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the clever and convenient thing
about getting a job in a capitalist firm as a young person is that one doesn’t have to think too hard. the deep and expansive tundra of emotional waste, of intellectual poverty, and of loneliness is relegated to the fantastic flights of adolescence. relationships and love and sadness all find their motifs in the decor and in white leather that feels like human skin compiled, layers upon layers.
une petite question sur le sujet d’expression
Chapter One of Capital has proven itself more enjoyable on my third read than previous ones (including my painful initiation in the Spring of 2009 “Marxist Literary Theory,” when it took me about 20 minutes a page). Now, I have the chance to focus on Marx’s methodological choice in organization. I read Harvey’s introduction to the book, and the brilliance in the first section is Marx’s primary attention to the commodity. I do have several questions that are perhaps only answered or made more coherent with an expanded scope of economics.
But, for now, I will confine my remarks and questions to the minute amount of text that I have read thus far. In order to stick to schedule, I am due to finish chapter one by tomorrow, but section three is full of so many rich examples and illustrations that I overlooked before in my anxiety to reach and comprehend the famous fourth section.
In the third section, Marx inches closer and closer to money, the symbol of abstract human labor. It is a wonderful approach too. This section is the first time that the word money is even mentioned. The mention of money-form comes into play when Marx gives historical account of Aristotle’s formulation of value, which does not distinguish the money-form as being anything more than a complex expression of relative value.
Relative (exchange) value is saying as much as 20 yards of linen = 1 coat, where a coat is a fixed value for the purposes of this formula. The meaning of this formulation lies in the absence of fixed value; ie it is possible that in a market where these two commodities are fluctuating in the same direction (“going up in ‘worth’”), where the relativity of this particular commodity relationship is only uncovered in light of a third indicator… we haven’t gotten there yet but this seems to be a good segue for money to come in.
BUT WAIT! It can’t be! You know why? Well, Marx is just about to show us with Aristotle’s conception of exchange. Namely, Marx wants to illustrate that money (although… WE ARE NOT THERE YET) is not a relative expression of value, but is itself the commodity of itself, it is the representation of congealed labor. Marx writes:
“5 beds = 1 house is indistinguishable from “5 beds = x $”
Aristotle writes: ” There can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commesurability… It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurate.”
This shows that Aristotle had no conception of ubiquitous or absolute matter of value; his belief in the impossibility of this expression belied his inability to recognize the value of labor, itself. Obvious ideological implications of Greek society‘s foundation on slavery and hence unacknowledged labor are apparent. However, Marx names this limitation a historical limitation and not a limitation of Aristotle’s genius. Rather, he formulates this failure as a historical contingency as something which hindered his genius. We are getting closer to the heart of the matter.
In this moment, we have moved away from the concrete explication of the commodity and its relationship to money and into the realm of historicity. Marx continues:
“The secret of the expression of value could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.” (Marx, 152)
This moment of popular acknowledgment in universal human equality is the very moment of the bourgeois revolution. It is the moment of industrialization and “equality” insofar as man is equal in civil society (in the Hegelian sense). I stopped my reading here for the moment to reflect on the implications of what Marx is writing. The ability to recognize and presuppose the foundational equality of men at the very moment that this relation between men is what determines value in capitalist exchange suggests that knowledge and historical interpretation have hitherto been contingent on historical framework and context. Like Hegel famously noted, knowledge was fated to come after the event.
But with Marx, even in this first chapter, we are liberated from the chains of contingency with the capacity to comprehend the social character of labor and the origin of social character, in our own moment as well as in the past. In this way, I am tempted to say that Marx viewed his own achievement in the execution of explanation but not in formulation. It is not mere historical accident or teleological necessity that we are now able to comprehend the social nature of commodity production, but capitalism signifies the zenith in contradiction of the concealed nature of value.
From the rooster’s crow in solitude we have found our laying hens; will we go hungry again?
