Tactical Dramaturgies: Media, the State, and the Performance of Place-Based Activism

Jeffrey Gagnon

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies University of Toronto

Tactical Dramaturgies: Media, The State, And the Performance of Place-Based Activism

Jeff Gagnon

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies University of Toronto

2021 Abstract This dissertation seeks to develop a theory of protest as it relates to the tactics and mobilizations of specific groups and the performance of their ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical responses to the contested relationships between state and space. In doing so, I make use of theoretical frameworks provided by performance, the social production of space, and media theories in order to develop a theoretical analysis of resistant practices of Idle No More, Occupy Wall

Street, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). In these sites I explore moments of performative resistance that challenge the supremacy of state power, dominion over language and voice, control of the body, and agency over space.

Primarily informed by Marxist spatial theory, supplemented by additional postcolonial and feminist theory and Indigenous knowledges, I examine digitally-enabled networks of solidarity and place-based activism that take up a critical stance towards digital networks, technologies, and cultures. My theoretical fusion of Henri Lefebvre, Brechtian performance traditions, and

Glen Coulthard’s challenge to recognition politics, generates for me a form of critique that makes the case for an inclusive and empowering spatial ethics. I have, therefore, sought to highlight the threads that connect these different philosophies and to seek out some of those places where such ethics can be put into practice through radical performances of political ii resistance. These mobilized performances which enact the tensions between margins and centres, ephemerality and materiality, localism and international solidarity, become the elements of a tactical dramaturgy that reveals the precarity of those ideologies and mechanisms of oppressive power.

Drawing on examples from these acts of political resistance, the sites and theory come together in my analysis under three broad themes: the voice as a challenge to the universal, the occupation of space as a challenge to state spatial supremacy, and the invocation of the mortified body as a rejection of the biopolitical state.

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Acknowledgments

The completion of this project was achieved thanks to a great deal of support form a huge number of people.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Barry Freeman, for taking me on and helping me work through many ideas and obstacles over the course of the past years. Professor Freeman’s mentorship, insight, and confidence in me were gifts that were instrumental to the completion of this project. I am deeply grateful for his enthusiastic support of my work.

I would likewise like to thank my dissertation committee members: Professor Antje Budde and Professor Kanishka Goonewardena for engaging with and bringing their expertise to bear on my work and challenging me to seek out knowledge in places I may not have considered on my own. Every committee meeting was a joy to participate in.

I am humbled and inspired by Professor Natalie Alvarez’s extremely generous, meaningful, and thorough feedback as external reader. I thank her for enacting this labour for me.

I would like to thank Professor Tamara Trojanowska both for taking on the role of internal reader and for the many ways that her kindness, guidance, and generosity have contributed greatly to my success within the Centre.

Thank you to Professor Rosalind Kerr, my longtime mentor and dear friend. For more things than I could ever list.

I would also like to thank many others for their support and inspiration. My family: Rejean, Heather, Rachel, Colin, Oliver, and Pat. Suzanne Micallef, whose door was always open. My extended family from TSB: Charlie, Carey, Alex, Tommy, Lue, Matt, Joey, and Riku. And my dog, Grendel, for his companionship throughout these past years.

Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.

Table of Contents Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Origins ...... 3

Outline ...... 4

Contexts ...... 6

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation...... 6

Occupy Wall Street ...... 8

Idle No More ...... 9

Chapter 1 Voicing Dissent ...... 12

1.1 Foundations ...... 12

1.2 Frames ...... 14

1.3 The Trap of Individualism ...... 21

1.4 The EZLN – Performing the Contingent Self ...... 23

1.5 Frames of Protest – The Althusserian Dramaturgy of the EZLN ...... 29

1.6 Insurgent Performance – Centering the Marginal ...... 36

1.7 Citational Declarations...... 44

1.8 Protest Finds its Voi(d)ce...... 49

Chapter 2 Autogestic Performance: Acts of Reoccupation and Cyber/Spatial Contestation ...... 59

2.1 Introduction ...... 59

2.2 Lefebvre & Brecht – Autogestus as Tactical Performance in Reoccupied Space ...... 62

2.3 The Absolute Local – Ontogenetic Cyberspaces, and Grounded Normativity ...... 76

2.4 Social Netwar and Indigenous Internationalism ...... 89

Chapter 3 Necrocriticism: The Mortified Body as Refusal of the Biopolitical State ...... 98

3.1 Introduction ...... 98

3.2 Bodies and States ...... 99

3.3 The Apparatus as Insidious Relationality ...... 102

3.4 Necrocriticisms ...... 106

3.5 Subcomandante Marcos – The Walking Dead...... 112

3.6 Ogichidaakwe Spence – Hunger as Refusal ...... 117

3.7 Conclusion – Occupy Wall Street and Mimetic Fragility ...... 123

Conclusion ...... 128

Bibliography ...... 130

Introduction

“So, do you find that the new realities of life under the pandemic undermine a lot of this work on space? Has the paradigm shifted?” The question was asked to me during my committee meeting for the third chapter of this dissertation. It was late April and jokes about how this was the most boring apocalypse imaginable (a joke the death of which one might be tempted to mark with its attribution to Charlie Booker one month later in The New York Times.) were giving way to emphatic shelter-in place recommendations, exhortations to “mask it or casket,” and reminders to keep two arms-lengths between oneself and others. On my computer monitor, each of my three committee members were neatly contained within their own parcel of screen real estate, all of us physically quarantined at home.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we experience space. FaceTime drinking parties, YouTube live concerts, the opening of theatrical performance archives to the public, and the now-ubiquitous Zoom meetings have accelerated the already blurring tensions between distance and proximity, solitude and socialization, here and there. It’s tempting to assume that the realities of pandemic space simply mean that we’ve retreated to the virtual. That online spaces have expanded and meat-space has shrunken, isn’t entirely accurate. While sheltering in place has certainly led to an increased reliance on cyberspace, we have for a long time now been living within augmented reality spaces. We remain, as we have for quite some time, always connected through various devices to the information cloud that allows us to manage our schedules, keep in contact with our loved ones, pay for goods and services, etc. Our connection to our mobile devices is far from new, but they have suddenly become much less mobile than they used to be and because of this, they’ve become much more visible. This interruption of the embodied movement that normally accompanies the flow of data seems to have broken one of the unstated agreements we have with ubiquitous computing. Namely that, like space itself, we aren’t supposed to really notice it. It’s supposed to be ambient, but frictionless.

The physical spaces we inhabit have likewise become imbued with new levels of friction. On the one hand, the spaces we inhabit in our daily lives have retracted to smaller and smaller spheres as we self-quarantine in the hopes of keeping ourselves and those around us safe. On the other hand, what spaces remain open to us are filled with an ever-increasing list of rituals, obstacles, prohibitions, and expectations. Many “real” spaces have been imbued with a new sense of

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imminence: grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals, elevators, warehouses, whether due to their relationship to supply-chains and access to necessary commodities, or as sites of possible contagion have all become more real than ever. Working in a grocery store during the pandemic made me acutely aware of my body and the spaces it inhabits. Maintaining a safe distance from others became an exercise in relational instincts, like finding the right spot relative to my scene partner during rehearsal.

Likewise, what also became increasingly clear are the class-based asymmetries of spatial agency. The privilege to shelter in place – even having access to a space in which to shelter – is not enjoyed by all and the tedious monotony of pandemic time is certainly not experienced the same way by everyone. The management of public space has important repercussions, some life- threatening, for citizens depending on their relationship to it.

Less than a week prior to our meeting, demonstrations against government-imposed shelter-in- place orders for combatting the spread of COVID-19 had broken out across the United States, with similar protests in Toronto planned for the forthcoming weekend. These acts of defiance perpetrated against measures taken to protect the broader population are unquestionably ill- informed and dangerous and it is tempting to write off these demonstrations as nothing more than corporate astroturfing. Given the widespread use of internet communications to manufacture public outrage and mobilize protests by various networked conservative interest groups, such a characterization is understandable. That said, certain social and economic conditions are also responsible for creating a suitable environment for this movement to take shape. The first major protests were organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a non-profit group headed by Greg McNally, a Republican strategist with ties to AOL-Time Warner, Newt Gingrich, and Betsy DeVos, among others. McNally has been integral in the fight against trade unions in Michigan, being a primary proponent of the voucher system in education and in the passing of Right-to- Work legislation. These protests should rightly be seen as a symptom of a political system that has gutted its fiduciary duty to its citizens. In Michigan, the erosion of social programs and the deliberate construction of a highly precarious workforce – initiatives championed by McNally – have produced conditions which, coupled with the paltry dispensations from the US Government’s CARES Act, make self-isolation a potentially disastrous option for many. In the case of the United States, weakened social safety nets, labour precarity, economic disenfranchisement, and manipulation through various media platforms have come together to

create the conditions for the very outbursts that sprung up across the country since April 15th. The anti-lockdown protests also raise the question of spatial agency: Of who is stigmatized for moving through public space and who is not. Given the confluence of these disparate elements: space, state, bodies, and digital media, I dare to hope that the ideas I explore in this document remain relevant to the analysis of protest in a post-COVID-19 world.

Origins

This dissertation, which brings together questions of space, digital technologies, and resistant performances feels like something I’ve been moving towards all my life. I grew up in a small town called Wawa, Ontario. My father was a lumberjack from Restigouche, Quebec, who never missed the opportunity to tell a story about a job action. I remember long hours in the car listening to him tell us about Reesor Siding 1963, Sudbury 1978, or Eliot Lake 1974. Just outside the car window, the town he was talking about would be dashing past and from my position in the back seat, the posts of the roadside cable barriers passing by would break up the view like an old film projector. These places were very real and very present, but the way he would tell these stories, they could’ve just as easily been Camelot, Themiscyra, or Middle Earth. When I was 8, a chicot fell on my father at work breaking his back and it would be ten years before he would work again. We didn’t travel much anymore after that and so the stories about strikers and scabs, bosses and police, mostly stopped. My mother worked as a secretary for a little while but she eventually began working at the new lumber mill and would be assigned to assist a contractor from Sault Ste. Marie with setting up the mill’s computer systems. For a few years in my early teens, I would come home after school and learn the ins and outs of Microsoft Windows NT with her as she crammed for hours to keep ahead of the demands placed on her by the sudden change in her work responsibilities.

For many years, Wawa was a mining town owing the majority of its industry to the Algoma Steel Corporation, but in the 1990s, the mine closed and the major industry shifted from mining to wood products. Wawa also attracted a large number of American tourists in the warmer months who came to fish or hunt. In the summer, I worked as a kayak guide, paddling up and down the Michipicoten river or across the north shore of Lake Superior. Storytelling became an integral part of that job and I would borrow my father’s rhythm and cadence to entertain adventure- vacationers or wealthy businessmen on team-building excursions, telling them apocryphal stories

about the fur trade, pointing out the pictographs at the Agawa Rocks, or inviting them to spot the face in cliffs of Old Woman Bay. This last one always elicits a sigh of recognition from my charges as they make out a brow, nose, or eye in the rock. If I’m being honest, I’ve never seen her myself.

Growing up in Wawa made me aware of space in a way that has stuck with me for a long time. The instability of the town’s primary industries made it difficult for shops to offer much in the way of commodities. Anything but basic groceries was often unavailable and what was available was marked up quite a lot owing to the inefficiency of transporting goods so far from major supply depots. Shopping convoys to Sault Ste. Marie were a frequent experience for groceries, school clothes, and Christmas gifts, particularly in the winter when the highway, which frequently closed due to snow, could be deadly to travel alone. It always seemed strange to me how tourists would talk about how lovely it must be to live there. It was a long time before I came to realize how much the privilege of moving through space unfettered could alter one’s perception of the environment. What sometimes felt like a prison to many of us, was experienced by tourists as an escape.

I believe very strongly that these formative experiences in my life have contributed to a deep interest in spatial ethics, in questions of who gets to define space, who may occupy it, and who gets to make use of it and how. Much of this dissertation talks about resistance to settler- colonialism and I think this is a topic that must be confronted, not only by those who are colonized, but also those, like me, who have benefited from dispossession. It is with that in mind that I examine elements of performed spatial reorderings in the hopes of finding ways to turn the logics of spatial dominance back on its state, capitalist, and colonialist progenitors.

Outline

This dissertation engages with theoretical frameworks from performance, the social production of space, and media in order to develop a theoretical analysis of the tactical mobilizations of digitally-enabled sites of political resistance groups as they respond to the ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical tensions between the space of the state and contested territories. My analysis is informed primarily by Marxist spatial theory, which I use to examine media-assisted networks of performed solidarity and placed-based activism supported by an engagement with and critique of digital networks, technologies, and cultures. My sources for this work were originally produced

in either English, French, or Spanish. While I am fluent in French and English, I am not so in Spanish. Therefore, in the case of French texts that were published in English, I use the English publication. For French texts that were not translated, I translate them myself. In the case of Spanish texts, I rely on English translations, usually done by the text’s producers or by activists. Certainly, having access to French texts gives me an ability to seek out deeper nuance in the writings I am working with. Likewise, I recognize that within the Spanish texts, there is a depth of firsthand understanding that is foreclosed to me. This project is broken down into three broad themes which form the basis of my chapters: the voice as a challenge to the universal, the occupation of space, and the mobilization of the mortified body.

Chapter 1 is interested in considering how groups resist against the recuperating effects of capitalist neoliberalism, which manages to diffuse subversive action by reabsorbing and commodifying it. In the hopes of finding within collective action, those moments or ideas that may challenge the inevitability of the status quo, I look towards how movements that, rather than relying strictly on aesthetics or symbolic language – tactics I see emblematized in the Culture Jam movement of the 1990s – reject the universalizing ideologies of liberalism and affirm the material human body in order to bring about a collision between oppositional ontological frameworks. To that end, I take up how The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and Occupy Wall Street, through an appeal to collective human specificity as found in the philosophical work of Adriana Cavarero and Louis Althusser, are able to challenge universalizing notions of the individual. I consider how these performative deployments of the voice, as the herald of the uniquely human, produce a political space for resistance.

In Chapter 2, I take up the question of spatial contestation and reoccupation. Through the insights provided by Glen Sean Coulthard’s analysis of settler colonialism and the politics of recognition and accommodation and Henri Lefebvre’s description of the State Mode of Production, I propose that acts of spatial occupation have the potential to disrupt the production of space. In this chapter, I look at the Idle No More-adjacent reoccupation of Parliament Hill by the Bawating Water Protectors in combination with the theories of Lefebvre and Bertolt Brecht in order to illustrate how reoccupation becomes a performance that short circuits the organizing spatial logics of, in this case, the Canadian state. This interrogation of space leads me to consider the potential for a progressive sense of a cyberspace that is recognized as material rather than

ephemeral. I then propose that the EZLN’s engagement with the space of the Mexican state involved the practice of a cybernetic spatial ethics.

Chapter 3 proposes that the foregrounding of the mortified human body can be mobilized as a tactic of necrocriticism, a critique of the ideologies and apparatuses of the state and corporations that position themselves as the stewards of life and bodily health. In this chapter, I look at the performed “death” of Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN as well as Ogichidaakwe Spence’s hunger strike during Idle No More as acts that refuse the state’s biopolitical self-justification by making use of the dying human body in order to reveal the undercurrent of violence that is inherent in the ordered, and putatively peaceful operation of neoliberal space. The chapter ends with a consideration of how the tactic of necrocriticism is sometimes reversed, with the state body being positioned as fragile in an attempted counter-attack against radical critique.

I begin with a brief overview of the three movements discussed in the subsequent chapters.

Contexts The Zapatista Army of National Liberation

The EZLN is a movement of Indigenous Maya primarily operating in Chiapas, Mexico. Founded in 1983, they rose to public notoriety on January 1st, 1994 when they declared war on the Mexican government. The declaration was announced in The First Declaration from the Lacondón Jungle, and was timed to coincide with the coming into effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The choice to engage in militant struggle against the government was informed by the 70 years of unbroken rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which made prospects for non-violent change from within the system particularly bleak since any partisan opposition to the PRI was ineffectual. Given the authoritarian bent of the PRI, its reneging on land reforms in 1991, and the looming threat neoliberalism posed to Indigenous sovereignty, the decision was made to attempt an overthrow of the government.

The initial uprising lasted 12 days during which time city halls were targeted in multiple towns around San Cristóbal de las Casas. Insurgents wore black balaclavas in order to protect their identity, but these masks would become iconic symbols of the movement with Zapatistas wearing them at many gatherings and always while delivering communiques to the public. In the first days, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the EZLN’s military leader, would deliver their

message to the world at a widely broadcast press conference. By the end of the first twelve days, some 300 people had been killed in the conflict. Over the next year the government would engage in skirmishes with the rebels, launching a hard offensive in February 1995 where they retook the land that had been taken the previous year. The EZLN retreated to the mountains. The movement garnered widespread media attention across the world. For Mexico’s trading partners, the EZLN were seen as a threat to economic stability and they urged the Mexican government to remove the Zapatista insurgency. The Mexican government would eventually sign the San Andrés Peace Accords in 1996, although they would remain unimplemented for years.

In 2000, Vicente Fox, head of the National Action Party (PAN), was elected president and he requested a dialogue with the EZLN. His stated goal was to achieve peace in Chiapas. After the government withdrew military personnel from Chiapas, Marcos agreed to open talks with Fox. The EZLN demanded, as a condition of peace, that the government remove the paramilitaries in the region who had been sent by the PRI. As relations between the government and the rebels broke down, the EZLN would launch the March for Indigenous Dignity in 2001.

For 15 days in March 2001, Marcos, the entire general council of the EZLN, as well as many allies travelled through Chiapas up to the capital city. The march was colloquially dubbed the Zapatour and it generated huge amounts of renewed interest in the Zapatista cause. Upon arrival in Mexico City, Commandanta Esther would address the National Congress to press them to implement the San Andrés Accords. A heavily modified version of the Accords would be approved on April 25th. This new version would decline to recognize Indigenous autonomy at the federal level, instead opting to allow individual states the freedom to recognize Indigenous sovereignty or not. The revised version of the law has been attacked for its enshrinement of Indigenous second-class citizenship status along with the codification of the divestment of Indigenous peoples from control over their own natural resources.

In 2005, as a consequence of their failure to see the San Andrés Accords fully implemented within the current government system, the EZLN released the Sixth Declaration from the Lacondón Jungle. In it, they declared the need for a new political party that would be independent of the political parties already existing in Mexico as well as an interest in fostering better solidarity with anti-neoliberal activists across the world. The Sixth was a call to activists,

political leaders, and other citizens to collaborate with EZLN in devising a new political movement. This would be the birth of The Other Campaign.

In 2006, Marcos would take the name “Delegate Zero” and travel throughout Mexico to recruit allies in the creation of a broad coalition of support against the effects that neoliberalism was having on Mexico. It was their hope to pressure the government into amending the constitution. After the election of Felipe Calderón of the PAN, the EZLN entered a relatively quiet period in which they, or Marcos, would occasionally comment on current events.

In 2014, after the death of Jose Luis Solis Lopez at the hands of paramilitaries, the EZLN held a memorial ceremony for their fallen comrade where Marcos announced that he would be effectively “dying” as the figurehead of the EZLN and that he would be adopting Lopez’s nom de guerre, Subcomandante Insurgent Galeano.

January 2019 marked the 25th year since the Zapatista insurgency rose to global prominence. Though the movement has somewhat faded from the international spotlight compared to the widespread popularity it enjoyed in the 1990’s, the EZLN continues to mobilize for decolonization in Mexico while practicing international solidarity. They continue to establish new autonomous zones in Chiapas and plan large scale gatherings to protest neoliberal government policies.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street (Occupy) was a protest movement that was aimed at economic inequality. Its original setting was in Zuccotti Park, in New York City, but it quickly spread to become a global phenomenon.

Kalle Lasn and Micah White of Adbusters magazine took inspiration from the Arab Spring protests, particularly Tahrir Square, a focal point of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In September of that same year, they published a call for a march on Wall Street that they characterized as America’s own Tahrir. Their stated goal was to call attention to the effects of corporate money on the democratic process, the rise in wealth inequality, as well as the lack of consequences suffered by the industries and individuals who brought about the 2008 financial crisis.

They mobilized under the slogan “We are the 99%” on September 17, 2001, and ended up at Zuccotti park, a space governed under Public-Private Partnership with Brookfield Asset Management. As such, Brookfield had the right to withdraw consent to occupy the space. This also meant that police had to be asked by Brookfield before evicting the protesters. This is in contrast to sites like Bowling Green Park, or One Chase Manhattan Plaza, two sites that were preferred, but which, as public space, were already barred to protesters by police. Protesters would remain at the Zucotti Park encampment until November 15, 2011.

The protests were characterized by the horizontalist direct-democratic approach to governance, as well as their determination to make the occupation of Zucotti as autonomous as possible, with the encampment functioning as a prototype for alternative forms of governance. As such while supplies and money were accepted from across the country, the encampment itself operated its own kitchens, an information area, and a library. Owing to New York City’s ordinances against the use of amplified sound, protesters made use of a tactic dubbed “the human microphone” in which an individual would speak and the crowd would repeat their words in unison.

The occupation of Zuccotti park gave rise to a number of copycat protests in cities across the world, where protesters would take over a space in the name of the broader Occupy Movement in order to protest wealth inequality, worker precarity, and money in politics.

On November 15, 2001, after receiving a request from Brookfield Properties, the police began clearing protesters out of the park, citing sanitation and health issues as the primary reason. Protesters would subsequently attempt to return to the space, but the encampment, which had become an important symbol of the movement, would never be rebuilt.

Idle No More

In November of 2012, Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Jessica Gordon, and Sheelah McLean gathered in Saskatchewan to discuss with Indigenous and settler communities the Harper government’s Bill C-45. This omnibus bill included within it a number of changes to legislation impacting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities across Canada including the Indian Act, the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, and the Navigable Water Act. These last two had been modified to streamline the process of development projects and would result in more unfettered access by development projects to lands and waterways adjacent to

Indigenous territories, all without any consultation with Indigenous communities affected by the proposed laws.

The movement that grew out of this initial meeting would coalesce around the repeal of certain parts of the omnibus bill, a demand for the federal government to take more seriously its role in the support of Indigenous communities, particularly those under crisis, and the adoption of a nation-to-nation relationship between the federal government and First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities.

Teach-ins, rallies, and protests were organized for a National Day of Action on December 10. These would coincide with Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s announcement that she would be engaging in a fast in order to pressure the Prime Minister to meet with her to discuss the crisis on her reserve. During the fast, Spence would subsist on tea, lemon water, and fish broth. Spence’s action was in support of Idle No More, although it was purposely kept distinctly adjacent to the movement. Still, Spence’s fast quickly became a symbol for supporters of the movement and the two have often been linked together in the media. Her hunger strike ended on January 24, 2013.

The group made extensive use of the internet and social media to organize and communicate its demands to the broader public and also manifested itself in multiple decentralized sites of protest, usually in the form of public gatherings in the weeks leading up to Christmas and afterwards. Round dance flash mobs were executed at various shopping centres across Canada and railways were blockaded in Belleville and Vancouver. In January 2013, the founders of the movement released a press statement outlining the group’s demands and framing its purpose as extending beyond only Indigenous issues and its scope as broader than only Canada as the environmental issues at play in their demands would have effects on all communities. The movement continues to mobilize around issues affecting First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples across Canada.

The appearance of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on the international stage was timed to coincide with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Occupy Wall Street (Occupy) arose primarily out of a response to the intensification of corporate influence on politics in the wake of the 2008 financial-services crisis. The EZLN’s long history as an anti-colonial land-based movement notwithstanding, both movements are tied

11 together as symptomatic responses to the effects of neoliberalism. As responses to the shifting social and economic realities of contemporary global capitalism, both the EZLN and Occupy collide with ideological frameworks that, as Guy Debord argues in the The Society of the Spectacle (1967), have a long history of absorbing dissent and selling it back to dissenters as a commodity. Thus, neoliberalism defuses and disempowers subversive elements in culture and redeploys them, often transforming crisis into cash flow. Indeed, the adoption of revolutionary ideals has long been a staple in the production of consumption, allowing companies to impress on their audiences the role of consumer while simultaneously destabilizing their identification with the structural loci of capitalist alienation. One need only look to Pepsi’s Live for Now Moments Anthem (Schultz and Diaz) or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s embracing of reoccupation protesters on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (Trasker) for recent examples of neoliberal recuperation in action. In the latter instance, Prime Minister Trudeau was able to pivot away from a demand for territorial sovereignty with an enthusiastic “Yes, and…” that deftly substituted recognition politics for institutional change. In the former, PepsiCo did away with the rhetoric of protest and change altogether, instead adopting only its aesthetic form, supplanting #BlackLivesMatter protesters who produced the iconic images alluded to in the commercial and replacing them with a smiling Kendall Jenner. The ad was lambasted, publicly derided, and ultimately pulled within 24 hours, but popular outrage did nothing to damage the soft drink manufacturer’s bottom line (Faber, Oppenheim). The readiness with which large corporations and state actors adopt the language and aesthetic trappings of political blowback raises for me the dilemma of resistance against a system that is so excellently tuned towards absorbing criticism. How then, does protest destabilize and confound the flexibility of neoliberalism’s recuperative power? How can such collective actions navigate and respond to foundational ideologies that make a given moment seem not only acceptable, but inevitable? What is left when language and rhetoric have their meaning and subversive potential hollowed out from the very moment of utterance?

It would seem that dissenting rhetoric is susceptible to this recuperative process as are resistant aesthetic forms that position themselves in primarily symbolic ways. The consideration of protest from within performance frameworks, however, may offer a tactical positioning from which embodied criticism may evade absorption by totalizing power. There appear to be certain postulates and performances that are anathema to neoliberalism and are routinely disavowed and

vilified by agents of counter-resistance when and where they show up in moments of protest. If protest, as performance, has the ability to reveal an anti-universal human specificity or to illuminate in a practical way the collision between oppositional ontological frameworks, then perhaps it is in these moments that revolutionary potential resides.

Chapter 1

Voicing Dissent

This chapter is interested in how such performative tactics are deployed by the EZLN and, to a lesser extent, the Occupy movements. At the most fundamental level, both movements are positioned against socio-political certitudes that legitimize the oppressive conditions they seek to overthrow. These ideological assumptions revolve around liberal notions of the relationships between individuals and the state and about a sense of universality in the face of collectivist identities and group action. These concepts are important because they tend to lie at the root of many criticisms lodged against protest and social justice action, oftentimes regardless of the specific causes being championed. I begin with an overview of these points of contention. I then consider the ways that acts of performative resistance can destabilize and challenge these foundational myths. Finally, I consider the performative alternatives to a neoliberal politics of individualism that are offered by the works of Louis Althusser and Adriana Cavarero, particularly the possibilities for a politics of resistance that can be found in the deployment of the human voice. If, as it seems, language is eminently susceptible to being coopted, then embodied material voices, which always precede logos, seem to offer a foundation of a political space for resistance.

1.1 Foundations

Neoliberalism and the responses to it have had a number of consequences for the performance of political resistance. Loïc Wacquant, noting the aggressive political and ideological top-down restructuring of the concepts of state, market, and citizenship, refers to it as a “revolution form above” (Wacquant 2009, 304). Analyzing the ascendency of the theories of scholars such as Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman put into practice by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the USA and UK respectively, Wacquant has identified four “logics” (Wacquant 2009, 307) upon which neoliberalism rests: economic deregulation, the

transformation of the welfare state through devolution, retraction, and recomposition, the expansion of the penal apparatus, and the cultural trope of individual responsibility. While reference to all four of these logics can be identified in many of the platforms espoused by any number of social justice groups, it is this last one that seems to provide a particularly pernicious form of counter-critique. Individual responsibility conceived as it is by a neoliberal hegemony cannot abide collective action or collectivist politics.

Geographer David Harvey identifies Wacquant’s fourth logic, the assertion of a regressive sense of individual agency, as a neoliberal positioning of the individual as the “foundational essentialist element in political economic life” (Harvey, 2006, 56). This privileging of the individual agent has had significant repercussions for the social makeup of society and for methods of seeking social justice. It has resulted, Harvey says, in a turn away from redress- seeking strategies that are politically minded in favour of more individualist paths to justice such as those that can be obtained through the courts and the legal system. Changes to the political structures that give rise to injustice and inequality require collective action both in order to raise awareness of a given issue and also in order to mobilize politically-minded communities to vote in favour of reform. Neoliberalism, which emphasizes the supremacy of the individual, rational agent, discourages the seeking of collective justice. Legal redress, however, is also expensive, time consuming, and requires a certain amount of expertise in order to navigate the codified rights and responsibilities that ostensibly fall equally upon all citizens. Justice, therefore becomes a commodity to be purchased even as an ascendant political turn towards the notion of universalist human rights promotes a myth of egalitarianism.

The consequent centralization of the individual under the neoliberal intensification of capitalism has also seeped into how protest is performed, effectively giving genesis to modes of protest that speak back to neoliberalism in its own terms. Even as the individual takes precedence over the collective, the very mechanisms by which justice may be claimed are frustrated. In the words of Mary Wrenn: “Neoliberalism cloaks the execution of the corporate agenda behind rhetorical manipulation that advocates for limited government. The corollary absence of government involvement on behalf of the citizenry writ large disarms the means of social redress for the individual” (Wrenn 2014, 508). Thus, even as individual political rights are upheld in abstract, the means for individual redress become vanishingly small. The response to the invidious effects of neoliberalism in the pursuit of justice has been, in Wrenn’s estimation, a renewal of

collectivist action along extra-economic lines as “a person’s identity becomes so undermined by the system that she must adopt a social identity in order to create a sense of personal identity and connection with others since her problems remain unanswered within the neoliberal state” (Wrenn 2014, 503). The adoption of an identity politics divorced from a politics of redistributive justice becomes a coping mechanism by which extra-economic markers of identity can be harnessed in order to lay claim to universalist laws of egalitarianism. In this way, neoliberalism’s restructuring of the conceptual frames of politics, economics, and collectivism has likewise had its effects on how protest is performed and on the discourse that surrounds it.

1.2 Frames

A frequent, even expected, response to public expressions of discontent and protest action is to bring public intellectuals onto various media platforms to decry protest as a selfish, misplaced, even mistaken cry of rage from individuals who have grown lazy, entitled, or weak. The names are by-now familiar to anyone who pays even scant attention to social media or who follows current affairs talk shows: Jonathan Haidt (Lukianoff and Haidt 2018), Jordan Peterson (Dose of Truth 2018), Camille Paglia (Gillespie 2019), Douglas Murray (Murray 2019), and David Starkey (Tominey 2020) to name a few. Out of all of these public intellectuals, Steven Pinker and his neo-Enlightenment project (Pinker 2012, Pinker 2018), is probably the most committed to promoting a view that human suffering, economic hardship, and socio-political oppression are on a decline, and therefore, to rail against oppressions today is to spit in the face of a long history of progress. Throughout his book Enlightenment Now, he makes reference to the “sin of ingratitude” (Pinker 2018, 85) and its place in Dante’s geography of Hell. His love letter to the current status-quo points to a pre-enlightenment past in which a litany of atrocities were commonplace, that “today’s barbarisms” (Pinker 2018, 402) are on the way out, and that to complain now, today, is to reject the ostensible progress that humankind has made. Pinker’s claims have come under much criticism, whether it’s his assertion that violence and war are declining (Gray, 2015), that poverty is all but eradicated (Hickel, 2019), even his misunderstanding of the history and philosophy of the Enlightenment (Harrison 2018) have been taken to task again and again by scholars. What becomes apparent as a running theme is that Pinker presents oppression and deprivation as diachronic – as relative to past conditions and developing through time – while at the same time only looking ahistorically at how these issues are quantified. Pinker, a linguist, cannot be unaware of these two differing approaches to the

study of phenomena, since synchrony and diachrony are basic concepts in linguistic analysis. His framing of these issues, whether dishonest or naive, becomes a means to defuse and subvert expressions of dissatisfaction with economic and social conditions, particularly any mobilization of collectivist politics, which he repudiates roundly, characterizing it as a counter-Enlightenment movement in which ”people are the expendable cells of a superorganism […] many on the left encourage identity politicians and social justice warriors who downplay individual rights in favor of equalizing the standing of races, classes, and genders, which they see as being pitted in zero- sum competition” (Pinker 2018, 48-49). Such a political position leaves little room for any kind of communal struggle and instead abandons isolated individuals in society to succeed or fail on their own.

Rejecting the configuration put forth by the public thinkers mentioned above, Zygmunt Bauman sees a tension inherent in the liberal democratic myths of the individual responsibility of the sovereign subject which requires a community that is atomized but which also relies on a certain appeal to popularity which manifests itself in the form of battles over identity. In Community (2001), Bauman identifies the consequences that neoliberalism has had for contemporary protest with particular focus on how attempts to engage with shifting economic and social structures on their own terms produces new challenges for collective action. The ascendency of neoliberal politics and the consequent embracing of identity as a fulcrum for political mobilization has produced a symptomatic move away from the modernist utopian models of political activism towards contemporary identitarian models that exist in a permanent state of renegotiation. While both models are the performative progeny of liberal political frameworks, they operate in different, even oppositional ways. That said, both models arguably reinscribe the systems that give rise to the inequities they seek to combat. These models are each concomitant with the forms of modernity that Bauman elaborates throughout his wider philosophical oeuvre: the solid and the liquid, with the latter being characterized by increasingly transient notions of identity and relationships in which the solidly defined individual identities promoted, for instance, by thinkers such as Steven Pinker fail to cohere over time and space.

