Occupy A People Yet to Come Edited by Andrew Conio Occupy Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of sys- tems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibil- ity of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of deple- tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re- alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor- phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo- political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Occupy A People Yet to Come Edited by Andrew Conio London 2015 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS First edition published by Open Humanities Press Copyright © 2015 Andrew Conio. Chapters by respective authors except chapter 2: Protevi, John. “Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS.” Theory & Event 14:4 Supplement (2011). © 2011 John Protevi and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/occupy.html This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-004-7 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-014-6 Cover Art: Declaration Flowchart by Rachel Schragis, Copyright © 2011 CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mis- sion is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Contents Preface 9 Claire Colebrook Introduction 23 Andrew Conio 1. On Anthropolitics: From Capitalism and Schizophrenia to Occupy and Beyond 67 Giuseppina Mecchia 2. Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS 88 John Protevi 3. Pack of Leaders: Thinking Organization and Spontaneity with Deleuze and Guattari 97 Rodrigo Nunes 4. Resistance to Occupy 125 Claire Colebrook 5. Preoccupations 158 Verena Andermatt Conley 6. Minor Politics, Territory, and Occupy 172 Nicholas Thoburn 7. September 17, 2011: Occupy without Counting 191 Ian Buchanan 8. Negative Space War Machines 203 David Burrows 9. Occupy America and the Slow-Motion General Strike 225 Eugene Holland 10. Savage Money 238 Andrew Conio Bios 269 Acknowlegements I would like to thank Claire Colebrook for her generous and steadfast sup- port during the writing of this book; the contributors, Andrew Stapleton, Sigi Jöttkandt and my many friends at Occupy and the Economics Working Group especially David, Tim, Clive, Mary, Ellena, Omar, Janos, Peter, Mike, Obi, Schlack, Nick and Vica whose commitment to finding ways to create a better world prompted the writing of this book. Preface End the Occupation, Long Live Occupy! Claire Colebrook I At the time of this book going to press, amidst all the diverging politi- cal theories and commentaries regarding how the twenty-first century might cope with the intertwined complexities of climate change, collaps- ing global finance, wars on terror that are also wars on freedom, potential viral pandemics and increasing disaster scenarios (with increased vulner- ability to disaster for the less fortunate) one thing seems clear enough: end the occupation. The attacks by Israel on Gaza have not received unanimous condemnation; there are still those, especially in the United States, who – for all the disproportionate suffering inflicted on those trapped in Gaza – still see Israel as having some right to defend itself, and still maintain that conflict was instigated by Hamas and therefore not subject to any critique outside the right of Israel to ‘respond.’ Regardless of the competing histories, narratives, conflicting allegiances and com- plexities, it nevertheless seems clear that ending the occupation would be the best and quickest way to end widespread and ongoing violence. Why does ending occupation, amidst all this complexity, appear to be such a clear and just thing to do? There are two identities – the State of Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza – both of whom can lay claim to having suffered displacement and both of whom can seem to ask quite legitimately for a territory of their own. In the ongoing demands for a sta- ble and peaceful future, perhaps one would support a two-state solution, 10 Claire Colebrook or perhaps there are other alternatives, but ending occupation seems an immediate imperative before anything else might be achieved, and occu- pation seems to be a simple and unqualified evil: a people were residing in a territory, and that residence was taken over from without. Even if one regards Hamas’s reaction to occupation as terrorism (rather than a war between a funded military force and those who have to find other means) the overwhelming fact is that Gaza is occupied. It was ‘originally’ Palestinian territory by virtue of the presence of those who are now imprisoned in Gaza. Here we strike a small difficulty with the concept of original occupation, which perhaps needs to be thought of as ‘prior’ occupation. The state of Israel is not occupying land that is terra nullius. This might allow us to think of ‘minor’ occupation – whereby a people is formed by occupying a space, with the space becoming the place that it is by way of occupation. This would need to be contrasted with ‘molar’ or ‘majoritarian’ occupation, whereby a world map is already laid out with established nations and agents who then lay claim (or not) to the right to occupy a space. Occupation is – initially – a form of territorialization, a becoming who one is, or becoming ‘a’ people by