On “Science as a Vocation”
I read this lecture delivered by Max Weber last night, which was delivered on November 7, 1917. There is so much that I want to say, but do not pretend to know, to understand, to have thought through thoroughly enough. Today, I will limit myself to a few elements of his lecture that were most striking and which are outlines for another project.
As I had written in an earlier entry, I am also reading my way through Capital, a task entirely different and even subsuming Weber’s lecture. In chapter one, section two of Capital, Marx goes in depth about the division of labor in capitalist society. In some modes of production, the weaver is also the tailor, but in capitalism, they are different. These distinctions are not naturally made, since even the tailor must vary and distinguish various types of labor that he is to undertake from day to day, hour to hour. Weber’s lecture outlines two component parts of “Science” (also understood as Knowledge”) as a vocation, proper: scholarship and teaching. He offers no illusions about the coincidence these strengths have in determining what kind of teacher and scholar one might make. Neither does he offer any justification of the university as something other than an aristocratic regime. At the same time that he invokes this strange division of one’s intellectual labor, he also compares the German and the American academy. In this way, Weber points out the obvious capitalization of the university. But aside from talking about apprenticeships and positions as a professor, he largely turns away from the question of the actual state of affairs in order to talk about another vision of the vocation.
Before I continue on to those points, I imagine that Weber’s own conception is a bit blind as to the motor of history (he says that we live in an age of intellectualization and of science, but he does not tie the withering away of the vocation as such with any historical development. Indeed, I found myself thinking that the division of the scientist-professor is sort of an arbitrary relic. For today, at least in the state-run universities that I have studied a little, I don’t know that teaching and scholarship are necessarily as bound into professorship or the university as they once appeared to be. I imagine that the changing environment of the university yields a sous-assistant who is not even able to research, who cannot even teach because he has not the time to be a scholar in search of income. It seems to me that this underclass of graduate and adjunct labor proves that the vocation as it is interconnected and dependent on the university is outdated and only feebly survives in its institutionalized form for older professors because of the exploited intellects a generation below them. I am not sure whether one might say that this is a bona fide division between the categories that Weber himself insists on, but rather that such categories are mistakenly bound up in the university institution as a permanent, or at least self-replicating, structure.
Anyhow, I will continue, assuming for a moment that such a thing as a vocation still exists when it comes to Knowledge. I was struck by the resistance of Weber’s thoughts to his own actions. It seems that only placing them side-by-side offers a complete reading. It seems that teaching is done for its own sake, and it cannot be confused with all of the other work and research carried out as a scholar. I think then, about the teacher who I have had. Weber inconveniently mentions that teachers are often viewed by young people as a sort of host-savior in the modern age. While I cannot understand much of Weber’s framework, I do think that this element of teaching and apprenticeship is valid, for it is not contingent on the university, while I must admit that I was taught in the university and had my most profound learning experiences there.
Weber differentiates between a teacher and a leader. How many times had I wanted a supernatural leader to confirm knowledge to me! It is the most childish of all the steps in education. The great teachers always insist on the incompleteness of their knowledge and of their capability to answer or effect the implications of their questions. It is unfortunate and even embarrassing that it had to be said. This is at the heart of what I took from Weber as a lesson. Teachers consciously operate in a realm that is neither knowledge nor failure when they are teaching. It is so hard for fledgling students not to think that our teachers are not goading us on to definite truth. Very often, teachers push us further than we’d like to go ourselves, knowing that they cannot save us, that it was never in their power to save us.
And I, who do believe in knowledge, not for choices to be made between a multitude of choices, but in that unfashionable word “truth,” thank my teachers who taught me early that a broken spirit is an illusion. That I have already been carried out far beyond their reach, that I must work for a lifetime to understand their questions in response to my own, and even more alarmingly, what forces droves us to speak.
I reject youthfulness
Youthfulness is an object inattention to real conditions, to consequences, to that actual state of affairs. Its elixir is romantic notions in gentle orange light, heightened drama that finds its articulation on the brilliant idea only half understood, and therefore, mystical. In youth we are supposed to “live a little,” if living means experience as if it were authentic and as if time did not exist and as if we might always be this way.