Bauman names “social justice” as the model that is tied to modernist utopian politics. The social justice model establishes specific goals and aims at bringing an end to a specific injustice. It relies on the identification of a clear opponent and on a solid organizational identity. Such models operate within rationalistically bounded frameworks and seek their own eventual

obsolescence through the accomplishment of specific goals. Social justice models seek to present a totalizing, comprehensive account of specific oppressions and to bring about substantive change. Being utopian, such models tend to be hierarchical, often vanguardist, and they rely on a clear demarcation of boundaries for inclusion – suffragist movements, labour mobilization, and movements for redistributive justice, for instance, fall under this model. Social justice models are collectivist in both the form they take and in their ultimate vision. This reliance on strictly defined collectivism means that a principal criticism of the social justice model is its failure to account for difference and intersectional identities.

Contemporary – Bauman would say liquid – conditions have yielded a form of political activism that embodies the logics of neoliberalism in various ways: the “human rights” model. As the name implies, this model of activism is mobilized less around the redress of specific wrongs and instead seeks recognition for an ever-evolving series of rights claims. This model is by definition unbounded by any kind of limiting goal, agenda, or membership. As Bauman says: “It is assumed that the question as to which of the infinite number of rights and which of the many groups and categories of humans clamouring for recognition has been overlooked, neglected, refused recognition or insufficiently catered for is not and cannot be pre-empted or decided in advance” (Bauman 2001, 75). The human rights model adopts wholeheartedly the universalist premises of neoliberalism such that these movements tend to eschew authoritarianism and provide a broad umbrella for membership. The varied demographics it seeks to attract means that, rather than having a singular goal, these movements are in a state of being perpetually refreshed, moving to new sites of contention as successes and failures alike are absorbed into an unrelenting state of resistance. Bauman notes, however, that the universalism of the human rights model and its adoption of the politics of difference ties it, in a perhaps contradictory twist, to a fetishization of the individual. The rights it seeks to procure “are meant to be enjoyed separately (they mean, after all, the entitlement to have one’s own difference recognized and so to remain different without fear or reprimand or punishment), they have to be fought for and won collectively, and only collectively may they be granted” (Bauman 2001, 76). It reduplicates the liberal social contract insofar as its actors, each and every one possessing the same individuality as each and every other, seeks to conform to the overarching identity of the collective which itself must seek to generate and preserve itself through the identification of opponents and others that it must exclude from within its boundaries.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, from its inception in the pages of Adbusters magazine exemplifies in many ways the evolution Bauman describes. Years before the now-infamous email that led to the occupation of Zuccotti Park, Kalle Lasn, the movement’s co-founder had published Culture Jam (1999), a political manifesto of sorts that sought to change the performative aspects of social movements. Lasn borrowed heavily from his interpretations of the work of the Situationist International to develop a political activism that could respond to consumer culture with “small, spontaneous moments of truth” (Lasn 2001, 99). Lasn argues that this new, decentralized social movement should do away with old hierarchies and authoritarian thinking and he ties this defiant politics to individualistic moments of revolt: “To the Situationists, you are – everyone is – a creator of situations, a performance artist, and the performance, of course, is your life, lived in your own way” (Lasn 2001, 101). Resistance, for Lasn is something that is lived and performed throughout everyday life on a personal level through isolated acts of détournement that seek to overturn capitalist recuperation. The expectation is that through the performance of culture jamming, “suddenly the spectacle would be exposed in all its emptiness. Everyone would see through it” (Lasn 2001, 108). This movement, emphasizing personal acts of performed resistance and insubordination, displays many of the hallmarks of Bauman’s human rights model: it eschews traditional collectivist politics, explicitly rejecting leftist politics and feminism, and seeks instead to promote a broadly accessible, universalist anti-consumerist activism enacted publicly but as more or less personal, isolated acts. Lasn constructs an identity of the culture jammer through a process of exclusion: “We’re Not Cool […] We’re Not Slackers […] We’re Not Academic […] We’re Not Feminists […] We’re Not Lefties” (Lasn 2001, 113-119), arguing instead that “The challenge for the new millennium activists is to find the courage to let go of all their old orthodoxies, ‘isms’ and sacred cows, and commit to a ruthless criticism of all that exists” (Lasn 2001, 121). In this way, the politics of culture jamming, as elaborated by Lasn promotes a sense of difference that is constructed within the conceptual frameworks of sameness. Such difference is, Bauman would say, not an authentic expression of human uniqueness, but a shell game in which subjects construct and modify their identities to suit the purposes of forging expedient political covenants that paradoxically erase uniqueness. The cold economics of the human rights model demands the enactment of disciplining strategies that keep claimants “on-message” and “in-line” so to speak. This sense of difference, in order to be politically expedient must “be shared by a group or a category of individuals numerous and determined enough to be reckoned with: it needs to

become a stake in a collective vindication of claims” (Bauman 2001, 76). Thus, the performance of self-constructed identities predicated on the kind of neoliberal sameness-in-individuality become the nexus of political action for these kinds of groups.

The tactics of culture jamming are likewise deeply implicated in neoliberal consumer politics. Lasn promotes the concept of “meme wares” as the primary modus operandi for the new activism. Lasn cannot marshal an attack on the systems that feed consumer culture, so he opts instead to combat the symptoms. Meme warfare makes use of existing systems and units of knowledge, enacting a détournement that substitutes anti-consumerist concepts for pro- consumer, pro-corporate ideologies. Examples include “uncooling” a brand in an attempt to break the symbolic association it has with dominant ideologies, or the production of “anti-ads.” Lasn even suggests unboxing one’s purchases at department store checkout counters and leaving the packaging behind as a form of protest (Lasn 2001, 129). These tactics are personally gratifying and they allow for the individual protester to engage in a symbolic performance of resistance, but in ignoring the structures surrounding the issues, in insisting on activism that exists on a strictly personal level, the structures are maintained in a way that, contrary to what Bauman says about the social justice model, assures that a perpetual series of sites of contestation are being generated in order to keep the movement relevant. Naomi Klein predicts the contradiction in No Logo (1999), written around the same time as Lasn’s manifesto, in which a high school student interrupts one of her talks to ask impertinently: “Look, I don’t have time to be some kind of major political activist every time I go to the mall […] Just tell me what kind of shoes are okay to buy, okay?” (Klein 2000, 399). Activism that is wholly conceived at an individualist level, may continually refresh a specific movement, but it also enforces an identity that, over time, becomes inconvenient, burdensome, and even untenable.

Some 10 years after Culture Jam, the initial introduction of Occupy by Adbusters demonstrates something of an evolution in Lasn’s original position in two principal ways. From the social justice model, via the examples set by the Egyptian Revolution and Spanish 15-M anti-austerity movement, it takes up a specific goal and mobilized itself in a more collectivist fashion. The specific goal in mind was to apply pressure to Barack Obama to convene a Presidential Commission to break the influence of money in politics, a goal that has yet to be fulfilled. In the original tactical briefing email published by Adbusters, Lasn and Occupy co-founder Micah White, call on supporters to engage in a tactic of “pragmatic simplicity” (Lasn and White 2011),

to physically occupy space, to “seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen” (ibid). Here, unlike in Culture Jam, the materiality of protest supersedes symbolic performance while the space that is occupied is symbolic in its significance, the occupation of space is a material act and one that cannot be completed individually. While Lasn’s privileging of symbolic resistance is still present in his choice of a space in New York City’s financial district of “singular symbolic significance,” the interruption to the flow of everyday life engendered in a critical mass of protesters staking claim to space and the challenge it poses to the sovereignty of capital and state serendipitously transformed the protest into something that could not merely be ignored as mere narcissistic posturing.

While Occupy could be said to have failed in the accomplishment of its primary demand, what it managed to do was to further evolve the protest frameworks that Bauman describes in Community. Like the post-Situationist Culture Jam movement, Occupy managed to root protest within the framework of everyday life, but not one that is private and individualized. Indeed, as Occupy encampments cropped up internationally, life within the camps, lived publicly, became an act of protest in and of itself. At the same time, Occupy moved further away from the individualist politics of Lasn’s 1999 manifesto, adopting a more collectivist approach that pays heed to Bauman’s call for an alternative hybrid model for political engagement that takes the claim for recognition from the “liquid” human rights model as a foundational given and inscribes it within a “solid” distributive justice framework. The community bond, performed at sites of occupation, takes seriously the universal promise of prosperity made by the neoliberal project and thus reframes the concept of deprivation as something that is defined synchronically – as emblematized in the slogan of the 99% -- rather than diachronically as the commonly described trope of neoliberal progress and development would propose (Bauman 2001, 83). This reframing of the concept of deprivation is, for Bauman, essential to movements that operate within neoliberalism, particularly those interested in redistributive justice. The revolutionary potential of this new framework for political activism is anathema to the individualization promoted under neoliberalism and finds itself often eroded by the liberal individualist spirit of self-responsibility. A focus on relative deprivation is inherently collectivist. It necessitates a comparison between communal reference groups (Bauman 2001, 86) which Bauman argues have, for the most part, all but collapsed in the wake of neoliberal politics which proposes affluence as a product of individual cunning and industriousness. Activism, then, must hold on to this sense of community

lest the counter-revolutionary project buttress itself against critique from behind a mirage of reified individual rights.

Instead, activism must find a way to promote an alternative form of individuality that rejects the tendency of liberal individualism to erase human uniqueness while also promoting a common human dignity that is grounded in community and relationality. Within the philosophies of Zapatismo1 the voice is mobilized in just such a way:

If the voices of those who write history speak exclusively, it is because the voice of the oppressed does not speak … not yet.

[…] In Chiapas, the rebel voice is only heard when it shakes the world of the landowners and business people. Indeed, the phantom of indigenous barbarism strikes government- building walls and gains access with the help of revolution, trickery, and threats. If the rebellion in the Southeast fails, like the rebellions lost in the North, Center, and West, it is not the result of bad timing; it is because the wind is fruit of the land; it comes and in time ripens, not in a book of laments, but in the ordered breasts of those who have nothing but dignity and rebelliousness.

And this wind from below, that of rebellion and dignity, is not just an answer to the wind from above. It is not just an angry response. Rather, it carries with it not just a call for the destruction of an unjust and arbitrary system but a new proposal: the hope of converting rebellion and dignity into freedom and dignity.

How will this new voice make itself heard in these lands and across the country? How will this hidden wind blow, this wind that now blows only in the mountains and canyons and hasn’t yet descended to the valleys where money rules and lies govern? This wind will come from the mountains. It is already being born under the trees and is conspiring for a world so new that it is barely an intuition in the collective heart that inspires it … (Marcos and Ponce de Leon, 62)

Voice is often used metaphorically within liberatory movements as a metaphor for agency and power in relation to broader society. When one speaks of “having a voice,” one is generally describing the ability to promote ideas and “make others listen.” The voice, however, considered

1 There is some disagreement on how to label Zapatista political philosophy. Zapatismo is a term originally used to describe the movements surrounding Emiliano Zapata, a mestizo leader of the Mexican Revolution and eventual namesake of the EZLN. Zapata promoted a form of agrarian socialism which would later be combined with Indigenous knowledges in the development of the EZLN’s later revolutionary philosophies. The links between Zapata and the EZLN are mostly symbolic. As such, many scholars distinguish between Zapatismo (Emiliano Zapata’s movement) and NeoZapatismo (The later philosophies of the EZLN). This is a distinction that is not made within EZLN communiques and texts. As such, I maintain the use of the term Zapatismo throughout this document to describe EZLN philosophies and practices.

21 literally, as a biological function of the human body – of every unique human body, is something Adriana Caverero has studied extensively and to which she ties the possibility for an alternative political ordering.

1.3 The Trap of Individualism

For Cavarero, the primary symptom of individualist liberalism, is a reduction of a multitude of unique beings into a single representative cipher. It is against this ontological position that a performance of collectivist protest operates. Cavarero sees this problem emblematized in signifiers like “man,” “subject,” or “individual.” These terms, so essential to communicating the emancipatory promise of liberal individualism ironically reduce that which they describe to a concept so devoid of specificity as to erase the particularity or “finitude” (Cavarero 2005, 174) of the human, thereby negating through its invocation the very concept it purports to represent. Cavarero refers to the individuals thus described as “fictitious entities” because their specificity and uniqueness has been obfuscated by a veil of universalist ideology. The Hobbesian Leviathan consumes that which is uniquely human, leaving behind a multitude of individuals, all exactly alike in their own individual way.

Cavarero’s critique focuses on the relationship between the modern state and the concept of the self-sufficient individual. She notes a historical rupture between Aristotelian conceptions of man as a political animal, one “who, by nature cannot be without others” (Cavarero 2005, 185) and the modern, autonomous, self-generating subject of liberal democracies today. Whereas Aristotelian man inhabited the polis as a response to a need for community, modern individuals are cast as existing without such natural bonds and so their participation in the state occurs under the ideology of the social contract. The result, as Cavarero states is that “modernity erases the natural bond and thinks of the individual as autonomous, isolated, and competitive” (Cavarero 2005, 186). This divestment of mutual human inter-reliance – of relationality, as Cavarero terms it – by the state produces a structure in which the ontology of liberal individualism abrades that which is uniquely particular to human beings and instead makes them conceptually identical:

No one means anything to anyone else; each is already complete in the self-sufficiency that encloses them in themselves, like a world apart. And thus they are prevented from “recognizing” each other because what is lacking here is precisely the context of community in which each one can exist and be recognized. Because they replicate the same, each one is worth one. (Cavarero 2005, 186)

Rather than producing a community of individuals, the material human is subordinated to a conceptual universal “man,” each interchangeable with another on the basis of their shared equivalence. This thwarted form of community, Cavarero argues, produces a society immunized from reciprocal obligation, what Roberto Esposito calls immunitas.

Esposito illustrates the relational bond between human beings by reference to the distinction between public beings (communitas) and private individuals (immunitas) where community implies a fiduciary bond of care towards one’s fellow citizens. Esposito bases his theory on Aristotelian notions of citizenship and notes that “If communis is he who is required to carry out the functions of an office […] on the contrary, he is called immune who has to perform no office […] and for that reason he remains ungrateful” (Esposito 2010, 6). What Cavarero calls a “bond,” Esposito defines more strictly as a debt: “The subjects of a community are united by an ‘obligation,’ in the sense that we say ‘I owe you something,” but not ‘you owe me something” (Esposito 2010, 6). This debt to one’s fellow citizen produces a lack within the subject, who then must seek out congress with others in order to fulfill the void left behind. Community comes into being through the processes by which human individuals seek each other out in the fulfillment of this originary lack.

In opposition to the relational model of communitas, the immunized state form (immunitas) presumes human beings as always already complete, autonomous, and imbued with free will. Participation in the community is a matter of rational consent. The immunized society is produced as a response to the Hobbesian notion of natural man being in a perpetual state of war of all against all. The drive to form the covenant that binds them comes from the mutual fear of death at each other’s hands. The chaotic and violent nature of the world necessitates the forging of societal bonds to ward off violence – to immunize against it. Submission of one’s liberty to the authority of the greater social power of the state, whose role in protecting the individual from violence and death legitimizes its monopoly over the exercise of power and violence in an absolute way. Subjects are, under this model, obligated not to each other but to the ideal construct that is the state. The individual subject is immunized against the contagion and chaos of relationality – against the demands of the communal bond that challenges personal liberty – in favour of submission to the state. For its own part, the state body is immunized against the contagion of the Other through the demand for submission and homogeneity. That which is anathema to immunitas is expelled to the periphery or destroyed. Within the social contract,

power becomes the elemental currency that maintains the integrity of the individual. This kind of power, being relational and not absolute, must be fetishized and reified so as to obfuscate the social relationships of predation are at the heart of the immunized society: “The ‘power of man,’ to take it universally, is his present means, to obtain some future apparent good” (Hobbes 1651). Power is the function of the rational agent who is driven by an unceasing desire to accumulate more. Esposito therefore says of Hobbes that he is “the most tireless adversary of community” (Esposito 2010, 26), saying of the Leviathanic model that it “is nothing other than a form of life that is preserved or lost according to unchanging relations of force” (Esposito 2010, 26). The disastrous consequence of this model is that violence becomes the constitutive frame for all human social relationships. This framework establishes the relationships between individuals and the individuals themselves as fleeting, interchangeable, and valuable only insofar as they provide a means to accumulate more power. It is a framework in which citizens have the “opportunity” to achieve security, “access” to competition for resources, and the “freedom” to live or die according to the vagaries of capital, reinterpreted of course, as a function of individual will and industriousness. The insistence on the primacy of the immunized, self-sufficient conceptual individual and the inviolability of personal rights and freedoms, combined with the neoliberal insistence on personal responsibility has produced an ontological context in which atomized individuals must fend for themselves and compete against each other while propping up the state. This reformulation of the relationship between citizens and the state, with its multitude of inherent contradictions, opens up avenues for performative critique. It is against this that the interrelational politics of the EZLN and Occupy are mobilized.

1.4 The EZLN – Performing the Contingent Self

In the face of a politics that redefines the individual’s responsibility towards the state, the political performances of the EZLN challenge long-standing ideologies of the relationship between political actors and their conception of self, substituting the notion of an immunized individual with one that arises through contingent interrelational processes.

Daniela Di Piramo suggests that an important theme in Subcomandante Marcos’ writings can be traced back to his university thesis in which he “argues that discourse is not only a medium for translation or reproduction of the hegemonic system but also a medium of struggle, while ideology conforms to practices that support the dominant system” (Di Piramo 2011, 178-178).

Ultimately, Di Piramo criticizes the EZLN’s political texts and Marcos’ fables for being unable to move beyond the modernist frames and consequent grand narratives they would seek to upend: “What is […] necessary is a shift away from the mindset that continues to rely, in its thinking process, on comfortable master narratives and individualism, hallmarks of the prosaic track of Western philosophy” (Di Piramo 2011, 205). In the closing paragraphs of her article, Di Piramo suggests that by calling on their allies to become engaged in the political process “as protagonists” (Di Piramo 2011, 204), the Zapatistas cannot help but tie themselves to an ideological framework that presumes a sovereign individual, one of the foundational chimeras of Enlightenment theories of the relationship between citizens and the state.

Di Piramo interprets the Zapatista communiques and Marcos’ writings as texts consigned to print, but the conditions of their creation, dissemination, and reception suggest that these are in fact performances that have been displaced to a periphery from which they supplement, enhance, and comment on the embodied reality of the EZLN’s struggle. This performative appropriation of the discourse of legislative rights, post-enlightenment liberalism, and neoliberal global capitalism allows for the enactment and rehearsal of alternative and subversive interpretations of these foundational ideologies. Resituating the text in this way, subordinating it to the performance, is not a new practice. Vsevold Meyerhold often challenged the primacy of the text but relied on textual supplements such as pamphlets in his theatrical productions. Bertolt Brecht made use of projected text and placard to situate the epistemological framing of his works. Edward Bond is notorious for the long programme notes he writes to guide the audience’s reception of his plays. Marcos’ letters and fables might or might not be read by those witnessing the Zapatista struggle and while they provide a reframing of the political discourse, they are not essential to understanding the embodied acts of protest and resistance and insurgency of the EZLN. This displacement of the frame of textual eminence, the subordination of the text, and its consignment to a liminal space on the borders of the performance becomes especially salient in the context of an insurgent citizenship that proceeds from the margins of society into the centrality of the global media spotlight.

Much has been said about the theatricality of the Zapatista insurgency. Octavio Paz, a longtime detractor, wrote extensively that the Zapatistas became notable not through their substance, but “through their style. It is a question of an esthetic definition more than a popular one” (Paz 2009, 30-31). He is quick to condemn the tactics of the EZLN as little more than a masterful

25 deployment of public relations and says of the Zapatista manifestations that they “had the solemnity of a ritual and the seduction of a spectacle” (Paz 2009, 30-31). He comments on their costuming and Marcos’ voice and diction all as constructed for the benefit of the audiences both in person and watching through the television. Alma Guillermoprieto describes Marcos as “self- possessed, considerate, ironic, and theatrical” (Guillermoprieto 2009, 35). Indeed, multiple reports of North Americans engaging in activist journalism to Chiapas, (Klein 2009, 114-123) journalists travelling to interview the Subcomandante (Simon 2009, 45-47) and scholars discussing the movement inevitably evoke the reviews of some of the most popular site-specific theatre pieces, detailing not only Marcs’ mise-en-scene (Castells 2010, 83), manipulation of time, space, and event, but also the costuming and virtuosity of the traditional performances of the Chiapas Maya. As a movement seeking justice for the vulnerable bodies it represents for the vulnerable bodies it represents, one that has at times resulted in bloodshed and death, the Zapatista insurgency is certainly not theatre, but their reception indicates that it is at least partially engaged with as performance.

The arrival of the EZLN into the global consciousness was effected in a way that established the movement within a performance framework via a series of live declarations and interviews delivered in monologue form by a mestizo translator using the nom de guerre “Subcomandante Marcos.” This framing establishes a performer-spectator relationship and complicates the possibilities for analysis of the movement’s project. Susan Bennett illustrates this complication in discussing the limits of reader-response theory applications in theatrical criticism:

The literary, as well as filmic, text is a fixed and finished product which cannot be directly influenced by its audiences. Even the serial form or the revised novel only allows limited input from readers. In the theatre every reader is […] involved in a reciprocal relationship which can change the quality and success of a performance […] The theatre audience is, like its cinematic counterpart, also a social gathering. Reading is, by and large, a private experience. (Bennett 1997, 20-21)

To bracket off the written texts of the EZLN from the larger performative context in which they are produced and from which they find their ultimate expression, then, ignores the movement’s reciprocal relationship with its allies and detractors. The movement is not a monolithic one-time event, but a tactically experimental and shifting assemblage of communiques, armed skirmishes, gatherings, media events, and other strategies that adjust, adapt, and transform over time and, thanks to the movement’s use of global communications systems, across space. This fluid

character of the movement is integral to the practice of the insurgents and is underlined by Marcos in a postscript to a letter published in La Jornada in 1994. Marcos makes a statement of solidarity with all marginalized groups, counting the EZLN among “the majority disguised as the untolerated minority” and lists a substantial but by no means exhaustive list of potential Others:

About all this whether Marcos is homosexual: Marcos is gay in San Francisco, a black person in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, and anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, an Indigenous person in the streets of San Cristobal […] he is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. (Marcos 1994, 320)

The contingent, reciprocal nature of the identity that Marcos describes for himself is reflected not only in the movement’s rhetoric, but it is enacted throughout its political practice as well. The movement itself has undergone at least six different phases since its inception.2 These are not necessarily recognized or agreed upon by all scholars, nor are most of the phases explicitly titled as such by the EZLN themselves with the exception of The Other Campaign, but the group has demonstrated an eminent re-writability or a state of indefinite rehearsal in the recognition of the shifting conditions and relations of social reality.

The performance frame of the events of January 1, 1994, situates the First Declaration from the Lacondón Jungle as a monologue. The frames of monologue and performance decentre the speaking subject and subvert the master narratives of the individual cited in Marcos’ speech. While the image of a singular individual giving expression to inner experience certainly invokes the subject, the event is overcoded with multiple hermeneutic frames that call into question the identity of the speaking subject. Marcos’ speech presents the spectator with a mise en abîme of intertwined, mutually negating subjectivities that reveal an overdetermined individuality that cannot find solid purchase.

Valentin Voloshinov argues that all speech is relational insofar as it is predicated on a reciprocity between speaker and listener whereby in order for an utterance to have meaning, it must be taken up by a listener: “A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the

2 The initial 6 phases are elaborated in Olsen, Thomas. “The Zapatistas and Transnational Framing.” Latin American Social Movements: Globalization, Democratization, and Transnational Networks. Edited by Johnson, Hank and Almeida, Paul. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009, p. 180.

27 bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee” (Voloshinov 1973, 86). His argument is that discourse cannot exist without others and that the formulation of any utterance necessarily must consider the interpretive vantage point of the listener. Because of the reliance on a social stock of signs commonly shared between the speaker and interlocuter, speech is always intersubjective. Moreover, for the subject to be expressible in language it must also be bounded by this relational disposition towards a listener because the expressibility of the subject’s interiority must be formulated in intelligible linguistic terms. Voloshinov uses this formulation to argue that “it is a matter not so much of expression accommodating itself to our inner world but rather of our inner world accommodating itself to the potentialities of our expression, its possible routes and directions” (Voloshinov 1973, 90). The monologue, then, is not the expression of an inherent individualism, but reveals a subject in process that is always twice socially mediated: at the level of conception and then at the level of utterance. For Voloshinov, this illustrates that the individual is always constituted by is social conditions and that “the personality of the speaker, taken from within, so to speak, turns out to be wholly a product of social interrelations” (Voloshinov 1973, 90). The notion of a bridge and of interrelationality also finds expression within the Zapatista political rhetoric. In Puebla, during the March for Indigenous Dignity, the concept of a mutually recognized dignity within difference was foregrounded:

Dignity is a bridge. It needs two sides which, being different, distinct, and distant, are made one by the bridge, without ceasing to be different and distinct, but ceasing, then, to be distant. When the bridge of dignity is extended, the We that we are speaks and the Other which we are not speaks. The One and the Other are on the bridge which is dignity. And the One is not more or better than the Other, nor is the Other more or better than the One. Dignity demands that we be We. But dignity is not out only being ourselves. The Other is necessary for there to be dignity. Because we are always Ourselves in relation to the Other. (Words of the EZLN in Puebla, Puebla.)

Indeed, Marcos frequently denies that there is an intelligible individual behind the persona he adopts. The political position of the EZLN recognizes identity, communication, and politics not as fixed concepts but as processes that are manifested through the performance of a contingent self.

Performance is woven through the entire Zapatista movement from the first media spectacle of January 1994, to the ironic resurrection of Subcomandante Galeano in 2014, to the present-day criticisms of President Donald Trump’s border wall with Mexico. The entire trajectory of the movement contains moments of rupture which infect the insurgency with a performative ambivalence: the use of props and costuming, such as the use of masks, military style fatigues, traditional paliacates (scarves), and the use of firearms (many purposely without ammunition) alongside wooden replicas or vaguely shaped sticks, all signal blurring of the line between performance and reality. Marcos’ speeches, indeed the entire persona he adopts, is replete with oscillations and contradictions: When asked in an interview on January 1, 1994, for instance, why the Zapatistas wear ski masks, his response undercut the real concerns of a militant insurgency with an ironic silliness:

Those of us who are more handsome always have to protect ourselves […] What is happening is that, in this case, the officers are those who are masked, for two reasons. The primary one is that we have to watch out for protagonism – in other words, that people do not promote themselves too much. It is being anonymous, not because we fear for ourselves, but rather so that they cannot corrupt us […] That is the truth, and for that reason, you should not believe what I said when I said I was very handsome. I am doing propaganda for myself. (Hayden 2009, 207-217)

Marcos’ irony undercuts the drive to categorize him as a romantic hero. As Di Piramo argues, “irony is a powerful tool that Marcos employs to demystify his own persona, hence keeping the perils of charismatic personalism at bay” (Di Piramo 2011, 193). Irony, however, deployed as an element of parody is a critical disposition that further situates the conceptual frame of the audience. When the object of criticism is overlayed with an imperfect duplication, the moments of rupture in which the original and the copy do not cohere produce a distanciation effect that opens the object to critique. Linda Hutcheon says of parody that it:

Seems to offer a perspective on the present and the past which allows an artist to speak to a discourse from within it, but without being totally recuperated by it. Parody appears to have become, for this reason, the mode of what I have called the “ex-centric,” of those who are marginalized by a dominant ideology. (Hutcheon 1988, 35)

Parodic representation identifies itself as a representation, as performance. Marcos makes use of this technique in a prolific way throughout his speeches and in his writings. This parodic undercutting becomes particularly poignant in Marcos’ final speech, delivered from the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipality (MAREZ), La Realidad.

Between Light and Shadow begins with a characteristic blurring of the boundaries of reality as the fictionalized masked insurgent invites the audience into a hybrid space: “Welcome to the Zapatista reality (La Realidad)” (Marcos 2014). This performance ends in the “death” of Marcos and his adoption of the name and identity of a fallen comrade: “to satisfy the impertinence that is death, in place of Galeano we put another name, so that Galeano lives and death takes not a life but just a name – a few letters empty of any meaning, without their own history or life” (Marcos 2014). It begins with a history of the creation of Marcos as constructed subject who was to serve as “a terrible and marvelous magic trick, a malicious move from the indigenous heart that we are, with indigenous wisdom challenging one of the bastions of modernity: the media” (Marcos 2014). In defiance of the popular wisdom, however, Marcos will perform the same trick twice. This phantasmagoria of the individual is revealed as a simulacrum beneath which there is no originary model. “Those who loved and hated SupMarcos now know that they have loved and hated a hologram. Their love and hate have been useless, sterile, hollow, empty” (Marcos 2014). And yet, what occurs here in (R)/reality, is not the stowing away of the performed individual, but a reiteration of it. As Marcos leaves the stage to enter the void of death, he remarks:

Marcos: Hey, it’s really dark here, I need a little light. [He lights his pipe and exits stage left. Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés announces that “another compañero is going to say a few words.] [A voice is heard offstage] Galeano: Good early morning compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Anyone else here named Galeano? [the crowd cries: “We are all Galeano!”] (Marcos 2014)

This event will be examined in greater detail later in Chapter 3, but for now what is important to consider is that the performance here links the individual to its constitutive ideologies. It comes into being as a construct brought about by the necessity for such an ideology. It is deconstructed, critiqued, done away with, and in the final moments is constituted yet again.

1.5 Frames of Protest – The Althusserian Dramaturgy of the EZLN

In his book on the writings of Subcomandante Marcos, the EZLN’s mestizo “translator” and frequent spokesperson to the media, Nick Henck notes the significant influence the philosophy of Louis Althusser, particularly his critique of ideological state apparatuses has had on how Marcos describes EZLN tactics. The operation of ideology would become an important theme in Marcos’

writings from his university days and throughout his work. The work of Louis Althusser on revolutionary theatre read alongside the political practices of the EZLN provides an analytical framework with which to examine the tactical dramaturgies of protest. The resistant performances of the EZLN enact a clash of ideological frames such as that described by Louis Althusser in his criticism of Bertolazzi’s El Nost Milan.

Andy Merrifield identifies in Althusser’s late writings a theorization of the concept of aleatory materialism or the materialism of the encounter (Merrifield 2013, 55). Merrifield says of Althusser’s philosophy that political change arrives “at particular moments or conjunctures when and where forces connect; when and where they come into collusion and collision with one another; when and where they take shape, take hold, take off, transmogrify into something historically and geographically new” (Merrifield 2013, 55). The idea of the encounter is that new political forms emerge out of the movement of parallel occurrences which converge and reveal the potential for new political realities. While Merrifield ties Althusser’s aleatory materialism to his later writings, the concept is already under development in his critique of performance practices in the early 1960s. Marcos’ performed critique of the individual as emergent from the ideologies that bring it into being invokes Althusser who argues that the ideological subject is limited by its social conditions, such as how the subject is brought into being as a response to the interpellating address by authority. At the level of political struggle, Althusser’s critique of a new materialist theatre and the structural clashes it enacts prefigures his later writings on the aleatory nature of the political encounter.

Althusser situates the radical potential of performance in what he calls a “dialectic-in-the-wings” structure that performs an encroachment of radical politics into everyday life. His notes on Bertolazzi’s play El Nost Milan identifies two simultaneous frames of action (which he calls “temporal rhythms”), the first being an alienated representation of urban life which depicts:

A sub-proletariat passing the time as best they can before supper […] waiting, for who knows what […] for something of some sort to happen in their lives, in which nothing happens […] they survive, that is all […] a time in which gestures have no continuation or effect, in which everything is summed up in a few exchanges close to life, to ‘everyday life’ […] In a world, a stationary time in which nothing resembling History can yet happen, an empty time, accepted as empty: the time of their situation itself. (Althusser 2005, 131-136)

This frame presents a spatio-temporal situation that is reified, closed off to critique. This is a time and space that are received as the pure containers of quotidian existence. On the narrative periphery of this frame, occurring at the end of each long scene are short, rapid sequences of action that tell the story of tragedy: A young widow is preyed upon by a villain who is murdered by her father in a bid to protect her honour. Horrified by the act, she condemns her father’s outdated morality that led him to this action, and ultimately runs off, the tragic implication being that she will be forced to prostitute herself to survive. This frame of “dialectical time,” says Althusser, is “a time in which some history must take place. A time moved from within by an irresistible force, producing its own content. [it is a time of conflict,] induced by its internal contradiction to produce its development and result” (Althusser 2005, 137-138). This second frame is thrown open to interpretation and critique, to the questioning gaze of the audience who must judge the actions of the heroine and her father. This moment of rupture, however, remains marginalized from the larger sequence of reified time. It is, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, “ex- centric.” The marginal placement of dialectical time on the borders of the reified is what prompts Althusser to call this configuration of the theatrical event “the dialectic-in-the-wings structure” (Althusser 2005, 142). These frames are not only oppositional (empty/full, allow/fast, non- dialectical/dialectical) but they are disjointed. Althusser says: “there is no explicit relationship between these two times or between these two spaces” (Althusser 2005, 134). It is, however, this absence of relations that Althusser finds so compelling. The dialectical frame is always, he says, delayed, but its position at the margins signals its imminence, guarding the borders of the possible. Althusser does not suggest, however, that his dialectical frame of “tragic time” is the sufficient condition for a performance practice that challenges ideology. Though it is a precondition, its boundedness makes of it a second ideology. Indeed, the tragic frame is itself bound up in “bourgeois morality” as are its assumptions about an independent consciousness. The chaotic ruin of the tragic event remains as does the frame of dialectical time and its audience identifies with and judges it whether through cathartic identification or cold logic. What Althusser seeks is a means to circumvent this “dialectic of the void” (that is, the failure to recognize within the frames themselves a series of contingencies and encounters) in which the marginal frame resurfaces and evacuates the ideology of inexorability from the frame of alienated time.

