The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the working session "Occupy as Form" on February 10, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Andrew Weiner, lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts.
Keyword: Autonomy
Among the numerous memes, tropes, and forms associated with
the Occupy movement is that of a concerted, public refusal to make specific
demands. Although advocates of this tactic have seen it as a potent way to
argue that the existing political system must be overhauled, rather than
accomodated, many liberals have criticized such a position as impractical,
while conservative pundits tout this apparent irrationality as proof that
Occupy can’t be trusted. So how might we understand the singular demands made
by the rhetoric of “no demands”? What sort of analysis could enable us to
disentangle the many different aesthetic, technical, and political factors that
converge in this form of contestation?
I would argue that any attempt to engage these questions
should be sensitive to their potential overdetermination. For example, we might
consider the refusal to make specific demands as a radical claim to autonomy,
an insistence that a space free from domination can be secured through
independent action. Such a position combines aspects of multiple modes of
thought and practice, not all of which are commensurable. Although it recalls
Marx’s model of emancipation as collective self-determination, it also
resembles Adorno’s valorization of aesthetic negation, in which the refusal to
clearly signify was held to be a crucial form of resistance. While certain
Occupy tactics exhibit continuity with precedents in the US –– the civil rights
movement, the mobilization against Vietnam, ACT-UP –– others are more clearly influenced
by sectors of the European Left, ranging from the independent educational
initiatives of the 1970s to the various neo-Marxisms typically grouped together
under the term Autonomism.
If the conditions that inform Occupy are thus complex and internally
inconsistent, this in no way means that the movement is necessarily doomed to collapse
under the weight of its contradictions. Rather, it indicates that it might yet
be possible to rearticulate the movement’s heterogenous elements into effective
new forms. Such an approach might make it possible to operate in a space
outside normative political rationality in a way that doesn’t concede to
liberal or conservative critics. In other words, might it not be possible to at
once refuse to make demands AND demand that Citizens United be repealed, that
the Glass-Steagall Act be reinstated, etc.? And might it not be possible to do
so in ways that interlace different forms of autonomy, blending clearly
intelligible demands with the more formless shapes of emergent collective possibilities?
Keep it magical. Keep it practical. Thanks Andrew!
ReplyDeleteHow can we approach magic more practically? How can we approach rationality more with greater imagination? That makes me think of the Center for Tactical Magic. I love the Witch's Cradles.
http://www.tacticalmagic.org/CTM/project%20pages/Witches_Cradles.htm
"It is at this event horizon that the Witches’ Cradles create a place where one can begin to realize an altered state (of consciousness, or an altered political state) and contemplate the next course of action."
HI Andrew, the mix you are trying to envision is really THE mix. Your text identifies what could be viewed as apparent contradictions in movements that seek regulation and also worry about establishing overly stable political forms. Is horizontality the thing to move toward or is the vertical/horizontal opposition also something that needs to be overcome? By isolating some of the apparent tensions in the movement, you can set the scene for a more complex conversation.
ReplyDeleteHI Andrew, the mix you are trying to envision is really THE mix. Your text identifies what could be viewed as apparent contradictions in movements that seek regulation and also worry about establishing overly stable political forms. Is horizontality the thing to move toward or is the vertical/horizontal opposition also something that needs to be overcome? By isolating some of the apparent tensions in the movement, you can set the scene for a more complex conversation.
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