If in the process of being young we are instead fighting for our freedom we must be acutely aware of the freedom we wish to seek. Do we wish for sexual freedom and at what cost have we won it? At the cost of being merely sexual, or what is worse, being fully sexual to the most mutilated degree possible in our society? If we fight for democracy, are we fighting for the whole sale opportunity for selection?
What power do young people have other than to ignore the consequences because they have not come to terms with the hstorical contingency of their era, which amounts to little more than the mindless replication of shortsighted, mystical, and unscientific narratives about “human experience” that will spoil another generation of the soil, spill blood in spite of our ambitions, against our natural inclinations for leisure. The impulses by and for which we fight are little more than romantic dreams meant to fail without that unfortunate task of work.
Our power is to demand everything. But how do we know everything? What is the nature of everything? Do we wish merely for the unlimited accumulation of products, including the accumulation of rights?
I reject youth and its disinclination for working, for its demand on me to praise it, to name it as the time in which life was most possible when it was precisely the moment when the conditions that determine existence were least understood, before I had the time to study it carefully. Recently, I saw a ridiculous little sign hanging in the home of a notoriously delusional family.
It read:
Recipe for Success
1 cup of good ideas
1.5 cups positivity
2 tablespoons of luck
1 tsp. smiles
4 cups perseverance
The one thing that was missing from it was the one thing that is actually attributable to any sort of achievement, which is, of course, good work. In fact, by buying the sign, perhaps the commodity that listed the ingredients for success evacuated the need for work, as if work itself could be purchased for us. The reason why I mention this example is because all things that are to be achieved, all things that were previously considered to be the product of knowledge are now excommunicated to the arcane, the boring, the esoteric product of hegemony if they are not made immediately accessible to us and to our “impulses.”
I reject moments of inspiration. I reject notions of ephemeral beauty. I reject the historical nature of what I am perceived to be.
Capital, a reading project for the last year of civilization
Well, it’s officially 2012 now, and starting at the beginning of the week. That smells like a delicious opportunity to begin a sizable reading/blogging project. For the first few months of this year (January-April, with God‘s help), I’ll be reading Marx‘s Das Kapital along side David Harvey‘s A Companion to Marx’s Capital.
My goal is to read a given portion each week, which I’ll name as the week comes. I will write general reflections and issues on the blog, and post an out-line of my notes for those people interested.
This is meant to be an exercise in close reading at the end of the world. After all, the planets are aligned… isn’t it a good time?
In 2012, meditation on togetherness
We were over a friend’s house last night for a little new year’s celebration. We managed to turn the television on right as the ball had dropped (we almost missed it). There were all sorts of second-rate “celebrities” kissing in blue Nivea Company hats. I was laughed at for being rather embarrassed by the tonguing. Anyhow, I really do like New Year’s Day.
It’s a day of unified remembrance of experience in time. It offers us a mutilated sense of universal consciousness. We reflect, the lights sparkle, we are reminded of our status together in a world we cannot quite name; we are all standardized to the minute stroke. Last night walking up Broadway in a quiet West Side neighborhood, almost every group that we passed was conscious of the same things: a. what time it was and b. were they close to getting to “the rest of the people.”
New Year’s highlights the desire to subjectively experience the unalterable state of post-modernity. It’s too difficult to say that all the party-ers in a given time zone are all counting down together in common for very long. Certainly, we become standardized in our thinking somewhere after the 26th, increasing in intensity at around 9pm on the 31st. Even the final seconds are garnering number-chanters. Perhaps standardized experience of passing time is really about one second of the year. It is about the last second, the “11:59″ rather than the 12:00am on the 1st. It is a time that is easily skipped over in our minds and songs, but is the moment of highest anxiety. Will it come?
