the given world, the other attempts its utopian breach. The split between these epistemes is not absolute, nor is there a contradiction in posited ends. Indeed, Roebling did not dispute the socialist, communitarian aims of Etzler’s project--he questioned the project’s pacing. Roebling’s utopian energies were directed into the pragmatic field of technology. He innovated wire rope production in Saxonburg, and it is this rope that would be instrumental in his design of the Brooklyn Bridge. Wire rope: not so grand as a robot that could produce wheat at will, but a small, quotidian object that would materially alter city-scapes throughout the world, promoting easy mobility across disjointed spaces.

We can see Occupy’s occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge as bridging the gap between these two epistemes of social change. Practical technological innovations like Roebling’s have altered our world, enabling the massive productivity that Etzler could only dream about. Indeed, our world is a perversion of the New World that Etzler imagined, and the fact that poverty reigns in a world in which Malthusian limits have been overcome should remind us that enhanced productivity without a redistributionist politics simply entrenches the class divisions Ricardo lamented. We need to keep Etzler’s vision--one in which no poor person is “neglected”--alive. And so we might see Occupy’s occupation of the Bridge as enacting a historical rendezvous between Etzler and Roebling, a re-joining after their split. The socialist Etzler strolls across the bridge, approaches the pragmatic Roebling, and says: “You’re own schemes have succeeded: you and others like you have re-made the world and enhanced the productivity of humanity. You’ve done what I failed to do. But you’ve done it in a distorted form. Everyone can eat, but many starve; no one need work, but people clamor for jobs. 170 years ago, it was perhaps correct for you to ignore me, to conceive of me as a charlatan. But today the Paradise that I imagined is social possibility. It’s time for you--the pragmatists and the technicians--to step aside; it’s time to embed the material world within a social morality. It’s time to ‘enjoy life as well as possible by [a] mutual sociality’ unfettered by material limits.” The occupation of the Bridge amounts to this: a remoralization of a factually existent material world that generations past could only imagine as a slightly insane utopian possibility.

Originary Acalculia; or, Perfume and the Political

Given the spate of recent Occupy clearances, as well as the threat of eviction facing Occupy Philly, the question arises: What’s at stake in staying, in continuing to occupy, in forcing a confrontation with the city and the police, in putting bodies in harm’s way? Some at Philly—the so-called “Reasonable Solutions” group—believe that we should be reasonable and move, and they’re acting on that belief. Denying the GA’s authority, they claim to represent the majority of occupiers—those who aren’t “radicals” or “anarchists”—and have been in talks with Nutter’s office. I think that this solution is “reasonable,” if we define reasonableness as participation in capitalist rationality. This rationality controls the event of the political by regulating the distribution of social time-space—through an economy of the political. We could re-read the entire archive of classical political economy to tease out this process of invagination, the point at which the species term [political] becomes a mere instance of the erstwhile part [economy]. But the regulative distribution of social time-space has far deeper roots, as we know. So let’s turn back to a diktat of Jesus, a locution that serves as the commonsense of any distributive rationality.

“The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” A woman, you recall, had just washed Jesus’ feet with perfume; the apostles, appalled by the costliness of the gesture, suggest that the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. The act of expenditure brings into conflict two distinct temporalities: the insistent transhistoricity of the poor and the eruptive but finite temporality of Christ’s appearance. Chronos versus kairos, the long duree versus the event. Jesus offers a phenomenological reduction of his own eruption into the world’s time-space: “the poor” mark that which must be bracketed, suspended in an epoché, kept away so that the divine kairos can take place as kairos. Humorously, the poor are actually too wealthy to participate in this kairos: they’re too rich with time, with chronos. They’ll always be around. Fidelity to the eventness of the event—the eruptive apparition of the divine—means neglecting the ordinary, the poor. The poor serve as an anti-figure for the event: they must not appear, and thus must be rendered invisible, so that the extraordinary, kairotic moment can constitute itself.

