[Draft 5 is much longer and edited in many places, to make it a bit easier: # mostly unchanged, # changed, # new paragraph.]
“As we gather together in solidarity to
express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us
together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces
of the world can know that we are your allies.” - Declaration of the Occupation of New
York City [1]
“It is like a little village. They have got
a food tent, a welfare tent, a first aid tent, an information tent, a library
tent and a university tent where they have their daily meetings. It is very
well organised… They have organised there own portaloos but there is still a
problem with street urination… The rainwater gullies have been blocked up with
food waste.” – Assistant director of Street Scene on OccupyLSX [2]
“At night, with such a big crowd in it, the
space had started to redefine itself a bit, and more by ambience than function.
People arranged themselves in it more according to how they felt about it.
There was an unanswerable question in the air, or so it seemed to me, about
what forms of life are possible. In different parts of the Park people
gravitated toward different answers.” - McKenzie Wark on Zucotti Park
[3]
"The districts of this city could
correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by
chance in everyday life." - Ivan Chtcheglov[4]
# Psychogeography has moved from revolution
(say: Guy Debord) to nostalgia (say: Iain Sinclair) and I think I know why. The
psychogeographers of the middle 20th century imagined the city as a collage of grandiose
shape-shifting sectors that would be endlessly explored by its inhabitants. The
city would be in permanent revolution, urbanism would by participatory, work
would have be abolished and play would be the core activity of life. Sixty
years later we find psychogeography evoking historic and fantasmagoric cities as
part of the contemporary city through narrative pyrotechnics and the wilful
paranoia of associative anecdote. Its politics is regressive rather than
pro-active, its demands on reality humble. The psychogeographer rather
than create alternative visions from
scratch has gone searching for them in places that have so far escaped
‘development’. The psychogeographer of today walks, in various funny ways,
reports it finds and little else [5]
with the idea that keeping streets alive by using them non-functionally is politics enough. For some psychogeography has become a career. Where did the
enthusiasm for town planning and architecture go? City planning has become
suspect and socially responsible architects are without exception the ones who
destroy the most in their wake. Beware of the demagogue who knows morality and
justice on his or her side. Architects
are upmarket pimps hiding deprivation and slavery behind a smokescreen of
perfumed pompadour and slick braggadocio. Nicholas Hawkmoor had style, Baron
Haussmann at least was earnest and who do we have? A bunch of nameless
'partners' kissing some hand of some godfather in some back room.
Psychogeography has become nostalgic because the present has so little to offer.
The psychogeographer looks out over a tower block, a gigantic mall, a four-lane
motorway and sighs (a psychogeographer is by definition someone without a
driver’s licence). As it happens the psychogeographer is the only one left to
sigh because the rest of the world is too busy talking into their mobile phones.
Needless to say: psychogeographers are suspicious about mobile phones too…
# Sure, an interesting building sometimes
gets built but nobody can still look at a modern building without seeing the
invisible hand behind it: the cabal of investors, bankers, estate-agents, crooked
politicians, construction firms, marketing firms, law-firms, extractive
industries, all dodgy, all corrupt, all purely self-interested. Housing has ceased
to be a basic human right and the simple wish to have a roof over your head
means being forced to commit yourself to a pyramid scheme where the newcomers
will always pay for the exorbitant riches of those who came first. A house is
no longer a home but an investment, a city is no longer a society but a marketing
ploy to be sold to its inhabitants. Of course you can download a
‘psychogeographic’, ‘Situationist-inspired’ augmented reality app that helps
you to forget all this. They cost only 99 cents and will keep you just as
stupid as you already are.
# Every city has its cryptoforests, places
that are camouflaged by nature to hide the discontinued urban. Cryptoforests
are places that are forested and wild but which will inevitable reveal humans
at the heart of it. All forests are psychological actors and the cryptoforest
is no exception, but the cryptoforest is not a 'real' forest, it's also city
and all cities could improve by allowing themselves to cryptofy: to become
cryptoforests, or, like a half-empty glass is also half-full, cryptocities.
Cities that cater to the needs of tent-dwelling semi-nomadic foragers who dance
the night away to celebrate the new grub season. The forager is the
psychogeographic double[6].
# The eviction of the Occupy Wall Street camp from Zuccotti
park on grounds of hygiene is akin to the arrest of Al Capone for tax evasion.