The stroke of midnight is already crowded out with a re-set spectacle (the kissing, the glitter, Mayor Bloomburg safely reminding us that it’s good to be alive, especially in New York). By then, we have dispersed radically from one another: all of our meditation is now about the party and vague sentimentality, the immediate conditions surrounding us. We have received pardon for another day, another year, another second. Our commonality was a ruse, and the anxiety for the future and momentary acknowledgement of history and also death was a clever trick that, after we’ve survived it, gives us all a heightened sense of individuality.
We become aware of ourselves in front of a blurry backdrop, as if someone really was filming us all along.
Happy 2012.
Why Does Everyone Love “A Dangerous Method”
I don’t write much on this blog these days, but I had to take twenty minutes of my day to write down why “A Dangerous Method” is *not* a dazzlingly brilliant film. The plot circles and winds through turn-of-the-20th-century Switzerland and Austria, recounting Carl Jung’s early treatment of Sabina Spielrein, his repressed and unhappy wife Emma, and the arch of his relationship with Sigmund Freud. The film has been touted by many critics and viewers as a subtle masterpiece engaged with historical giants of the earth. But Cronenberg’s film, to me, falls flat at all points meaningful.
I get it, I get it: Jung is the metaphoric representation of the ego in both sexual and intellectual registers in the film. He engages in a lusty masochistic id-affair with Sabina (Knightley) with all of her dramatic conclusions that wreak of acting rather than mania. Yet, Jung is unable to abandon his wife Emma, the “foundation of his home” and superficially idealistic woman. Professionally, he is the awe-struck, contemptuous, and blatantly reverent-while-blind chosen one of Frued’s. He attempts to find some more attainable and spiritual version of psychoanalysis than the high-highfalutin rigidity with which Freud attempts to cauterize the field. But, his professional and psychiatric relationship with another prominent analyst, Otto Gross, sends him into a tailspin: to fuck the patient or not?
Throughout the unfolding of this movie, subtle and delicate as it may be, I think that my issues with this movie are more with the lack of follow through in “historical representation.” Throughout the movie we are practically beaten to death with the Jewish question in Jung’s biographical life. Viggo’s Freud tells Sabina to trust the Aryan Jung, 20 minutes to the credits, because we are both Jews, and Jews we will always be.
Again, at the end of the film, when Sabina meets Jung for the last time at the eve of the war in 1913, she asks him about his new mistress. She asks if she is similar to Sabina: “is she your patient? is she Jewish? is she studying to be a doctor?” Jung smiles and saying something about perfume in the air, tells Sabina about his dreams that Europe will be bathed in the blood of bodies and death.
AND THEN THE MOVIE ENDS! What a let-down. I think that the dynamics between Sabina and Jung and Freud could have been so well dramatized and problematized for us
if THE WARS weren’t supposed to be the silent and already-understood breaking-off point of society or meaning. So look, if Freud and Sabina are both Jews, and Jung has this inexplicable attraction to “The Jewish” perhaps the metaphor grows more complex: perhaps the ego drive is at war with two “others” who can cope and exist with each other without destruction. Only when the “human” ego comes into contact with these forces is there conflict, violence, and death. The motor of life and death is a uniquely human struggle.
Then again, in an epilogue, the film explains that Sabina and her children were murdered by Nazis, that Freud was forced out of Vienna by the Nazis in his old age, dying of cancer, while Jung lived until 1961, dying peacefully and alone. BAH but the film completely disregards Jung’s fascist fan boys, those brown shirts. His “human” theory is left hanging clear of his historical liaisons with the Nazis and the Aryan unconscious. What would this mean, carried out in film, if we were to see how the rational, the human, the middle roading ego lapses, quite easily, into fascism and exploitation. All of a sudden, the viewers would have been implicated in the sea of blood that they dreamed about, the war and the culture that died with it that somehow contemporary culture still valorizes.