For Althusser it is the clash of these two frames and the unresolved contradictions produced by their coming together that offers the potential for performance that criticizes ideology:

The silent confrontation of a consciousness (living its own situation in the dialectical- tragic mode, and believing the whole world to be moved by its impulse) with a reality which is indifferent and strange to this so-called dialectic – an apparently undialectical reality, makes possible an immanent critique of the illusions of consciousness. (Althusser 2005, 143)

Consciousness cannot grasp the real through its own interiority, it needs must encounter a radical other to shake it from its complacent illusions. Althusser argues that this is the true power of the dialectic-in-the-wings, not that the audience can hold itself in judgement over the contradictions within a performance, but that these contradictions force a reckoning with the contradictions within their own daily lives. It is not sufficient to hold up a mirror to society, as it were, for the gazing subject will only see reflected that which they already know to be there: its own illusory self, warts and all. Rather, what is needed is to smash the mirror and allow the refracting shards to realing and reposition the familiar image in all its parts. It is the gazing subject’s attempt to reconstitute and reconcile the familiar through these myriad broken pieces, that the audience is instigated into a dual recognition (of social structures) and identification (with the governing ideologies). The play on its own is not able to furnish the dialectical critique Althusser seeks. Rather, the spectator brings critique to the play by virtue of the simultaneous identification and recognition afforded them by their spectatorial vantage point. The dialectical act comes in the experience of the performance, not in the reading. As Althusser says, the resolution of these contradictions is left up to the spectator who is interpellated as “an actor who starts where the performance ends, who only starts so as to complete it, but in life” (Althusser 2005, 150). This dialectical performance can be read in the clash between the neoliberal ideological frame of the Mexican government as it collided with the alternatives enacted in the Zapatista March for Indigenous Dignity.

On February 24th, 2001, the EZLN embarked on a two week, 40 vehicle caravan tour that left San Cristóbal de las Casas and wound a spiral path around the country towards the capital city on March 11 where some 250,000 people gathered on the public square to express support for the movement. The March for Indigenous Dignity included the entire General Command of the EZLN as well as Subcomandante Marcos, most of whom had not tavelled beyond Chiapas since the start of the revolt in 1994 due to their fugitive status. The action’s primary focus was to

demand an audience with the government at a congressional meeting to discuss the San Andrés Accords, a peace accord between the EZLN and the Mexican government that called for land reform, recognition of Indigenous diversity, participatory democratic changes, and the release of political prisoners (English Translation of the San Andrés Accords). The signing of the Accords had been stalled since 1996 when the Mexican government walked away from negotiations. Media reports at the time liken the March to a rock & roll event, dubbing it the Zapatour (The Economist, 2001). For President Vicente Fox, the march presented an opportunity for political haymaking and so he engaged in a very public protracted game of one-upmanship with Marcos. In the lead-up to the event, the two were engaged in an increasingly public display of rivalry, with communiques from the EZLN branding Fox “Mr. Lies” and argued, in the spirit of the Zapatista slogan “lead by obeying,” that Fox “should learn to govern with the people and not in place of them” (Patterson 2001). Fox himself sought to counter the EZLN’s growing popularity by showing himself to be Marcos’ equal. Shortly after Marcos was presented with a ceremonial baston, or cane, as a symbol of respect from Indigenous leaders, Fox appeared on television with his own baston, adorned with a green, red and white ribbon. The inadvertent symbolism of an object of Indigenous ceremonial significance bound in the colours of the Mexican flag in the hands of the President went mercifully without comment. What did receive comment, however, was the government’s own attempt to stage a counterdemonstration that would undercut public enthusiasm for the march. A concurrent Concert for Peace in Chiapas was organized by the Mexican government alongside two rival television stations: TV Azteca and Televisa (Tegel 2001). The EZLN General Command responded sarcastically in a communique discussing the upcoming march: “Once again, we are clarifying that police officers disguised as journalists will not be allowed entrance, nor, by decision of the community, those persons from the television station which destroys Indigenous schools with their helicopter (even though now they are holding ‘concerts for peace’)” (EZLN Press Conference for February 22). The communique references an incident from 1998 in which a government helicopter carrying a TV Azteca hostess to a Zapatista Autonomous Community for an ambush piece destroyed the roof of one of the Zapatista schools. Ultimately, the counter-protest was received with wide skepticism outside of the mainstream news networks.

While ostensibly aimed at achieving the same goals as the March for Indigenous Dignity, the Concert was met with derision and mockery by a number of commentators sympathetic to the

EZLN cause. These two concurrent events played out Althusser’s dialectic-in-the-wings across national territory and on an international stage with the insurgent performance of the Zapatour interrupting the reified time-space of the federal government.

The government sponsored Concert for Peace was wholly a project of the prevailing political and cultural hegemony. Sponsorship for this event was deliberately stage-managed in order to perform a phantasmal reconciliation of the type the Mexican government claimed it was seeking with Zapatista rebels. The Concert was to enact three reconciliations in which bitter rivals would ostensibly come together for the benefit of all. Mexico’s two largest media conglomerates – longtime rivals Televisa and TV Azteca – were the primary sponsors. The two musical headliners, Maná and Jaguares, are also known for having a longstanding rivalry with each other. The third reconciliation would be that between the Mexican government itself and the Indigenous people of Chiapas, to whom all proceeds from the concert would ostensibly go. The event, for all its curated deployment of a symbolism of unity could not escape being plagued by conceptual contradictions, such as those inherent in the Mexican government’s appeals for a cessation of hostilities against the backdrop of the slowly advancing Zapatista caravan. Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff satirized the event in a cartoon depicting a bound Marcos held at “camera-point” and forced to attend a wedding between Ricardo Salinas Pliego and Emilio Azcárraga Jean, the respective heads of the two media conglomerates, in an empty Estadio Azteca. Latuff has Vicente Fox officiating the ceremony garbed in a cassock sporting the concert’s logo, holding a “Bible” with dollar signs on its interior pages. The cartoon is clear in not only its condemnation of the complicity between the two media conglomerates with the government, but also in its argument that the entire event exists not as an expression of any true desire for unity but as a media spectacle designed for the benefit of prevailing authorities. Indeed, this concert was ultimately little more than a desperate grasp to capitalize on the already- occurring Zapatista march towards the capital city and on the growing public support the group was getting worldwide from artists and musicians. In February of 1999 Subcomandante Marcos released a letter thanking many Mexican and international artists and musicians for their support of the Zapatista cause and proposed a celebratory concert “once we have won” (Marcos 1999). The Concert for Peace in Chiapas, in this context, comes across as an attempt by the Mexican government to preempt any kind of peace talks and skip ahead to a celebration that not only excludes the aggrieved party, but erases their participation at every level of its production. Critics

of the Concert reacted with cynicism. Florence Toussaint in Proceso magazine characterized the event as pageantry: “Two rivals suddenly united and surprised us with their generosity. For the suspicious, the announcement is part of a grand strategy of counter-propaganda. The TV stations don’t want to stop being the principal actors” (Chiapas Peace Concert or Counter-Propaganda?). The Concert for Peace in Chiapas is a project primarily by and for Mexico’s social and economic centre as represented by the mainstream media networks and the ruling government, as well as by the erasure of Zapatista participants from the peace process to which it is putatively committed. By contrast, the March is a performance that proceeds from Mexican society’s social and geographical margins, tying the political act of protest to the everyday lives of its marginalized actors who invade the Mexican centre and reappropriate space not as consumers, but as stakeholders, a claim they make unilaterally without, and even against, the position of the prevailing power structures. Media is embedded in the Zapatista performance of protest and the EZLN refashion themselves as multi-platform performers in order to enact a politics that highlights the conflicting of ideologies at the heart of the tension between their performance style and the Mexican government’s. The Concert and the March manifest as conflicting media forms that reveal the ideological frameworks out of which they are generated. Marshall McLuhan describes the tensions between media that are said to be hot or cold thusly: “Hot media are […] low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience” (McLuhan, 23). The Concert was a singular event bound to a particular time and place. It came pre-packaged for its putative audience. It was produced and developed with a specific goal in mind: Peace in Chiapas. McLuhan argues that a hot medium is exclusionary and at multiple levels the Concert was indeed designed to exclude: as an overproduced spectacle, it excludes input by its attendees. It exists simply to be consumed. It is disconnected from the realities with which it is supposed to be engaging. By what logic, one might ask, can the Mexican government genuinely believe that by purchasing a ticket and receiving a performance would audiences bring about peace in Chiapas? Indeed, even this question would seem to impart far too much agency onto attendees. There is no expectation that peace is something that concertgoers would bring about. It is simply presented as something that will happen in the event’s wake. There is no implication of the work or action that goes into building and maintaining peace. This oversimplification of the concept of peace makes of the Concert an event that is only logically coherent if it’s completely divorced from the historical and material conditions of its genesis. Everything external to it must be excluded, erased, and discounted. Even the very people it is

nominally purported to help are overlooked as either producers or audience members. The March, by contrast, is an active coproduction. It isn’t a singular event, but a two weeks long process. Participants and spectators must produce this event together. As with the dignity it champions, the March requires the intersection of a vast multitude of systems, individuals and groups in order to manifest its stated goal. Even the circuitous path the attendees walk seems to imply the cool participatory media McLuhan envisions: “the concentric with its endless intersection of planes is necessary for insight. In fact, it is the technique of insight, and as such is necessary for media study, since no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media” (McLuhan 2001, 26). The March, like many of the EZLN’s performances, is concerned with “effect rather than meaning” (McLuhan 2001, 26) and as such it stands in stark conflict with the Concert and with the kind of activism championed by Kalle Lasn in Culture Jam. It makes its incursions into the Mexican media space on its own terms circumvents those avenues of representation made permissible by government and corporate authorities and instead appropriates and reinvents those spaces to serve their own ends. It enacts, on multiple levels, a performance of what James Holston calls insurgent citizenship.

1.6 Insurgent Performance – Centering the Marginal

For Holston, insurgent citizenship arises when marginalized groups deploy alternative tactical practices in order to stake a claim to public space. Such interventions cut across or grind against traditional social and legal hierarchies, thereby calling the ostensible legitimacy of such hierarchies into question by their very performance. The Zapatistas’ ironic interpretations of the discourse of the state and the coterminous re-functioning practices they employ, in a Brechtian way, activate an estrangement effect on the presuppositions underlying entrenched assumptions about the nature of citizenship, namely the state’s privileged role in the conference of rights unto the populace. Holston argues that citizenship has become “a measure of differences and a means of distancing people from each other […] to distribute different treatment to different categories of citizens. It thereby generates a gradation of rights, in which most rights are available only to particular kinds of citizens and exercised as the privilege of particular social categories” (Holston 2008, 5-7). These gradations produce “differentiated citizenship” with the resultant practical inequities causing rupture between the ideological frame of citizenship and the reality of life on the social, political, and economic peripheries. Insurgent citizenship is symptomatic of the precarious life under neoliberalism and is therefore “inherent in structures of power and their

37 practices” (Holston 2008, 13). What is ultimately revealed in these subversive citational practices is that the very concept of citizenship is itself a performative – inhering not in the universal dignity of the individual, but within a diversity of practices through which individuals earn, through their productivity, citizenship or have it revoked piecemeal. When acts of insurgent citizenship exceed the ideological boundaries of entrenched citizenship and demonstrate the performativity of the normative (for example, by literalizing the concepts of corporate personhood or critically invoking the disciplining syntax of state decrees.) the possibility for alternative configurations of the relationship between the citizen and the state are revealed.

The concept is tied to Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “the right to the city” which Holston describes as “a claim by the working classes to a presence in the city that legitimated their appropriation of urban spaces and their refusal to be excluded from them” (Holston 2009, 247). In discussing the “right” to the city, Lefebvre distinguishes the concept from both natural and legal rights: “The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to inhabit. The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation (clearly distinct from the right to property), are implied in the right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996, 173-174). In the face of land-based forms of resistance to the government as is the case for the Indigenous Zapatista’s facing off against the Mexican government, the right to property is subordinated to a right to participation and appropriation, land and space are open for human use, rather than closed off to private ownership for the generation of profit. Lefebvre’s conception makes of this a kind of right that is performative, that is made manifest through practice rather than being a static condition conferred on individuals by either the power of the state or by divine authority: “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand […][it] cannot be conceived as a simple visiting right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (Lefebvre 1996, 158). Indeed, Lefebvre, is explicit that such a right cannot come from rational though, nor can it be reduced to a mere state of being. Only though action and practice, only through the relational engagement with others inhabiting a given space, can it become real. It is a hybrid practice: “There can be no possibility of an analysis accomplished in the context of knowledge. The unity outlined is defined by a convergence” (Lefebvre 1996, 163-164). Lefebvre here elaborates the four elements of his synthesis: 1) a vision or goal, 2) urban theory, 3) philosophy, and 4) art, which bring with them the “capacity to transform reality, to appropriate at the highest level the facts of the ‘lived,’ of

time, space, the body and desire” (Lefebvre 1996, 164). Holston applies Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city to the everyday practices of city dwellers who, through their appropriation of space, challenge the traditional doctrine that “the state is the only legitimate source of citizenship rights, meanings, and practices. [Hoslton uses] the notion of insurgent to refer to new and other sources and to their assertion of legitimacy” (Hoslton 1998, 157). This insurgent citizenship is an outgrowth of traditional planning practices as laid out in the 1928 Congres International d’Architechture Moderne (CIAM). The CIAM led to a vision of urban planning that Holston describes as inherently utopian insofar as it is predicated on a view that the state is able to push society towards an ideal future through the imposition and management of planning and social sciences. Thus, the various apparatus of state formation are the mechanisms through which “governments try to forge new forms of collective association and personal habit as the basis for propelling their societies into a proclaimed future” (Holston 1998, 158). The legitimacy of the state and the citizenship rights it confers, therefore, becomes essential to the utopian project. In the case of the Chiapas Concert for Peace, the event needs must exclude the Zapatista insurgents from the production of this space because to do otherwise would be to lend legitimacy to alternative formulations of citizenship. This conundrum illustrates an irreconcilable contradiction with regards to emancipatory citizenship: the very means by which marginalized groups are oppressed is touted as the only legitimate means by which they may seek full citizenship. As Holston says: “The forces of centrality are entrenched in the civic square by design and that entrenchment establishes the terms of an official public sphere […] whereas the center uses the structuring of the public to segregate the urban poor in the peripheries and to reduce them to a “bare life” of servility, the very same structures of inequality incite these hinterland residents to demand a life worthy of citizens” (Hoslton 2009, 246). Lefebvre recognizes this contradiction himself, alluding to it as “One of the last but not least contradictions [being][…] between the socialization of society and generalized segregation” (Lefebvre 1996, 157). Thus, the emancipatory potential of a democratic society is always tied to the conditions of inequality that it produces. If the political position espoused by proponents of the Concert for Peace in Chiapas is one that demands submission to social, political, and economic hegemony – those very same forces that consign the marginalized to social peripheries – then the March proposes an alternative formulation of citizenship that joins Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city to the concept of democratic citizenship. It is an incursion into entrenched modes of citizenship by

39 those dwelling on the peripheries of a society that is legitimized by the very fact of its occurrence.

The March for Indigenous Dignity made insurgent citizenship literal on the international stage by combining an appeal to “entrenched,” legally defined citizenship with Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city. Departing from Mexico’s southern periphery, the caravan proceeded in a circuitous route making various stops at points across twelve states in the south of Mexico. While the ultimate destination was the capital city – and much was made of the fact that seven years prior, the EZLN had promised to march on Mexico City as part of their First Declaration, - - the path taken by the caravan resituated the political and economic centre of the country, casting it to the periphery of this performative claim to citizenship. The March was a hybrid encounter: while on the one hand, the stated objective was to force the federal government to adopt the San Andrés peace accords (the COCOPA law), signed in 1996 before being subsequently rejected by the Zedillo government, the demonstration was more than simply an appeal to legislative recognition. Indeed, while the federal government and the mass media primarily described the March as a peace rally, thereby linking it to their own concert and to President Fox’s entreaties that the Zapatistas negotiate peace (Giordano 2001), the EZLN was adamant that peace was a secondary objective and one that could only be achieved after certain legislative and non-legislative preconditions were met. Marcos commented on the topic of the March and its objectives in a FAQ:

Why has the EZLN not signed the peace? Because Zedillo’s government did not carry out the accords it signed with the EZLN. In order for peace to be real, it must be built on accords that are fulfilled. If it’s not so, then it’s not peace, but pretense. The EZLN has wanted peace for seven years, but not just any peace, one with justice and dignity. We are continuing on that path. (Marcos, FAQ on March, 2001)

Indeed, peace has, for the most part, been conspicuously absent from the communiques and speeches delivered by the EZLN during the period of the March, the single exception being during a stop in Toluca where the EZLN took the opportunity to differentiate between different kinds of peace:

For the rich, peace is made through concerts with special effects and much publicity and in primetime with greetings from the government […] They wanted to buy peace with money, and now they’re realizing that it was badly employed money, that the product they acquired is nowhere to be seen, that it is one more fraud like the many their companies make.

They are only just starting to realize that the peace with justice and dignity, where you and I exist without fear, the only peace possible, does not have a price. It cannot be purchased with money, even though it be a lot, nor with threats and blows. It is secured by fighting with truth and without deceit. Because it so happens that the peace concert of above is over with now, and those from below are not. It so happens that the applause has ended now, and we have not. It so happens that the program and the commercials have finished now, and we continue. It so happens that those lies are gone now, and we are here. For us, the dark corner, the threatened march, in the time slot when the television is turned off. (EZLN Words in Toluca 2001)

Peace thusly defined is little more than an acceptance of subaltern status and an acquiescence to the continued functioning of an alienating and alienated society. Upon arrival in Mexico, Marcos announced: “We are here to shout for and to demand democracy, liberty and justice” (Thompson and Weiner 2001). This Lefebvrian “cry and demand” along with the insurgent performances that destabilize the spaces of centrality occupied by the state throw into relief the contradictory nature of not only the peace proposed by the government and the media companies, but also the entire apparatus by which society functions – its notions of peace, justice, order, and citizenship. Indeed, from the very first, the entire rebellion against the Mexican government has been justified in part through an appeal to the Mexican constitution itself:

as our last hope, after having tried to utilize all legal means based on our Constitution, we apply Article 39 of our Constitution which says: […] National Sovereignty essentially and originally resides in the people. All political power emanates from the people and its purpose is to help the people. The people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government. (EZLN General Command 1994, 219)

Such a right, enshrined in the legal parlance of political power, can only find fulfillment through its enactment. The Zapatista rebellion underscores the relationship between power and citizenship as much as it does that between peace and servility.

This revelation of the contradictions inherent within the Mexican democratic system was continually reiterated throughout the procession of the March. The March itself was a performance that was carried out in two modes: the caravan itself, which enacted a steady, roundabout incursion from the peripheries and into the economic, geographic, and political centre of Mexico and in the second mode, at every stop along the way, the subcomandantes would deliver speeches and tell stories that challenged the discursive foundations of social and political exclusion, drawing attention to how the concepts held up by the regime were defined

41 differently by Zapatistas. In Oaxaca, technological development and political power were redefined in emancipatory terms:

We want science and technology, but not in order to kill the earth and good thinking, but to make it better and richer. We want to free ourselves from the slavery which the powerful subject us to, but not in order to make ourselves equal to him, to be stupid and evil. We want to live in the present and to build a future with everyone. What we do not want is to cease being indigenous. (EZLN General Command 2001)

This redefinition of the terminology of neoliberal Mexico is an important part of the Zapatista’s performance of insurgency. It demonstrates the contradictions inherent in the values of democracy, freedom, citizenship, justice, rights, and peace that are enshrined in the state’s performance as benefactor to the people and calls attention to the way these concepts have traditionally been tied to second-class status for large swaths of the population. The EZLN adopt these concepts, but always with a nod towards the gaps between the promise and its fulfillment. Rather than reject the technical jargon of state bureaucracy, the Zapatistas embrace it by combining it with concepts that escape definition within legal and political frameworks, offering up a hybrid politics. In Puebla, they spoke of dignity: “Dignity is, therefore, a house with one single floor, where we and the other have our own places – which is what life is – and nothing else, but the same house. Therefore dignity should be the world, a world where many worlds fit” (EZLN Words in Puebla 2001). This new world in which many fit that is prefigured by the Zapatistas in the speeches is the same one that they act out over the course of their march towards the capital city and it is brought about through an active coproduction that includes not only the primary conceit or framework proposed by the Zapatistas, but it requires that the gaps in fulfillment be engaged with by audience-participants of all kinds.

To shift Althusser’s critique of Bertolazzi and Brecht into the realm of the EZLN is to consider the performances of the Zapatistas in this dialectical fashion. The event of the Zapatista insurgency is the abject, dialectical moment that interrupts the alienated time of everyday life. Eschewing the name “leader” or “spokesman,” the Marcos persona adopts the role of “translator” for the Zapatista movement and it is as such that he finds his role in the larger performance of resistance. He exists not for the benefit of narrative, nor as a symbol around which to rally. The Indigenous rebels have no need of a mestizo translator for themselves, nor do they need to see their own subjectivity reflected back to them in an uncomplicated way. The Marcos persona,

42 with its anonymizing ski-mask, stands at the threshold of the moment of rupture enjoining the audience to identify with the injustices suffered by the Indigenous Maya and recognize within this conflict their own participation in the structures that oppress them all. It is in the crossing over of performance and reception and the attendant destabilization of consciousness that space is opened up for the critique of master narratives.

The EZLN were ultimately granted permission to speak before the Mexican Congress to the Committee on Indigenous Affairs and on Constitutional Studies. This would be the first time that any Indigenous community would address the Mexican Congress. In a surprising turn, Marcos would not be in attendance. Instead of a soldier, the Congress would be addressed by a civilian leader, Comandanta Esther. Her speech before the Mexican Congress repeats the insurgent practices of the March for Indigenous Dignity’s 15 day incursion into the geographical centre of the country. As the seat of national governance, the Congress represents a space of authority on two levels: It is the centre from which legislation proceeds and it also establishes the performative frame that structures debate and dissent. Esther’s speech to the congress identifies the space she occupies as one of discursive authority and she recognizes the subversive nature of her presence there:

We realize that our presence in the tribune led to bitter discussion and confrontations […] this tribune is a symbol. That is why it caused so much controversy. That is why we wanted to speak in it, and that is why some did not want us to be here. And it is also a symbol that it is I, a poor, indigenous and Zapatista woman, who would be having the first word, and that the main message of our word as Zapatistas would be mine.” (Comandanta Esther 2002, 196-197).

Esther positions herself as emblematic of the larger movement she represents and she takes on a hybrid identity at once excluded from discursive power while also demonstrating herself to be conversant in its language. The Zapatista rebellion and the criticism it lobbies at the Mexican government has always been strategically ambivalent with the mechanisms of state power. Never wholly rejecting the social machinery that they find oppressive, their speeches and demonstrations always point towards a world in which many worlds fit and the vision they put forward is always a new hybrid politics that comes out of the gaps between the putative objectives of the neoliberal state and the experience of the Indigenous Maya and other marginalized groups. Indeed, though the deployment of the legal jargon and pageantry of

43 national politics, Esther calls into question the power hierarchy inherent in the state both at the level of ideology and as practice.

The incursion of Esther’s insurgent marginality (as Indigenous as a woman, as poor, as a rebel) into the central space of legislative production challenges both the long-standing erasure of the periphery from the centre and the civic legal codes embodied by the Congress itself. Moreover, she illustrates the contradictions within the system of governance by bringing up the rejection of the COCOPA law:

This proposal was accused of balkanizing the country, ignoring that the country is already divided. One Mexico produces wealth, another appropriates that wealth, and another has to stretch out its hand for charity. […] accused of creating Indian reservations, ignoring that we indigenous are already living apart, separated from the rest of the Mexicans, and, in danger of extinction. […] accused of promoting a backward legal system, ignoring that the current one only promotes confrontation, punishes the poor, and gives impunity to the rich. It condemns our color and turns our language into crime. […] accused of creating exceptions in political life, ignoring that in the current one the one who governs does not govern, rather he turns his public position into a source of his own wealth, and he knows himself to be beyond punishment and untouchable as long as his term in office does not end. (Comandanta Esther 2002, 199)

Esther’s presence at the Congress recalls the performance described in Althusser’s critique of Bertolazzi. She embodies the dialectic time of the event, upsetting the assumptions that undergird the alienated historical time of legislative practice. She foregrounds the ideological exceptions to the COCOPA law and demonstrates how the entire legislative system is predisposed to prop up the oppression she seeks to combat.

Comandanta Esther also attacks the assumptions inherent in the structure of democratic politics when she makes conspicuous the absence of seven Indigenous comrades who are unable to be present at the Congress: “As indigenous, the seven fought for their rights and, as indigenous, they were met with responses of death, jail, and persecution” (Comandanta Esther 2002, 197). The invocation of her absent comrades is set up as an indictment of the structure of the political system which is supposed to welcome dissent. Indeed, dissent is ostensibly foundational to the political system that is represented in the Congress, as she reminds her audience: “In this Congress, there are various political forces, and each one of them joins together and works with complete autonomy […] and no one is persecuted for being from one or the other parliamentary wing, for being from the Right, from the Center or from the Left” (Comandanta Esther 2002,

197). Esther’s critique of the parliamentary system reveals the structural prejudices of national politics, juxtaposing the recently inaugurated National Action Party of Vicente Fox with the Institutional Revolutionary Party which, mostly under Ernesto Zedillo, presided over the Zapatista rebellion since their declaration of war in January 1994. This discussion of the peaceful dissent that is possible within congressional chambers alongside Esther’s reminder of her absent Indigenous comrades within the context of the Concert for Peace in Chiapas lays bare the structural iniquities in the current system of governance. Just as the peace being proposed is a false one, the dissent and debate of which the Mexican democracy is so proud is only permissible within very strict ideological boundaries. In this way, Esther’s performance before the congress presents the EZLN’s appropriation of space and discourse as bearing equivalent authenticity to that of the government.

1.7 Citational Declarations

The performative unmasking of the relations of violence and oppression hiding beneath the reified concepts of citizenship, liberty, and inalienable rights, evokes Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. As described by Elin Diamond: “Brechtian theory in all its gaps and inconsistencies is not literary criticism, but rather a theorizing of the workings of an apparatus of representation with enormous formal and political resonance” (Diamond 1988, 82-94). The apparatus of representation in question is not simply the performance stage, but also the social apparatus that frames all epistemologies, particularly ideal concepts of “man” and the individual’s relationship to the State.

In describing the process of devising his theatre practice, Brecht makes explicit the relationship between his art and insurgence: “And yet what we achieved in the way of theatre for a scientific age was not science but theatre, and the accumulated innovations worked out during the Nazi period and the war — when practical demonstration was impossible” (Brecht 1992, 179-180). Developed as a response to the universalizing tendency in art and coextensive ideologies of totalitarianism, an important goal of Brecht’s dramaturgy was the development of a form of critique that challenged the comfortable assumptions of ideology through citational reiteration that highlighted the contradictions inherent within them. Brecht refers to this as “the alienation that is necessary to all understanding” and argues that “When something seems ‘the most obvious thing in the world’ it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

What is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect. People’s activity must simultaneously be so and capable of being different” (Brecht 1992, 71). Brecht is here describing the operation of the Verfremdungseffekt, which seeks to estrange various phenomena of everyday life through a kind of citation and reiteration that “quotes” social behaviour rather than embodying it. The critical distance that is maintained between the artist and the work allows for a certain foregrounding of the underlying contradictory social relations involved in producing a given phenomenon. Brecht’s method is somewhat predictive of Theodor Adorno’s “negative dialectics” insofar as the Verfremdungseffekt provides an inroad to criticize the primacy of the general and the erasure of the specific. With regards to the relationship between society and the individual, this citational performance allows the EZLN to throw into question the neoliberal foundations and justifications for their oppression.

The Zapatistas’ First Declaration from the Lacandón Jungle, initially delivered by a masked Subcomandante Marcos from atop the balcony of the Municipal Presidential Palace in San Cristobál de las Casas situates the EZLN insurgents within the historical and social relations of their immediate moment: “We are a product of 500 years of struggle” (EZLN General Command 2009, 218) announces Marcos before elaborating a litany of grievances. The speech that follows oscillates between condemnations against the failure of the State to live up to the liberal promise of assuring bodily integrity and a series of proclamations in the language of bureaucratic politics that promises inalienable rights and freedoms. “no land, no work, no health care, no food, no education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace or justice for ourselves or our children” (EZLN General Command 2009, 218). If the Enlightenment values that are used to justify an immunized neoliberal state in Mexico have failed to live up to their promise, then the First Declaration condemns them on their own terms. Liberty, justice, sovereignty, and protection from death have all been found wanting in the supposed consensual contract between the individuals and the state to which they are subjects. The complaint is a straightforward and direct accounting of the breach of the social contract. The solution, the triggering of Article 39, is an ironic reversal of the state’s claim to legitimacy that strikes at the heart of the liberal ideologies of liberty, sovereignty, and the primacy of the individual subject. The conditions for legitimacy of the Zapatistas’ claim to political participation are established in the paragraph immediately

preceding the triggering of Article 39: They tie themselves to a number of historical struggles for justice and sovereignty such as the Mexican War of Independence, and the violent repression of union workers (1958) and students (1968). It is, however, the reference to the “Porfirsta dictatorship” that sets the tone for an unsettling of the discourse of the neoliberal state as anything but a series of empty signifiers. The government of Porfirio Díaz, which spanned three decades straddling the turn of the 20th Century (1884-1911) had, up until the 1990s been emblematic of repression and cronyism. After the neoliberal turn of the 90’s, however, there arose a significant neo-Porfirsta movement which sought to reclaim Díaz’ legacy as one of the architects of a proto-neoliberalist Mexican State. The dictator, once reviled, has been reimagined as an architect of freedom and liberty thanks to the conceptual frame afforded by the state’s creeping neoliberalist values. In invoking the discursively constructed and ideologically driven heel-face turn of the Díaz government alongside the heterogeneous identities of the various groups resisting oppression over time, the Zapatistas throw into doubt the conceptual borders of the immunized state. What was once aberrant is now vital. What was once heroic has become a contagion to be expelled. The self-legitimizing history and language of the state and upon which its legitimacy relies, are shifting, fluid, and serve little more than the state’s incessant self- generation.

It is the performance, however, of the triggering of Article 39 that ultimately expresses the tenuousness of the state’s claim to natural legitimacy. The performance of The First Declaration is a kind of malicious compliance. The declaration is citational. It is performed, but it is performed with a difference that produces an irreconcilable contradiction. From atop the balcony of the governmental space of the Municipal Presidential Palace, Marcos proclaims the covenant that confirms the sovereignty and liberty of the individual above all else. The act invokes the rituals of law and governance, but it is ultimately shown to be ineffectual. The claim to sovereignty is performed in ostensible good faith and within the judicial halls of power, but it is the presence of Marcos’ speaking body, the representative of a dispossessed minority, that voids the performance of its legislative power to affect change. This performed estrangement of the word of law reveals the illusory nature of the concepts that bind the citizens to the state. Sovereignty, which naturally inheres within the individual and which is the foundation of the social contract, evaporates at the very moment of its invocation. The repetition of the binding

47 word of a universalizing law renders that very word infelicitous by the conditions of its utterance.

This appropriation and citation of the language and symbolism of the state is repeated throughout the First Declaration, a tactic that destabilizes the rhetoric of hegemony by taking it seriously. There is a call for the government to indict itself according to its own rules “According to this declaration of war, we ask that other powers of the nation advocate to restore the legitimacy and stability of the nation by overthrowing the dictator” (EZLN General Command 2009, 218) as well as a double-edged appeal to global power, “We declare now and always that we are subject to the Geneva Accord, with the EZLN as the fighting arm of our liberation struggle” (EZLN General Command 2009, 218), the adoption of the Mexican flag “we have the beloved tri- colored flag” (EZLN General Command 2009, 218), and a repeated reminder of the constitutional validity of the war couched in the language of individual rights and freedom. “Our struggle follows the Constitution, which is held high by its call for justice and equality” (EZLN General Command 2009, 220). These citational invocations of the signifiers of liberty, justice, and individualism cannot help but produce infelicitous speech acts because the concepts to which they refer are false chimeras. The demands made of the government and the claims to Constitutional justification do, however, produce an unresolvable contradiction: to deny these claims is to deny the concepts on which they are founded. The First Declaration, therefore, through the performance and reception of the language of the state, enacts the limits of the reified concepts that justify the subordination to citizenship.