And far away from Manhattan, in my sleepy Utrecht where nothing ever
happens, the same gambit has been tried for the local camp. Conservative politicians
objecting to the camp on the front door of the city council are citing the
major disruption of tourists tripping over tent pegs as reason for eviction. Apart
from offering a way to get rid of a camp on terms that might lead to awkward
accusations of curtailing unarguable rights like the freedom of speech,
political and judicial resistance to Occupy has a deeper reason: they need to
protect the housing-investment pyramid scheme. It is probably safe to say that
not a single one of the 2600+ Occupy groups the world has counted defined
beforehand which of their goals should be met before they will voluntary
abandon camp[7]. They
exist indefinitely until society changes significantly and this is unlikely to
happen soon. As Pete Wright has written: “Change happens through the imperative
for change, not the request,“[8]
and because the economic crisis is the best thing that ever happened to the
established economic superpowers the imperative is not thereat all[9].
In the indeterminate process of occupation people will quickly learn that a
house really is a luxury you can do without, that long exposure to winter cold
(talking about Europeans winters here, not Canadian or Russian ones) makes you
look a bit scary but is perfectly survivable. The criminalization of squatting
and the eviction of Occupy camps are part of the same motive: you are not
allowed to escape.
# The General Assembly model where
"the process toward creative synthesis is really the essence of the
thing" is such a fragile process that it will create a close-knitted community
of trusted others or will fall apart[10].
The consensus model takes away endless talk from a professional class of
politicians to the 'people' and everybody who has ever been involved in
non-hierarchical decision making knows that a person with strong opinions but
little facts and little self-criticism can turn any meeting into a race with
the red queen of dreadful infinity and this alone provides an excellent reasons
for socially cohesive subgroups to break off from the main camp and try their
luck elsewhere.
# The internal organization of Occupy, the refusal to create leaders, the
refusal to legitimize outside power and governance (even if only in theory),
its indeterminate duration, its state of permanent crisis (read: the risk of
eviction) can create a situation where tribal life-ways can be discovered and
explored. Occupy starts a process that can turn a well functioning, socially
cohesive camp into a self defined tribe (as much Hell Angel as Yanomami) that may
feel the need to turn their back on society[11].
At least a few people have recognized from the start that this is the real
substance of Occupy. Anthropologist and Occupy Wall Street co-organizer David
Graeber has written:
"Zuccotti Park, and all subsequent
encampments, became spaces of experiment with creating the institutions of a
new society - not only democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries,
clinics, media centres and a host of other institutions, all operating on
anarchist principles of mutual aid and self-organisation - a genuine attempt to
create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old.” [12] [13]
What he is really saying is: we don’t have concrete demands because we are
not interested in changing the world, we are interested in finding a way to
live where we can more fully ignore it. Occupy provides a meeting place and
testing ground for would-be communards. The Scriptonite blog perhaps puts it
best:
“To understand Occupy, you must get
one thing. The Occupy Movement is as much about education and information sharing
as it is about protest. The purpose of
the camps, are to act as villages. They
bring people together to share a space, food, ideas and build the personal
relationships that galvanise a movement.
There is also a massive support structure behind that of social media,
direct action and organisational capabilities able to manifest ideas generated
on the camps, into realities in the outside world.” [14]
# Once village utilities are in place camps may want to look further for
ways to severe more links to the outside world. Learning from experts on
foraging, alternative sanitation, alternative energy, alternative medicine, etc,
etc, to become fully prepared to move from Wall Street to Wild Street.
# There comes a moment for every Occupy camp that eviction is the best thing
that can happen to it. In Utrecht,
where the Greens are the biggest political party and likely to agree with Occupy
demands, the camp is protected from eviction. But where does that leave you? The
camp wilts under the stress of fluffy non-committing tolerance. I was genuinely
surprised by the activity and the conversation that was generated at one of
their first Saturday-afternoon festivals, but as camp continues people will probably
just get used to it and once people get used to they will start to ask awkward
questions like: what do you really want. And: does the 99% really exist outside
of statistics and is it a statistic that is valid outside the US?
