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.
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