I was thinking about what Joanna said, about occupying schools, and thinking about how the situationists want occupations that explode time and space. how would occupying a school necessarily be an explosion of labor time?
as you said earlier, and I can't think of a more important idea to keep in mind: this isn't a war against the theft of our money. it's a war against the theft of our time and lives. When Marx (?) says that capital lines its pockets with the dead bodies of labor, that's what he meant.
I was reading something by Lyotard, about the student uprisings in '68:
<quote>You may say that a boycott of ticket punching in three Metro stations will not overthrow capitalism. But let’s be understood: neither will the seizure of power by a large party of the Bolshevik kind. The results of experience are now conclusive. The latest generation of revolutionaries starts from these conclusions; it realized in May 1968 that an intervention on the spot and for the moment, one that the adversary could not predict, was more capable of unbalancing it than any passively applied slogan whatsoever. But something more is needed.
In truth, what is required is an a pedagogy. For a century the Marxist workers’ movement has only reversed the conduct of its class adversaries. Its leaders, hierarchy, troops, schools, discourse, directives, tactics, and strategy all offered the inverted image of their bourgeois models. For a long time spontaneism was the only alternative to this mimicry by reflection. But spontaneism does not even represent for bolshevism what primitive Christianity is for the church; there is no reason to believe that the workers will of their own accord go so far as the practical critique of the system, even if it may be possible to imagine that sinners have no need of pastors to save themselves. The “here and now” attitude breaks with spontaneism just as it does with bolshevism. It does not propose the seizure of power, but the destruction of powers. It knows that until a significant minority of workers have managed a de facto break with the institutions by which they are infiltrated, a new class power will form itself again. This attitude itself only serves as an example of a break with the initial repression, that which made us forget to invent, decide, organize, execute. I call it apedagogy because all pedagogy participates in this repression, including that which is implied in the internal and external relations of the “political” organizations."
Not entirely sure what to make of all of that, but one thing Nanterre, Here, Now reminded me of was something Grimes said about hurricane Irene: too bad it fell on a weekend and people didn't get a day off. I laughed, inured to the havoc wrought by such weather events, having spent a decade preparing for a dozen or so hurricanes which, for me, never got worse than a minor flood - when compared to Katrina at any rate. You can be outraged by the comment, considering all the damage, death, destruction. Still, there's something very right about what Chuck said in so far as a hurricane is an event the completely disrupts time for people who are preparing for it and then surviving it.
This is what the Situationists are up to. These occupations, to their mind, are most effective when they are a bit like a hurricane. Not because they ravage buildings and kill people, but because daily life is upended.
When a hurricane is coming (or, around here, when a winter storm or flood is approaching or happening) every day life is suspended. The daily drudgery of getting up, going to work, making dinner, going to a civic league meeting, hitting the gym -- it all stops. There is a weird kind of excitment in the error. People are almost giddy. People are excited. They feel alive. Nothing is the same. They get on the bus, and the atmosphere is charged, everyone is abuzz. They stop to get supplies, and people in the grocery store are talking to each other in line. People who normally avert their gaze look at you and smile or share information about where to get batteries, what's being said on the news, etc. People can be angry and selfish in one aisle, fighting over the last box of poptarts. Turn the corner, in the next aisle, they can be crazy helpful to perfect strangers.
There's a sense of adventure because everything they take for granted - how to live daily life without electricity or gas or heating oil or running water - must be rethought. How will I feed my family with no power? Basic questions of survival come up. There's a sense of wonder as they realize they were more capable than they knew. There's a recognition that we have a common, shared life and, for good or ill, we need one another, we need society, we need civilization - as much as we can often chafe against these same things.
This, from my brief skim of the situationist material on the concept of an occupations, and especially what happened in Paris '68, is what they are after with an occupation understood as the disruption of time and space, where the disruption is to infiltrate the insidious norms that produce and reproduce every aspect of our lives.
The reason why it resonates, for me, is the radical left understanding of oppression (e.g., Iris Marion Young, etc.): if you want to find oppression going on, look for all the things you think are normal. That where oppression operates and why it is so insidious - which is a point Postone is making as well.