What would that have meant? But instead, we are left in the shadows of history, of the personal dilemma. We are left to identify with with historical pre-programming.
hmph
Rather missing the point, but interesting. http://web.archive.org/web/20071215041107/http://www.benjaminhoffauthor.com/essay.htm
find your place on the Brooklyn Bridge
There was a lot of tension last night between protesters who crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge last night on #n17. It was clear that a lot of people were tired and cold, and we were *maybe* getting a little tired of telling ourselves that this is really what democracy looks like. There were a lot of people who weren’t used to being leaderless, and local conversations erupted on quotidian subjects and personal lives. As we passed the Verizon building, the V-workers projected “WE ARE THE 99%” and a few other messages on the side of the building. Relatively low key until at the Brooklyn side, a helicopter come close overhead and we chanted “pigs can’t fly”. A couple of French girls started chanting that cops are the 99% (enter a line of riot-helmeted cops to the left). Awkward smiles on the cops’ part, protesters either boo-ed or silently walked beside them. Behind us: “From New York to Greece, fuck the police”…. which promptly stopped when that subgroup actually *saw* the police. It was as if it was too late to think in horizontal terms, as if that last mirage had been blown and somehow it was a network of private cliques and partisans or maybe people who were frustrated with their own political impotence.
Someone started talking trash about Jefferson and Paine, mentioning some idiocy about the Statue of Liberty standing for Imperialist Oppression. Hm, and here I was, thinking that these figures and symbols marked the end of monarchy and were actually the radical backdrop for their middle class position and comfy shoes that supported their elitist/non-confrontational liberal stance.
Silly me. Anyway: tensions are growing. This is what “democracy” looks like.
#N17: The problems and discontents with non-violent action in the United States
In theUnited Statesthe default position of protestors in the Occupy Wall Street movement has been one of non-violence. This position is not viable and is the micro-chip of implosion for the movement. Non-violence is less about actual violence on the streets on this particular day or protest, and more about potential and political impotence. If knowledge and power are viewed as co-foundational tenets of revolutionary potential, then a brief excursus into each is necessary in the current horizon of political action.
Knowledge and power have been terms co-opted from their inception into language. The relationship between knowledge and power is filtered through the process of articulation. Articulation toward knowledge as the kernel of power is the first division between the political subject and himself. This division can be understood as the original contradiction of the political body, individual and social.
This contradiction is the foundation of the political self that is inescapable. Violence and intersection with the idea of violence is an idea that plagues the burgeoning American Left. As I write this, there are thousands of occupiers in lowerManhattanflooding the streets. Several sitters occupy the intersection ofNassauand Pine, and there are reports of police brutality, even before the tentative opening bell. Hegemonic authority rests in the police not because of their legitimacy, but in their potential in violence.
The police, in New York as much as anywhere else in theUnited States, are part of a fragmented body of violent potential. The police, and hence authoritative power, cannot be adequately matched or have its power wrested from it until the political body of dissent comes to grips with the nature and knowledge of violence.
“Reclaiming democracy” and the anti-foundational myth of the American people:
It is five minutes past nine and the Occupy Wall Street protestors have kept Wall Street from opening. This movement is indicative of the supreme skill and ability of the movement to come into symbolic contact with economic power. As traders are turned away from the floor and police mount an assemblage of barricades along the old narrow streets, it is unclear who is being held away from what. In a protest that seems to have all of the ear-markings of a nascent riot, who authorized the caveat of “peaceful protest”? As it turned out, the opening bell still rung and trading continued. Pedestrian traffic closed, and we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be political in a world where direct action is contingent on the pacifism of power?
The pacifism of power is a concept of underestimation on the part of the hegemon (the “1%” as the Occupy movement has popularized, but I will say the actants of capital and its derivative forces i.e. the police). On the live feed there are comments on the sidebar saying “come on protestors, look at people in other countries: start throwing rocks already.” In response there was comment that said “we don’t want a riot.”