way of assembling in a spatial zone. Taking away a territory is not only taking away a people’s being – their right to exist and their existence – it is also the creation of a different register. Rather than an earth that is occupied by peoples there is a map of states, polities, geopolitics, markets, relations and nations that overcode and negotiate the distribution of peoples across the earth. To follow Deleuze and Guattari on this question: occupying space is not something ‘a’ people does. Something like a people emerges through the occupation of a field, which in turn becomes a space. If this is so, then one can see history, geopolitics, capitalism and the war on terror as a problem of territorialization and deterritorialization. Most simply, capi- talism deterritorializes in many different ways but one way is to gener- ate a field of exchange, markets, finance, debts, and labor flows that pre- clude any territory from being simply what it is. The occupation of any space becomes overcoded by another virtual space – the world of capital, and arms industries – and nowhere is this more evident than in the US response to Israel, where the simple moral demand to end occupation is neither fully enforced nor fully articulated because of that other register of ‘security,’ which will ensure that global trade, militarization and force Preface 11 become a smooth operating system with no other imperative outside the system’s own ongoing function or operation. This is capitalism’s cynicism that allows for any belief whatever, and then allows for the market and exchange not only to operate regardless of belief but also to commodify belief by generating ‘green,’ ‘feminist,’ ‘queer’ and even ‘activist’ commod- ities (such as Jay-Z’s marketing of ‘Occupy All Streets’ t-shirts). Here is where – despite first appearances – Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy allows for a nuanced political (or micro-political) account of occupation. At first glance their thought would seem to offer nothing but a violent relativism of force: there is no such thing as a people or a terri- tory prior to occupation. Something becomes what it is by forming rela- tions with what it is not, and those relations become relatively stable, but always and necessarily subject to deterritorialization. When a territory – Gaza – is represented by a single body – Hamas – one set of relations (bodies in space) has been overtaken by another set of relations (political identities and allegiances), and this other strata or register then becomes reterritorialized on a single system (capital) that quite like Deleuze and Guattari’s own philosophy acknowledges no essential territories or rela- tions. But the difference resides in capital’s reference of all relations and territories back to a global system of maintaining a global system. So, yes, there is nothing in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy that grants anyone any right to anything; all identities and territories begin with appropria- tion and deterritorialization, becoming what and who one is in relations that are not one’s own. Any attempt to grant supreme importance to a single territory – the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, capitalism, democracy – is a form of violence that precludes the very dynamism that brings anything into being. But there are two modes of occupation: minor and molar. Minor occu- pation produces a territory through occupation so that a people or move- ment comes into being by way of assembling and taking up space. We might say that all indigenous peoples, by definition, are forms of minor occupation insofar as their being has no existence outside the taking up of space. The sequences is not, ‘this is who I am and what I stand for, and therefore I have a right to occupy,’ but rather, ‘this is occupied space, and therefore this is who we have turned out to be.’ In the Occupy movement that inspired this volume the logic of minor occupation was at work. Yes, 12 Claire Colebrook Wall Street was the site for a people – finance, banking – and yes, this site was overtaken and occupied by protestors. The logic was not, ‘this is our space and we have a right to this space because of who we are what we represent and because we stand for humanity in general.’ On the contrary, the occupation began and then certain motifs of proportion or statistics were made quite explicit: to say ‘we are the 99%’ is less a claim of identity, property and right and more a claim of assembling. And if Wall Street was based on a deterritorialized system of owning space because some system other than occupation was at work (real estate, property, coloni- zation of space), the Occupy movement was based on ‘higher deterrito- rialization.’ Rather than right or ownership or taking back what was owed to ‘us,’ there was no ‘us’ or ‘we’ outside the event of occupation. I would suggest that the same applies to Israel and Gaza: the Israeli defense force is adopting majoritarian or molar occupation, appealing to a narrative of nation, right, security, constituted peoples and property. Tragically, those abandoned in Gaza, cannot appeal to any straightfor- ward conception of nation – but Gaza is where they are. All they have is their occupation of space, a space that has then been occupied by a force that does not simply counter-occupy but places the competing claims to space as some grand narrative of security, nation, legitimacy and right. It might seem quixotic, and violently so, to suggest that rather than respond with a counter-narrative of right and nation one imagines a world of occupation without right. Such a new earth would not set the occupa- tion of a territory within a moral framework but would instead begin with occupation – the assembling across a space that generates ‘a’ people, and then enables certain narratives of rights to be formed ex post facto Such a call for a radically immanent politics might be naïvely wishful, but here I would quote Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre who affirmed the possibility that was articulated at the Seattle protests (prior to the Occupy movements) that another world would be possible : Becoming the child of an event: not being born again into innocence, but daring to inhabit the possible as such, with- out the adult precautions that make threats of the type ‘what will people say?’, ‘who will they take us for?’ or ‘and you think that is enough?’ prevail. The event creates its own ‘now’ to which the question of a certain ‘acting as if ’, which is proper Preface 13 to children when they make things (up), responds. (Stengers and Pignarre 2011: 4) II Deleuze and Guattari once declared that it was not easy being Heideggerian. By this I take them to mean not that Heidegger was a difficult thinker (for then they might have said the same about Kant or Leibniz), nor that it was unfashionable to be a Heideggerian phenome- nologist in the late twentieth century (for then they might have said the same about any of their more obscure commitments to less canonical figures, such as Raymond Ruyer or less politically tolerable writers such as Henry Miller or Ezra Pound). Rather, there is something intrinsically risk-laden about the possibility of Heidegger’s philosophy that takes us to the heart of the relation between philosophy and politics, or the pol- ity. Philosophy is possible by way of deterritorialization: the formation of the polity occurs when life’s relation to the earth shifts in register and one can create concepts that are not extensive (regarding what there is), but intensive (or what one might be able to think). It is in What is Philosophy? (1991) that Deleuze and Guattari theorize the geopolitical conditions of philosophy, tying philosophy to an agonistics that can only occur among friends who can be genuinely combative at a conceptual level because they are occupying a terrain of luxury that liberates them from immediate material production. (A similar notion of philosophical agonistics was articulated by Jacques Derrida in Politics of Friendship (1994) , where he quoted William Blake’s ‘Do be My Enemy for Friendship’s Sake,’ (Derrida 2005: 72)). If one is bound to another for reasons of state or diplomacy then relations are mediated by some external measure of justice or propri- ety, but if there is nothing at stake other than the struggle itself then the genuine force (of concepts) can take hold. Deleuze and Guattari argue that certain geopolitical forces need to have played themselves out and constituted a specific territory for philosophical agonistics to emerge. Their theorization of the philosophical plane of concept-creation has got them into quite a bit of trouble, given that they tied their observa- tion to a specific limitation of democracy with regard to the ‘becoming of subjected peoples.’ Here, they argue that ‘Europeanization’ needs to be 14 Claire Colebrook distinguished from becoming, just as in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) they argue that there is no ‘becoming-man’: Why are there so many becomings of man, but no becom- ing-man? First because man is majoritarian par excellence, whereas becomings are minoritarian; all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian. When we say majority, we are refer- ring not to a greater relative quantity but to the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white- man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 291) In this sense the 99% remains as a minority (as do those ‘living’ in Gaza), not because they are fewer in number but because their identity has no basis outside the assembling in common. By contrast, the becoming of ‘man,’ has an internal end or telos towards which history is oriented. Both the figure of European reason and ‘man,’ go through time in order to realize their proper potential, in order to arrive at their own freedom, liberated from any specified form. Such a conception of democracy as a becoming that is nothing other than its own unfolding – as free self- determination – needs to be differentiated from Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of becoming as always ‘becoming-...’ (becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible), where becoming is not a self-unfolding but always in a relation with what is not one’s own. This is why philosophy and art, they argue, allow for a creativity that can only occur by way of ‘a people that are lacking’; one does not write because one is a member of a polity, for it is writing and creation that occur only in the absence of an autonomous or proper becoming: The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. Europeanization does not constitute a becoming but merely the history of cap- italism, which prevents the becoming of subjected peoples. Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation. It is not populist writers but the most aristocratic who lay claim to this future. This people and earth will not be Preface 15 found in our democracies. Democracies are majorities, but a becoming is by its nature that which always eludes the major- ity. The position of many writers with respect to democracy is complex and ambiguous. The Heidegger affair has compli- cated matters: a great philosopher actually had to be reterri- torialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to meet up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question and some- times absolving it through such complicated and convoluted arguments that we are still in the dark. It is not always easy to be Heideggerian. It would be easier to understand a great painter or musician falling into shame in this way (but, pre- cisely, they did not). It had to be a philosopher, as if shame had to enter into philosophy itself. He wanted to rejoin the Greeks through the Germans, at the worst moment in their history: is there anything worse, said Nietzsche, than to find oneself fac- ing a German when one was expecting a Greek? How could Heidegger’s concepts not be intrinsically sullied by an abject reterritorialization? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 108–09) How might we approach this argument regarding Heidegger, concepts, philosophy, shame, and a future ‘people and earth?’ For Heidegger, phi- losophy had at one and the same time covered over the essentially non- essentially nature of being, and the intrinsically inauthentic nature of authenticity. Because philosophy emerges in a leisured and aristocratic condition, freed from an economy of material production and occurs amongst friends who have the space to be antagonistic, it is capable of creat- ing concepts. If you are genuinely my friend and we have the luxury of speaking in a manner of absolute war – because the conversation is in a different register from the day-to-day constituted demands of the body – then we can start to create concepts on a different plane: we might ask what justice really is only if the answer is not bound by immediate mate- rial consequences and institutions. It is only in the absence of political and material diplomacy that genuine friendship opens genuine agonis- tics. For Heidegger philosophers broke away from the everyday world of projects, concerns, meanings, and the ready-at-hand; and they could do so because that world of projects could be rendered inoperative by 16 Claire Colebrook asking the question not of what this thing is for me, but what this thing or being is as such. It is in a moment of disorientation, or a certain loss of world, that one might start to think not of a world that is always already human but an earth (the forces from which the human world are composed). We might say that what Deleuze and Guattari refer to elsewhere as the ‘war machine,’ or an agonistics that has not been captured by opposing sides (such as political parties, nations, identified groups or communities), is only possible when there is no actual war: in a state of war one holds on to who one is, where one is, what one stands for and what one believes. Doing so reduces the intensity of the war machine to stabilized terms and oppositions; the war machine would be destructive of such a terrain. In this respect Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, like Heidegger’s, is not at all easy because it abandons the negotiation of a field, abandons settle- ment among terms and instead aims for a ‘higher deterritorialization’: in both cases one thinks the relation between ‘world’ (constituted mean- ing) and ‘earth’ (the plane that renders such constitution possible but also fragile). Heidegger argued both that one can ask questions and begin to think only because one has a world (a horizon of meaning, concern, care, others, history and ‘ownness’) and that one becomes aware of the having of a world when the world breaks down. Authenticity is therefore not so much attachment to the projects and horizons that make us who we are, but a sense that while all we do and think emerges from the ‘life- world,’ what is truly worth thinking about is that there is a world, and that it might not be. This does not mean that living authentically is liberation from any identity, history, project or tradition, but that having a world or tradition is something one takes on with a radical sense of decision. We can only take up a free and decisive relation to a world that was not of our own deciding, and nothing legitimates that world other than that world itself. And here, of course, is where things start to become ‘not at all easy’ as a Heideggerian. One might not only say that there are certain material and geopolitical conditions for adopting one’s world freely and decisively, and that for Heidegger these conditions were tied to a German National Socialism that aimed to eradicate anything that appeared as too inert or unthinking to embrace radical self-becoming. One