# The occupation of a square or a park may be a photogenic way to show that
what’s happening on the news is also happening in the lives of millions of
people, but there comes a time to declutter. A few weeks before its eviction
the OWS Tumblr page mentioned the rumour that the police were telling homeless
to move to Zuccotti park. True or not: the phenomena is recurrent, homeless
people find Occupy camps congenial to their own needs but they will often fail
to take notice of the rules. Occupy Amsterdam went as far as to negotiate a
strategic half-eviction with the police that would evict the drunks, the
homeless and the Slavic and leave the prudent and well-behaved true occupiers
in their tents. The police as the mercenaries of a middle class tea-cup revolution.
Occupy’s Empty Tent Syndrome may not be as bad as the media likes to make it
appear but it’s certainly there: taking a bath, recharging your Iphone, phoning
you mother, eating a take-away meal (with all that cold you can use the grease),
catching an event of your favourite sport, those are things most people prefer
to do at home and this is where the homeless and the vagrant win: they can
afford to be there all day.
# A movement without leadership is controlled by an elite. There is no
reason to invoke a Bourne Provocateur to explain it. A supposedly egalitarian social
structure will always create informal leaders and these will have more power if
the number of participants increases. I can’t explain the process as a law like
a social psychologist can but I am sure it is true. Instead of clinging to willful
naivety of 19
th century anarchism why not borrow from tribal
knowledge and install a chief. Someone from whom you demand feasts and
impeccable generosity. Anthropology can offer many cases of social systems where
the chief has to work twice as hard to acquire the goods for redistribution he
needs to keep his people happy without ever gaining him any power other than
the right to speak at the general assembly. I repeat: a leader has the right to
speak, and the guarantee that no one will listen. Chiefdom is a way to keep the
bossy ones from being boss by isolating them
[15]. Start
a meeting by calling for a volunteer to be the chairman and then send him or
her away to clean the toilets. The Golden Bough starts with an overview of
ancient ways to get rid of kings when their time is up; find inspiration there.
# There is a maxim that a culture in decline needs to look outside of itself
to freshen up and Occupy is a good example. It has borrowed the idea of a tent
camp from Tharir Square, the general assembly model from Quaker public worship
(as the Spanish Indignadas claim) and it comes as no surprise that David
Graeber, an anthropologist, has become the most visible representative of
Occupy Wall Street and by affiliation of the world wide movement. Graeber's
thesis advisor was Marshall Sahlins, whose 1966 essay 'The Original Affluent
Society' is a foundational text in modern day hunter-gatherer studies (and often
reprinted as a primitivist punk zine) pioneering the thought that foraging
people are not backwards but free, egalitarian and happy
[16].
Add Pierre Clastres' observation that most foraging societies are not relics
from the stone age but forms of self-barbarization, a way to be flexible and
permanently ready to escape from outside control and you begin to see the true
vision of Occupy: the tent is not just a symbol of resistance, it's a promise
of tactical lightness that is not defined by protest but by its incorporation
of alternative sources of practical skill. Occupy doesn’t need
politicians, it needs Eskimo’s, Aboriginals, Bushmen and other people with
genuine commitment to their independence. Looked at like this the Occupy
movement is not an anarchist movement but an anthropological experiment in creating a situation in which different ways
of being a political and social individual can be experienced. There is also a
paradox: the only successful communities that could be called successfully
anarchic came about by being ignored by the state, not by breaking away from
it.
# Dutch newspapers extensively covered the story of 14 year old runway Kelly
who disappeared from suburbia to Occupy Amsterdam where she fell in love with a
17 year old Czech nicknamed Pikachu, after Pokemon, how sweet. Together they
travelled to Occupy Paris, were involved in a failed attempt to set up camp in
Central Marseilles and planned to travel to Barcelona when her parent intercepted her and
took her back home. A newspaper quoted her mother as saying: “She was driven by
love and a bad time at school[17]”.
It shows that Occupy provides a much needed setting for adventure. It also
shows how Occupy has created a network of places for people to freely move in
to, meet people, discuss the world, share the food, and, hopefully, offer to
help prepare it too. This practical, welcoming, quality of occupy where a
willingness to help pays out in comradely dividend is also addressed by the New
Yorker in an article describing Ray Kachel’s move from unemployment in Seattle
to the adventures of Occupy Wall Street. More than anything else the article
stresses the open sociality of Occupy as one of its strongest assets:
“He
tweeted regularly, and soon had more than thirteen hundred followers. Perhaps
readers were drawn to the modesty and the objectivity of Kachel’s notes on the
occupation. October 8th: “There are elements of communal living. it’s a really
amazing experience tho totally out of my comfort level.” October 22nd: “It
surprises me i have a guardian angel. it doesn’t surprise me he’s a
soft-spoken, hard working Irish guy from the bronx.” October 23rd: “Dear mr.