This is the question of the movement: why not talk about violence, why not make the 99% the 92%, why are we so resistant to rioting? In the recent eviction of ZucottiParkon November 15th, the mayor and the police demonstrated their body was couched in overt control over the occupation. It is difficult to conceive how we might determine ourselves as directly confronting the bodies of power when we are determined by police barricades and court rulings. Only after the movement comes to grips with the nature and importance of mobilization can it comprehend the logic of the “other side.” In short, dancing has gone on long enough; distinctions must be made between friends and enemies. We’re either within the bounds of current American power structure or we reject them. If we reject them then we are not subject to its ruling, and we radically reclaim the narrative of the American people for the people rather than submitting to a retroactively mythical conception of it.
Throwing guns over our shoulders is not at all what violence means in this context. Coming to grips with American force means coming to grips with the actual state of affairs instead of tossing around a lot of pre-determined rhetoric about “the people” and “our rights”. If we want to see our rights then we must realize that they have been systematically revised and condensed as political development has
In spite of ourselves, we are still American. As we sing the National Anthem in the streets of lowerManhattan, an electronic current flows before us in a rush that we the people cannot catch up with in time. We tell ourselves and each other that we are making history, and what an American thing to do. To take an historical example: during the constitution of the American political body in the 1760’s through unanimous consent to claim independence, the American people were conceived as manifest in sprite of concrete concerns. The American people were “actually” American even thgouh they were externally British citizens… it was the purported duty and right to claim oneself as an American by defying the external powers. In this way, the Occupy Wall Street protestors have tapped into a legacy of pre-figurative determination in much the same way although only in symbolic measures thus far.
As noon approaches, there is an increasing tension between advocates for riot and those who wish to remain peaceful. AsZucottiParkis opened, protestors have removed barricades and faced violent reactions from the police who have reportedly lunged and hit members of the press. Brookfield Security has reportedly left the vicinity, and about half of the people are chanting “No riot here, take off your riot gear,” although the police are not in fact wearing riot gear, only helmets.ZucottiParkis closed off on the north side and they continue to be torn down. What will the fate of a non-violent protest be? How can we look at the 99% the same? There are people who will “riot” and there are people who will not.
Ignorance of violent submission
The distinction between rioting and protesting is a liberal notion, and the use of the word liberal is not meant to be pejorative but perhaps in the future we will come to think of “peaceful protests” as a foolish concept and an impossible position. On the fliers for #N17 posted last night the tagline said “Resist austerity. Rebuild our economy. Reclaim democracy.” This slogan was taken down in lieu of “Resist Austerity. Reclaim the Economy. Recreate our Democracy.” Perhaps we are learning that to peacefully demonstrate does not require a terminal obedience to an authority who is not so determined to keep things bruise-free.
Perhaps we won’t always submit ourselves to slavery in the name of freedom dripping from the faucet.
occupy tidbit
This is the question of the movement: why not talk about violence, why not make the 99% the 92%, why are we so resistant to rioting? In the recent eviction of Zucotti Park on November 15th, the mayor and the police demonstrated their body was couched in overt control over the occupation. It is difficult to conceive how we might determine ourselves as directly confronting the bodies of power when we are determined by police barricades and court rulings. Only after the movement comes to grips with the nature and importance of mobilization can it comprehend the logic of the “other side.” In short, dancing has gone on long enough; distinctions must be made between friends and enemies. We’re either within the bounds of current American power structure or we reject them. If we reject them then we are not subject to its ruling, and we radically reclaim the narrative of the American people for the people rather than submitting to a retroactively mythical conception of it.