might also point out, as Jacques Derrida has done, that a certain notion of contemporary Preface 17 politics, democracy and modernity as a lazy consensus and acquiescence to passively received political forms was crucial to Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric that relied on refusing democracy as a contamination of the truly decisive freedom of spirit. Democracy, parliamentary representa- tion, communication and politics in its day-to-day combative forms were (for the Nazis and twentieth-century fascism) the hallmarks of a world dominated by money and an unquestioning acceptance of the consti- tuted field. As Derrida pointed out in his reading of Benjamin, the dream of a ‘divine violence’ that would annihilate the ongoing order of received law was perilously close to the National Socialist rhetoric of renewal and redemption through a form of cultural rebirth (Derrida 1994). One might then go on, as Deleuze and Guattari do, and tie the Heidegger affair to a problem of philosophy and its aristocratic temper. Philosophy is deterritorialization or the production of a register different and distant from the constituted terms of a polity; it is the refusal of the plane of functions, communication and certainly of ‘ the people.’ Is it any wonder, then, that this notion of authentic and decisive thinking could so easily align itself with another territory – in Heidegger’s case the German Volk who were not one populace among others but the privileged people for thinking world-creation? Bearing that in mind, we might say that today it is not easy being Deleuzo-Guattarian, and not just because their thought is abstruse, out of favor (in the new materialist turns) or irrelevant, but because their celebrated rhetoric of nomadism and deterritorialization is a luxury that displaced persons without a territory, or whose territory is occupied, cannot afford. Worse, as their criticism of communication and democ- racy above seems to suggest, a certain privilege is attached to those who are not mired in literal and material antagonism but can occupy another plane, of pure conversation. One might suggest that their celebration of deterritorialized philosophy offers a glib dismissal of a certain mode of capitalist democracy – the democracy of free markets and imposed con- ceptions of the consumer-oriented private individual – but reinstalls a hyper-democratic prejudice: some traditions, such as Western philoso- phy, have at their heart the potential to distance themselves from any constituted tradition such that ‘democracy’ would not be a worldview or tradition so much as a critical mood or irony with regard to any tradition. 18 Claire Colebrook International interventions that impose, maintain or secure democracy are supposedly not undertaken for the sake of this or that constituted people, but for some abstract or virtual ideal of humanity in general. Against such a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhetoric of deterrito- rialization and nomadism as yet one more way in which the West uses a concept of the universal to impose its own norms, presenting itself as the ideology that is no ideology, and – worse – of using concepts of nomad- ism and deterritorialization in a world where real events of displace- ment are life and death matters, I want to suggest that we think seriously about Deleuze and Guattari’s claim for a new people and a new earth as a genuinely futural endeavor. It is not easy being Deleuzo-Guattarian pre- cisely because such talk of a people to come, deterritorialization, the war machine and nomadism appears at best uselessly naïve and at worst as violently appropriative. How dare one celebrate at a metaphorical level a placelessness that is traumatically painful for many who do not have the luxury of the philosophical view from nowhere? Isn’t such a strat- egy stupid, risky and far too abstract to be of any use in urgent political struggles? What we need – it might be said – is not abstraction and deter- ritorialization, but history, facts, distinction, and –more than anything – the affirmation of what is genuinely owed to a people who have had their land, their personhood and their conditions for living stolen. At the time of this volume’s going into production the world was wit- ness to such violent occupation and literal deterritorialization. Despite pressure from the international community, and despite widespread condemnation in much of the press and social media, the Israeli defense forces continued to assault and wage war on the occupied territories. Originally conceived in the wake of the radical and revolutionary Occupy movements across the globe, this collection of essays could (it seemed in 2012) quite easily contest capitalist and supposedly liberal ideologies of property by celebrating radical potentials for becoming, dissolution, non-identity and a notion of movement without place or clearly defined ends. Indeed, one might say that the neoliberal rhetoric of ends, out- comes, success and even personhood had done much to precipitate the increasing reterritorialization of all political possibilities on market effi- ciency and corporate personhood. To celebrate a certain destructiveness without clearly defined ends, a certain non-productivity and even social