ferguson. i have lived in new york
for over two weeks now. it does not smell of wee.” October 27th: “Keep seeing
reference to ‘horrendous police abuse’ re: ows. I’ve been here 2+ weeks and
have seen none and heard of little.” November 13th: “I lived in my old
apartment in Seattle
for nearly a decade and barely knew 2 other tenants. . . . i’ve lived in
liberty square for just over a month and regularly talk with many of my
neighbors and have made many new friends.[18]”
# By March 2012 Occupy Utrecht had been
dealing with street violence for a few months but this time one of the
occupiers had retaliated a harasser by beating him on the head with a hammer. A
statement was issued by Occupy condemning the action in the strongest terms
without taking the only proper consequence. They should have pulled backwards
from the boat in order to enter it, as Coleridge would say, and disbanding camp
citing their unwavering commitment to non-violence. They didn’t, displaying a
shocking lack of strategic insight while showing the unwavering stubbornness of
the true believer, and everything that will happen from now on will be a
deception. Incidentally: a while back a university teacher involved with Occupy
Utrecht allowed himself to be interviewed by a newspaper and was quoted as
saying that there are good bankers and bad bankers and that it is important to
see the difference. I wonder how that stellar insight would go down at an OWS
GA. It shows that not all camps are making the same choices when it comes to
tactics, and that not all camps have strategies.
# “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” It’s a 1845 Marx quote
used by Occupy groups around the world. Marx had little patience with the well
intentioned but doomed naivety of small groups trying to design a perfect
society in the seclusion of a wilderness. If you want to improve society you
must start by improving political structures. Occupy is unequivocally not
seeking to change the political system from the inside out and this makes it,
in the Marxian analysis, a utopist movement misunderstanding Marx’s slogan.
Still: it is to better to quote Marx wrongly than to quote rightly from that great
unwashed Hegelian harlequin: Slavoj Zizek.
# “The dérive, a technique of
rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive
behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite
different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.[19]”
Debord wrote this in 1956 and it has been quoted by psychogeographers every
since as its defining statement. What it means is that the drift (usually taken
as the same thing as psychogeography, though it wasn’t for Debord) is a
political act that releases you, even if only temporarily, from all forms of economic productivity and
consumption. Sixty years later we take extensive leisure time for granted and
the drift is evoked as a value free term for personal advancement by artists,
app-developers and all other scum that wants to make it in the so-called
creative industries. The drift is not a walk that is not from A to B, it’s a
way of life that feeds into the psychogeographical restructuring of the city as
a platform of political struggle. Creating a village on the footsteps of the
stock-exchange is psychogeographic, reading Walter Benjamin in a Starbucks is
not.
# Tent city urbanism (and what comes after)
is a far cry from the spectacular models of Constant's New Babylon or the
magico-marxist rereading of the Hawksmoor churches and Canary Wharf.
In that the psychogeography of the recent past has fallen for the spectacle of
the 'legacy'. My first impression of the Occupy camp was that it was paltry, a
dynamo of underwhelming sadness, a place of insignificant littleness, but I
soon realized my initial response was a form of conditioning that must be exorcised
with a pickaxe. I was looking for a hacienda, baroque optical illusions and
empty spaces creating richly filled time and I saw..... battered tents against
a grey building on a clouded day on a miserable Monday morning[20].
And it may well be that at least a few tents are permanently empty, but I like
the idea of Potemkin tent village, a farcical pow-wow of bleeding ugliness at
the heart of the city. Dubai
is a travesty, a weed patch a place of wonder and discovery. The cryproforest
is also battered and paltry, a cheap undefined green that is not a forest, not
a garden, not even a park, but give it half a chance and it will take over
everywhere where humans retreat. The urbanism of the future is the
cryptoforestation of derelict properties, abandoned carparks and never
developed building sites. In this respect the economic crisis is on our side.
Occupy communities are working toward it from the other end, and when the
cryptocity arrives they will find themselves fully prepared for it.