The poor will continue to serve as a species-term for that which, because omnipresent, cannot and should not appear in the constitution of an event. The semiosis of the poor will be an anti-semiosis; the omnipresence of the poor means that their signs mark nothing more than an unremarkable being-there. To try to find the poor is to enter a disorienting world in which signs cannot direct us anywhere, a world in which signs signify disorientation. After all, the omnipresent poor have no direction, no aim, no ability to transcend the bad infinity that is impoverished dwelling on earth. Engels invites us to take a walk through this bad infinity: “Above Ducie Bridge, the left bank grows more flat and the right bank steeper, but the condition of the dwellings on both banks grows worse rather than better. He who turns to the left here from the main street, Long Millgate, is lost; he wanders from one court to another, turns countless corners, passes nothing but narrow, filthy nooks and alleys, until after a few minutes he has lost all clue, and knows not whither to turn. Everywhere half or wholly ruined buildings, some of them actually uninhabited, which means a great deal here; rarely a wooden or stone floor to be seen in the houses, almost uniformly broken, ill-fitting windows and doors, and a state of filth!” It goes on like this. The semiosis of poverty revolts against the order of the proper by refusing to be anything but horribly common, horribly generic. Phenomenologically and rhetorically, Engels can’t get his bearings: the proper sign of “Dulcie Bridge” is sharply juxtaposed to clichéd descriptions of the world of the poor, a world bereft of deixis, proper names, the possibility of orientation. And, as he points out, Manchester was constructed in such a way as to produce zones of visibility, of orientation, of proper signs and stable semiosis, and zones of invisibility, of disorientation, of common signs—of the poor.

We see, then, a double invisibilization of the poor. As ordinary, as a chronological constant, they cannot appear in the constitution of the kairotic event. But, as ordinary life unfolds in its humdrum chronos, the ordinary/poor is also that which one need not consider or make legible. The poor are foreclosed from participating in the constitution of an eruptive moment and they are so spatially distributed that they will not come-to-legibility within the ordinary time that they figure.

What are the implications for us, in our decision to move or not move? The demand that Occupy move from the site of the polis—City Hall—is to ask the poor to invisibilize themselves, to disappear from view, to go elsewhere. Through the production of camps, the poor as poor are appearing: Dilworth Plaza is not unlike the messy, disorienting Manchester neighborhood through which Engels walks (though it’s far more hygienic). This common space is invaginating the site of the proper; the properly political is re-subordinating the economic. To leave would be to participate in the invagination of the polis by the economic, to willfully submit to the very economization of political time-space that constitutes itself by bracketing the apparition of the poor. Our visibility, our constitution of a political event, is more important than an administrative decision—particularly a decision to gentrify City Hall. We’re removing the political from the economic, from distributive rationalities. The political will only ever appear as an incalculable event, only after a polis-to-be has staked its possible being on a refusal to participate in the economization of who-appears. An originary acalculia: the kind of decision that led a seemingly irrational woman to dump perfume on Jesus’ feet without considering what that expenditure meant for the poor.

Bloomberg, That Fucking Asshole; or, Reflections on the Insult

I intended to write about the genre of the petition today—to clarify, for myself, the implications that inhere to the act of petitioning—but last night’s clearance of Occupy in New York has interrupted my schedule. Like many, I’m angry. I imagine a utopian scene in which I sit down with the mayors of Oakland, New York, Portland, (Philly soon, one guesses) and so on. I imagine, in my frustration, taking seven minutes to insult them with the full range of my cruel rhetorical resources. I would tell Bloomberg that he’s a fucking asshole, a marionette of capital, a vulgarian facilitating the vulgarization of the world, an intellectually impoverished cock whose concept of responsible authority is determined by a realty company asking for “assistance.” This scene of insulting speech is obviously a product of frustration. But I want to consider how the structure of insulting speech-acts sheds light on what has been happening to Occupy camps throughout the states. I want to suggest, briefly, that these crackdowns are rhetorically structured as insults.