my sister’s birdcage
There are minds who wander effortlessly to the outer helm of the winter walk, to the undercut of an ancient ruddy bridge, packed with soft blue slate and clay whose every exposure to the void, the terrifying and cold apartment complexes, only strengthen the deep and rolling snow clouds that muffle all the screaming. Soothing thunder strikes the bedrock of the universe. The little girl in the grass, on the sand, the water crashing far above her head of light-tube hair …Foot steps fall over one another in supple carelessness and these worlds, these dreams and outer pathways spin around a tiny silver sphere. Each valence is a pathway, a rotation around a silver bell; the tingling hum of metals bent and whistling to each other pulses underneath the eyelids, and then shakes the fingers. If after everything you can hear me, learn first how to be silent, how to be still. For now, my eyes are always open, and the pulse of time—my days and months and webs of time—are gone before I have them. Sit quietly for the wind. Adventure in the mind is suicide. I remain with my eyes open, slipping in a dirty city, offering a crooked celebration to moments counting down to work time, to my false lives, my hated hours, living as a slave to them. No master of my dreams, no sunburned afternoon in August rest, no day gone by well and truly, but as planned. The hours are murdered by the minute marker and all goes according to the minutes, the tasks. And even the sister in my dreams, or my loved one, or those friends who I have lost in the thousandth winter of my short life, look on as if pained, doing little to unbend their sympathetic grimace. Doing little in their cages.
I love you.
I love you.
little girl who’s never heard my voice, I love you with all the sorrow of my every word, and I wish I could love you with ideas, but you’ll see that’d just kill you faster than your hoped-for 80 years.
Good luck tomorrow. Silently, I love you.
A body with a lot of organs and a mic
Today was Occupy Wall Street Day of Action. There were thousands of people in Times Square. It was crowded and barricaded early on, which made it difficult to discern who was a protester, a spectator, and a befuddled tourist. At five o’clock, there was intermittent dancing and chanting. The streets were operational, and the northbound side of Broadway and 44th was closed off. Time passed, the streets filled. The barricades were opened up and the street was closed. A college kid with a jacket that said “KILL ME” on it climbed up a traffic post and held up his sign: “Bail out college loans.” Another protester held up a sign that said “NOT ANTI-CAPITAL JUST ANTI-THEFT,” a third “CAPITALISM IS ORGANIZED CRIME.”
There were a few mic-checks. (Mic checks are when a person/group wants to communicate a message and establishes rings of echoers around him/it.) The mic-checking man said that we were a peaceful protest, and I walked up to him to repeat himself. (No one really knew how the mic-check worked.) He reiterated that it was a peaceful protest. I started to wonder how horizontal this really is. I have never had any stars in my eyes about #occupywallstreet, but horizontalism seemed to be one of the admirably coherent and consistent characters of the protest. How can one member determine what is spontaneously the will of the body? Why were the dissenting members who were willing to support “violent” action somehow made exterior to the protest? Who is speaking?
Mounted police came up the rear and cops were preparing to make mass arrests.
The noises in the crowd quelled. A mic was established. We were asked to sit. Most people sat. I wanted to call out that sitting meant making oneself arrestable. There was no question. I stood up and smoked on the barricade. There was a march to Washington Square Park. No one knew why or where to go. We started walking. “Cops are the 99%” was chanted.
Cops are not the 99%. Cops are the class enemy and they are class traitors. Who is speaking?
After walking 32 blocks, we got to WSP. There were a lot of people. At ten o’clock there was a general assembly. People here knew how to mic better and there were three generations (echoes) established. The people in the middle asked for us all the break up into groups to discuss whether or not we should occupy Washington Square Park (which, unlike Zucotti Park, is public and closes at 12am.) Lots of people made the “wrap-it-up” sign after a lot of emphasis on the “need to use this beautiful moment with all these beautiful people.” Overwhelmingly, people said no. Twelve people stayed until midnight. It made me wonder what the intent-call was for. Who is speaking? How are they speaking?
Anarcho-capitalists were overwhelmed by communists and black (and red) flag anarchists. A good communist started drinking after one of his friends and comrades showed an insurrectionist streak and opened up his bag with flares in it. A washed up anarcho-punk turned waiter felt alive again, revitalized.
Who is speaking?
What in the world….
Is it possible that Zizek will be speaking today at noon in Liberty Park?