A similar kind of estranging ironic repetition of political ideologies is used by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Unlike the EZLN, however, the Occupy movement is notorious for presenting very few, if any concrete demands in favour of expressing a generalized critique of the results of the neoliberal project. The initial demand as laid out in an email from Adbusters Magazine was “[We] demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for Democracy Not Corporatocracy, we're doomed without it” (Chappell 2011). Bernard E. Harcourt refers to “Political Disobedience” in the Occupy movement, which he contrasts with the concept of “civil disobedience” which “accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed” (Harcourt 2011). This term contrasts with the concept of a civil rights discourse

48 that would still identify such rights as private and individual goods granted by the state to which one surrenders natural sovereignty. Like the EZLN, Occupy does take aim at the concept of citizen rights. The movement challenges the naturalized concept of liberal individualism. Indeed the date of the beginning of the protests was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. The performative challenge to the legitimacy of the rule of the state, however, would seize on a newer symbol of the contradictions: corporate personhood. For Occupy, the most consistent emblem of the contradictions inherent in the immunized state is embodied in the 2010 legal cases of Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow.org v. FEC, which allowed for the creation of Super PACs, organizations that that could receive unlimited monetary donations from corporations, unions, and other groups to be spent in nearly unlimited ways, the only restriction being direct contribution and collusion with political candidates. These legal rulings established the ability for corporations to effectively run shadow campaigns in order to further their own political interests on the grounds that money and speech were equivalent. One of the many slogans of the Occupy movement, “I’ll believe that corporations are persons when Texas executes one” (Block and Witt 2011) cites and repeats the contradictory nature of the societal bond: human beings submit to a state that has the sovereign right to end their lives through a variety of means (execution, confinement, war, etc.) all in the name of the primacy of the individual. Meanwhile, corporate entities are being granted rights inherent to dignity and self- determination but suffer none of the burden that the non-identical human must shoulder. This conferrence of the right to political speech onto corporations reveals the naturalness of human rights as not self-evident but as constructed and ideological.

These subversive invocations of the ideological underpinnings of power make visible the operation of what Étienne Balibar calls the Nation Form. Balibar notes the operation of parallel ideologies of individuality in the conceptions of nation and identity. Just as the individual subject is assumed to be independent, rational, and possessed of agency, the production of a national personality appears as the culmination of a narrative of destiny fulfilment and progress. Balibar, however, argues that such an ideology is in fact a two-fold retrospective illusion:

It consists in believing that the generations which succeed one another over centuries on an approximately stable territory, under an approximately univocal designation, have handed down to each other an invariant substance. And it consists in believing that the process of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as to see

ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only one possible, that it represented a destiny. (Balibar 1990, 338)

The ironic citational tactics of the EZLN and Occupy reach back to specific temporal nodes along the conceptually constrained path of history and destabilize the logic of inevitability, proposing instead that such moments, indeed all moments that have led up to the present one, are, as Balibar says “not a line of necessary evolution but a series of conjunctural relations” (Balibar 1990, 340) which have been imbued post hoc with a legitimizing sense of historical determinism. Such stances, whether the rebrand(ish)ing of historical revolution or the adoption of political disobedience interrupts the putative inexorability of naturalized state power.

1.8 Protest Finds its Voi(d)ce

Adriana Cavarero identifies within human expression the same tensions that subordinate an embodied human uniqueness to the universalizing discourse of liberal individualism. If, as is stated in Bauman and Esposito, that which is uniquely human, the communitarian drive that seeks to fulfill an originary lack through mutual congress with others, is thwarted by the framework of the immunized society, then a similar phenomenon operates at the level of discourse itself. Cavarero argues that the Western philosophical traditions eschew discussion of human uniqueness and plurality in favour of privileging metaphysical “fictitious entities” (man, subject, individual) who stand in metonymic representation of that which is specifically human. Cavarero argues that the voice, heralding human uniqueness, has long been omitted from philosophy on the grounds that "uniqueness is epistemologically inappropriate” (Cavarero 2005, 9). It proves to be politically inappropriate as well. The historical subordination of the voice to language or to the content of the utterance privileges cognition and thought, which are ultimately private and always already bound up within a totalizing system of signification, over the vocalization which exceeds thought and communicates ante-linguistically and unrepeatably the presence of a unique body.

Cavarero proposes a vocal ontology of uniqueness as a philosophy that upends the immunizing drive towards conceptualizing individuals as whole, sovereign, or self-fulfilling. A privileging of the human voice and its symbolic excess seems to provide a position from which to critique and destabilize the ideological assumptions that are foundational to the operation of a hegemony that

50 disperses collectivity and alienates the subaltern. In place of the totalizing politics of universalism which would elide the uniqueness of the speaking being, replacing it with a form of equivalent exchange between individuals, she offers instead a politics of mutual vulnerability, which she develops out of Emmanuel Lévinas’ distinctions between le Dire (the act of speaking) and le Dit (the content of both the utterance and the entire cultural history from whence it proceeds). The traditional subordination of le Dire to le Dit has served a metaphysical dehumanizing function which erases the irreducible specificity of the human in order to privilege “an intelligible order that represents, signifies, designates, duplicates, and organizes the objective order of beings” (Cavarero 2005, 29). The goal is to break down the conceptual borders between le Dire and le Dit and to foreground the nonidentical beings who communicate first and foremost, in the very act of speaking, their own “proximity that makes them responsible for one another” (Cavarero 2005, 29).

She sees this tendency most clearly expressed in the relationship between speech and the human voice itself. “The simple truth of the vocal, announced by voices without even the mediation of articulate speech, communicates the elementary givens of existence: uniqueness, relationality, sexual difference, and age - including the ‘change of voice’ that, especially in men, signals the onset of puberty” (Cavarero 2005, 8). In speech, the voice announces, prior to anything else, itself. It performs the fact of human plurality by its mere presence and its uniqueness inducts speakers into a relational bond at the level of the singular uniqueness inherent to each. It is extra- symbolic and as such, it becomes a fulcrum with which to overturn a politics that by necessity erases human plurality. It is, in McLuhan’s terms, cool insofar as it relies on a practical and participant relationship between interlocuters. The recongition of the voice stands in opposition to the hot content that is logos which, pre-filled as it is with certainty, “cannot include much empathy or participation at any time” (McLuhan 2001, 30). Cavarero affirms the primacy of vocalization and the consequent privileging of the concomitant human specificity it heralds as an act of subversion against the ontological frameworks that conceal it behind discursive simulacra. The Western philosophical tradition disavows the originary excess of the voice in favour of a totalizing conception of speech through a sleight of mind similar to that which substitutes non- conceptual human plurality with the fictitious conceptual entities “man” or “subject.” Consideration of the voice, always necessitating a vocalizing entity, implies the question of not just what is said, but who it is who is speaking. As such, the voice cannot conform to a

universalist notion of an individuality that blankets entire populations. From the instant of its invocation, the voice answers a question not-yet-asked: Who is speaking?

This communication of the symbolically excessive essence of the human makes of all speech a political act of relationality. “speech becomes political on account of the self-revelation of speakers who express and communicate their uniqueness through speaking - no matter the specific content of what is said” (Cavarero 2005, 190). The voice, originating in a speaker and dependent on a listener, is always relational. Cavarero proposes that the voice escapes the organizing frames of a politics which cannot account for—and a signifying system which cannot contain, the nonidentical speaking being. “The speakers are not political because of what they say, but because they say it to others who share an interactive space of reciprocal exposure. To speak to one another is to communicate to one another the unrepeatable uniqueness of each speaker” (Cavarero 2005, 190). The individuality that inheres within the human voice is not the Hobbesian subject of state power, but rather an evacuation of such organizing categories altogether. Its meaning cannot be rationalized nor can it be contained and so it must be omitted in order for the hegemonic universalist political frame to cohere. The voice, always originating from one who speaks and always destined toward a listener is, as Voloshinov said of the word, a bridge, not between subject and object, but between a multitude of subjects who rely on each other to manifest and make intelligible their humanity. The bridge crosses a void between subjects, it fulfills a lack of the sort Esposito proposes ties communities together, providing an interrelational bond.

The interrelationality inherent in the voice offers a radical politics that rejects not only the universalizing tendency of liberal politics endemic to globalization but also what Cavarero sees as the potential for a reactionary, fundamentalist, nationalism found within many more localized politics. For Cavarero these two political frames are not opposites, but rather feed each other: “The identity that is denied by the deterritorializing process of the global is thus rediscovered in a mythologization of the territorial history of local communities […] pockets of identity that assert their identity in an exclusive way, through ethnic cleansing and so forth” (Cavarero 2005, 203). Her project, then, founded on the vocal ontology of uniqueness is to “bring about a revolutionary perspective - or, rather, to challenge the identificatory pretenses of the local, rather than counting on the universalizing promises of the global” (Cavarero 2005, 204). The relational politics that arise from her theory of the voice considered within the context of globalization

52 produces a new political space, a deterritorialized local she terms “the absolute local” (Cavarero 2005, 204).

The absolute local, rather than being a specific place, is instead used to describe the space that is opened up by relational political practice. It is absolute insofar as it is manifest anywhere and anytime such politics are being practiced, regardless of whether the political actors are situated at different sites or even in different countries. The space of the absolute local becomes experiential insofar as, responding to the globalization of power and hegemony, it is produced in the interstices between political actors who, in speaking and interacting, engage in a practice of not simply expressing the content of their demands but their shared humanity. Such a political space is always “here” and “now.” Politics, says Cavarero, “takes place, but it is not a place” (Cavarero 2005, 204).

This interrelational politics of vulnerability, privileging the human voice, is visible in the political practice of the EZLN. From the very first day of the insurgency, in an interview with La Jornada, Subcomandante Marcos foreshadows Cavarero’s theory:

Even though you happen to be listening to me now because I am here, in other places others, masked in the same way, are talking. This masked person today is called Marcos here and tomorrow will be called Pedro in Margaritas or José in Ocosingo or Alfredo in Altamirano or whatever he is called. Finally, the one who speaks is a more collective heart, not a caudillo. That is what I want you to understand, not a caudillo in the old style, in that image. The only image that you will have is that those who make this happen are masked. And the time will come when the people will realize that it is enough to have dignity and put on a mask and say: Well then, I can do this too, and I do not need to be of a particular physique. (Marcos 2009, 209)

Marcos describes the absolute localism of the insurgency, indicating how the sites of struggle change and how each space is taken by a different speaker, each with their own name, and each speaking with their own voice. He describes his compatriots, not by what they are, but by who, by their names. Indeed, this embodied, political voice, a voice that expresses human uniqueness is prolific throughout the Zapatista communiques, often presented through the metaphor of “the wind from below” (Zapatistas! 1994, 29). Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds is one of the earliest written communiques, predating the 1994 insurgency by a year and a half, but it was never released until late January of 1994. The bulk of the essay lays out a number of economic and social problems experienced by the Chiapas indigenous such as squalid living conditions, dispossession at the hands of both the government and large corporations, and restrictions against

53 finding autonomous means of access to vital resources such as water. It also establishes the notion of the wind as foundational to political struggle. Marcos writes of the "wind from above,” which he likens to the voices and rhetoric of corporate and state repression and he presents the Zapatista resistance as an alternative voice, one of hope, but a hope born out of intense privation. I quote him at length:

Not everyone hears the voices of hopelessness and conformity. […]They can't hear; they are deafened by the crying and blood that death and poverty are shouting in their ears. But, when there is a moment of rest, they hear another voice. They don't hear the voice that comes from above; they hear the voice that is carried to them by the wind from below, a voice that is born in the Indigenous heart of the mountains. This voice speaks to them about justice and freedom, it speaks to them about socialism, about hope...the only hope that exists in the world. The oldest of the old in the Indigenous communities say that there once was a man named Zapata who rose up with his people and sang out, “Land and Freedom!” These old campesinos say that Zapata didn't die, that he must return. These old campesinos also say that the wind and the rain and the sun tell the campesinos when to cultivate the land, when to plant and when to harvest. They say that hope is also planted and harvested. They also say that the wind and the rain and the sun are now saying something different: that with so much poverty, the time has come to harvest rebellion instead of death. That is what the old campesinos say. The powerful don't hear; they can't hear, they are deafened by the brutality that the Empire shouts in their ears. “Zapata,” insists the wind, the wind from below, our wind. (Zapatistas! 1994, 32)

It is important here the way Marcos intertwines the voice and the wind, moving back and forth between the politics of resistance and the importance of the land and its resources. Both the wind as an element of nature and the wind as revolutionary speech are essential to the lives of the Indigenous people in Chiapas. Likewise, the voice is necessary, whether as the expression of life and hope, or as a part of cultural renewal. These concepts, tied together and to a relationship with the land on which they rely for their existence, predicts a kind of politics of the absolute local. As the essay goes on, it becomes clear that the land and the space of resistance are indeed deterritorialized and are called into being as a result of political practice. Marcos challenges the notion of a strictly local rebellion, stating that “It has mistakenly been said that the Chiapas rebellion has no counterpart, that it is outside the national experience. This is a lie. The exploited Chiapaneco's specialty is the same as that of exploited people from Durango, Veracruz, or the plateau of northern Mexico: to fight and to lose” (Zapatistas! 1994, 33). The Zapatista struggle involves land, but is not a place. It takes place. This early conception of a proto-“absolute local” would be extended by the EZLN over many years, ultimately finding expression in 2005 with a

54 new tactic called The Other Campaign during which the EZLN extended its project worldwide. The Other Campaign was announced in 2005 through The 6th Declaration from the Lacondón Jungle which contains an important passage with regards to the Zapatistas’ political practice and the invocation of Cavarero’s absolute local. The Other Campaign extends the struggle against oppression to a global scale, both as a recognition that the economic forces that hold sway over the Mexican government extend far beyond Mexico's borders, but also in recognition of the common struggle of a multitude of voices worldwide. As such, the EZLN, more than simply using their networks to project their communications outwards, seek to steward a resistance movement that can take in multiple “heres” and “nows.” Among the 6th Declaration’s announcements of common struggle with other oppressed groups, there is a brief passage outlining the promise of sending material aid in the form of supplies, clothing, and coffee to other groups. These supplies are intended to support the groups in various ways and the passage remarks: “and perhaps we'll also send some organic coffee from the Zapatista cooperatives, so that they can sell it and get a little money for their struggle. And, if it isn't sold, then they can always have a little cup of coffee and talk about the anti-neoliberal struggle, and if it's a bit cold then they can cover themselves up with the Zapatista bordados” (EZLN Sixth Declaration). The passage, though it makes no reference to the kinds of theoretical axioms present in Cavarero's philosophy, enacts the notion of the absolute local, taking a moment to pay heed to the human element of political struggle and to the subversive potential that can be found even in a conversation over a cup of coffee. This axiomatic conception of human plurality embedded within the ideology known as Zapatismo deterritorializes political resistance, recognizing the unique character of individual struggles while promoting dignity and respect between actors. As Marcos defines Zapatismo, rather than being a political ideology: “It is […] an intuition. Something so open and flexible that it really occurs in all places. Zapatismo poses the question: ‘What is it that has excluded me? What is it that has isolated me? In each place the response is different. Zapatismo simply states the question and stipulates that the response is plural, that the response is inclusive” (Marcos and Ponce de Leon 2002, 440). This pluralist inclusivity that recognizes the specificity of particular struggles while enjoining participants to give voice to their presence produces the political space of resistance. It is global in scope, but as Cavarero puts it, “freed of the territoriality of place and from every dimension that roots it in a continuity […] it extends as far as the interactive space that is generated by reciprocal communication. It is a relational space that happens with the event of this communication and, together with it,

disappears. The place and the duration are contingent and unforseeable” (Cavarero 2005, 204). The contingency and unforseeability of the movement make of it an Althusserian encounter.

According to the EZLN General Command:

Zapatismo is not a new political ideology or a rehash of old ideologies. Zapatismo is nothing, it doesn't exist. It only serves as a bridge, to cross from one side to the other. So everyone fits within Zapatismo, everyone who wants to cross from one side to the other. Everyone has his or her own side and other side. There are no universal recipes, lines, strategies, tactics, laws, rules or slogans. There is only a desire: to build a better world, that is, a new world. (qtd. in Navarro 2004, 1)

The politics of the EZLN walk the line between the frameworks elaborated by Zygmunt Bauman in Community. Rather than make the choice between the frames of social justice or human rights, Zapatismo rejects the forced choice as one that is false. Instead of an enforced belonging to a given identity, the absolute local seeks to acknowledge the irreducible uniqueness that inheres in each. As Cavarero puts it:

Because it is faithful to the ontology of plurality, the local puts in play uniqueness without belongings and entrusts the sense of the relation to this alone. And this, in addition to evoking a passivity, implies first of all the preliminary activity of stripping ourselves of our […] being. What remains, because it was always there, is the question ‘who are you?’ addressed to the ‘you who are here.’ (Cavarero 2004, 1)

Put more succinctly, in the resounding slogan of the EZLN, the absolute local produces a world, “a world in which many worlds fit,” a liquid world.

This stripping away of one’s being, as Cavarero describes it, finds further performative achievement in the use of masks by the insurgents. Daniela Di Piramo is skeptical, however, that “the construction of the masked Subcomandante, an “empty signifier,” … can serve as a mirror to any of us” (Di Piramo 2011, 181). Di Piramo cites Slavoj Žižek’s criticism of Hugo Chavez as a “unique Leader whose function is to magically resolve the conflicting interests of those who support him” (Di Piramo 2011, 181). “Multitude in power,” says Žižek, “necessarily actualizes itself in the guise of an authoritarian leader whose charisma can serve as an ‘empty signifier’ able to contain the multitude of interests” (Zizek 2003, 131). Di Piramo charitably puts forward:

That Marcos attempts to avoid the hegemonizing effects of the universal and the grand narrative is blatantly obvious if we look at the construction of his persona as the

“faceless” Subcomandante, the empty signifier that is meant to replace the universal in order to allow pluralities. (Di Piramo 2011, 200)

Her concerns are that, citing Žižek, “an empty container, where the space is supposedly open for an irreducible plurality, instead of a totalizing homogenizing force […] could function in much the same way as in populist and in fascist movements” (Di Piramo 2011, 200-201). It is worth nothing here that, while Marcos is indeed masked, so too are all Zapatistas when they present themselves publicly. Moreover, as has been stated multiple times, while he arguably leads many aspects of the movement, Marcos remains a Sub-comandante who is answerable to the General Committee. Those errors aside, Di Piramo doesn’t account for a politics that eschews both a liberal universalism and a pluralist sense of local belonging, such as the ontology of uniqueness proposed by Cavarero. The interpretive frame provided by a politics vested in the absolute local sees the masked insurgent not as an empty signifier, but instead hears the flesh and blood voice that speaks from behind the mask revealing the presence of an evacuated signified. Di Piramo argues that “just as the mask does not succeed in its task of de-personalizing and de- universalizing (realistically this would probably be an impossibility), the written word cannot escape the demons of the universal” (Di Piramo 2011, 201). If the mask cannot depersonalize, then perhaps it is not its task to do so. Certainly, the mask serves the pragmatic function of protecting the civilian identities of the Zapatista insurgents, but this purpose, alongside the function that offers a voice prior to a face, only serves to further underscore the unique flesh and blood human making themselves known to those with which they speak. It is not the written word that here challenges “the demons of the universal,” but the embodied voice that heralds the absolute local and the alternative political order made possible within the space it creates: “And this wind from below, that of rebellion and dignity, is not just an answer to the wind from above. It is not just an angry response or the destruction of an unjust and arbitrary system. Rather it carries with it a new proposal, a hope of converting rebellion and dignity into freedom and dignity” (Marcos and Ponce de Leon 2002, 36).

Di Piramo makes prolific mention of the fact that much of Marcos’ political writings reference the more popular works of Louis Althusser, particularly with regards to his theories of ideology. As discussed earlier in this chapter, Althusser’s nascent concept of the encounter, as elaborated in his critique of El Nost Milan elucidates the revolutionary potential of a performance of resistant politics. There is, however, a connection to Althusser, revealed through the

consideration of Cavarero’s discussion of the voice, that is not frequently considered and which Di Piramo overlooks. Althusser’s theory of the aleatory encounter rests heavily on the concept of a void. This Althusserian void, invoked in the non-signifying voice that so preoccupies Cavarero, produces the space in which the politics of the absolute local may be manifest.

Althusser’s late structuralist critique is unique in its relationship to causality, proposing a series of aleatory conjunctures that are retrospectively imbued with a sense of determinacy. Such a philosophy attempts to distance itself from a totalizing view of structures as either cause or effect of a given whole, proposing instead that they are overdetermined, contingent, and immanent, as Andy Merrifield says: “diverse and often disparate elements encountering each other” (Merrifield 2013, 57). This sense of the immanent always just under the surface is the defining characteristic of Althusser’s aleatory philosophy, a tradition he traces in the work of Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida. The primary text from which this conception of the encounter is taken is The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter (1982). The manuscript, which was left unfinished and ultimately compiled, edited and translated by François Matheron, was motivated by Althusser’s split from the Parti communiste français (PCF) and became part of a project to promote the accomplishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, an aim that had been all but abandoned by the PCF. Althusser’s main thesis is that traditional teleologically-minded materialism has failed to escape being tied to rationalist idealism. Indeed, it is Althusser’s contention that the “underground” materialism of the encounter has historically “been repressed by the philosophical tradition […] interpreted, repressed and perverted into an idealism of freedom” (Althusser et al 2006, 168). Thus, as Cavarero sees the human voice as abraded by a philosophical tradition that cannot brook uniqueness, Althusser sees a philosophical tradition that relies on the maintenance of Western, rationalist, logocentric frameworks even when it purports to be at its most revolutionary. Like the twin narratives described in Althusser’s critique of El Nost Milan, the encounter is a meeting of disparate elements which, in an apparently paradoxical way, can only be said to exist after the dialectical moment in which they swerve together and converge, producing something new. Likening the encounter to the falling of raindrops, Althusser argues that: “the [rain] atoms’ very existence is due to nothing but the swerve and the encounter prior to which they led only a phantom existence” (Althusser et al 2006, 169). Thus, the encounter, through a seeming paradox, brings into being its constituent elements at the moment of conjuncture. Althusser’s philosophy

of the encounter rejects an ontology of historical necessity in favour of one that privileges contingency. The encounter might never take place in which case the elements that constitute it have no effect on the wider world like the alienated subjects of Bertolazzi’s play. However, as with the absolute local, the encounter may indeed take place and take hold, giving rise to new forms and new political and philosophical possibilities. The philosophy of the encounter, then, in the first place, serves as a destabilizing conception of the givenness of any present situation. It throws into question the inexorability of the present moment by challenging its grounding in an ideologically conceived necessity and instead demonstrating it as “haunted by a radical instability, which explains […] that laws can change […] at the drop of a hat, revealing the aleatory basis that sustains them” (Althusser et al 2006, 195).

If the encounter is to take place, then it must take space. Falling raindrops need room in which to converge. For Althusser, the space of the encounter is the void as illustrated by his reference to Machiavelli, who could only “create the conditions for a swerve,” (Althusser et al 2006, 171) namely the construction of the Italian state, from amid the disparity of atomized states. “It is in the political void that the encounter must come about, and that national unity must ‘take hold’. But this political void is first a philosophical void” (Althusser et al 2006, 173). Althusser here reveals that Machiavelli’s originary void can only exist after the fact. Its antecedence is contingent on the fact of a conjuncture that succeeds it. There can, after all, be no pre-Italian state without there being an Italian state for the political void to precede. The void, then, must be theorized into existence. The void-space that gives rise to political action therefore requires a clearing-out of old, instability-haunted ideologies that constrict thought and action. As Althusser puts it: “One reasons here not in terms of the necessity of the accomplished fact, but in terms of the contingency of the fact to be accomplished” (Althusser et al 2006, 174). This reliance on contingency and encounter, suggests that the space of resistance is not created for the “dialectic of the void” but perhaps out of a dialectic of the voice: in which a multitude of human beings, each deploying their voice in an act of ideological insubordination, generate the conditions for the absolute local.

Chapter 2 Autogestic Performance: Acts of Reoccupation and Cyber/Spatial Contestation 2.1 Introduction

During the night of June 28, 2017, the Bawating Water Protectors of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and five Indigenous students from Carleton University arrived on Parliament Hill to erect a tipi on the Hill grounds – land that remains unceded Algonquin territory. The group was initially met with resistance by police, with the construction of the tipi being blocked by the RCMP. Nine people were arrested, later released, and then prohibited from returning to Parliament Hill for six months. This specific act of spatial reoccupation was a singular piece of a much larger decentralized movement operating under the umbrella of UNsettling Canada 150 which sought to cast a critical eye towards the sesquicentennial celebrations of Canadian Confederation and to call attention to the asymmetrical relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. The Canada 150 celebrations, costing around a half-billion dollars, became a lightning rod for political resistance and critique, particularly in the context of the social and economic conditions of various Indigenous communities across Canada who continue to live with restricted access to clean water, health and suicide epidemics, poverty, and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

The following day, during a press conference held by the group Wabi’s Village: A Community of Hearts, which had intended to bring up the issue of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), Candace Day Neveau of the Bawating Water Protectors was addressed by CBC Reporter Julie Van Dusen who stated that “Most Canadians think that Justin Trudeau is making an effort. I gather you don’t feel what he’s doing is worthwhile” (NetNewsLedger). Neveau responded by calling attention to the recent disappearances and deaths of teenagers in Thunder Bay. Van Dusen’s response was to ask: “How can he be blamed for that?” (NetNewsLedger) which prompted Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail of Attawapiskat First Nation Reserve to respond angrily:

There has been 524 years of holistic genocide on Turtle Island […] and as far as how Justin Trudeau is doing: […] we’re asking the United Nations […] that charges of genocide, a war against humanity, war crimes, and a crime of aggression be laid because your Liberal Party was also responsible […] every party […] your every governance that

has been in power. There’s been a war conflict of Indian Residential School, 60s Scoop, Indian Dayschool, and Millenium Scoop. None of your governments have clean hands. All of your governments have blood on their hands. The moment we have our voice and our backbone you want to shut us down. […] You can’t take our truth. (NetNewsLedger)

Iahtail refused to answer the question and asked the reporter to leave. In protest, Van Dusen’s colleague from CTV News, Glen McGregor, then re-asked the same question in the face of the recriminations from the representatives of Wabi’s Village after which point the speakers ended the press conference and left the stage. The following day, the Tipi was moved to a spot near the main stage for the sesquicentennial celebrations and Prime Minister Trudeau’s visit to the Tipi was widely reported.

The spatial ethics at play in this confrontation are ones in which the Canadian state’s organization of land-as-property conflicts with the Bawating Water Protector’s engagement with land as the locus of complex and reciprocal relations and obligations. This is a conflict that resides at the heart of many contemporary struggles between colonized Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states as pointed out by Paul Nadasdy, who notes the incommensurability of settler state spatial frameworks and legal notions of aboriginal title with Indigenous understandings of common stewardship. This creates a paradox for addressing all Indigenous rights claims because since title, or property, is the legal basis for Indigenous rights then these must always be mobilized under a private property framework. As Nadasdy puts it: “to even engage in the process of negotiating a land claim agreement, First Nation people must translate their complex reciprocal relationship with land into the equally complex but very different language of ‘property’” (Nadasdy, 248). Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard cautions that the land-as-property framework has had an insidious effect on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and land, suggesting that:

one of the negative effects of this power-laden process of discursive translation has been a reorientation of the meaning of self-determination for many (but not all) Indigenous people in the North; a reorientation of Indigenous struggle from one that was deeply informed by land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations (grounded normativity), which in turn informed our critique of capitalism […] to a struggle that is now increasingly for land, understood now as material resource to be exploited in the capital accumulation process. (Coulthard, 78)

The chapter that follows considers the re-occupation of Parliament Hill not as claim to property, but rather as the invocation of an altogether different spatio-ethical framework. In considering

the tactical dramaturgies of spatial contestation and reoccupation, I begin with Glen Sean Coulthard’s analysis of settler colonialism and the politics of recognition and accommodation. Coulthard argues that not only are recognition politics insufficient for emancipatory politics, they obfuscate what he sees as the two primary modes of Indigenous oppression: territorial dispossession and colonial dominance. From Coulthard’s adoption of Marxist critiques of dispossession, I move onto discuss the work of Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theory of the State Mode of Production (SMP) identifies a “new” state form that is neither inherently capitalist nor socialist. I tie Lefebvre’s characterization of the SMP to Coulthard’s critique of the dispossession of Indigenous territory and I discuss the spatial ontology that Lefebvre attributes to the SMP. Lefebvre proposes autogestion as a theory of resistance that critically engages with the ideologies of the SMP in the name of autonomy. I discuss autogestion as an interruptive critical disposition that challenges spatial hierarchies. I then propose that, in the context of the performance of resistant political mobilizations, German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgy is applicable to Lefebvre’s theories of autogestion so as to provide a framework through which one can view the re-occupation of Parliament Hill. In my view, the performative re-occupation of Parliament Hill was an organized, direct, challenge to the spatial ontologies of the Canadian settler state, tactical hybrid of the ideas explored by both Brecht and Lefebvre: an autogestus. From there, I return to Adriana Cavarero’s notion of the absolute local, a reconceptualization of social spaces that are simultaneously local and global in order to consider Coulthard’s and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s arguments about Indigenous notions of space-based ethics. Simpson is skeptical of the use of Internet communications technologies by Idle No More activists. Her position is that an essential mode of Indigenous resistance, grounded normativity, is foreclosed by the use of digital communications technologies because they are disconnected from the land. I take up this criticism, not with an aim towards debunking Simpson’s argument, but only to offer an alternative view. The operation of what Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism” notwithstanding, I consider Lefebvre’s theory of the double illusion and Doreen Massey’s notion of a progressive sense of place to propose a reconsideration of Simpson’s argument on the grounds that Cyberspace is inescapably material and that, while it is certainly tied to capitalist production and exploitation, it also has the potential to reconceptualize space as a relational practice. I propose that the spatial ontology of Cyberspace shares much in common with the spatial relationships practiced in grounded normativity and Indigenous internationalism.

Finally, I consider the Zapatista resistance to the Mexican state in the context of “cybernetic” spatial ethics informed by the tenets of Indigenous internationalism.

2.2 Lefebvre & Brecht – Autogestus as Tactical Performance in Reoccupied Space

In Red Skin White Masks (2014), Glen Sean Coulthard argues that the structural domination imposed by settler colonialism is based on the double dispossession of Indigenous lands and political authority. It is for this reason that Coulthard looks skeptically at Indigenous political movements that mobilize around the politics of recognition and accommodation (Coulthard 25). Such a politics, in Coulthard’s estimation, leaves intact those structures of economic development that rely on and therefore produce economic exploitation and dispossession, substituting the conference or imposition of asymmetrical and nonreciprocal identities for forms of justice like self-governance and autonomy that necessarily require a dismantling or radical reconfiguration of the settler state and the political and economic machinery on which it relies. He notes a historical precedence for Indigenous activism in Canada that makes recourse to the politics of recognition which he argues has “emerged as the dominant expression of self- determination within the Aboriginal rights movement in Canada” (Coulthard 2). This privileging of recognition over transformative forms of justice has remained to the present day, in Coulthard’s view, the primary framework for conceptualizing possible articulations of Indigenous self-determination in Canada. He further argues that any attempts to reconcile Indigenous nationhood with settler-state sovereignty can’t help but remain “colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self- determining authority” (Coulthard 151) and so is doomed to forever be incapable of addressing the two problems of dispossession from land and political autonomy. His solution is to look towards Karl Marx’s theories on primitive accumulation and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial work.

Coulthard’s critique of the politics of recognition notwithstanding, he nonetheless notes three limiting characteristics within Marxian articulations of transformative redistributionary justice that make them insufficient for interrogating the relationships between Indigenous populations and settler-colonialist States: fixed temporality, teleological necessity, and the presumption of dispossession’s repressive or violent nature.

With regards to the fixed temporality of Marx’s theory, Coulthard notes that Marx envisions dispossession as a process that “inaugurated the accumulation process” (Coulthard 9) before fading into the background in order to then allow “the silent compulsion of economic relations” (Marx qtd. in Coulthard 9) to carry domination forward and that this silent compulsion remains obfuscated by the relations between capitalist and labourer. Dispossession, understood from this point of view, is a finite event that was accomplished at a set point in the past. One might, for instance, interpret the enclosure of the commons as a series of faits accomplis that have set in motion processes of accumulation by dispossession that are now enacted through capitalist relations. On the other hand, one might consider enclosure as one in a series of continuing acts of dispossession tied to contemporary issues such as the commodification of water, the violation of Indigenous treaties, or austerity measures that privatize public space. Coulthard argues that, in the age of neoliberalism, blatant acts of violent dispossession continue to manifest worldwide.

