btw, i read a really good analysis of why we can no longer use models of civil disobedience if we support an anarchist approach to social change. Berhard Harcourt calls is "political disobedience":
"Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: It resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period."
In this instance, then, the various tactics are understood as part of a broader of political disobedience. This makes sense since we aren't opposing laws or unjust implementation, but huge abstract things like capitalism. Where could we possibly find a law to civilly disobey to symbolically display our disobedience to capitalism? WE can't. What we have to do, in order to fight these abstractions, is what Harcourt calls political disobedience. The tactics of general assembly, consensus decision making, diversity of tactics, the refusal to make demands, etc. are all tactics that emerged pragmatically, as a result of the learning experience inherent in practical political activity. But they are now theorized as reflective of AND constitutive of a politics of political disobedience.
These are forms of political disobedience because they emphasize horizontal authority and de-emphasize vertical authority. It is politically disobedient to directly refuse and contradict the demand that a political organization have a single set of identifiable leaders, a command structure, a set of rules for making decisions, etc. etc. [1] (JOdi Dean, IIUHC, complains that these are "accidents" that OWS stumbled upon. As such, a weakness of OWS, and why it will fail if OWS doesn't listen and heed her advice, is that the things that they do are presented as purposeful when they are really just the inevitable result of their ideological dispositions. THus, the lack of demands wasn't something someone came up with because they had a strategy but something they came up with because of their ideological committment to bringing together all kinds of activists from many different political persuasons. Since there were so many different politics there, no one could come up with a demand. Apparently, if one had outlined one's ideological commitment to accepting and encouraging lots of different political views to the Occupy, preferably while lodged away in the Adirondacks at university conference center, and explained how the thigh bone is connected to the shin bone is connected to the ankle bone and THEN implemented the plan, it would be called strategy?)
The reason why I've found this concept of political disobedience fascinating is that here, before OWS, we accidentally experience this the funny way when we organized a bike advocacy group on the basis of consensus democracy, leaderlessness, etc. The feathers sure flew in the city government and media when they couldn't identify a leader!
anyway, Harcourt's article is worth reading because it's an excellent critique of what's wrong with criticisms that position themselves "outside" the movement, not because they aren't in support of it, but because they refuse to understand the syntax of what Occupy demands.
"But the evictions also raise deeper grammatical issues about the way in which we discuss the Occupy movement – even within our limited forums of free speech. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/occupy-wall-streets-political-disobedience/>I've argued in the New York Times that the idea of a leaderless occupation movement represents a new paradigm of political resistance – what we might call <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/occupy-wall-streets-political-disobedience/>"political disobedience" – that demands a new vocabulary. I'd like to suggest here that it also calls for an entirely new grammar.
The syntax that the critics and pundits are using no longer seems to work. Statements to the effect that <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/occupy-wall-street>Occupy Wall Street <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/kristof-occupy-the-agenda.html>should get an agenda or, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203699404577044583038468266.html>as the Wall Street Journal disdainfully remarked, should stop engaging in "days of feckless rage", no longer fully make sense. It is as if these grammatical formulations cannot be "heard" properly given the leaderless paradigm of the new resistance movement. They sound like the inaudible noise in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus>Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus – or, perhaps more familiarly, the "mwa, mwa, mwa" that adults make in Charlie Brown cartoons.
This is true even for the fellow travelers. So, for instance, when <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/22/occupy-movement-change>philosopher Peter Hallward contends in The Guardian that "we will need to convert the polemical clarity of the new slogan – 'we are the 99%' – into a commanding political standpoint," somehow the syntax doesn't work: it is not clear who "we" are, nor whom Peter Hallward is addressing. Are "we" assembled protesters on the internet, readers of the Guardian, "leaders" of a movement, or critics? My sense is that this kind of statement, especially in the form of an op-ed in the Guardian, is somehow inaudible and slightly meaningless. It cannot be "heard" properly anymore.
The problem is, first, spatial. Normative statements about Occupy Wall Street – claims about what the movement should do – are functionally inaudible unless the speaker is physically occupying an Occupy space. Peter Hallward cannot audibly tell anyone what Occupy Wall Street should do – any more than the Wall Street Journal could – unless Hallward is physically "occupying" an Occupy space. And you can't "occupy" while sitting at your computer or publishing an editorial. You cannot "occupy" at a distance from an Occupy site.
The problem, second and connectedly, is <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_%28philosophy%29>rhizomic. Because the movement is leaderless, there is no one to "speak to" apart from the assembled protesters at an Occupy site; and there is no way to "speak to" the resisters unless the speaker situates him or herself as a member of the resistance movement. Naturally, no one can "speak for" Occupy Wall Street. Under this new political paradigm, the resistance can only be "heard" from its space of occupation, and only then, through the coordinated voice of assembled discussion and potential consensus.
But beyond that, to produce an effective normative statement about Occupy Wall Street, the speaker needs to be physically occupying Wall Street. And not just physically present, but "occupying" that site, in the sense of having a self-imagination that they are part of the resistance movement. What it takes to "occupy", grammatically speaking, does not necessarily require a tent or sleeping bag, nor even a poster (though that surely helps), but a self-conception that one is protesting. Mere presence does not even suffice. The journalist on the beat, the visiting tourist, the police officer patrolling the park, or the politician claiming to be responsive to the protesters' demand, none of these would be "occupying" unless they took the further step of conceiving of themselves as part of the resistance movement.