[December 2011 – March 2012]
- Image from
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053463/Occupy-London-90-tents-St-Pauls-protest-camp-left-overnight.html
[1] From October 2011, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/01/1021956/-First-official-statement-from-Occupy-Wall-Street
[2] The problems of urbanism in a nutshell:
http://www.ehn-online.com/news/article.aspx?id=6010
[3] http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/10/07/mckenzie-wark-zuccotti-park-a-psychogeography/
[4] Ivan Chtcheglov's Formula for a New Urbanism.1953; see:
http://www.bopsecrets.or/SI/Chtcheglov.htm
[5] For an overview of contemporary
psychogeography see the Psychogeographic Field Reports [2011]:
http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/p/psychogeographic-field-reports-zine.html
[6] See: Forage Psychogeography:
http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/p/what-is-forage-psychogeography-suppress.html
[7] "By October 9, Occupy protests had
taken place or were ongoing in over 95 cities, across 82 countries, and over
600 communities in the United
States. As of November 17 the Meetup page
"Occupy Together" listed Occupy communities in 2,609 towns and cities
worldwide." quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement
[8] http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2012/03/protest-occupy-global-change
[9] Manuel Castells on the economic crisis in a TV interview:
This idea that this is not a crisis, but a trick, do
you agree with that?
Absolutely. On
the trick part. It is a crisis, in economic terms, but the crisis in fact has
been used to improve the power and the profits of the financial groups which
are in fact the leading elite in our society. All major banks and financial
institutions in the last year have reported extraordinary profits. But now the
governments are in a fiscal crisis, the governments need the money, and the
banks say: “Well, in order to be stable and not to go back into our trouble, we
cannot lend it to you. And in fact, the only way we are going to lend something
to someone if you start cutting wages, firing workers, curtailing social rights
and eliminating the collective power of the unions.” In that sense, the trick
part of this statement seems to be empirically supported. Because profits are
hugely up, some of the Spanish banks have reported largest profits in history,
in 2010. And at the same time, the condition has been created for an assault on
the welfare state, social rights, labour union power, and in fact on all the
institutions that were constructing people’s lives in terms of their basic needs.
So I don't think it’s necessarily conspiracy of the capitalist class and
organisation but ultimately it is being used in those terms. So in the
perception of people this is obviously a trick.
[10] David Graeber:
http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/
[11] For a historic precedent see Gary Snyder, Why Tribe,
1969:
We use the term
Tribe because it suggest the type of new society now emerging within the industrial nations. In America of course the word has
associations with the American Indians which we like . This new subculture is
in fact more similar to that ancient and successful tribe, the European
Gypsies-- a group without nation or territory which maintains its own values,
its language and religion, no matter what country it may be in. The Tribe
proposes a totally different style: based on community houses, villages and
ashrams; tribe-run farms or workshops or companies; large open families;
pilgrimages and wanderings from center to center. A synthesis of Gandhian
"village anarchism" and I.W.W. syndicalism.
[12] David Graeber: Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011112872835904508.html
[13] This sounds like a distant echo from
Buenaventura Durruti’s quote from 1936 that was quoted and re-quoted by a
number of Occupy-related blogs
"We have always lived in slums and holes in the
wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not
forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities,
here in Spain and America and
everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And
better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit
the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might
blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a
new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute."
[14] http://www.scriptonitedaily.org/2012/02/voices-from-occupation-sleepless-night.html
[15] For a fascinating similar discussion from
the early 1970ties read Jo Freeman’s ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ and
Cathy Levine’s response, ‘The Tyranny of Tyranny’.
http://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine
[16] Sahlins ‘The Original Affluent Society’ also offers an aesthetic of
forage psychogeography, http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm:
The construction of substantial houses likewise becomes
absurd if they must soon be abandoned. Hence the hunter's very ascetic
conceptions of material welfare: an interest only in minimal equipment,
"if that; a valuation of smaller things over bigger; a disinterest in
acquiring two or more of most goods; and the like. Ecological pressure assumes
a rare form of concreteness when it has to be shouldered. If the gross product
is trimmed down in comparison with other economies, it is not the hunter's productivity
that is at fault, but his mobility.
[17] http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1012/Binnenland/article/detail/3074503/2011/12/13/Ouders-weggelopen-Kelly-gek-van-geluk.dhtml
[18] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/05/111205fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all
[19] http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm
[20] Paraphrasing Ivan Chtcheglov's ‘Formula
for a New Urbanism’.