For his second critique, Coulthard takes issue with Marx’s characterization of primitive accumulation as both necessary and inevitable to the induction of colonized populations into history and their eventual development into participants in revolutionary socialism. His concern is to find a way to challenge the racist or Eurocentric justifications for the assimilation of colonial subjects on the grounds that “this assimilation will somehow magically redeem itself by bringing the fruits of capitalist modernity into the supposedly ‘backward’ world of the colonized” (Coulthard 11). This understanding of the inevitability of primitive accumulation erases the specificity of, for example, Indigenous practices and philosophies that may already reject capitalism by their very nature. With regards to this critique, Coulthard identifies in Marx’s later writings attempts to rectify his earlier position and to seek out avenues by which noncapitalist modes of production could inform anticapitalist politics.

Finally, Coulthard is dissatisfied with Marx’s formulation of the relationship between dispossession and accumulation as one that is primarily manifested in overt violence or force. His contention is that, particularly in Canada, “state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, liberal settler polities” (Coulthard 15). Indeed, Coulthard’s second critique illuminates the third insofar as colonial subjects can be called upon to participate in their own dispossession through putatively “voluntary” participation in development – the abandonment of traditional modes of life, the migration to urban centres, and the entrance into

colonialist capitalist-worker relations of production. Coulthard makes this point explicitly when he points to the Canadian government’s policy of “cede, release, surrender” of Indigenous rights and title as a prerequisite to the resolution of land-claims as a means “to facilitate the ‘incorporation’ of Indigenous people and territories into the capitalist mode of production and to ensure that alternative ‘socioeconomic visions’ do not threaten the desired functioning of the market economy (Coulthard 66).

The ravages of capitalism notwithstanding, Coulthard’s second critique of Marx explicitly challenges the notion that the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler-state is wholly a problem of capitalism. The inducement that frames colonization has and continues to be, in his estimation, not the proletarianization of Indigenous people, but their dispossession from the land (Coulthard 13). Thus, Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production is, while necessary, insufficient to the task of analyzing the colonialist mode of production as evidenced in Pyotr Kropotkin’s warnings about Soviet Imperialism and its potential to result in “socialist primitive accumulation” (Kropotkin qtd. in Coulthard 12). It is with this particular critique in mind that I want to consider the work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who developed two related theories that may open up the limits of Marx’s thinking and provide additional inroads to critiquing the settler-colonialist state: The State Mode of Production (SMP) and autogestion.

Henri Lefebvre was born in 1901 and over the course of his 90 year life he was witness and contributor to numerous 20th century social, intellectual, and political movements writing prolifically on such topics as space (The Production of Space, 1974), the urban (The Urban Revolution, 1970), Marxism (Dialectical Materialism, 1940), state theory (De L’État, 1976- 1978), and everyday life (The Critique of Everyday Life, 1947-1981) among many others. Lefebvre joined the French Communist Party in the 1920’s and became actively involved in writing party theory. He came to eschew considerations of economic determinism in favour of focusing on alienation, particularly its relationship to everyday life and the application of dialectical materialism to analyses of the quotidian. Thoroughly anti-dogmatic in his approach to Marxism, he was driven out of the PCF in the mid-1950s in-part due to his growing agitation against Stalinism. Lefebvre’s Marxism was influenced by his lifelong involvement with artists and activists. Throughout his life, he would associate himself with Surrealists and Dadaists as well as Guy Debord and members of what would eventually become the Situationist International. The May 1968 revolution had a profound impact on his work and led him to write

one of his most celebrated works, The Production of Space, which sought to elucidate the relationship between space and capitalism by showing “how space serves, and how hegemony makes use of it” (Lefebvre, 2012 11). Lefebvre’s body of work is substantial, but its adoption in English circles has been somewhat uneven. Many of his works were never translated into English or have only been partially so and some of his most influential texts, such as all four volumes of De L’État (“On/Of the State”) have long been out of print in any language. Lefebvre’s areas of inquiry are extremely varied and widespread.

The State Mode of Production is Lefebvre’s theory against the vicissitudes of both the Stalinist state and liberal democracies as giving rise to what he referred to as “a new state form” (Lefebvre, 2009 124) in which the state would take control of and administer economic and industrial development and growth. This explosion of the administrative apparatus has resulted in a “qualitative transformation” (Lefebvre, 2009 129) of the state. For Lefebvre, the SMP was not a distinctly capitalist phenomenon and he is explicit in mentioning that the SMP can manifest itself in almost any country. As Lefebvre says: “Le personnel politique dans le socialism d’Etat y entre aussi bien et pour les mêmes raisons que le personnel homologue dans le capitalisme d’Etat.” (“The politicians in a socialist state can just as easily and for the same reasons enter into the SMP as may their capitalist state counterparts”) (Lefebvre 1977 196). Indeed, Lefebvre argues that the originator of the SMP was in fact Joseph Stalin and that a radically altered version of it has since been established in social-democratic countries, particularly in Northern Europe. This latest liberal-democratic iteration of the SMP is the “new” state form to which Lefebvre refers. He characterizes it as having sold-out many of the hallmarks liberalism (individual liberty, autonomy, democratic enfranchisement) in favour of a kind of reformism that only slightly blunts the harsh edge of the expropriation of labour while keeping the capitalist frameworks and hierarchies intact. In order to accomplish this, the bureaucratic state apparatus had to be expanded. Lefebvre takes this approach to task, referring to it as a “simulacrum of decentralization,” a class compromise which appropriates surplus labour value in the name of various social programs and then “pretends to redistribute power while in fact only tasks are actually dealt out. A strongly constituted State does not easily give up its diverse powers, which are in turn guaranteed by the institutions that it coordinates and dominates” (Lefebvre, 2009 128- 129). Thus, the SMP effectively depoliticizes the social-democratic strategies for dealing with capitalist accumulation and then binds them to the bureaucracy of the state itself, intertwining the

political projects of European democratic-socialism with the state’s self-constitution and rejuvenation. Lefebvre sees the SMP as the unavoidable outcome of all states which must find means to maintain and perpetuate themselves. He breaks down the functional dimensions of the SMP into a trinity that mirror’s Coulthard’s critique of Marxism: Managerialism, Securitization, and the monopoly on violence (Lefebvre, 2009 129). Thus, where Coulthard notes the operation of colonialist violence in the name of dispossession, Lefebvre points to the state's use of domestic repression and mobilizations towards foreign wars. With regards to the Marxist assumption of the machinery of colonialism abrading difference in the name of progress and development, Lefebvre underscores the homogenizing function of the state’s managerial and administrative apparatus. Finally, where Coulthard brings up the notion of consent as a mechanism of assimilation, Lefebvre points to the mobilization of securitization and social protection wherein the state’s all-embracing power acts as an aegis against vulnerability and precarity. It is in this way that Lefebvre argues the state “reproduces itself in reproducing the relations of domination” (Lefebvre, 2009 130).

Scholars of Lefebvre frequently characterize his theory of the SMP as prescient of the rise of neoliberalism. Indeed, Neil Brenner argues that in the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher era, the state’s redistributive function was clawed back alongside a growth in the state’s administrative and managerial roles as the nursemaid of capital. Says Brenner, “we may currently be witnessing the emergence of a historically new form of the SMP in which the state’s function as an agent for the commodification of its territory […] has acquired an unprecedented supremacy over other regulatory operations within the state’s institutional architecture” (Goonewardena et al 243). Andy Merrifield suggests that in wake of the diverse anti-globalization movements of the 1990s SMP orthodoxy has proliferated to such a degree that “the dialectical link between space and politics seems to have receded behind the blanket category of economic globalization […] It’s the economy, state, and civil society all rolled into one” (Merrifield 126). In the years subsequent to the 1990s, the SMP has managed to insinuate itself so fully into the political landscape that, as Stuart Elden notes, contemporary political discourse has been co-opted such that “the debate is of how to promote capitalist growth, rather than a challenge to what capitalism is and should be about – even for the Left” (Elden 225).

Merrifield’s contention that the SMP has precipitated an erosion of the links between space and politics is particularly important in the context of Coulthard’s insistence on the necessity of land

for the settler-colonialist project. He conceptualizes land as not only the contested material of Indigenous anticolonialism and anticapitalism, but he underscores the importance of this struggle as one which considers “the land as system of reciprocal relations and obligations” (Coulthard 13). One of Lefebvre’s most significant contributions to state theory is his analysis of the reciprocally constitutive relationship between the state and space. Lefebvre identifies three spatial “moments” (Lefebvre, 2009 224-225) of convergence between state and space: In the first place, there is physical/material space, the “national territory” that is “produced” insofar as it is brought under the sway of technocratic administration and management and which in turn produces the state by virtue of its existence as the physical and material resources it provides. Lefebvre’s second spatial moment is the “social space” that artificially perpetuates institutional hierarchies which are legitimized by a national language. If material space is the territory that the state has, then social space is the space that the state is. Social space carries with it the entirety of permissions and prohibitions that accompany behavior within space. Finally, Lefebvre completes the triad with the concept of “mental space.” Neither the physical space of territory, nor the social space of state institutions, this third space which remains inherently tied to the previous two is a space of representations of the state that are constructed and imbued with meaning both officially and by individual citizens.

In the context of anti-colonial reoccupations, it becomes evident how these three spatial moments become tied to acts of spatial contestation in which a claim is staked on a given (material) territory which falls under a given (social) political administrative authority, often on the grounds that the space’s (mental) importance and meaning are tied to nationalist or group identifications with that space. State space, then, takes on multiple characteristics and functions in the administration of social relations: It is an object of consumption, a means of production, and an essential political instrument insofar as Lefebvre says: “The state uses space in such a way that it ensures its control of places, its strict hierarchy, the homogeneity of the whole, and the segregation of the parts. It is thus an administratively controlled and even a policed space” (Lefebvre, 2009 188). Invoking the contradiction of state space as both homogeneous and segregated reveals its shifting nature within an anticolonial context: it is homogeneous insofar as it falls under the dominion of political centrality and is conceived as a fixed whole while it is also segregated, fragmented, through relative hierarchic distributions of (social, economic, cultural) centres and peripheries. State space, then, is itself structured under a colonialist framework. As

Coulthard says of land, state space is constituted by and in turn constitutes a system of relations and obligations, but it does so by first consolidating material, mental, and social space through the reproduction of the social relations of production while also ideologically maintaining these three spatial moments as distinct from and independent of each other. Finally, through its organizational logics, it subordinates disparate classes and groups into acting as agents of reproduction. The space of the SMP negates alternative conceptions of space. It naturalizes and depoliticizes colonialist occupations of space.

Lefebvre’s response to the SMP is to introduce the practice of autogestion as a practical means of countering the consolidation of state space. Not quite a complete panacea in its own right, the concept is more of a critical disposition towards state power over space. The term has no direct English translation, although scholars have variously translated it as “self-management” (Butler 82), “radical grassroots democracy” (Brenner and Elden 4), participatory democracy (Merrifield 175), and “self-organization.” (Shields 108) The term encompasses all of these concepts to a certain degree, but it should not be confused with administration under the SMP or with co- management, the reformist production of lower-order managerial classes, a configuration which Lefebvre repudiates altogether.

What is of primary importance in autogestion is that it is a social practice that seeks to dialectically negate the state-imposed hierarchies through the peoples’ seizing control of their own conditions of existence. Lefebvre therefore characterizes it as a conflictual practice or an ongoing struggle rather than a static end-goal. It is decidedly anti-statist insofar as Lefebvre says of the State of autogestion that it “can only be a State that is withering away” (Lefebvre, 2009 150) and that its only true end goal can be achieved “by means of the activity of the base: spatial (territorial) autogestion, direct democracy and democratic control, affirmation of the differences produced in and through that struggle” (Lefebvre, 2009 251). It is a process deeply fraught with conflict and contradiction, seeking to challenge the naturalized hegemony imposed by the SMP. It reveals the contradictions within the SMP’s simultaneously homogenizing bureaucracies and its atomizing relationships to accumulation and dispossession through a dialectically engaged practice. Lefebvre sees within autogestion an anticolonialist project, and he identified within the Algerian Revolution elements of this reclamation and redefinition of space and a rejection of the top-down imposition of spatial hierarchies. As Lefebvre himself says: “Autogestion throws into question society as a whole and the apparatuses that were inherited from the colonial era, or that

were established at the time of independence” (Lefebvre, 2009 145). The violent and antidemocratic legacy of the Algerian Revolution stands as an important reminder of the danger of considering autogestion as an action that, once taken and accomplished, yields a final utopia. Rather, this is a perpetual process that must be performed, rehearsed, practiced, and negotiated in perpetuity. It is a constant dialectical practice in which alternative conceptualizations of space, power, and governance are superimposed on the state’s space and political apparatus in order to force contradictions and tensions into visibility and to challenge the relations between “the rulers and the ruled, the active and passive, subjects and objects” (Elden 227).

Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion provides little in the way of concrete, actionable tactics. It is, as stated above, primarily articulated as the taking up of an attitude or disposition of skepticism and resistance towards prevailing spatial power structures. As such, it can seem difficult to transform Lefebvre’s ideas from objects of theoretical inquiry into concrete tactical interventions. This is certainly by design. Lefebvre, after all, was not interested in providing a universalized toolkit to hand to activists and which could be applied and enacted without consideration of the specificity of a given situation. The recognition of difference – in ideas, in individual situations, in social conditions, etc. – is of paramount importance to Lefebvre’s project. Moreover, it is the clash of competing ideologies, the dialectical confrontations between diverse actors and their relationships to the state, between different constructions of space, and the negotiation of oppositional modes of life that imbues autogestion with its emancipatory potential. The struggle is not only a characteristic of the process, it is a necessary condition of its politics. Given the fluid, contingent character of autogestion, as well as Lefebvre’s unwillingness to concretely or exhaustively systematize the concept or its processes, discussion of the ways the tactic may be executed can be difficult. In the context of performance, particularly organized public displays of resistant politics, the dramaturgical work of Bertolt Brecht may provide, if not anything approximating a formal “how-to” manual, some insights into how such concepts may be put into practice.

In many ways, what Lefebvre was with regards to the philosophy of space and theories of the state, Brecht was to the realm of Modern drama. Born in 1898 in Augsburg, Bavaria, Brecht would come to be one of the most influential and prolific dramatists of the 20th Century. Working variously throughout his life as a playwright, director, poet, critic, and theorist, upon his death in 1956 he left behind an enormous oeuvre. He began studying Marx in the 1920s,

70 which profoundly influenced his theoretical work. His primary concerns throughout his dramaturgical theory consistently revolves around questions of how one stages politics in general and emancipatory, revolutionary politics in particular. Like Lefebvre, Brecht’s relationship to prevailing communism was fraught with controversy. He famously never joined the East German Communist Party and many of his writings were deeply critical of the Weimar state. In the 1930s, he was engaged in a vehement and protracted debate with György Lukács over radical socialist aesthetics. Brecht’s own aesthetic was deeply experimental and eclectic. Still, in spite of his ubiquity and his success, Brecht has frequently been misinterpreted, misappropriated, and misunderstood in the English-speaking world so much so that Brecht scholar David Barnett characterizes the adjective “Brechtian” as being “frequently meaningless and at worst misleading” (Barnett 2). The popular misunderstandings of Brecht’s dramaturgy tend to be centered around two poles: aesthetic misappropriation and translation.

With regards to the first case, Brecht’s Epic Theatre practice is often interpreted as an aesthetic choice and so there is often an assumption that duplicating the form of Brecht’s work will necessarily duplicate its effects. The goal of the Epic Theatre is to amplify social contradictions such that audiences can be induced to take up a critical disposition towards the social conditions presented on the stage and to then extrapolate this process to larger society. With an eye towards that aim, Brecht makes use of a number of aesthetic techniques that work counter to Aristotelian- inspired forms of conventionally realist drama – audiences may be lighted along with the stage, montage is used to fragment the narrative thereby producing an episodic structure to the performance, set designs tend to be non-realistic, and projections and placards similar in style to the intertitles of silent film are used to situate the context of a scene. These techniques are employed by Brecht to downplay the illusory nature of the theatre and to make evident the constructedness of the action on the stage. This is not simply an aesthetic choice, but a political one that seeks to foreground the naturalized reality of everyday life and confront spectators with a world that is contingent and changeable. Many practitioners, however, can make use of ostensibly Brechtian techniques without necessarily employing any kind of political thrust behind them.

Secondly, with regards to translation, there has been much confusion regarding what Brecht called the Verfremdungseffekt. The most influential translation of Brecht’s writings on the theatre was also one of the earliest and it had a profound effect on Brecht scholarship in English. In

1964, John Willett collected and translated a selection of Brecht’s writings for the book Brecht on Theatre, a volume that has since become one of the most important resources for Brecht scholarship in English. At the time, Willett translated what Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt as the “alienation effect” which gave the impression that Brecht’s theatre was supposed to alienate its audiences. The term is more closely related to the process by which the familiar is made strange but this characterization has long plagued understandings of Brecht’s work as “slow, ponderous, didactic” (Barnett 2). As is the case with autogestion, there is no direct English translation of this term and so I will be using it untranslated.

The Verfremdungseffekt is a neologism coined by Brecht and it is one of the primary components of Brecht’s dramaturgy alongside the use of historicization (Brecht 240) and experimentation. These techniques combine to create a theatrical practice that illustrates history as a process, that shows the world as changeable, and that challenges the notion of essential human nature. All of these techniques stand in dialectical tension with the until-then more traditional theatrical practice of presenting dramatic events as closed off from history, current social conditions as natural, and human beings as independent and bounded. Brecht says of his use of Verfremdungseffekt that: “The new kinds of Verfremdung were supposed to remove only from those incidents that can be influenced socially by the stamp of familiarity that protects them against intervention today” (Brecht Organon 43 242). Verfremdungseffekt brings together aesthetic and political critiques of art. Brecht’s primary objection to the so-called realist models of aesthetic representation is that such forms are far from being realistic at all since, in the aim towards mimicking surface reality, they necessarily leave out any consideration of history and material conditions. Brecht argues that it is Epic Theatre that is in fact the truly realistic aesthetic because unlike Socialist Realism or Naturalism, Epic Theatre seeks to reveal rather than obfuscate or ignore the underlying social and political realities that produce the conditions of everyday life. As he says in Realism and the Proletariat:

Realistic means: revealing the causal complex of society/unmasking the ruling viewpoints as the viewpoints of the rulers/writing from the standpoint of the class that has in readiness the broadest solutions for the most urgent difficulties besetting human society/emphasizing the factor of development/concretely and making it possible to abstract. (Brecht 203)

The importance of abstraction for Brecht is that it allows anything that is socially significant to be repeated in performance, only in a manner that amplifies contradiction and invites critical

72 scrutiny. It is important to acknowledge here that, politically motivated though it may be, Brecht’s dramaturgy is first and foremost a theatrical intervention. As such, it may seem counterintuitive to make use of theories meant to be applied within an organized, produced, and theatrical setting in order to interrogate the “real world.” This caution notwithstanding, much of what Brecht strives to create through his dramaturgical practice seems to me applicable to the interruption of narratives of all kinds whether they be theatrical or ideological. Moreover, in combining Lefebvre’s autogestion with Brecht’s dramaturgical work, in the context of organized, produced, and performed acts of resistance, the horizon of dialectical critique can be moved beyond aesthetics, production, and everyday life. Brecht himself seems to have promoted the idea that his dramaturgy functions at least in-part outside of the confines a strictly defined Epic Theatre. Recalling a conversation with Brecht, Walter Benjamin says: “Brecht talks about epic theatre, and mentions plays acted by children in which faults of performance, operating as alienation effects, impart epic characteristics to the production. Something similar may occur in third-rate provincial theatre” (Benjamin 115). This seems consistent with the idea that what is of primary importance to these theories is not the level of production, so much as it is that “the interrupting of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theatre” (Benjamin 3). It is also worth noting that, like with Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion, Brecht’s dramatic theory is highly skeptical of systems. Describing Brecht’s aphoristic Me-ti texts, Anthony Tatlow says:

Occasionalist in character, they deal with recurring topics, though these are not systematically structured. Indeed, one of the ‘subtle’ themes that runs through the texts is the inherent danger of believing in systems. When no longer challenged by experience, practice ceases to innovate. Then, as one text suggests, experience is replaced by pre- established ‘judgements.’ Such judgements are determined by ideological belief. Professional administrators construct bureaucracies of thought, whose primary interest lies in preserving their own position to the detriment of individual and innovative producers. (Tatlow 10)

Put more succinctly, Water Benjamin says in his second draft of What is Epic Theatre?: “The task of epic theatre, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. But ‘represent’ does not here signify ‘reproduce’ in the sense used by the theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions. […] by processes being interrupted” (Benjamin, 18). Thus, Brecht’s dramaturgy is not developed to describe a template to be dropped arbitrarily onto a given performance, but it is in fact, as he says, “a continual process of abstraction” (Brecht 195). Barnett qualifies Brecht’s Epic Theatre as follows: “A

dialectical theatre is one in which awareness is raised, in both the theatre-makers and the spectators. … [Brecht] designed his dialectical theatre in order to generate critical spectators, who would then take their insights into the workings of individuals and society on stage back into their everyday lives” (Barnett 36). If autogestion is the dialectical negation of the illusory economic, social, and political hierarchies of the state, then Brechtian theory may provide possible tactics by which to produce “intervals […] which tend to destroy illusion” (Benjamin 21) whether that illusion be a naturalistic stage narrative or hegemonic assumptions about space, its production and the question of who may occupy it.

Autogestion is a reassertion of the real social relations that have been obfuscated by ideologies of the national, social, and mental spaces generated by the SMP. It operates by engaging with the concretized, naturalized spaces of the SMP and showing them to already be abstractions of capital and colonialism. The abstracting process of the Verfremdungseffekt operates similarly at the level of socially significant action – it reframes human activity as abstract in order to make visible the hidden material conditions that give rise to it. It is, after all, only after the constitutive structures of human activity and social relations are made visible that they can be criticized and, ultimately, changed. It is towards this end that Brecht makes use of the technique he calls Gestus, “the entire complex of diverse, individual gestures, combined with utterances, that forms the basis of a discrete human incident and relates to the overall attitude of all those taking part in the incident” (Brecht 272). Another neologism, Brecht uses this term to describe the performer’s use of physicality in a way that frames behaviour as not born out of “human nature,” but out of humans’ relationships to each other and to the state. Gestus allows the actor to amplify those features of social behaviour and identity that are, as Brecht says, socially significant: “The work process is not an example of a Gestus unless it shows a social relationship such as exploitation or cooperation” (Brecht 272). Mark Silberman says that “Gestus describes a procedure that connects theater event, society, and audience by making actions observable, pointing to the structurally defining causes behind them, and enabling social critique” (Silberman 319). Like Lefebvre, Brecht sees the expression of such attitudes and relations as highly complicated. It is not sufficient to say that one is alienated; alienation must be concretized by abstracting, framing, and denaturalizing the unquestioned assumptions that produce alienation and oppression in the first place. It is important to consider that Gestus is, like autogestion, a perpetual practice. Gestic techniques that work to frame a specific behaviour or series of relations may need to be adapted,

74 modified, or discarded altogether when dealing with another. Brecht is extremely wary of any kind of easy fix when it comes to incorporating Gestus in performance and while he is undoubtedly developing an aesthetic practice, a revolutionary aesthetics divorced from revolutionary politics would be worthless for his project of changing the world in which he lived: “Stylization is not the intent. In stylization gestures and inflections ‘mean something’ (fear, pride, pity and so on). Gestus produced through this kind of stylization causes the flow of actions and reactions to dissolve into a series of fixed symbols” (Brecht 166). It is a sentiment that Lefebvre shares explicitly: “Our cultural revolution cannot be envisaged as aesthetic; it is not a revolution based on culture, neither is culture its aim or its motive […] The objective and directive of our cultural revolution is to create a culture that is not an institution but a style of life; its basic distinction is the realization of philosophy in the spirit of philosophy” (Lefebvre, 1971 203). The similarities between and complementarity of these two philosophies leads me to consider the confrontation of the Bawating Water Protectors as the deployment of an Autogestion/Gestus hybrid, an autogestus.

First of all, it is worth noting that while much of the subsequent discussion around the “Parliament Hill Tipi” characterized the act as a “protest,” the individuals representing the action at the press conference on June 29 were adamant that this was not an act of protest, but a ceremony (NetNewsLedger). That said, the event itself was inescapably an act of spatial contestation, it was highly performative both at the level of ritual and for the simple fact that it attracted an enormous audience. As an act of spatial reoccupation, the erection of the tipi is a performative superimposition of an alternatively conceptualized, decolonized space onto the settler-state space and it challenges the operation of the abstracted spaces of the SMP at all three of the spatial levels Lefebvre identifies. At the level of the socio-spatial relations of national territory, the Water Protectors could not have chosen a more apt location than the literal space from which the governance, regulation, and administration of colonized spaces is issued. As a gestic performance, the tipi is an indictment of the politics of recognition pushed by the Canadian government, a politics that relies on obfuscating the relationships of primitive accumulation and dispossession of land upon which the state relies to construct and rejuvenate itself. If gestus is to be read as an embodied interruption of processes, this incursion into the illusory space of the national capitol is an interruption of the production of the space of the Canadian state. The spatial relations of colonizer/colonized, lawful/illegal, guest/host,

75 marginal/central are abstracted in the act of disregarding the nationally produced space of the Capitol/capital and the social relations of the colonized activists are brought into stark relief. The forgotten importance of this land as the constitutive material of the Canadian state is brought glaringly into sight though its reoccupation.

If the Water Protectors’ tipi challenges the homogeneous national space through the introduction of difference, it also butts up against the fragmented, alienated space of everyday life through its disruption of the ordering logics of the SMP. Here, the commodified social and political space of the state experiences an incursion in which the social, spatial, colonial, economic, and other peripheries are brought to the centre and put on display. Categories and boundaries are disregarded both literally and symbolically and hierarchies are thrown into question by the contradiction between the presumed right of free movement and the evident prohibition imposed by the state’s ordering of space.

Finally, at the level of mental space, the Water Protectors challenge the representational space of the state in two ways. First, the reassertion of their right to centrality poses a paradox for the Canadian state which must contend with the contradictions that are invoked when national imaginaries of freedom, equality, fair treatment, and good government are brought into question alongside the undermining of national myths of prosperity and opportunity. The mere presence of these activists forces a reckoning with the ideological position of popular conceptions of the state. On another level, however, the tipi also opens the spatial frame into a temporal one. Engaging in this act of reoccupation during the sesquicentennial celebrations also undermines the notion of developmental progress. Here, the participants inhabit not only their spatial relations, but they also force a reckoning with the consequences of a protracted project of colonization that continues to this day and they bind the Canadian government in general and Prime Minister Trudeau as the primary spatial organizer, more specifically to that legacy.

This confrontation contains within it multiple dialectical moments such as the clash between oppositional spatial ideologies at every level and the conflictual relationship between security agents and the Water Protectors. Even the name of the two conflicting groups evoke the contradictions of the SMP – the one group acting as stewards of the natural resources upon which all depend for life, the other engaging in the bureaucratic repression of those same citizens in the name of the state. What is revealed here is the conflict between two articulations of spatial

agency whereby the erection of the tipi recontextualizes the reoccupation of the abstract space of the state, making evident the state’s need to first produce a conceptual space, then naturalize its occupation of that space on the basis of sovereignty until finally that space must be yoked under the bureaucratic power of legal and political authority.

2.3 The Absolute Local – Ontogenetic Cyberspaces, and Grounded Normativity

I conclude the previous chapter, with a discussion of Adriana Cavarero’s invocation of the politics of interrelationality as finding expression in the concept of the absolute local – the name she gives to the social and political space that is created through mutualist political dialogue. Such a space, in Cavarero’s view, demands the adoption of “reciprocal exposure” (Cavarero 2005, 190) and it ultimately reveals a hybrid form of political mobilization that challenges both the universalizing tendency heralded by the liberal politics of globalization as well as the more reactionary, fundamentalist, nationalisms that are potentially found in more localized political movements.

The advent of Web 2.0 technologies and the read/write Web is often proposed as an expression of the kind of reciprocal exposure that Cavarero sees as enshrined within the politics of the absolute local. Networks permit users to assemble, communicate, and organize collectively. Manuel Castells, for instance, describes Internet social networks as “spaces of autonomy, largely beyond the control of governments and corporations that had monopolized the channels of communication as the foundation of their power, throughout history” (Castells 2). He argues that “Communication networks were the blood vessels of the Occupy movement” (Castells 171) and that the various Occupy camps:

created a new form of time […] The routine of their daily lives was interrupted; a parenthesis was opened with an undefined time horizon. […] Given the uncertainty of when and if the eviction would come, the occupations lived on a day-by-day basis, without deadlines, thus freeing themselves from time constraints, while rooting the occupation in everyday life experience. (Castells 169)

The absolute local’s emergence within digitally-enabled new social movements, however, is by no means an accomplished fact. As Leanne Simpson argues regarding the Idle No More movement in the aftermath of its initial explosion into public awareness, the Internet’s usefulness to Indigenous forms of resistance may be suspect:

The Internet is the ultimate Cartesian expression of mind and mind only. There are no bodies on the Internet. There is no land. Insertion of Indigeneity in cyberspace is not insertion of Indigeneity in the physical world. As much as it pains me to admit, grounded normativity does not structurally exist in the cyber world, because it is predicated on deep, spiritual, emotional, reciprocal, real-world relationships between living beings. (Simpson 221)

Simpson’s critique echoes Cavarero’s concerns about how the privileging of logos enacts an erasure of human specificity and obstructs the potential for a politics borne out of an ethic of interrelationality. For Simpson, the exclusion of land and of the local from such political mobilizations forecloses their full realization as emancipatory technologies: “Every tweet, Facebook post, blog post, Instagram photo, YouTube video, and email we sent during Idle No More made the largest corporations in the world, corporations controlled by white men with a vested interest in settler colonialism, more money to reinforce the system of settler colonialism” (Simpson 222). Simpson is expressing the problematic of what tech blogger Sascha Lobo has termed platform capitalism. (Lobo 2014) Nick Srnicek identifies platform capitalism as the framework under which data becomes the raw material extracted in the production of capital. Says Srnicek on this topic:

data have come to serve a number of key capitalist functions: they educate and give competitive advantage to algorithms; they enable coordination and outsourcing of workers; they allow for the optimization and flexibility of productive processes; they make possible the transformation of low-margin goods into high-margin services; and data analysis is itself generative of data, in a virtuous cycle. (Srnicek 41-42)

From this point of view, the anxieties that Simpson expresses with regards to networked mobilization are understandable. Any use of social media is inextricably tied to the generation of profit for the very same companies, governments, and systems against which protesters mobilize. Moreover, the use of any platform is also not without its pitfalls.

Platforms, as Srnicek defines them, are the digital infrastructures that allow groups and individuals to organize and communicate. Srnicek’s description of the platform problematizes the way Castells presents them as the lifeblood of the Occupy movement and gives support to the objections Simpson raises at Idle No More’s reliance on them: “They therefore position themselves as intermediaries that bring together different users: customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects. More often than not, these platforms also come with a series of tools that enable users to build their own products, services, and

marketplaces” (Srnicek 43). Srnicek leaves open the implication that digital infrastructures always deny certain potentialities by design – while some users are brought together by the platform, others may be excluded from it by design. Those very tools that facilitate certain actions simultaneously foreclose others. Thus, platforms serve a mediating function in two ways: “a platform positions itself (1) between users, and (2) as the ground upon which their activities occur” (Srnicek 44). The platform’s ability to operate as a space for assembly and resistance is always tied up with the restrictions on access and behaviour that it imposes on users. This much is true, and Simpson is correct to highlight the fact that Cyberspace is implicitly tied to the relations of exploitation and divestment upon which settler colonialism rests. That said, I would like to suggest that grounded normativity, a concept that is synergistically tied to struggles that are at once place-based and also reliant on developing networks of co-resistance across geographical boundaries as enacted through the politics and ethics of the absolute local, can find expression through Cyberspace. For Glen Sean Coulthard, these tactics of resistance and resurgence contain within them the potential for extension beyond narrowly defined land-based activism.

In Red Skin White Masks, Coulthard develops the concept of grounded normativity as a broadly Indigenous and specifically Dene political tradition that stands as an alternative to the politics of extractionist settler colonialism. Grounded normativity is comprised of three main points of resistance: 1) mentorship and education that seeks to reconnect Indigenous people to sustainable land-based knowledge and practice, 2) the fostering of self-sufficiency at the level of production and distribution, and 3) an approach to economics and governance that is tied to Indigenous values emphasizing community participation and an equitable distribution of power and resources both within and between Indigenous communities (Coulthard 172). Coutlhard and Simpson jointly lay out their thoughts on the crucial question of resistance within Indigenous contexts in an article for American Quarterly:

In what ways can and do marginalized subjects and communities work across their micro-specificities to align more effectively against macro-structural barriers to freedom and self-determination? What is the composition of these macro-structures of exploitation and domination and what sorts of ideological attachments do they produce to blur them from view and thus block our ability to work collectively against them? Are these structures reducible to capital, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, heterosexual and cis- male dominance, and/or the violence of the state, or is our collective unfreedom

overdetermined by all of these at once and in complex ways? (Coulthard and Simpson 250-251)

These questions evoke Cavarero’s appeal to the ethics of the absolute local and open up space for multiple marginalities, all engaged in disparate struggles, yet also united across culture, time, and geography in common resistance. They also contain a critique of Simpson’s earlier anxieties surrounding the legitimate inclusion of Cyberspace within tactics of grounded normativity. When Coulthard and Simpson question the composition of macro-structural forms of oppression, they highlight the reifying power of ideology over the nature of domination – what is produced is presented as naturally occurring. Structures of power obfuscate their sources and produce “ideological attachments” that “blur them from view and thus block our ability to work collectively against them” (Coulthard and Simpson 251). Social media networks often present themselves as free spaces for assembly and the platforms, as Srnicek remarks, often obscure the way they mediate user interaction while acting “as the ground upon which their activities occur” (Srnicek 44). Internet social media networks, bound up as they are in spatial metaphors, operate within a double-illusion, a term coined by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space.