There is a third dimension to the problem: an authorial dimension. The conventional sentence structure of the type "People should do xyz" rests on a claim of authority that no longer seems to hold. It is as if time-honored forms of knowledge and expertise no longer grammatically produce truthful statements. The contention from an economist, a politician, a pundit or columnist opining about what Occupy Wall Street must do to succeed is no longer a fully meaningful sentence because the authors of those sentences themselves have failed.
That seems to be a central message of the Occupy movement: the purported experts are precisely the ones who got us in this situation that so many perceive as intolerable – <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-americas-primal-scream.html?_r=1&ref=nicholasdkristof>a condition of continuously increasing inequality where, today, "the 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans." That, I take it, is the guiding Jacobin spirit of this new form of political disobedience, but without the Jacobin leadership. And it is precisely the leaderlessness that accentuates the new syntactic challenges: those who are trying to "steer" Occupy Wall Street in the "right direction" – whether with good or ill will – have already failed miserably and, as a result, there is no authorial grammar to their statements.
This new syntactic order – and its accompanying apparatus of general assemblies, human microphones, and hand signals – has radical implications. The first is the utter obliteration of charismatic leadership. This is a product not just of leaderlessness, but also of the "human mic" as a form of expression, communication, and amplification. The "human mic" interrupts charisma. It's like live translation: the speaker can only utter five to eight words before having to shut up while the assembled masses repeat. The effect is to defuse oratory momentum. It also forces the assembled masses to utter words and arguments that they may not agree with – which also has the salutary effect of neutralising political momentum.
Second, the new grammatical structure opens up the political space of occupation to multiple voices, views, and opinions – to a multiplicity of what the movement calls <http://occupywallst.org/>"political persuasions". For instance, someone occupying might say that they are pro-union, without the resistance movement itself being pro-union. Others may object and argue that unions are hierarchical institutions that reproduce or crystallise new forms of oppression. In this sense, one could imagine hearing a large group of Occupy protesters arguing for union-bargaining in Wisconsin, but it would not "make sense" for anyone to say that "Occupy Wall Street is "pro-union". The grammatical structure of that sentence would not work.
The new syntax allows for a convergence of multiple views and an overlap of sometimes mutually exclusive ideas, without an exclusionary mechanism operating. There can be pro-government protesters next to anti-government protesters, for instance, without the resistance movement needing to adjudicate between them. All those statements can be heard, as long as the authors are physically present, occupying, self-identifying, and then voicing their opinions in terms of "we."
Of course, a leaderless movement could not enforce any of these new syntactic formations, but that's hardly an issue. Grammar works through who is "heard" and what "makes sense" far less (except in grade school) by means of policing. It operates, for the most part, through auditory exclusion and filtering.
The central conception of "leaderless" is, naturally, one of the most controversial aspects of Occupy Wall Street and the source of much criticism – even among friends and fellow travelers of the global Occupy movement. The most frequent objection is that it simply paralyses political action. Slavoj i ek gave expression to this complaint with regard to the resistance movement in Greece, <http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite>when he wrote, back in August:
"[I]n Greece, the <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/protest>protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness."
i ek's call for "a strong body" that acts with "all necessary harshness" is, of course, the antithesis of a leaderless resistance movement – it is much more of a Leninist vanguard party. But for those who are attracted to that model, it is worth emphasising that the notion of "leaderless" may actually open radical possibilities. It seems, in fact, that it has. The <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa>United States, at the very least, is now engaged in conversation, debate and soul-searching that was pretty much inexistent – under identical economic conditions – only three months ago.
I suggested before that this new paradigm of "political disobedience" may represent a form of resistance to the way we are being governed. I would add here that by eschewing old-fashioned partisan politics and wornout ideological debates, this type of resistance may indeed open possibilities. It may serve to resist the crystallised forms of hierarchy and domination that are so often deeply embedded in the very alternatives, solutions, proposals and ideologies that are offered.
In this regard, it may be worth returning to some of the theoretical writings that followed the student uprisings of May 1968. David Showalter, a brilliant undergraduate in my graduate seminar, pointed me to an insightful passage from an interview with Michel Foucault from the mid 1970s. When asked whether, after critique, there is "a stage at which we might propose something?" Foucault responded:
"My position is that it is not up to us to propose. As soon as one 'proposes' – one proposes a vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have effects of domination
These effects of domination will return and we shall have other ideologies, functioning in the same way. It is simply in the struggle itself and through it that positive conditions emerge."
It is only by open contestation and struggle that "in the end", Foucault suggested, "possibilities open up." It certainly does seem that possibilities have opened up. There is a conversation going on in the United States that I have not heard before. It is the product, I believe, of this new paradigm of leaderless occupation. It is also the effect of a new syntax that is being deployed by an impressive group of well-educated and articulate young women and men expressing themselves in a new political grammar. Surely, there is a virtue in keeping contestation open. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/30/occupy-new-grammar-political-disobedience
At 10:49 AM 2/12/2012, Julio Huato wrote:
>shag wrote:
>
> > it's kind of anticipatory. as news of OWS recedes and
> > people actually have to be plugged in to see that OWS
> > is doing things and that it's not dead, it nonetheless feels
> > as if it must be moribund.
>
>It may feel that way, but (as you suggest) it is not the case. Even
>the conventional media is calling it a regroupment:
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/occupy-movement-regroups-laying-plans-for-the-next-phase.html
>
>Indeed, the kitchen and the library and the Occupy University and
>you-name-it (in Mexico, an Occupy soccer league would be emerging) are
>all essential structures to build. In fairness, I don't think Louis
>Proyect is dismissing these initiatives. I think it's better to focus
>on what people actually write and be cautious about drawing
>inferences.
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