What is an insult? Let’s take as an example the utterance, “Bloomberg, you’re a fucking asshole.” The utterance seems like an act of predication: Bloomberg, the subject, is included within the class of fucking assholes. But we might also think of “Bloomberg is a fucking asshole” as a nonpredicative assertion. Unlike other terms—white, tall, etc.—it seems impossible, as Agamben discusses, “to establish a class that includes all things to which the predicate in question [“fucking asshole”] is attributed.” Agamben discusses nonpredicative statements in his discussion of friendship, and, usefully and intriguingly, he suggests that the assertion of friendship (“I am your friend”) is rhetorically parallel to the insult (“You’re a fucking asshole, Mayor Bloomberg”). Insults, he writes, “do not offend those who are subjected to them as a result of including the insulted person in a particular category…something that would simply be impossible, or, anyway, false.” Bloomberg is not a “fucking asshole”; the assertion is catachrestical; it doesn’t refer to an actual reality; the statement is consciously false. So why might the good mayor get offended? Because an insult “is effective precisely because it does not function as a constative utterance…it uses language in order to give a name in such a way that the named cannot accept his name, and against which he cannot defend himself.” Insult is effective because it misses what it hits; and, indeed, it hits by missing. Bloomberg is not a fucking asshole—whatever that would actually be—and it is the mis-naming of Bloomberg that hits him, that hurts him. Or would, if he weren’t a fucking asshole.

Insult is a speech-act that affects the insulted by not addressing itself to the properties of the subject. And it’s the structural errancy of insult—how it hits by missing—that rhetorically structures the acts of violence visited upon Occupy camps. As Bloomberg knows full well, the Occupy movement now has a virtuality exorbitant to its materialization in common space; moreover, the destruction of one common space will be recuperated immediately, in the occupation and formation of new common spaces. We’re a many-headed hydra. Each act of violence—the slashing of a tent, the grip of a cop’s hands on the arms of a yelling protestor as she is hauled away, gas in eyes, batons on heads—necessarily misses what it intends to hit. Bloomberg knows this: he knew that there would be a GA today, he knew that people would return to a park (if not the park), he knew that these moments of violence are not and could not be addressed to the subject that is Occupy, because Occupy is exorbitant to its punctual manifestations. Occupy now names the virtual matrix out of which bodies will precipitate an occupied time-space. Bloomberg knows this.

Like my own desire to insult that fucking asshole, Bloomberg, Bloomberg’s own violent insults emerged out of a frustration. The mayor claims that he was decisively sovereign in his command to clear the park. In an item on Bloomberg’s news site, under the dramatic heading “Final Decision,” we read the mayor assert sovereign responsibility for his decision: “But make no mistake -- the final decision to act was mine.” Nonsense. The mayor also notes, “Inaction was not an option.” The closure of options restricts the field of decisiveness; Bloomberg’s sovereignty was bounded by the (apparent) structural necessity to act. I suggest that the sovereign, final decision was in fact a frustrated negotiation with a heteronomous force that produced a mood, a feeling that positioned Bloomberg as having-to-act. Waiting to act would have been savvier; while I think Occupy will outlast the winter, the coming weeks do threaten to produce a slow-down of Occupy activity. He knows this fact, too. The decision to move was a non-sovereign submission to an affective tonality of frustration. This frustration was itself the product of the fact that Occupy is a virtuality, vague and amorphous. It’s not a centered subject. It can appear anywhere, and will reappear once it has been temporarily forced to disappear. It cannot be bargained with. But neither, humorously, can it really be insulted: a non-subject, Occupy has no properties, and so it can't be mis-named, either in speech or in violence structured as insulting speech.