Lefebvre argues that space obscures its social character through the twin spatial ontologies of the double illusion “each side of which refers back to the other, and hides behind the other” (Lefebvre, 2012 27). On the one hand, Lefebvre identifies the illusion of transparency, tied to the disciplining function of the platform, offering up space as “giving action free rein” (Lefebvre, 2012 27). Such a spatiality is said to be transparent, making thought or idealism incarnate. For Lefebvre, the illusion of transparency “goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places. Anything hidden or dissimulated – and hence dangerous – is antagonistic to transparency” (Lefebvre, 2012 28). The operation of the platform, in other words, hides itself from view and presents itself and the action it gives rise to as uncompromised and unmediated. It is this illusion that Simpson is combatting when she critiques Idle No More’s reliance on social media networks. In her view, the user mistakes their actions as free and fails to grasp the ways in which their praxis is always already prescribed by the platform. This concern with regards to the platform ties into what Srnicek calls the network effects of platform capitalism (Srnicek 25) – the characteristic whereby a platform’s value (as a tool for users and as a profit generator for shareholders) is directly tied by the number of people on it. With this in mind, Simpson is correct in flagging the users’ necessary complicity with the platform in order to

80 make any use of it. Lefebvre ties the illusion of transparency to the privileging of the logos in Western culture and the traps of the illusion of transparency with regards to social networks is predicted by Lefebvre’s work which attacks the substitution of communication for praxis:

What justification is there for thus claiming that within the spatial realm the known and the transparent are one and the same thing? […] Closely bound up with Western “culture”, this ideology stresses speech, and overemphasizes the written word, to the detriment of a social practice which it is indeed designed to conceal. […] For some, whether explicitly or implicitly, speech achieves a total clarity of communication, flushing out whatever is obscure and either forcing it to reveal itself or destroying it by sheer force of anathema. Others feel that speech alone does not suffice, and that the test and action of the written word, as agent of both malediction and sanctification, must also be brought into play. The act of writing is supposed, beyond its immediate effects, to imply a discipline that facilitates the grasping of the “object” by the writing and speaking “subject”. In any event, the spoken and written word are taken for (social) practice. (Lefebvre, 2012 28)

Such are the characteristics of the platform taken as “the ground upon which” action occurs. Simpson recognizes the dangers of the illusion of transparency in its representation of restricted action as free choice, its manipulation of users as profit generators, and its privileging of speech over action.

Lefebvre’s second spatial illusion is that of opacity, the realistic illusion, or the illusion of natural simplicity. Such an approach to spatiality accepts the immediately graspable surface appearance of space as its essence. Space is an assemblage of things, and, as Lefebvre says, “‘things’ have more of an existence than the “subject”, his thoughts and desires” (Lefebvre 29). Such a space is understood to exist independently and objectively of human practice. It surrenders itself to human action only insofar as it can be quantified, measured, manipulated, and made productive in some way. For Lefebvre:

The illusion of substantiality, naturalness and spatial opacity nurtures its own mythology. One thinks of the space-oriented artist, at work in a hard or dense reality delivered direct from the domain of Mother Nature. […] When space is not being overseen by the geometer, it is liable to take on the physical qualities and properties of the earth.” (Lefebvre 30)

The illusion of opacity presents space as having no bearing on social practice beyond its mere existence as the container of resources and the room within which to quantify and use them. Such a space is depoliticized and seen as inherently apolitical. Lefebvre’s critique of the illusion of opacity seeks to mark space as something that is always more than material and that always

81 extends beyond the possibility for its objective quantification. Lefebvre, here, is wary of spatial ontologies that rest too firmly on the notion of soil and land, for fear that such conceptions naturalize political and social conditions into received truths. When Cavarero mentions the danger of a politics that entrenches itself too firmly within the local, the kind that gives rise to a xenophobic populism, this is the spatial mode she is critiquing. It is a spatial ontology that shuts out any consideration of the interplay of social factors in the production of space on the ground that space simply exists as it is:

Symbolisms deriving from nature can obscure the rational lucidity which the West has inherited from its history and from its successful domination of nature. The apparent translucency taken on by obscure historical and political forces in decline (the state, nationalism) can enlist images having their source in the earth or in nature, in paternity or in maternity. The rational is thus naturalized, while nature cloaks itself in nostalgias which supplant rationality. (Lefebvre 30)

It is the assumption of natural simplicity that emerges in critiques of Cyberspace such as the one Simpson makes with regards to the impossibility of grounded normativity. In the case of Internet social networks, if we are willing to accept the spatial metaphors by which we make sense of them, such spaces take on a phantasmatic transparence in their putative facilitation of free action and untrammeled discourse. At the same time, the illusion of opacity operates in a seemingly counterintuitive way by presenting Cyberspace as naturally ethereal and insubstantial. This should not here be confused with the illusion of transparency but is more rightly understood as a misunderstanding of the materiality of data. If the illusion of natural simplicity is an ideological misrecognition of a space’s surface features for its essence, then in the case of Cyberspace, such an interpretation voids data of not only its social production, but also its materiality. Opacity, in the case of online platforms and social networks is the obfuscation of a base materialism through the superimposition of a concept of such spaces as naturally diaphanous and disconnected from the material world. This much is apparent in the language used to talk about such networks. Indeed, when language itself is presented as “transparent” in Lefebvrian terms, it is not always apparent how metaphor restricts the way socially produced spaces are understood.

The genesis of the term Cyberspace comes not from the field of informatics or technology, but from the arts. It is typically attributed to the works of William Gibson who first uses it, leaving it undefined, in Burning Chrome (1982). In his 1984 novel, Neuromancer, Gibson defines the term and establishes a spatial ontology for conceiving of the Internet in a specific way, describing

Cyberspace as “a drastic simplification of the human sensorium” (Gibson 31). Evoking Lefebvre’s double illusion, he calls it:

A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson 30)

From the moment of its inception into popular discourse, the concept is linked to a spatiality that is transparent in its ability to provide unfettered access to the sum total of human knowledge and opaque in its incorporeal alter-dimensional rejection of material considerations. Gibson’s work, though fictional, would come to have longstanding ramifications for how the Internet is conceived and understood. For instance, Michael Benedikt refers to it as a “a parallel universe” (Benedikt 1) while Michael Batty describes it as ushering in “a new kind of space, invisible to our direct visual senses, a space which might be more important than physical space itself” (Batty 615). Such conceptions of Cyberspace posit digital networks as spaces that not only transcend physical space but also represent networks and platforms as independent of it. They either become wholly ethereal, as in a shared hallucination, or they are imbued with an unassailable materiality that resides on some alternate plane of existence. This dual misrecognition of Cyberspace recalls Lefebvre’s insistence that the double illusion is made up of two opposing yet mutually reinforcing ideologies. Regarding the illusion of natural simplicity, he says: “To reject this illusion thus implies an adherence to ‘pure’ thought, to Mind or Desire. Which amounts to abandoning the realistic illusion only to fall back into the embrace of the illusion of transparency” (Lefebvre 29). These spatial ontologies of Cyberspace continue today with discussions of, for instance, ethereal cloud computing and the obscure, impenetrable dark web and they surface in Simpson’s critique of social network platforms.

Simpson’s critique of Cyberspace rests on her view of it as “ungrounded,” disconnected from land, place, and space. She opines “I wonder if the simulated worlds of the Internet are simulations that serve only to amplify capitalism, misogyny, transphobia, anti-queerness, and white supremacy and create further dependence on settler-colonialism in the physical world” (Simpson 221). Data is, however, despite decades of spatial ontologies that grant it a nearly empyrean character, undeniably material and so the digital dispossession which she describes should be considered within the same context as the material dispossession that is at play when

individuals make use of oil or gasoline for their vehicles, for instance. Data is generated through human interaction with the world. It is sensorial and is captured materially through input that is either experienced directly by human beings, or by proxy with the aid of machines which themselves must be constructed from the same natural resources that are used to build and transform spaces more commonly considered to be physical. It is recorded, and so must ultimately reside within some kind of physical storage within data centres that rely on supply chains for maintenance and construction, which must be cooled, and which are increasingly responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions and electricity usage3. Finally, the production and extraction of data, in many cases, can only occur on lands and territories that are disputed. These realities of Cyberspace reveal the material stakes of Lefebvre’s double illusion. An unwillingness to engage with the materiality of Cyberspace makes it impossible to critique its connection to dispossession and environmental degradation. In this context, it becomes possible to conceive that the potential for grounded normativity is not absent from Cyberspace, but that its potential is hidden behind the ideologies of the double illusion.

An alternative ontological approach to Cyberspace, one that keeps in mind Cavarero’s absolute local and that takes account of such a space as neither fixed absolutely, nor transparently apolitical, may open up the possibility for a grounded normativity supported by digital platforms and a spatial ethics that defends their reoccupation. This is not to say that the economic and social traps of Cyberspace will be done away with completely, only that it can serve in some ways to support interrelationality and grounded normativity. Indeed, if space can be viewed as performative, as in the work of Gillian Rose, then we ignore its relational character at our own peril. Says Rose: “Space is not an anterior actant to be filled or spanned or constructed, and to claim it is runs the risk of making a contingent spatial articulation of relationality foundational” (Rose 248). To deny the performative, relational, grounded, and contingent nature of Cyberspace is to resign ourselves to misrecognition and hopelessness.

3 Datacentres have been reported to account for roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions with Google alone having a carbon footprint of roughly 2 million tonnes. (Vaughan) Greenpeace reports that the IT sector consumes about 7% of global electricity. (Cook)

Indeed, there is a historical precedent for a more relational notion of Cyberspace to be found in the term’s actual origin which predates Gibson’s first published use of the word by roughly twelve years. Contrary to popular belief, the first known use of the term was “Atelier Cyberspace,” the pseudonym under which artist Susanne Ussing and architect Carsten Hoff collaborated in the late 1960s (Lillemose and Kryger). As with Gibson, Ussing and Hoff use the term to refer to the field of cybernetics, which focuses primarily on areas of inquiry such as feedback, communication, the relationship between living beings and machines, autonomy, and the concept of self-organization. Rather than imagine a fixed alternate dimension as does Gibson, or a kind of eminently accessible global village as in the case of Marshall McLuhan, Ussing and Hoff explore the relationship between space, technology, and sense experience. Their exhibitions were devoid of any kind of computers or communications technology and were instead focused on the relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit. “Sense rooms” were constructed of long drapes of fabric and large bags filled with polystyrene balls or polyurethane foam, making shared spaces tactile, responsive, and changeable, but also highlighting the ability of a space to seemingly invite one in or urge users to modify it. In Hoff’s own words:

Our shared point of departure was that we were working with physical settings, and we were both frustrated and displeased with the architecture from the period, particularly when it came to residential buildings. We felt that there was a need to loosen up the rigid confines of urban planning, giving back the gift of creativity to individual human beings and allowing them to shape and design their houses or dwellings themselves – instead of having some clever architect pop up, telling you how you should live. We were thinking in terms of open-ended systems where things could grow and evolve as required. (Lillemose and Kryger)

This cybernetic approach to space reaffirms the possibility of engaging with it as something contingent, relational, and grounded. It is the nascent form of an ontology of Cyberspace that predicts Doreen Massey’s critique of the concept of time-space compression4 in Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place (1993). As is the case with Adriana Cavarero, Massey never directly mentions Cyberspace in her text, although worldwide communications networks are integral to the subject of her inquiry and her definition of the term makes it obvious that the

4 The concept, developed by David Harvey is an extension of similar theories such as Karl Marx’s annihilation of space by time as elaborated in the 5th book of The Grundrisse (1857-1858) and Marshall McLuhan’s global village, which he defines in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).

concept is indebted to the advent of global information technology infrastructures: “Time-space compression is a term which refers to movement and communication across space. It is a phenomenon which implies the geographical stretching out of social relation” (Massey 60). She is rather, therefore, addressing the concept of time-space compression as it is presented in discourse about globalization. Her goal is to problematize power-geometry: the asymmetrical relations of wealth, power, mobility, and sovereignty that arise in a globally connected world and to challenge any simple evaluation of the benefits or disadvantages of the notion of a global world. I wish to propose here that Massey’s critique of the ontologies of globalized space dovetail with the kinds of discourse around Cyberspace discussed so far in this chapter. Her vision for a progressive sense of space provides a conceptual standpoint from which to examine the concept of Cyberspace as it relates to grounded normativity and the absolute local, particularly in the context of Simpson’s view of grounded normativity as “the interdependence of land and bodies in a networked fashion” (Simpson 44) while also potentially dissipating Lefebvre’s double illusion.

Massey proposes a relational ontology of space in order to account for power-geometry. In examining contemporary characterizations of globalization, she enumerates a number of ways in which place, the more solidly defined and immutable cousin to space5, are conceptually problematic: “One is the idea that places have single essential identities. Another is the idea that the identity of place – the sense of place – is constructed out of an introverted, inward-looking history based on delving into the past for internalized origins” (Massey 65). Massey uses Kilburn, a district in North London, in order to demonstrate how and where power-geometries fall apart when applied to place. She notes, for instance that the district evades any kind of seamless, coherent identity that can be universally agreed upon. Instead, she notes the myriad different ways people travel through the district, their preferred hangouts, and the near-infinite

5 For a more in-depth examination of the putative differences between space and place, see Tuan (2005, pp 3-7). Massey and Tuan both use “place” to describe any space that could be said to be “inhabited” by human beings and given meaning. It is localized whereas “space” is seen as abstract. Tuan’s humanistic use of this distinction is contrary to Lefebvre’s Marxist criticism of the double illusion. While Tuan and Lefebvre seem to disagree on the abstractness of “space,” Tuan’s description of “place” does evoke the social constructionist approach to space that Lefebvre makes use of. Massey’s article recognizes the social production of both place and space, but she uses “place” to describe those spaces that are consciously perceived as being bounded, coherent, and as having an identity. Because there is little functional difference between how Massey uses the two terms with regards to the argument in this chapter, I use her analysis of place to discuss Cyberspace.

86 connections between its inhabitants, visitors, and the rest of the world. In Massey’s view, not only is a singular identity impossible to pin down for such a place, but “it is impossible to even begin thinking of Kilburn High Road without bringing into play half the world and a considerable amount of British imperialist history” (Massey 66). Finally, she notes that even tracing the territorial borders of the district becomes nigh impossible without ignoring the complex network of social, economic, political, cultural, and material relations that produce this space. Massey’s point is to demonstrate the failings of a conception of time-space compression that cannot or will not account for these multiple identities and experiences of place as well as the ways power-geometries act upon them. It does not take much effort to consider these issues in the context of platform capitalism specifically and the concept of Cyberspace more broadly. Rather than conceptualizing it as an immutable, hallucinatory non-space, a consideration of Massey’s critique of time-space compression would consider Cyberspace as an equally complex network replete with varied, asymmetrical, and contingent relations of all kinds – a space as susceptible to power-geometries as any other. As is the case with an ideologically defined sense of time-space compression, “the question of to what extent its current characterization represents very much a Western, colonizer’s view” (Massey 60). For Massey, the solution to these problems is not to reject Kilburn as a space outright. Indeed, she sees a retreat from engaging with space – whether local or global – as potentially disastrous:

there is at the moment a recrudescence of some problematical sense of place, from reactionary nationalisms to competitive localisms, to sanitized, introverted obsessions with ‘heritage.’ Instead of refusing to deal with this, however, it is necessary to recognize it and try to understand what it represents.” (Massey 65)

Her approach, then, is to recognize that there are ultimately a near-infinite number of Kilburns, each produced at the nexus of selective relational practices between individuals and groups and to explore the possibility for a politics of the absolute local. Access to, agency within, ownership of, and mastery over this space are all distributed unevenly throughout these multiple Kilburns, but for Massey “If time-space compression can be imagined in that more solidly formed, socially evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be the possibility of developing a politics of mobility and access” (Massey 64). Such an understanding of space is essential to understanding it as a social and political. Could, then, the same not be said for a progressive sense of Cyberspace? If Massey can conceive of these multiple Kilburns, could there not also be multiple Cyberspaces?

In Massey’s view, alternative formulations of the relationship between individuals and power- geometries would lay the groundwork towards confronting these problems in new and imaginative ways: “Perhaps it is most important to think through what might be an adequately progressive sense of place, one which would fit in with the current global-local times and the feelings and relations they give rise to, and one which would be useful in what are, after all, our often inevitably place-based political struggles” (Massey 65). Following Lefebvre, Massey’s argument proposes a shift away from a conception of space as absolute in favour of developing a sense of the local and the global that is networked and relational. Massey articulates the problem of the absolute local thusly: “The question is how to hold on to that notion of difference, of uniqueness, even of rootedness if people want that, without it being reactionary” (Massey 65). The same can be said of how to conceive of progressive Cyberspaces. How to engage with these (capitalist) platforms, loci of human activity, and networks of interaction in a manner that is informed by what Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin call an ontogenetic understanding of space, an “understanding of space that is developed in which space is understood as continually being brought into existence through everyday transductive practices” (Dodge and Kitchin 163). Massey’s position, as well as the recognition of the materiality of Cyberspace strains the conceptual integrity of the online/offline dualism and may extend the potential of political activism, critique, and resistance6. Such a consideration of Cyberspace seems naturally allied to Simpson’s call for Indigenous resurgence which, in her words, “means the reattachment of our bodies to our lands, regardless of whether those lands are rural, reserves, or urban” (Simpson 44). A progressive sense of Cyberspace would add “or digital” to those spaces of Indigenous resurgence and grounded normativity.

Coulthard develops the concept of grounded normativity out of the challenges specific to Indigenous forms of resistance in settler-colonialist states, but he keeps open the possibility of its application within an absolute local framework when he asks: “Why not critically apply the most egalitarian and participatory features of our traditional governance practices to all of our

6 Such a refusal of the neat parceling off of the digital from the physical with regards to space can be noted over the past two decades in the contested status of wireless networks in New Zealand as part of land-based treaty claims. See: Cameron, Aidan. Maori Rights in the 4G Radio Spectrum: Fantasy or the Future of Treaty Claims. (2013), Waitangi Tribunal. Report of the Waitangi Tribunal on Claims Concerning the Allocation of Radio Frequencies. (1990), Everton, Graeme. A 5G Network is Coming and Māori Deserve a Share. (2018).

economic activities, regardless of whether they are undertaken in land-based or urban contexts?” (Coulthard 172). This question seems to preempt Simpson’s anxieties surrounding Idle No More’s use of social networks and Cyberspace, offering up the possibility that while such spaces are tied to power and economics in complex and convoluted ways, they may always also provide avenues to resurgent practices. Indeed, it is worth noting that the concept of cybernetics – from which Cyberspace takes its name – as it developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s,7 has its roots in articulations of relational autonomy and self-management (Heylighen and Joslyn 3). For Coulthard, grounded normativity is an ethical framework tied to place-based practices and related forms of knowing. He develops the concept out of traditional Dene practices that considers land, or place “as a field of relationships of things to each other” (Deloria Jr. qtd. in Coulthard 61). Thus, in Coulthard’s estimation, Indigenous autonomy and resistance to settler colonialism is most saliently articulated around the issue of dispossession from land and territory. Culthard’s description of land-based politics, as exemplified in Dene language traditions, evokes the progressive sense of place that Massey argues for: “In the Weledeh dialect of Dogrib …, for example, “land” (or dè) is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material), but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on” (Coulthard 61). Space, in the context of grounded normativity as Coulthard presents it is, to use Gillian Rose’s terminology, not “an anterior actant” but is always “a doing” and this doing is “the articulation of relational performances” (Rose 248) wherein those who act and are acted upon are mutually constituted. These relational conceptions of space are intimately bound to relational conceptions of the self, as Coulthard states: “it it also demanded that we conduct ourselves in accordance with certain ethico-political norms, which stressed, among other things, the importance of sharing, egalitarianism, respecting the freedom and autonomy of both individuals and groups” (Coulthard 61). Grounded normativity, then, is always place-based and local, but, given the relational, contingent, and networked nature of the land and space it inhabits, it is also international, virtual, and cybernetic. The ethics of grounded normativity can be found at work in the politics of the EZLN and these redefinitions of space have come to be characterized by the RAND corporation as a social netwar (Ronfeldt 1) for over two decades.

7 This field of inquiry is commonly referred to as “Second-order cybernetics.”

2.4 Social Netwar and Indigenous Internationalism

It is perhaps easy at first blush to discount notions of ontogenetic space, grounded normativity, the absolute local, the social production of space, and others as simply insubstantial theory without material consequence. After all, one might ask, in the final analysis what difference does it make whether we see space as socially produced and relational or fixed and absolute? It is worth considering, however, that practices informed by these theories have resulted in the advent of a new conceptual model within conflict studies. In the 1990s, the RAND corporation published a number of reports outlining the concept of netwar, which was defined variously as “…societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication” (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1993, 144). The term is contrasted with cyberwar, which is defined as digitally enabled military conflict. The term netwar is instead reserved for conflicts between state and non-state actors with little distinction drawn between environmental groups, human-rights organizations, organized crime syndicates, advocacy groups, and Indigenous anticolonial activists – and the stated goal of a netwar is to “disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it” (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1993, 144). Netwar is said to be waged “by ‘networks,’ perhaps more than by ‘hierarchies’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 1) with the network form being the principal characteristic of this type of ideological conflict. Such conflicts are simultaneously local and global and Arquilla and Ronfeldt identify three intersecting factors that primed the Zapatista resistance for this kind of conflict: (a) The influx of mestizo supporters within the movement provided the Indigenous Maya with allies from outside of their localized struggles and information they could add to their place-based knowledge; (b) The Zapatistas had already been working with a number of local and transnational non-government organizations (NGOs), particularly service and advocacy groups, prior to the start of the 1994 declaration of war; (c) “At the social base of the EZLN are the indigenas from several Mayan language and ethnic groups. This layer, the most ‘tribal,’ engages ideals and objectives that are very egalitarian, communitarian, and consultative” (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, 173). This last point is particularly important to a progressive sense of space and to the adoption of Cyberspace. If, as Gillian Rose argues, space is a doing rather than a being, then it becomes clear that the Zapatistas already had a long history of “doing” space in a specific way. The social, ethical, and political framework out of which they operate has already predisposed them to considering spaces as

relational and contingent. The EZLN, though they have benefited greatly from Subcommandante Marcos’ performances and artful use of the media, were not in any significant way technologically advanced in informatics. Rather, they already had been performing the kind of networked spatial politics at the local level that they would later come to enact globally.

Though the Zapatista insurgency has often been described as developing a new way of doing politics, I am interested here in the political way that they do space. In the aftermath of the 1994 declaration of war against the Mexican government, the EZLN would introduce itself to the world as a thoroughly paradoxical anti-globalization movement. They exist at the intersection of a number of contradictions: As a land/place-based Indigenous rights group, they mobilized around local issues as enumerated in the First Declaration: “work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace” (EZLN b 218). These values and concerns share much in common with the Dene concept of grounded normativity as described by Glen Sean Coulthard:

Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question of land – struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitive way. (Coulthard 60)

The Zapatista ethical frame has evolved out land-reform movements, Catholic liberation theology, independent peasant movements, Maoist organizing, anti-neoliberalism, Indigenous autonomy, international NGOs and human rights discourse and the literary and performance aesthetics have been informed by their traditional practices, Marxist (particularly Althusserian) theory, pop-culture, and cybercultures. The movement had its genesis in the site-specific local concerns of Eastern Chiapas, but it rapidly grew to challenge both the Mexican federal government as well as international governance and economic policies. The EZLN embodies Cavarero’s notion of the absolute local insofar as it straddles a conceptual gulf between the universal and the particular. In Marcos’ words: “Zapatismo is […] something so open and flexible that it really occurs in all places. Zapatismo poses the question, ‘What has excluded me?’, ‘What has isolated me?’[…] In each place the response is different. Zapatismo simply states that question and stipulates that the response is plural, that the response is inclusive” (Marcos 45). The Zapatistas have adopted an ethics that recognizes struggle in the universal

sense, while keeping the space open for a multitude of specificities. It is for this reason that the membership has rejected the idea of forming a political international in the communist tradition (Harvey 159). Rather, Zapatismo is a political practice informed by the traditions of local groups in Chiapas that aims to honor and include individual identities in their specificity while also recognizing a universal sense of relationality and shared responsibility. E. Jeffrey Popke describes Zapatismo as “a form of ethical subjectivity that transcends both cultural difference and borders” (Popke 308). Again, to quote Marcos discussing the future he wishes to see for Mexico: “This nation must acknowledge that it is not made up of equals, but of others” (Marcos qtd. in Navarro 162). This sense of relationality and responsibility for the other finds its simplest expression in the doctrine of mandar obedeciendo: to lead by obeying, a horizontalist conception of leadership that challenges the spatial definitions imposed by not only the Mexican state through a conceptualization of state power as being seated, not centrally, but disparately throughout the country. Moreover, it challenges the spatial organization of the neoliberal project by seeking to connect the local to the global in a manner that insists “on the autonomous right of local communities to choose and define the manner of their connection to larger structures” (Stahler-Sholk 501). Such an approach proposes a spatial ethics that transforms the space of a political community from something fixed and localized to a hybrid network of the local and the global with neither taking precedence over the other.

Marcos lays out the material consequences of a relational sense of space in a letter he writes to English author John Berger. In the epigraph to the letter, Marcos quotes Berger asking: “A reader could ask himself: What is the relationship between the writer and the place and the peoples about whom he writes?” (Marcos 2002, 263). The question, whether a direct quotation from Berger or not, is almost certainly prompted by an old interview with Berger in the New York Times. In discussing his decision to move to the French Alps, the writer muses: “I wanted to see if I could write about peasants. Write about what mattered to them. And to write about them in this way - to understand their experience of their world - I'd have to live among them” (Marzorati 1987). Marcos’ response takes up the question of mediated distance, proximity, and relationality through the experience two children have with seeing the painting of the English countryside on the cover of the book Boar Land:

Heriberto and Eva (five and six years old respectively) come and snatch the book. They look at the picture on the front cover. […] The drawing, Mr. Berger, elicits from them a

quick connection between image and reality. […] there is no doubt that the horse in the painting is La Muñeca – a mare that accompanied us in the long year when the indigenous rebellion governed southeastern Mexico […] [the image on the cover] does not transport [them] to the English countryside. […] It leaves them here, or it brings them back. It brings them back to their land, their place, to their being children, to their being campesinos, to their being indigenous, to their being Mexicans and rebels. (Marcos 2002, 263-267) 8

For Heriberto and Eva, the spatial divide between them and the images of faraway places do not determine their connection to those places. Rather, what they take from these images and communications becomes a part of themselves. They experience the other in the English countryside and a space of relationality is produced in the interstices between Berger’s England and the mountains of Chiapas. In the second part of his letter, Marcos further takes this concept up in order to argue that such a spatial politics cannot be assumed to simply spring forth out of an engagement with media, but it must be sought out. He takes up another of Burger’s points. To the statement: “The act of writing is nothing more than the act of approximating the experience of what is being written about: in the same manner, it is hoped that the act of reading the written text is another act of similar approximation” (Marcos 2002, 268). Marcos’ response is to elaborate on two conceptual media spaces surrounding the recent death of his comrade Alvaro; one with the potential to unite, the other with the power to alienate:

Or of distancing oneself, Mr. Berger. […] I do think it’s so, that the reading of the written word and the image could approximate the experience or create a distance. […] Alvaro returns in the photo; Alvaro speaks in the photograph with his death. He says, he writes, he shows[…] through the photo of Alvaro dead, a reader, far away, from a distance, can come closer to the indigenous situation in modern Mexico […] “Pay attention! Something is wrong with macroeconomic plans […] Look! This is what the numbers and the speeches hide. Blood, flesh, bones, lives and hopes crushed, squeezed dry, eliminated in order to be incorporated into the indexes of economic growth and profit. Come!” says Alvaro. “Come close! Listen” […] But Alvaro’s photo also can “be read” as a distance, seen as a vehicle that serves to create more space in order to stay on the other side of the photo, like “reading” it in a newspaper in another part of the world. “This does not happen here,” is the reader’s take of the photo. “This is Chiapas [this] is far away.” There are, in addition, other readings that confirm it: public announcements, economic figures,

8 The book is a Spanish translation of Berger’s novel Pig Earth (1979), it is possible that Marcos has retranslated the Spanish title (Puerca Tierra) back into English. The novel is relevant to the exchange between Marcos and Berger insofar as it is a fictional accounting of the decline of peasant cultures in the face of modernity. Berger emigrated to the French Alps (where the novel is set) some years before. The novel and its sequels are informed by his experiences living there.

stability, peace. […] “I am here, and this photo happened over there, far away, small,” says the “reading” that creates distance. (Marcos 2002, 269)

Marcos here ties the image to two separate conceptions of space and communications technologies. Whether space is fixed or contingent, the image is the same. The events are the same. There must be an ethics of relationality that transcends distance, and Marcos argues that it is made by listening and by being vulnerable to the Other. Without the progressive sense of place practiced by the Zapatistas, we are left with “the regionalization of pain and despair [and] the internationalization of arrogance and trade” (Marcos 2002, 269).

In Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s view, Indigenous internationalism must include a sense of grounded normativity. She uses a story of the relationship between two nations: the Michi Saagiig (Mississauga) Ninshaabeg and the hoof clan (the deer, caribou, and moose), to illustrate the practice (Simpson 58-61): The story tells of a period of famine in which the deer, moose, and caribou seem to disappear from the environs of the north shore of Lake Ontario. This disappearance happens gradually over the course of a few years and it isn’t until the Nishnaabeg are in dire straits that they take note of the animals’ retreat from the area. It comes to be known that the animals have left the area because the Nishnaabeg have disrespected them by overhunting them, wasting their meat or hoarding it from less fortunate members of the community, and by failing to observe appropriate reverence. Through diplomacy, the Nishnaabeg and the hoof clan are ultimately able to come to an agreement whereby the Nishnaabeg agree to look after the animals, share what they hunt and never waste it, recognize the sacrifice of the animals they hunt, and rely on other food sources if the animal population ever dwindles. In exchange, the hoof clan agrees to return to the area and give up their lives so that the Nishnaabeg can feed themselves. Rituals that are still observed today are said to have their origin in this covenant.

The story demonstrates the connection between a sense of relationality and mutual care enacted between nations that is central to Nishnaabeg internationalism and it explains how their grounded practices, such as the deer hunt, are encoded with a kind of horizontalist ethical network. As Simpson puts it, “We have always thought of the bush as a networked series of relationships” (Simpson 56). Moreover, Simpson’s story reveals that a concept much like the notion of ontogenetic space is built into Nishnaabeg practice even at the level of language. The Nishnaabe name for the territory that the Michi Saagiig Ninshaabeg share with the hoof clan is

Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig, which she translates as “the place where we all live and work together” (Simpson 2) a name that is both specific and contingent. Kina Gchi Nishnaagbeg- ogamig describes a specific place, namely the area along the north shore of Lake Ontario, but it also describes a space that is produced whenever individuals come together in the spirit of mutual consent, dignity, reciprocity, and empathy in order to share with and learn from each other. It describes, in Simpson’s words, “an ecology of intimacy” (Simpson 8). Through this practice, Nishnaabeg Internationalism produces the kind of “cybernetic” spatial politics that is also found in the EZLN, and even in those internetted spaces that arise out of a sense of the absolute local.

This kind of ethics of space, grounded as it is in tradition, space, and everyday life, is a kind of embodied resistance to dominant power hierarchies. Responses by governments make clear just how tied to spatial ontologies these kinds of practices are. Attempts by governments to reassert and impose an orderly and fixed sense of space are varied. In Canada, treaties, reservations, and districting all transform “the place where we all live and work together” into something that is no longer relational but absolute. These kinds of measures functionally counter the internationalization of local political communities through a forced reinscription of the double illusion by legally delineating space in a manner that isolates and contains resistance. These spaces are reconceptualized as local and remote in order to bottle up Indigenous spatial practice, but they are also opened up to extraction by multinational corporations and made subject to globalization without internationalism.

This redefinition of space and attempt to reconceptualize Indigenous internationalism as solidly local is a strategic move not only against a specific group but is an attempt to forestall acts of co- resistance. In a 2007 Japanese edition of one of their earlier reports on the Zapatista Netwar, for instance, Arquilla and Ronfeldt detail the wider political ramifications of the kind of spatial practices in which the EZLN were engaged:

This netwar was able to occur in 1994 because so many activist NGOs were already networked and mobilized outside of Mexico, ready for a new target, after having tried (quite unsuccessfully) to protest U.S. policy in Central America and/or halt passage of NAFTA. Then, years later […] many Mexican and foreign NGOs turned away from the Zapatista struggle to focus (quite successfully) on other high-impact efforts: e.g., in 1999, the protest movement known as the “Battle of Seattle”; and in 2000, the presidential

campaign and election in Mexico that displaced the ruling PRI party from power. In sum, the Zapatista social netwar was about much more than the Zapatistas. (Ronfeldt 2009)

Ronfeldt characterizes the shifting focus of the alter-globalization movement as a “turning away” from the Zapatista struggle, which may be true to a certain degree. But the displacement of the PRI and the anti-globalization movements that sprung up such as The Battle of Seattle, the Carnival Against Capital (Cologne, 1999), the G8 protests in Genoa (2001), the protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas (Quebec City, 2001), and many others are also representative of the absolute local being put into practice. Various groups operating throughout the world took up the EZLN’s anti-neoliberal banner and carried it across the globe. The Zapatistas continue to engage in this kind of internationalist localism, as evidenced in their continued communiques and projects such as the Schools for Chiapas project and The Other Campaign (2006), which saw the group reaching out to an even wider array of movements such as labour unions, Indigenous groups, women’s rights activists, Queer liberation groups, environmental activists, student groups, teachers, sex workers, and many others. In the case of the EZLN, the practice of Indigenous internationalism managed to transform resistance. Rather than a reaction to the localization of pain and despair, they developed an internationalized resistance and critique.

As with Indigenous groups in Canada, The EZLN have likewise seen their spatial ontologies challenged by state power in violent ways. The Mexican government’s response to the seizure San Cristóbal de las Casas illuminates how the two groups enact contested spatial ontologies. In the aftermath of the 1994 uprising, the Mexican government responded by trying to force the insurgency back into a local paradigm. There were attempts to sow division between different groups and individuals through bribery, public works programs, and handouts; one Indigenous municipality received government sponsorship in exchange for working as a pro-government paramilitary group and at the political level, the area was redistricted in order to reposition the local legal and political authorities and break solidarity between various Zapatista support zones (Stahler-Sholk 503). The greatest display of the discordance between the government and the EZLN’s respective conceptions of space, however, was manifested in the military campaign that followed the 12 day ceasefire that occurred in the immediate aftermath if the 1994 revolt. Breaking the ceasefire, the Mexican government deployed a third of their army to the sparsely populated Chiapas region and began escalating militarization, pushing resisters deeper into the Lacondón Jungle. In the government’s misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict, they

96 sought to retake San Cristóbal de las Casas and crush the rebellion at its centre (Stahler-Sholk 500). In late December of 1994, the EZLN engaged in an act of networked defiance by declaring 38 different autonomous municipalities in and around the areas of Ocosingo, Altamirano, Comitán, El Bosque, Teopisca, and others. The occupation of these municipalities, most of which continue to be held by Zapatistas, would establish a separate, but parallel system of governance around the concept of Mandar Obedeciendo. When the EZLN announced in 1996 that “It is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient with making it anew” (EZLN 1996 a), these autonomous municipalities would exist not only as symbolic expressions of governance practices invested with the ethics of Indigenous internationalism, but they would also be an expression of active ethics, a material challenge to the neoliberal project in Mexico.

Lefebvre says that “space speaks” (Lefebvre, 2012 142). As in the case of Parliament Hill, it can speak in a voice laden with prohibition, with bureaucracy, with arbitrary hierarchies supported by edicts from on high and answerable to the needs of capital and state. It can speak of title and property and the legal measures one must take to access it. But space has another voice embodied in the wind from below. As Marcos has said, this “wind is fruit of the land” (Marcos and Ponce de Leon, 62). It is a voice which speaks to the complex and intertwined relationships that produce space. The reciprocity and relationality that may welcome, but always also reminds us of our obligations not only to space and land but to each other. A voice that speaks back against dispossession and oppression and that speaks to an ear that chooses not to listen to the wind from above. The Bawating Water protectors nurtured that voice and answered its call.

Cyberspace, too, speaks in two voices, one of which facilitates genuine communication and intersubjectivity. Speaking in such a way, it may reproduce homogeneity and passivity, but it may also promote intersubjective autonomy. As with Lefebvre’s notion of space, it is not merely either the producer of social relations or the product of those same relations. At its best, it can be progressive, ontogenetic, even grounded. A reconsideration of all spaces, who we produce them with, who we invite into them, the way we all live and work within them, is something radical. The Zapatista revolt and the re-occupation of Parliament Hill by the Bawating Water Protectors, both involve making space speak in a voice the state was not willing to hear. In both cases, the performance of Indigenous place-based ethics and grounded normativity resulted in suspicion, condemnation, and violence. Coulthard discusses how the politics of recognition fail to provide an appropriate remedy to the problem of territorial dispossession and settler-colonialism, two

97 land-based forms of domination. Land is the reason for dispossession, but space is the mode of it. Engaging in traditional practices in isolation, within opaque spaces, out of sight and out of trouble, is easily relegated to mere regionalism by a neoliberal spatial order. When these spaces become progressive, contingent, relational, “cybernetic,” armies are mobilized.

Chapter 3 Necrocriticism: The Mortified Body as Refusal of the Biopolitical State 3.1 Introduction

This chapter concerns itself with the way suffering and mortification foregrounds the human body in a manner that challenges the organizing ideologies of the liberal state. Building on concepts explored in the first two chapters, I move from voice and space, to body and state. Particularly, I am interested in how apparatuses that control, order, and sustain life in the name of shoring up biopolitical sovereignty may be confounded or resisted by acts of performative bodily mortification. I am calling this tactic necrocriticism insofar as it mobilizes the destruction of the body as a critique of a surveillance state that takes as its putative object the promotion of life. Whereas the previous chapter highlighted challenges to the spatial supremacy of the state, I now consider how the dying body is mobilized to reveal the undercurrent of violence that is inherent in the ordered, and putatively peaceful operation of the biopolitical state. To paraphrase Peggy Phelan’s criticism of the work of Sophie Calle, these performances challenge the absentification of the mortified body in order to show what the biopolitical state – invested as it is “does not have and cannot offer” (Phelan 1993, 148).

I begin with an overview of the relationship between the body and the liberal state as described in Cavarero, Hobbes, and Grosz with particular attention to the politics of relationality Cavarero expresses as an alternative to liberal political orders that obscure or ignore the particularity of the human body in favour of an illusion of universalism. I then complicate Cavarero’s politics by discussing how surveillance apparatuses complicate the idea of subjectivity while also further disassembling the body into bioinformatic data. This leads me to consider as a possible axis of resistance, a necrocritical appeal to bodily mortification, a tactic I contrast against the resubordinating injury-focused politics of politicized identities. Finally, I look at two cases of what I would term necrocriticism: The “death” of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, and Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike against the Harper government. I end the chapter with a return to Hobbes and an examination of how the state may attempt to perform its own version of necrocriticism by appealing to a false performance of mimetic fragility in order to raise the question of protecting a fragile state body.

3.2 Bodies and States

In Chapter I, I discussed Adriana Cavarero’s concerns regarding the shift towards a discursive privileging of logos over voice. In Cavarero’s view, the political project of the liberal state has necessitated a conceptualization of human beings as at once isolated and universalized, individualistic but also identical in that individualism, equivalent and interchangeable. Cavarero’s project is to illustrate how human particularity, or finitude, has been replaced with a universal “fictitious entity” heralded in logocentric linguistic descriptors such as “man,” “subject,” or “individual.” Her response is to reintroduce the human voice as the standard-bearer for that which is irreducibly human by proposing the introduction of a “vocal ontology of uniqueness” (Cavarero, 173) in the pursuit of a politics of relationality.

Cavarero’s formulation renders rights-based emancipatory discourse suspect because of its inextricability from the framework of the liberal nation-state and, therefore, its consequent necessary submission to the erasure of the human and the generation of human “fictitious entities.” The procedures of modern democracy are founded on the image of a genericized body or, as Cavarero puts it: “Modern democracy, as a procedural form that organizes the representative body, the principal of “rights” is inherently tied to the ideology of liberal individualism” (Cavarero 186). Thus, the abstract membership of an ideologically naturalized “man” within the state obfuscates from human beings the nature of their social conditions as the effects of political or economic relations of power. As Cavarero states: “The so-called pathologies of democracy that were the object of much debate in twentieth-century political thought depend on this very logic, which is called on to construct the political bond on the constitutive unbinding that guarantees the autonomy of the individual” (Cavarero 186). Thus, in her view, the nationalistic bond between citizens on which the concept of rights relies, demands a decoupling of the universalized subject from communitarian social bonds. Indeed, the construct of nation exists specifically to replace the communitarian bonds that are abraded by the mechanisms of state citizenship. If the modern liberal state relies on an atomized universal subject, then it is the concept of the nation that assembles these individuals together by linking them to a mythic history of shared territory. As Cavarero puts it: “the contradiction of the nation- state is thus first inscribed in a logic that claims to reconcile universality with territoriality” (Cavarero 201). The ostensibly universal “rights of man” are conferred, assured, and protected by the state and are guaranteed by legitimate membership within the nation. For the groups

100 covered in this chapter, an appeal to the universality of these rights, then, is subsumed by the problematic of legitimate territorial occupation. When the state engages in repressive strategies of control, it fails to uphold the illusion of universality and transparently reveals its investiture in particular – rather than universal – economic, class, and political interests.

To varying degrees, both sites of resistance covered below challenge the sovereignty of the state through acts that definitionally question the state’s territorial constructions. This construction of territoriality is a necessary part of state sovereignty. The quintessential model of which, articulated by Hobbes in the Leviathan, proposes that it is the state that defines human activity. Hobbes characterizes the state’s borders as the buttress against all forms of calamity and the necessary precondition for human flourishing. This stands in opposition to the “State of Nature” which he describes below:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes 84)

What is particularly apparent in Hobbes, and particularly salient for Indigenous responses to the sovereignty of the settler colonial state, is Hobbes’ alignment of pre-existing Indigenous civilizations with the State of Nature: “there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America […] have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before” (Hobbes 85). Sovereignty is embodied in the state and it necessitates the imposition of a new space over pre-existing polities. It cannot exist alongside the communitarian bonds that precede or are external to it. As Hobbes says: “There is a Sixth doctrine, plainly, and directly against the essence of a Common-wealth; and ‘tis this, That the Sovereign Power may be divided. For what is it to divide the Power of a Common-wealth, but to destroy it; for Powers divided mutually destroy each other” (Hobbes 236). Sovereignty is a zero- sum game. And so, as Cavarero points out, the universalizing tendency of the state and the construction of the universalized citizen-subject is reliant on the exteriorization of all superfluous

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elements, whether those be, as in Cavarero, the nonidentical human, which is elided so that “man” may be absorbed into the machinery of the state, or in the case of Hobbes, the consignment of Indigeneity (and, therefore, any resistance to the legitimacy of settler-state territoriality) to the constitutive borders made up by the State of Nature. Robert Nichols notes that the State of Nature in fact served two purposes:

[…] to lend rhetorical weight to the contractarian thesis by raising the stakes – warning that theories that supported shared or cooperative sovereignty would degenerate into anarchy, and, thus, to the condition that the ‘savages’ found themselves, and secondly, to deny the Amerindians in practical terms a right of sovereignty that was extended to other peoples” (Nichols 47).

The contractual relationship between individuals and the state establishes the rights and duties of citizenship which are to be applied universally, indeed the contract is the generative apparatus that produces civilized, rights-bearing “man” by positioning human nature within the realms of war, individual sovereignty, nature, and animals, aligning it as the binary opposite of man as a subject, which Hobbes positions in the realm of peace, law, culture, and citizenship. State power is mobilized along this binary axis and it positions the body as an assemblage of needs to be fulfilled or denied “on the power of Life and Death” (Hobbes 326). Within the Hobbesian calculus of sovereign power, the body as irreducible and unique being is omitted in order for the universal exchangeability of subjects existing within the state absorbs them into a greater body politic. Elizabeth Grosz explains it thusly: “this conception of the body politic relies on a fundamental opposition between nature and culture, in which nature dictates the ideal forms of culture. Culture is a suppression and perfection of nature” (106). The consequence of the liberal political framework, then, is not only the separation of nature from culture, but also the separation of the body from the subject.

Moreover, as Grosz remarks, the actual body – a collective whole made up of diverse parts working in concert to the benefit of each individual organ as well as of the greater collective, is substituted for the virtual body of the state: “The body politic is an artificial construct that replaces the primacy of the natural body […] As a political and hence social relation, the body politic, whatever form it may take, justifies and naturalizes itself with reference to some form of hierarchical organization” (106). For Grosz, the practical model of the relationship between body and state (which she presents synecdochally through reference to “the city”) is one of assemblage rather than of ideological totality. Just as Cavarero proposes a politics of relationality as a

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solution to the alienation and atomization of life under the modern state, Grosz offers up a model that foregoes assigning primacy to either culture or nature and which considers an interfacial relationship between state and body as an interrelational matrix of systems, flows, events, entities, and technologies. This, in her conception, the body and state are seen “not as megalithic total entities, but as assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds between substances to form linages, machines, provisional and often temporary sub- or micro- groupings” (Grosz 108). The ultimate goal, in Grosz’s view, is a body which escapes identification, regulation, and quantification, a prospect which grows vanishingly small in an age of ubiquitous surveillance. Giorgio Agamben problematizes this critique of the Hobbesian duality between “man” and “nature” by introducing a third vector of subjectivation: the apparatus.

3.3 The Apparatus as Insidious Relationality

Though Cavarero says little, if anything at all, about the relationship between the devocalization of logos and contemporary communications technologies, her philosophy of vocal expression can be traced through the evolving relationship between the foundational philosophies of the liberal state, the advent of surveillance technologies, and the ways biopolitical frameworks define and limit notions of the human body. This convergence has, in many ways, perfected the erasure of the nonidentical human in the name of a project to shore up state sovereignty or, as Benjamin Bratton would refer to the current political form “platform sovereignty.” This assemblage operates in the interstices between individual and conceptual bodies. William Bogard, for instance, highlights the bio-technological nature of surveillance when considering it from the standpoint of “a cyborg assemblage, i.e., in terms of surfaces of contact or interfaces between organic and non-organic orders, between life forms and webs of information, or between organs/body parts and entry/projection systems” (Bogard 33). Bogard’s description of this cyborg assemblage, replete with its resolution of seemingly contradictory objects, updates Cavarero’s “fictitious entity” to the status of a data projection or model. Under surveillance, the body has become the indispensable input mechanism for the generation of a data set that is only ever legible after the flesh falls away and reveals the information beneath it. It is these data ghosts that are ultimately the true objects of the surveillant assemblage, divested of their meat and bones, they become the building blocks of an information-powered algorithmic state. Shoshana Zuboff notes this trend in an IBM report that states that: “Thanks to the internet of

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things, physical assets are turning into participants in real-time global digital markets. The countless types of assets around us will become as easily indexed, searched and traded as any online commodity […] we call this the ‘liquification of the physical world’” (Zuboff 209). The individual is absorbed into a generalized information flow that is read for the purposes of producing entertainment, generating capital, and assuring the compliance of a multitude of physical bodies.

Rather than a notion of a global politics of relationality as sought by Grosz and Cavarero, the contemporary political paradigm has managed to mobilize various micro-groupings of assemblages into the subjectivation machine that Giorgio Agamben calls the apparatus. In What is an Apparatus? (2009), Agamben seeks to define Foucault’s use of the term dispositif which appears in much of his later work on governmentality. He translates the term as “apparatus” and argues that, instead of situating the process of subject-creation wholly within the state’s sovereign power over life and death, or in any particular entity or object, the apparatus is nodal and includes nearly everything imaginable, each node operating on its own to produce subjects through their interactions with objects and living beings alike. In a manner that recalls the Hobbesian subject’s movement from the state of nature into citizenship Agamben describes the process thusly:

I propose to you nothing less than a general and massive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured. […] Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures , behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and – why not – language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses – one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face. (Agamben 2009, 13-14)

Challenging Grosz’s insistence on an assemblage that can confound state sovereignty by crossing thresholds between substances, the apparatus is, to use Grozs’ term, interfacial insofar as it is “the network that is established between these elements. […] it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge” (Agamben 2009, 2-3). This interstitial nature of the

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apparatus, its liminal positioning between power and knowledge is the essential element that differentiates it from Hobbesian notions of sovereignty and gives it its relational character. Rather than a binary form of control exerted over a population in a “state of nature” who are civilized through the force of the sovereign state, it is the interplay between human and apparatus that allows for subject formation. Thus, the apparatus operates as “a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being” (Agamben 2009, 11). The apparatus produces the subject it governs by providing a broad field of possible thought and action – or choice – within which the subject is ostensibly free to operate. The apparatus provides to the subject a horizon of the conceivable based on collected traditions, practices, bodies of knowledge, and institutions in order to “govern, control, and orient [human beings] in a way that purports to be useful” (Agamben 2009, 12). That which is non-useful, or outside the apparatus’ conceptual frame is, of course, unthinkable and, so, impossible. As Byung-Chul Han puts it: “Disciplinary power is normative power. It subjects the subject to a set of rules – norms, commandments and prohibitions – and eliminates deviations and anomalies” (Han 20). The apparatus, as Agamben describes it, doesn’t stifle individual identities, but rather promotes them, albeit in a radically constrained form, resulting in an explosion of a nearly infinite number of subjectivities as human beings engage with its various mechanisms at myriad points of contact and in unending combinations. “the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification: the user of cellular phones, the web surfer, the writer of stories, the tango afficionado, the anti-globalization activist, and so on and so forth. The boundless growth of apparatuses in our time corresponds to the equally extreme proliferation in processes of subjectification” (Agamben 2009, 15). As the user engages with and relates to the apparatus, they move from the class of “living being” to the class of “subject.” As with Hobbes, a distinction is drawn between the natural “living being” and the subject who is “capture[d] and separate[d]” (Agamben 2009, 18) from the order of animals through engagement with it. It is this element of the human, freed of the guardrails imposed by the apparatus and capable of modes of existence that may otherwise escape quantification that remains subordinated to the state.

What becomes apparent is that the apparatus proliferates a subjectivity overflowing with identities, amassing bodies, but devoid of the human. Every subjectivation, in spite of its relational character, only produces an incomplete model. Or rather, the model it produces is complete for whatever purposes for which it was generated. In a later essay, Agamben would

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express his anxieties about this incomplete subjectivity by labelling it “identity without the person” (Agamben 2011, 47), casting a skeptical light on Cavarero’s optimistic hope for a future politics of relationality.

Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson note that surveillance has taken on the form of an assemblage where a hybrid of once discrete surveillance systems operate in concert by “abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows” (Haggerty and Ericson 606). Surveillance has always had as its object the human body, but the new bodied subject of biometric surveillance is purely virtual. These flows are reconstituted into decorporealized bodies, or “data doubles,” which not only render human beings legible to agents and algorithms alike, but which do so in a radically abridged format. No longer simply an erasure of the unquantifiable humanity of the individual, the liberal subject is itself further distilled down to consumption habits, potential criminality, map vectors, and conversational keywords. What becomes particularly troublesome for the concept of personal identity in the face of such assemblages is, as Agamben points out, “This is something with which I have absolutely nothing to do, something with which and by which I cannot in any way identify myself or take distance from: naked life, a purely biological datum” (Agamben 2011, 50). If the liberal state functions on the basis of the exchangeability of a universalized subject, the surveillance assemblage makes room for a certain amount of uniqueness, so long as it can be standardized, quantified, and compared to a general model. This becomes apparent when one considers that “groups that were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored” (Haggerty and Ericson 606), often through their own participation. The identities that are produced through the surveillance assemblage are always incomplete, and always multiple. What is produced is no longer a community of individuals relating to each other, nor a polity generalized under state power, but “an infinite multiplication of masks. At the moment when individuals are nailed down to a purely biological and asocial identity, they are also promised the ability to assume all masks […] none of which can ever really belong to them” (Agamben 2011, 53). Never before has the Enlightenment myth of the self-sufficient, autarkic subject been more debunked than under a framework that simultaneously strips away the uniquely human while also affixing to the subject an inescapable and often permanent database of behaviours, habits, patterns, and biological functions. Indeed, as Shoshana Zuboff notes, that which escapes quantification becomes “dark data,” which is seen as “the

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intolerable ‘unknown unknown’ that threatens the financial promise of the ‘internet of things’ (Zuboff 210). Under the biopolitical framework reinforced by surveillance assemblages obsessed with minute bioinformatic monitoring of the body, the nonidentital human has been superseded by the leviathanic citizen, who in turn has been recast as the User – a fictitious entity of an already fictitious entity. This latest subject of sovereignty – in this case, platform sovereignty – need not even be human at all. As Benjamin Bratton points out, the user can be human, animal, machine, pluralities, multiples, or composites (Bratton 376). All these differences are flattened out and genericized by software. The User need only be able to provide and respond to feedback. Thus, the human can finally be wholly erased while the subject can never disappear.

3.4 Necrocriticisms

The problematic for emancipatory politics, particularly place-based politics, under the framework of the digitally erased body is the question of how to reassert the body, the voice, and the irreducibly human within a socio-political context that has done away with all three. The power of the sovereign in Hobbes resides in the ability to end life, to impose upon the living an exception to their assumed freedom to live. The power to enforce such a decree is the power to rule. Contemporary biopolitical liberal states, however, ostensibly derive their legitimacy, not on the basis of killing, but on the basis that they manage life itself. Byung-Chul Han refers to this tendency towards life management with the term “healing as killing,” noting that:

Neoliberal psychopolitics is always coming up with more refined forms of exploitation: Countless self-management workshops, motivational retreats and seminars on personality or mental training promise boundless self-optimization and heightened efficiency. They are steered by neoliberal techniques of domination, which aim to capitalize not just on working time but on the person him- or her-self. […] It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints – from the logic of quantifying success on the market. […] [P]erpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation. (Han 29-30)

These state and non-state surveillance assemblages quantify life and produce multitudes of subjects in the form of data ghosts. Peggy Phelan notes this trend towards a decorporealization of the body and its increasing importance as a source of data in Mourning Sex:

As our current cultural moment is buffeted on one side by the claims of virtual reality and electronic presence, and on the other by a politicized and commodified spirituality

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(from Christian fundamentalism to new age gurus), it behooves us to think more seriously about what theatre and performance have to teach us about the possibilities and perils of summoning the incorporeal. To what end are we seeking an escape from bodies? What are we mourning when we flee the catastrophe and exhilaration of embodiment? (Phelan 2013, 2)

Phelan distinguishes between bioinformatics and spirituality as though they are oppositional but the reality of life under neoliberalism is that these two concepts feed each other. Han positions self-optimization ideology as producing its own fanatical devotees: “Endlessly working at self- improvement resembles the self-examination and self-monitoring of Protestantism, which represents a technology of subjectivation and domination in its own right” (Han 30). Human life is tracked, regulated, multiplied, and ultimately weaponized and deployed in the name of capital and the algorithmic state. Life is captured and separated from bodies, its reproduction and flourishing, at least as data, becomes the legitimating test of neoliberal state authority. In such a context, then, in which the state’s ability to foster life lends it legitimacy, choosing to suffer publicly becomes a radical act of criticism.

Agamben’s interpretation of the bioinformatic technologies of the apparatus reject the notion that they are tools to be mastered and manipulated towards emancipatory ends: “Those who make such claims seem to ignore a simple fact: If a certain process of subjectification (or in this case, desubjectification) corresponds to every apparatus, then it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it ‘in the right way’” (Agamben 2009, 21). Likewise, the machinery of surveillance and state control which has ceased long ago to reside in one specific space or to be under control of any one entity, is not something that can be destroyed. For Agamben, the solution is to find ways to confound the organizational logics of the apparatus. He identifies the capture and separation of the human through the apparatus as an act of sacralization. That is, bioinformatic surveillance removes life from common usage. The User generates data but is often not free to access or make use of it. Similarly, the management of life has become the domain of sovereignty and disciplining state power. Citizen-users may participate within certain allowable parameters, but ultimate control still rests in the flows between capital and the state, which mobilize the apparatus towards the production of certainty. As Zuboff explains: “the surest way to predict behaviour is to intervene at its source and shape it. […] In order to achieve these [economies of action], machine processes are configured […] to enhance certainty by doing things: they nudge, tune, herd, manipulate and modify behavior in specific directions (Zuboff

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200). Zuboff identifies these processes as particularly surreptitious in the realms of telemedicine and bioinformatic health platforms. The generation of “body area networks,” while ostensibly empowering to the User through the revelation of hitherto inaccessible bioinformatic data, also resides on “porous platforms and proprietary servers transforming your life into surplus so they can make book on what you will want next and enable their customers to sell it to you first” (Zuboff 246). She notes that legally, most health and fitness applications and devices are not subject to the same kind of privacy laws that govern healthcare. In the end, while the User may, given sufficient literacy and assisted by specific devices, read the data produced by their interfacing with smart health applications, dominion over its use and conversion into capital remains in the hands of tech producers and the state. Agamben likens this process to ancient Roman notions of sacralization, a process whereby some thing is removed from common use by humans and reserved for use by the gods:

The apparatus that activates and regulates separation is sacrifice. Through a series of minute rituals that vary from culture to culture […] sacrifice always sanctions the passage of something from the profane (open to common use) to the sacred, from the human sphere to the divine. […] Profanation is the counter-apparatus that restores to common use what sacrifice had separated and divided. (Agamben 2009, 18-19)

By way of analogy, one could certainly argue that through the sacrifice of multiple forms of user-generated data to the “black box” datacentres of the cloud and the imposition of a political ideology of universality, the body’s particularity has been sacralised, omitted from the realm of common use. What, then, is the counterapparatus that can profane human particularity and return to us, no matter how briefly, human existence in full? Zuboff notes the coining of the euphemism “dark data” to describe forms of data that confound digital omniscience: “Unstructured data cannot merge and flow in the new circuits of liquified assets bought and sold. They are friction. […] Because the apparatus of connected things is intended to be everything, any behavior of human or thing absent from this push for universal inclusion is dark: menacing, untamed, rebellious, rogue, out of control” (Zuboff 209-210). The reassertion of the nonidentical human, by whatever means, becomes a radical act that threatens the neoliberal apparatus.

I propose that acts of bodily mortification provide critics of the biopolitical surveillance state with a means to not only address these erasures, but also to perform resistance in a manner that dispels the abstraction of the human into the User. The experience of bodily pain, in this context, becomes a reassertion of the nonidentical human that stands in stark contrast to the conceptual

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dissolution of the body. It reclaims and foregrounds the pre-Hobbesian body. Whereas state and surveillance conspire to disassemble, categorize, abstract, and quantify subject bodies, pain is something that transcends language and abstraction.

In The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry outlines a theory of the relationship between pain, language, and the state. Scarry’s position is that pain and suffering are unique among human experiences insofar as they are able to escape discursive abstraction. Pain, as anyone who has had to sit in a doctor’s office looking over a diagnostic rating scale could attest, is difficult to quantify and nearly impossible to verbalize. It is an experience that exists wholly within the body. It has no object insofar as it is always an interior experience. The sensation of pain, even pain caused by an external source such as a blade or a flame, is not the experience of touching the offending object, but rather a feeling of one’s own body hurting oneself. It is for this reason that Scarry refers to it as is “an intentional state without object” (Scarry 164). Unlike, for instance, seeing or hearing, which finds its accomplishment in something external to the body, pain can exist wholly within and therefore need not rely on anything external at all. As an objectless experience, Scarry argues, it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language” (Scarry 5). Indeed, if logos has managed to obscure the voice that heralds the presence of the nonidentical human who speaks, then physical pain is itself immune to such an abstraction. “Physical pain is not only itself resistant to language but also actively destroys language, deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and groans. To hear those cries is to witness the shattering of language.” (Scarry 172) Here, the human voice is reasserted as the bearer of a meaning that cannot be transmitted through signs. The materiality of the human body is emphasized to the exclusion of everything else, reverting the individual to a prelinguistic state. If the subject of the apparatus is deterritorialized through digital information flows that disassemble and transmit biological data across networks, pain is always local insofar as it is inseparable from its bodily location. It is this conception of the body in pain that I will use to frame the cases I examine below.

I am categorizing political performances that foreground the mortified body in this way “necrocriticism” in order to differentiate the tactics and aims of this mode of performance from other forms of protest and performance that foreground injury or suffering. While I am reluctant to impose a totalizing definition for the concept, there are certain common markers that, in my view, identify a performance as necrocritical. First and foremost, these performances occur

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within a broader biopolitical context that takes the management of life as its aim whether through state governance, the authority of medical experts, or algorithmic bioinformatics. The quantification of the human body, its translation into data, and its resubordination to the will of the state is inescapably tied to discourse surrounding these events: there are, for instance, questions of ethnic authenticity levelled at the leader of the EZLN and public speculation and speculative “expert opinion” attempting to narrow-down how many calories Chief Theresa Spence consumed during her hunger strike. Secondly, these sites of protest are engaged in a performed criticism of the state’s supposed fiduciary duty to its population. In both cases, bodily harm is presented as evidence that the ideal of the state to provide a good life for its citizens is false. The harm that is experienced by protesters is itself a condemnation of the political rhetoric of the state. Hence, necrocriticism: If the state has branded itself with the language and rhetoric of life, these protests mobilize the embodiment of varying degrees of death. Thirdly, if liberalism takes as its premise the presumed equality of all human beings it also promises to foster universal freedoms, then these sites of protest, by centralizing a nonidentical human body foreground the state’s paradoxical simultaneous appeal to the universal and the particular. These performances, through the display of the mortified body, physically enact the incommensurability of the universal and the particular.

It is moreover worth contrasting necrocriticism against the mobilization of politicized identities that take, for example, the gendered or racialized body for its referent. While such identities do figure prominently within the larger contexts of these sites of protest, the aim of both acts of resistance is a structural change to society rather than a bid for recognition, acceptance, or respect. I concern myself here with Wendy Brown’s work on the mobilization of political identities around an (often social, rather than physical) injury as a form of liberal political protest that frequently resubordinates itself to the disciplinary logics and exclusionary discourses of the liberal state.

Brown sees as foundational to this problematic, the tensions between the particular and universal subjects of sovereignty. Similar to Cavarero’s critique of the individual divested of its unique human attributes, Brown notes a contradiction between the notion of a free, self-generating individual existing within a state that guarantees universal freedom and equality. As she puts it: “in a smooth and legitimate liberal order, the particularistic “I’s” must remain unpoliticized, the universalistic “we” must remain without specific content or aim, without common good other

111 than abstract universal representation or pluralism” (Brown 1993, 392). In her view, when identities are mobilized around inclusivity without also critiquing the ordering logics of the liberal state that give rise to exclusion in the first place, they by necessity must pay appropriate discursive fealty to the disciplinary apparatuses that produce those difference and they must accept the liberal state’s claims to support the universal good of its citizens. Thus, if the stated goal of such mobilizations is inclusion, various vectors of oppression endemic to the state, such as economic stratification, commodification, exploitation, displacement, and alienation must be “discursively normalized and thus depoliticized [such that] other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight” (Brown 1993, 395).These identities, premised as they are on exclusion from the universal are, therefore, dependent on that exclusion as a constituting factor. Contemporary political identity, therefore:

reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified “I” that is disenfranchised by an exclusive “we.” […] politicized identity emerges and obtains its unifying coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as protest against exclusion, a protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that reinstalls the humanist ideal – and a specific white, middle- class, masculinist expression of this ideal – insofar as it premises itself on exclusion from it. Put another way around, politicized identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as well as their exclusion from it, for their own perpetuity as identities. (Brown 1993, 398)

This “we,” as discussed earlier in this chapter, is ultimately a fiction generated in the image of state hegemony. Rather than being revealed as itself a symptom of institutional power, identification with the experience of injurious marginality is, under such a framework, presented as a failure or aberration in how the state functions. This misrecognition of how marginality operates invests the politicized identity in its own subjection such that it comes to be structured by what Nietsche called ressentiment, which first externalizes (by producing and naming an agent of oppression) and then anesthetizes the pain of exclusion by producing an affect of anger or indignation which “overwhelms the hurt” (Brown 1993, 401). Thus, the goal of a politicized identity, as Brown presents it, is not to transform a system, but to salve the “wound” of exclusion by being allowed to submit oneself fully to presumptive universal discipline. This is a misreading of the concept of the liberal universal, which requires a constitutive exterior for its own integrity, whether that be the state of nature in Hobbes, or whatever identities are marginalized out of the white, middle-class, masculine ideal that Brown identifies.

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It is in this last consideration that the differences between Brown’s “wounded attachments” and necrocriticism become particularly pronounced. The investiture in injury that is characteristic of the liberal politicized identity and subsequent abjuration of hurt through ressentiment are reversed in necrocriticism. Rather than seek induction into the universal ideal of the state, these genres of protest refuse its claims that it fosters life, and the assumption that simple inclusion should be a goal at all. As is evident in the histories of each of these sites of resistance, harsh and unyielding criticism is levied at state power and even at individual agents of repression. Affect is unquestionably present in all political struggles, particularly when the stakes are as high as they are in these two interventions. In this case, however, there is no attempt to “overwhelm the hurt,” but rather to feel it fully and make it visible so as to call attention to the hypocrisies of the state. As Elaine Scarry points out: “As in dying and death, so in serious pain the claims of the body utterly nullify the claims of the world. The annihilating power of pain is visible in the simple fact of experience observed by Karl Marx, ‘There is only one antidote to mental suffering, and that is physical pain’ (Scarry 33). Whereas politicized identity mobilizes injury as its constituting exterior with an eye towards inclusion within the system that has marginalized it, the pain of necrocriticism, tied to those elements of the human body which are inexpressible and unrepresentable, seeks not to enter into the fold of the liberal state, but by appealing to that which cannot be included within conceptions of the universal subject, necessarily seeks to transform it.