And thus the comfort of the insult, as a speech-act or as a violent act on bodies. Even if an insult misses what it intends (hitting by missing), the structural requirement that the insult miss its addressee necessitates that we think of the addressee—even if it doesn’t exist—as a subject possessing a set of properties, as a centered subject that can be wounded by actions, verbal or otherwise. Bloomberg’s violent insults attempt retroactively producing Occupy as a subject, even if only as a subject-in-and-through-violation, because the non-subjective, de-centered sociality of Occupy is frightening. A specter is haunting Bloomberg, and he’s afraid. And so he tries exorcizing the specter by transforming it into a (wounded) subject—a set of bodies that can be hit, a material agglomeration that can be slashed, removed, and trashed. All the more unethical because it cannot achieve the aim it posits. Bloomberg’s decision to raid was the feckless insult of a fucking asshole.

Press Release from Occupy Philly (in part)

Below is the text of a press release issued by Occupy Philly in response to Nutter's opportunistic instrumentalization of a rape at City Hall—an instrumentalization that paves the way for the demolition of the site. I don't have all of the working groups' texts, but the People of Color Caucus' statement offers an insightful critique of Nutter's opportunism and cynicism.


PRESS RELEASE

RESPONSE TO MAYOR'S SUNDAY PRESS CONFERENCE

FROM OCCUPY PHILLY LEGAL, FOOD, AND SAFETY WORKING GROUPS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR CAUCUS

November 14, 2011

First, we want to thank the people of Philadelphia for their ongoing support for Occupy Philly and our efforts to address social and economic inequities in our city and beyond.

We’ve called this press conference today to correct the inaccuracies in Mayor Nutter’s statements yesterday about our occupation.

Occupy Philly and the occupy movement in general did not create the problems of public health and unemployment outlined by the mayor. On the contrary, these problems, among many others, created the occupy movement. Such problems are not symptoms or inventions of Occupy Philly, nor are they exclusive to the occupy movement. They are instead indicative of the greater social, political, and economic injustices of our society and everyday life—injustices often perpetuated by the mayor’s policies. This is exactly why we started this occupation.

We feel that the mayor’s inaccuracies, which four Occupy Philly working groups will specifically discuss today, were an intentional effort to divide and discredit our movement. Within Occupy Philly, we proudly support a diversity of opinions. We stand in solidarity with each other and our direct democracy, and we reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence.

We haven’t changed; the mayor has. The mayor’s new tone is an attempt to shift the focus from the real source of the problems impacting our city to those of us engaged in trying to create just alternatives.

So we’ve brought together delegates from the Occupy Philly Legal, Food, Safety, and People of Color of Caucus to address specific comments of the mayor’s.

Statement from the People of Color Caucus

As the People of Color Caucus, we work to eliminate racism and related systems of oppression inside and beyond the Occupy Philadelphia movement. We oppose the mayor’s recent statements about Occupy Philadelphia regarding civil disobedience, homelessness, and violence against women and invite him to meet with us to resolve them.

It is shameful that the Mayor has decried the use of civil disobedience as a tactic, when it has been used by leaders like Rosa Parks and Philadelphia’s own Cecil B. Moore as a way to fight racism in our nation. Civil disobedience is at the heart of American values, but the Mayor’s policies are not.

We reject the Mayor’s argument that more policing leads to more safety. We point to both the repressive youth curfew law and Stop and Frisk as examples of how increased police contact actually puts people of color at risk. We point to the police shooting just last week of Sadiq Moore as he entered his own home. We demand an Occupy Philly encampment and a City of Philadelphia that are free from police harassment and violence.

We question the Mayor’s concern about homelessness given his refusal to consider the very serious problems that the Dilworth Plaza renovations will cause for the homeless Philadephians who have occupied the space far longer than these 40 days. This issue is especially pressing given the City’s recent decision to close the Ridge Avenue shelter this Winter, our largest homeless shelter.

We believe that the cynical use of sexual violence and health concerns are opportunistic ways for the mayor to justify an attack on our movement. In the most recent reports available from the PPD, there were 28 rapes reported in our city in the last two weeks of October – where were the other 28 press conferences over those two weeks? We oppose violence against women in all of its forms, and this movement is ultimately about creating a just world in which all people are safe in their bodies, homes, and cities. As we stand against that violence, we also stand against attempts to derail this movement.