3.5 Subcomandante Marcos – The Walking Dead

Here we are, the always dead – dying again, but this time to live. – Zapatista Communique. January 10, 1994.

The question of embodiment has always been one of significance for Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the former military leader of the EZLN, particularly the disciplining ordering of his body by the state and the media. Newspaper articles, journals, interviews, all frequently highlight that he was a mestizo revolutionary at the head of an Indigenous movement. In some cases, this is presented as a curiosity, in others it is a condemnation. In the early days of the revolution, Mexican authorities denied that this was an Indigenous movement at all on the basis that their spokesperson was not Maya. This challenge to Marcos’ inauthenticity echoes colonial imperatives to delegitimize Indigenous resistance through biopolitical orderings such as blood

113 quantum in order to reserve for the state the power to authorize certain Indigenous voices over others. In other instances, reporters have widely speculated about Marcos’ health. If communiques weren’t forthcoming or Marcos hadn’t been seen for some time, it was speculated that his health was failing or that he may be dead. Marcos himself has denounced this obsession with his body over the bodies of multitudes of Zapatista civilians at various times: “The first involuntary collaborators in the rumor about sickness and death have been the ‘experts in zapatology’ in arrogant Jovel and chaotic Mexico City who presume their closeness to and deep knowledge of Zapatismo” (Marcos 2014). Indeed, the presentification of an Indigenous body, standing in solidarity against the state is an oft-recurring theme in the rhetoric of Zapatista resistance practices. To make the body count in this way is to reject the homogenizing discipline of the state. In the case below, it is not only the body, but its destruction that becomes a principle vector of mobilization.

On May 25, 2014, at an Amphitheatre in La Realidad, Chiapas, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos gave a broadcast address that would mark his first and final public appearance since 2009. Earlier that month, José Luis Solís López, also known as Compañero Galeano, was brutally murdered in an attack by paramilitaries. At what was to be a memorial for their fallen comrade, an Indigenous teacher at one of the Zapatista schools, Subcomandante Marcos addressed the crowd of over a thousand for the final time: “these will be the final words that I speak in public before I cease to exist” (Marcos 2014).

Marcos’ speech gives a brief recounting of the early days of the revolt against the Mexican government, of the struggles throughout the 90s and early 2000s, and the introspective silent period that the movement underwent until around 2012. And he gives an account of the accidental construction of the figure of Subcomandante Marcos:

In the earliest hours of the morning on the first day of the first month of the year 1994, an army of giants, that is to say, of indigenous rebels, descended on the cities to shake the world with its step. Only a few days later, with the blood of our fallen soldiers still fresh on the city streets, we noticed that those from outside did not see us. Accustomed to looking down on the indigenous from above, they didn’t lift their gaze to look at us. Accustomed to seeing us humiliated, their heart did not understand our dignified rebellion. Their gaze had stopped on the only mestizo they saw with a ski mask, that is, they didn’t

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see. Our authorities, our commanders, then said to us: “They can only see those who are as small as they are. Let’s make someone as small as they are, so that they can see him and through him, they can see us.” (Marcos 2014)

The Marcos persona, clad in castoff military clothing, his face obscured with a black ski mask, smoking his pipe, was, in fact, simply a man wearing castoff military clothing, hiding his face to protect against identification by the government, who also liked to smoke. The intent of the movement was to foreground its Indigenous roots by installing an Indigenous spokesperson to communicate with the media. That spokesperson, however, died in the aftermath of the 1994 uprising (Oikonomakos) and so Marcos stepped in to fulfill his role. Celebrity, for Marcos and the Zapatistas, was a tactic born out of the digital age and used against mass media and government alike. A singular individual was needed to coax the media into engaging with the Zapatista struggle, someone who could generate clicks and sell newspaper subscriptions and so Marcos became that celebrity: “And so began a complex maneuver of distraction, a terrible and marvelous magic trick, a malicious move from the indigenous heart that we are, with indigenous wisdom challenging one of the bastions of modernity: the media. And so began the construction of the character named “Marcos”” (Marcos 2014). If the “cult of individualism” (Marcos 2014) of media and state require an individual with which to engage, the Zapatistas were only too happy to oblige them. This part of Marcos’ speech resembles nothing so much as a theatrical postmortem in which he details which elements of this trick worked and which he would have changed. One particularly amusing mistake was the too-rapid proliferation of various identity- decoys who, over time would be “discovered” by the media or the state to be Subcomandante’s true identity: “During the first year we exhausted, as they say, the repertoire of all possible “Marcoses.” And so by the beginning of 1995, we were in a tight spot and the communities’ work was only in its initial steps” (Marcos 2014). The speech weaves fiction with fact, playfully dancing around the reality that Marcos’ identity by this point is one of the worst-kept secrets of the EZLN. Ultimately, though, the Marcos that is known by the media and by the state, the Marcos that is tracked and quantified, the data-double, is relinquished to the state, to the media, to the algorithms, the apparatus, or the stack. What Marcos keeps for himself and for the movement is the irreducible and irreproducible being that he is. Similarly, the Zapatista movement, its own sense of autonomy, its territoriality, and corporeality, stand in contrast to the universalizing erasure, the bioinformatic quantification, and disciplining “care” the state imposes on them. “Those who loved and hated SupMarcos now know that they have loved and hated a

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hologram” (Marcos 2014). The construction of a “holographic” spokesman is a rejection of the power relations inherent in traditional media. The EZLN, rather than succumbing to the vagaries of a media that creates and destroys celebrity for its own ends, would maintain their autonomy through the construction of what amounts to a digital homunculus. If the life of Marcos is a hologram, it is such so that the corporeal humanity of the dead, marginalized, and disappeared may be proclaimed. Marcos lists off the names and causes of death (when known) of allies both local and international. Those killed by police repression in San Salvador Atenco in 2006, victims of murder in Ostula, Bachajón, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Juan Francisco Kuykendall. He addresses the dead thusly:

And the greatest mockery of all is that with every shovelful of dirt thrown by the thug currently on shift, the system is saying: “You don’t count, you are not worth anything, no one will cry for you, no one will be enraged by your death, no one will follow your step, no one will hold up your life.” And with the last shovelful it gives its sentence: “even if they catch and punish those who killed you, we will always find another, an other, to ambush and on whom to repeat the macabre dance that ended your life.” It says: “The small, stunted justice you will be given, manufactured by the paid media to simulate and obtain a bit of calm in order to stop the chaos coming at them, does not scare me, harm me, or punish me.” What do we say to this cadaver who, in whatever corner of the world below, is buried in oblivion? (Marcos 2014)

This highlighting of the death of citizens, of the state’s stamping out of the particular in the name of a narrowly-defined universal, calls attention to what Agamben calls “the state of exception,” or ban (Agamben 1998, 105). Sovereignty, in Agamben’s estimation, lies in the ability to suspend the law, to suspend the fiduciary duty that the state owes to the wellbeing of its citizens. By way of example, he refers to Desidero Cavalca who defines the concept of the medieval ban as not only granting permission to kill a given individual, but also to consider them already dead: “Whoever is banned from his city on pain of death must be considered as dead” (Cavalca qtd. In Agamben 1998, 105). The banned individual, as Agamben says, remains a subject of the law insofar as they are not immune to policing, but they are also excluded from its protection. What becomes clear, as Marcos presents these numerous dead and lays them at the feet of the state that claims moral legitimacy through the protection of its people, is that the exception isn’t all that exceptional at all. Marcos links the killing of Galeano, and of any other Zapatista, to the state’s attempt to kill the EZLN and he offers to take his fallen comrade’s place. Under a state in which bodies are so interchangeable, Marcos takes the ideology at its word and, “to satisfy the

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impertinence that is death, in place of Galeano we put another name, so that Galeano lives and death takes not a life but just a name – a few letters empty of any meaning, without their own history or life” (Marcos 2014). After exiting the stage for a few moments, he returns to introduce himself to the crowd: “Good morning compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Anyone else here named Galeano? [the crowd cries, “We are all Galeano!”] Ah, that’s why they told me that when I was reborn, it would be as a collective” (Marcos 2014). The rebirth as collective resolves the liberal state’s contradictions between the universal and the particular. Tying this new life to the deaths of so many comrades and allies, Marcos’ performance supports the particularity of the individual, but simultaneously rejects the ordering logics of a system of erasure, consigning “a few letters empty of meaning” so that the body in all its corporeality may be acknowledged.

This death as an individual followed by a rebirth as multitude challenges the process of exchange that lies at the basis of the political project of the state. As Peggy Phelan says, it “clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital” (Phelan 1993, 148). This one-for-one principal of equivalent exchange is interrupted by a death that is not abjured but embraced. The murder of Galeano makes of his death an element of the Mexican state’s self-production. It is a transaction through which the state exchanges the life of one man for the life of the state. Marcos’ performance effectively devalues that currency, refusing the equivalency principal at play. It pries from the state’s hands the control over life and death that it maintains, redeploying it within a new economy run by the EZLN themselves. Jean Baudrillard writes at length on the relationship between the state, symbolic exchange, and death. Market economies, in his view are haunted by the symbolic exchange of gift societies:

The principal of reversibility (the counter-gift) must be imposed against all the economistic, psychologistic and structuralist interpretations for which Mauss9 paved the way […] Everywhere in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversal and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation and power. Hence the reversibility of the gift in the counter-gift, the reversibility of exchange in the sacrifice, the reversibility of time in the cycle, the reversibility of production in destruction, the reversibility of life in death, and the reversibility of every term and value of the langue in the anagram. In every domain it

9 Baudrillard is referring to anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who studied gift-economies and noted that to receive a gift is to make oneself beholden to another’s power until an appropriate counter-gift could be returned to the giver.

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assumes the form of extermination and death, for it is the form of the symbolic itself. Neither mystical nor structural, the symbolic is inevitable. (Baudrillard 22)

For Baudrillard, the apparatus of the state and biopolitics exists to short-circuit the principal of reversability, substituting it for a market of equivalent exchange and an economics of infinite accumulation: “The economy lives only on the suspension of death that it maintains through material production, and through renewing the available death stocks, even if it means conjuring up […] blackmail and repression” (Baudrillard 199). Accumulation, in Baudrillard’s estimation, is an attempt to abolish death altogether, but ultimately results in “the industrial prolongation of death just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution” (Baudrillard 199). In the death and resurrection of Galeano, Marcos rejects that notion of equivalence, instead countering the state’s transactional life-giving/life-taking in the name of accumulation and security with a sacrificial gift-countergift. Galeano’s life, used by the state to defer its own death, has its recuperative function denied by Marcos’ reversal of the terms of exchange. Galeano’s death, accepted as sacrifice, becomes a reciprocal mass-resurrection, illustrating “the absolute impasse of political economy, which intends to eliminate death through accumulation: the time of accumulation is the time of death itself” (Baudrillard 199).

3.6 Ogichidaakwe Spence – Hunger as Refusal

While Agamben doesn’t explicitly talk about colonialism, his reference to the State of Exception, as described above, is of particular importance to settler colonial contexts: Colonial sovereignty necessarily requires that an exception be made which discounts the pre-existing civilizations over which the settler colonial state imposes itself. It is this exception, inherent in the Canadian state, that Ogichidaakwe Theresa Spence revealed through her six week-long hunger strike, calling attention not only to past wrongs, but to the continued dispossession of Indigenous peoples that is foundational to its existence. The State of Exception is not an accomplished event fixed to an historical past, but rather is a process that is enacted and reenacted in every affirmation or articulation of the colonial state. As Achille Mbembe says: “Within the empire, the vanquished populations were given a status that enshrined their despoilment. In these configurations, violence constituted the original form of the right, and exception provided the structure of sovereignty (Mbembe 23). From such a point of view, the entire structure of the state relies on its ability to first deny from the colonized, under threat of violence, the very freedom and liberty which it then claims to provide through its legal, governmental, and disciplinary mechanisms.

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Agamben says about the apparatus that it implies in all cases a process of subjectivation “without which it cannot function as an apparatus of governance, but is, rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence” (Agamben 2009, 19-20). What is given to the colonized, then, is merely violence. Settler-colonialism only loses the stigma of its violence and therefore can only recuperated as benevolence through an act of historical amnesia that posits – by forgetting the state’s breaking of treaties signed in good faith, for instance – the state as coming to exist within a political void. “Settler colonialism directly informs past and present processes of European colonisation, global capitalism, liberal modernity and international governance. If settler colonialism is not theorised in accounts of these formations, then its power remains naturalised in the world that we engage and in the theoretical apparatuses with which we attempt to explain it (Morgensen 43). The promise of authentic subjectivity, already shown to be false, must therefore be profaned and rejected if all the hallmarks of liberal subjectivity (participation in the economy, property rights, freedom of movement, etc.) are ultimately denied to the citizen. Such an act of sovereign violence was the basis for the assemblage of protest sites and acts of resistance operating under the generalized banner of Idle No More. The introduction of Bill C-45 in October 2012 involved a massive curtailing of Indigenous territorial rights and authority. Beginning in December of 2012 as a response to various concerns, the movement catalyzed around the passage of the Bill into law and is ongoing to this day. The movement has involved various forms of bodily and online protest and critique, including the associated public fast by Attawapiskat First Nation Chief, Theresa Spence.

Starting on December 11, Chief Spence engaged in a fast in order to raise public awareness of the housing crisis faced by her reserve and of the Canadian government’s failure to abide by treaties signed with various First Nations. She requested a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General David Johnson and vowed she would not break her fast until they agreed to discuss Canada’s treaty relationship with First Nation leadership. A month later, Prime Minister Harper agreed to attend a meeting, not with Spence, but with Shawn Atleo, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. During her fast, Spence subsisted on fish broth, tying the protest to Aanishnaabe ceremonial practices. Leanne Simpson directly highlights the ways that that Spence’s fast, and the slow mortification of her body, are tied to the state apparatus:

Fasting as a ceremony is difficult. It is challenging to willingly weaken one’s body physically, and the mental and emotional strength required for fasting is perhaps more

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difficult than the physical. So when we fast, we ask our friends and family to support us and to act as our helpers. There is an assumption of reciprocity – the faster is doing without, in this case to make things better for all Indigenous Peoples, and in return, the community around her carries the responsibility of supporting her. (Simpson 156)

The question Simpson raises of reciprocity positions Spence’s fast in a particularly damning relationship with the Canadian state. The form of performed resistance that Spence adopts recalls the long history of the hunger strike as a form of political revolt.10 As a tactic, hunger strikes are a notoriously extreme measure and one which typically signals the exhaustion of all other possible avenues of redress. In most cases, hunger strikes are performed in situations in which the strikers are suffering some form of incarceration (Long Kesh Prison, Ireland (1981), in Turkey’s F-Type prisons (2001), in the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre in Australia (2002)) or as an act of colonial resistance (Irish Republicans 1916-1923, Indian freedom movement (1915-1947)). Maude Ellman argues of the IRA hunger strike that “it was not by starving but by making a spectacle of their starvation that the prisoners brought shame on their oppressors and captured the sympathies of their co-religionists” (Ellman, 17). It should be noted that in many instances, Spence and her allies describe her action against the Canadian government as a fast, and often explicitly distance themselves from the term hunger strike. Margery Fee offers a plausible explanation for why when she discusses the negative media reaction to Spence’s fast: “Tolerant ordinary Canadians were one again seriously inconvenienced by ungrateful, dishonest, and potentially violent Indigenous people” (Fee 215). A similar sentiment is echoed by Freddy Stonypoint, a Water Protector from Sagamok Anishnawabek who, in discussing the reoccupation Tipi during UnSettling Canada 150 notes that: “The rhetoric of protest and demonstration and rallies is always going to be thrown against Indigenous people as a form to recast us as threats” (NetNewsLedger). Spence’s fast, then, tied as it is to ceremonial practices and to an act of political resistance, is not simply a hunger strike but is also something more. Moreover, as the head of a government in her own right, – albeit one that is much smaller and contained within the Canada – Spence models an alternative political ordering between government and population. By positioning her body and its slow destruction in opposition to the

10 Further reading on the hunger strike throughout history and in different global contexts, see: Ellman, Maud. The Hunger Artists. (1993). Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence. (1991). Grant, Kevin. Last Weapons. (2019). Bargu, Banu. Starve and Immolate. (2014). Fiske, Lucy. “Hunger Strike, Lip Sewing and Self-harm.” Human Rights, Refugee Protest and Immigration Detention.(2016).

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crisis that faces the population for which she is responsible, Spence performs a reversal of the operational characteristics of the neoliberal state, which, as described above, produces and rejuvenates itself through the discipline, control, capture, and disposal of citizen bodies. Spence’s fast, by virtue of the fact of her political status, becomes more than an act of protest. It is transformed into an assertion of the kind of relational politics that I discuss in Chapter 1 – Esposito and Cavarero both talk about the importance of communitarian bonds and the sense of social debt that ties communities together. The weakening of Spence’s body, her reliance on support from allies and community members reestablishes those very bonds that the liberal state has long-since done away with in its production of immunized, individual subjects. The weakening of Spence’s body likewise stands as a living and dying critique of the state’s failure to live up to the promise of protecting the health and bodily integrity of the population. In the words of Scott Lauria Morgensen: “Settler colonialism can be denaturalised by theorising its constitution as biopower, as well as how it in turn conditions all modern modes of colonialism and biopower” (Morgensen 53). Spence’s fast and the mortification of her body, the performance of her suffering, and the consequent attempt to discipline her body through the apparatus of the media helped to foreground the biopolitical structures of settler colonialism.

The biopolitical nature of the crisis afflicting not only Attawapiskat, but also other Indigenous communities across Canada has been succinctly summed up by Murray Angus in And the Last Shall be First: Native Policy in an Era of Cutbacks (1990): “(1) funding – money for Indigenous people comes from the “social envelope,” which is under attack; (2) demographics – Indigenous people are the fastest growing population – so even maintaining programs is expensive; (3) and racism – white people will look after their own first” (Murray, qtd. in Pasternak 43). The first of these causes highlights the asymmetrical application of citizenship within a liberal state. By defining as “social programs” those moneys earmarked for the protection and corporeal soundness of a significant portion of the Indigenous population, the state stigmatizes those disbursements as “assistance,” as the benevolent magnanimity of the state. As Dur Orja Jay has pointed out, the traditional territory of the Ahtawapiskatowi ininiwak, Spence’s home territory, is not only the home of a reserve suffering a housing and health crisis, it is also the home of a $1 billion mine construction project run by De Beers, a project facilitated by the passage of Bill C- 45 and the consequent repeal of environmental protections and Indigenous sovereignty over Indigenous territory. The project is anticipated to make over $6.7 billion with all taxes going to

121 the provincial government. As Jay succinctly puts it, “Attawapiskat is subsidizing De Beers, Canada, and Ontario” (Jay 110). The illusion of the liberal state as provider and protector cannot cohere in the face of a contextual juxtaposition of the suffering and deaths of colonized peoples and the power and capital produced by those deaths.

Glen Sean Coulthard has remarked on the importance of linking Indigenous bodies to the economic impetus of settler-colonialsm. “if you want those in power to respond swiftly to Indigenous peoples’ political efforts, start by placing Native bodies (with a few logs and tires thrown in for good measure) between settlers and their money, which in colonial contexts is generated by the ongoing theft of our land and resource base” (Coulthard 36). Though Coulthard is mostly referencing the Mohawk Resistance of 1990 and can easily be extended to other blockades such as Wet’suwet’en, Chief Spence’s fast also spurred a flurry of activity among the government and media alike. Certainly, at the very basest level, the obstruction of points of access to natural resources is enough to mobilize action on the part of the state, but embodied resistance in a colonial context also forces into the present the history of land and resource expropriation upon which the state’s integrity relies. It brings into material reality and immediate visibility the permanence of the State of Exception. It confounds the collective hallucination that “the state is the model of political unity, a principle of rational organization, the embodiment of the idea of the universal, and a moral sign” (Mbembe 24). The management of these “social programs” becomes the management of both bodies and territory. As land is seized, defined, and parceled out to both state and non-state colonial occupiers, and spatial relations are redefined to fit within the prerogatives of the renewal and development of state power, biological data is captured, analyzed, and bodies classified according to myriad criteria, all in aid of producing a certain imagined national history.

Spence, or more specifically the discourse surrounding her fast, further calls attention to the asymmetrical relationship between the disciplining apparatus of bioinformatic surveillance and those bodies deemed worthy of protection. Haggerty and Ericson note that “we are witnessing a rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance, such that groups which were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored” (Haggerty and Ericson 606). But while surveillance and biopolitical discipline may be increasing, the putative aim of fostering the health and wellbeing of populations seems suspiciously lacking in the context of the violence and health crises inflicted on and afflicting Indigenous populations. The reason for this

122 dearth of data on this specific population seems reflected in the liberal state’s need to erase particularity from the universal subject it seeks to create. Haggerty and Ericson propose that the process of surveillance involves “the creation of a space of comparison” (Haggerty and Ericson 613) against which collected data-doubles can be measured and observed. In considering such a comparison, one wonders whether the social imaginaries of the state could withstand such a plainly articulated condemnation of the doctrine of equality in which inconvenient populations are consigned to the realm of dark data.

Where the surveillance assemblage was not lacking, however, was on the policing of Chief Spence’s body and the almost giddy speculation in the media over whether Spence’s hunger strike was legitimate and whether or not she was in actual danger (Hopper, Kirkey, Postmedia), while others seemed disappointed at the thought that the fast may not include an actual risk of death (Goldstein, Hume) with Barbara Kay notably comparing the protest to a fad diet:

And although it is a bit awkward to point out, the photos I have seen of Chief Spence do not show her looking quite so gaunt and sickly […] What Chief Spence seems to be on is more like a “detox” diet than a fast […] If Chief Spence actually intends to starve herself to death, she is going about it the wrong way […] at this rate, it is going to take her a very long time to get the job done (Kay).

Kay’s op-ed mobilizes bodily surveillance apparatuses and a rhetoric of medicalization and health to discount Spence’s fast as inauthentic. She references images from the media to diagnose Spence’s body as in need of, or even deserving the starvation she is going through, as though Spence’s suffering is necessary for her own edification. What Kay’s critique of Spence seems to blunder into, however, is a tacit endorsement of the state violence that Spence was protesting. Indeed, Kay’s entire piece fails to engage with any Indigenous bodies (or Indigenous body counts) other than the one she finds to be vexatiously clinging to life. The “job” she argues is failing to get done is not systemic change, nor even successfully shaming the Prime Minister into a meeting, but Spence’s death by starvation. Kay demonstrates a razor focus on the body of one woman, while erasing the historical and ongoing destruction of bodies that lie at the foundations of the state itself. It is Spence’s own bodily mortification that draws that contrast into visibility. The focus on the authenticity of Spence’s proximity to death, the insistence on being able to know scientifically, medically, biopolitically, the state of her body demonstrates the tacit complicity of the processes and technologies that absentify, erase, and ignore the multitude of unmentioned and unnamed bodies for which she fasts. Pamela Palmater expresses this point

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when she argues that “For every day Spence does not eat, she is slowly dying, and that is exactly what is happening to First Nations, who have lifespans up to 20 years shorter than average Canadians” (Palmater 40). Spence’s hunger strike and the public question of her bodily mortification forces the historical processes of dispossession into what Peggy Phelan calls “a maniacally charged present” (Phelan 1993, 148). Phelan argues that performance is “resistant to the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to the discourse of reproduction” (Phelan 147). Phelan is, of course, talking about the irreproducibility of live performance art and I make no claim that Spence’s fast is art but it is, through the fact of its organization, its entrance into public spectatorship and its openness to the critique of individuals and media alike, unquestionably a performance. In its presentation of the spectacle of Spence’s starving corporeal body and its double status as dark and illuminated data, this performance reveals the emptiness of the state and its agents claims to legitimate dominion over those bodies it has been either unwilling or unable to enclose within its universal envelope. In Phelan’s words this uncertainty “suggests another way of thinking about the relation between representation and the real” (Phelan 180). Leanne Simpson remarks that Spence’s supporters “support her sovereignty over her body and mind” (Simpson 156) and it is in this choice to mortify her body through hunger that Spence produces an alternative conceptualization of sovereignty, one grounded in the reciprocity of mutual support and that stands in contradiction to the state’s claim to sole sovereignty over citizen bodies. Spence’s fast was not only a performance that in many ways highlighted the failure of the liberal state to foster life, but by directing the media apparatus to train such a focused gaze on the ostensibly insufficiently mortified body of a single Indigenous woman, she gave the lie to the handwringing performances of concern by a hegemonic culture and system dependent on the very forms of exploitation and oppression it should exist to abjure.

3.7 Conclusion – Occupy Wall Street and Mimetic Fragility

In a 2013 conversation, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou argue for a rethinking of the concept of vulnerability in a manner that reframes it, not as disempowerment, but as the grounds for a new politics of resistance:

AA: there must be another way to enact vulnerability, without becoming socially dead from political destitution or subjecting others to a life of social death. This other way to live requires, as you have written, “a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it.” (Butler 2013, 158)

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In Butler’s formulation, the recognition of mutually shared precarity is often the catalyst for political action. If a situation being protested is unendurable, then a protest is definitionally an assembly of bodies failing to endure together. Many forms of protest perform this shared sense of vulnerability in an attempt to dispel precarity.

Butler is generally opposed to violent resistance, and so argues for a means by which to “protect vulnerability without precisely eradicating it.” Her opposition is based on relational politics which would abjure violent self-defence on the grounds that “If one defends oneself violently against the prospect of a violent annihilation, is one still in a constitutive [relational] relationship with the one against whom one struggles?” (Butler 2013, 123). That said, performative violence, or merely the aesthetic representation of potential violence, is often invoked against injustice and precarity. A clenched fist, held aloft, is at one and the same time both the brandishing of an offensive weapon and is also synechdochally representative of a movement in which the individual fingers, otherwise vulnerable to injury, are gathered into a more resilient whole. Such a symbol is ubiquitous in its use by labour movements, feminists, the American civil rights movement, and probably most famously, the Black Panther Party. Likewise, Subcomandante Marcos famously wore a bandolier and often carried a rifle, although the bullets in the bandolier were purposefully mismatched to the firearm he carried. We see in such forms of protest an invocation of the body as one that is not only capable, but also prepared to engage in defensive violence. Such performances may also short-circuit the organizing ideologies of the state.

In the case of the Black Panthers, the 1967 Mulford Act, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, was a repealing of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In response to the armed citizen-patrols in which members openly carried loaded weapons to protect their neighborhoods against police violence, both Democrats and Republicans were forced into breaking the mythic inviolability of the right to bear arms. This “malicious compliance” with state ideology forced the revelation of a number of contradictions: Is police brutality happening or not? Do citizens have the right to protect their bodily integrity or not? Are the so-called foundational rights of the individual inviolable or not? At what point does compliance with state ideology become illegal or even treasonous? Such forms of protest highlight the relational aspect of vulnerability. Such acts of performative violence are ultimately still tied to a sense of relationality insofar as the bodies seeking to protect themselves are not vulnerable as an

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existential fact, but are vulnerable in relation to something else: another individual, a system, a series of material conditions, etc.

An appeal to vulnerability, however, is not completely without the possibility of being recuperated by the state for its own purposes. In Discipline and Punish (1977), Michael Foucault describes in detail the drawing and quartering of the regicide, Damiens. In The Tears of Eros (1961), Georges Bataille muses over a series of gruesome photographs taken in 1905 that detail the Leng-Tche [sic], the slow cutting and dismemberment of Fou-tchou-li, a Mongol guard who killed his master, Prince Ao-Han-Ouan. In 2014, Zapatista Subcomandante Moisés tells reporters and allies of the slaying and dismemberment by machete of Zapatista teacher José Luis Solís López by paramilitaries hired by the Mexican government as part of a counter-insurgency strategy against the autonomous self-government of the Zapatistas. In all such cases, the integrity of the state body becomes the motivating catalyst for repressive violence. That said, this mimetic fragility of the state is ultimately grounded in a notion of its vulnerability as fixed, stripped of its relational framework, and absolute. Such a conceptual vulnerability, articulated independently of the social and material relations of precarity deflects from vulnerability’s spatial, historical, and contextual specificity. It becomes a kind of universalized condition the appeal to which is foreclosed from critique and naturalized. The reassertion of this mimetic fragility as a kind of warped necrocriticism mobilized against citizen bodies plays out in the waning days of the Occupy Wall Street encampments in a manner that ties together the ideologies of state spatial supremacy and the control and management of corporeal health.

Luke Winslow characterizes the Occupy encampment as a protest that enacts a grotesque critique of various conceptual categories and boundaries that shore up the divisions between the economically advantaged and disadvantaged. As demonstrations, Occupy encampments allowed protesters to assemble and perform an alternative political order in which various needs could be identified and met through practical application of a politics of relationality. Barbara Ehrenreich describes the logistics of a protest camp as follows:

occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided—to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1 percent. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee? (Ehrenreich)

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Ehrenreich’s article indirectly raises the mediating effects space has on public and private bodies. Public citizens of sovereignty require a private space, closed off from public display, in which to exist in order that they may function relatively unfettered within public space. Anti-vagrancy laws generally restrict the carrying out of ostensibly private – generally biological rather than social – functions (relieving oneself, sleeping, sex, etc.) within spaces designated as public. The reinforcement of these boundaries coincides with the Hobbesian expulsion of the bare human from the space of society. As Winslow argues, the Occupy encampment is a hybrid space which raises the threat of the grotesque as a challenge to the integrity of the state body:

the Occupy encampments served a grotesque function by drawing attention to the taken- for-granted boundaries designed to separate the rich from the rest, the clean from unclean, and the productive from unproductive in a way that opened up liminal space where ambiguity and contradiction prompt the construction of new vocabularies that can explain our social condition. (Winslow 279)

Winslow’s argument is that the boundaries that are transgressed are those of class – gainfully employed protesters were camped alongside homeless people, for instance – but taken alongside the prohibitions against the commingling of private and public bodies, the very divisions that are foundational to the liberal state’s existence themselves are thrown into question. When the State of Nature finds itself within the state of society, not only are the boundaries themselves put up to scrutiny, but the supposed impossibility of multiple sovereignties coexisting is also called into question.

The Zuccotti park encampment was ultimately shut down on the grounds of it being a public health hazard. Bolton, Froese, and Jeffrey (2016) note that a rhetoric of public health and sanitation was the most commonly deployed justification for evicting Occupy protesters from the park. Thus, a biologically determined universalized body, one presumed to be fragile and susceptible to illness and death became the grounds on which this form of resistance was counteracted by authorities. In a manner that darkly mirrors the necrocritical display of a mortified pre-Hobbesian body, the mimetic fragility of the body politic became the grounds on which to force an end to a public display of resistance to unbearable economic disparity.

This mimetic fragility is built into foundational philosophies of the Leviathan. Violent or repressive responses to the perceived fragility of the state are noted in Hobbes by Robert Kraynak. Kraynak’s analysis of Behemoth argues that Hobbes saw the state as inherently fragile

127 on the basis of its investiture in the intellectual pursuits of scholars and clergymen rather than in the might of the sovereign to impose order and obedience: “By subordinating the violent power of the state to the doctrinal warfare of various intellectual factions, state authority was always precariously positioned without a supreme basis for its right to govern” (Kraynak 53). The shifting conception of state authority from a divine right to rule, to something determined through philosophy and reason has forced the state to engage in discourses that claim to promote the health of a political body. The body of the state, therefore, must be protected against contaminating resistance that may disrupt the carefully sorted boundaries that keep the State of Nature at bay. For Hobbes, the solution is to “rid [the universities] of seditious doctrines and learned folly that destabilized Western civilization and 17th Century England” (Kraynak 53). For biopolitical states, it is a self-justification that obfuscates the operational violence of the state under a false pretense of care. Galeano and Spence, through performative mortifications, have challenged this pretense and demanded that the regulation and control of the body give way to a genuine ethics of care.

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Conclusion

Through the various modes of protest explored in the antecedent chapters, the precarity of the state and the contradictory nature of its foundational ideologies are revealed through various modes of protest that revolve around a dialectical clash between presumed opposites. Where central authority is invoked, it is decried by voices from the margins. Where the materiality of space is foundational, its arbitrary character is revealed. Where the body is erased, it is reaffirmed. In a series of tactical performances, localism is countered by international solidarities, globalization is reigned-in by place-based knowledge, and transactional economies are met with a gift that cannot find its counter in anything short of death. Where life is mobilized as an oppressive force, the response is an invocation of its opposite.

One month after my committee meeting for Chapter 3 of this dissertation, the killing of George Floyd Jr. by Minneapolis police sparked international outrage and mobilized multiple protests across the world against racism and police brutality. In the ensuing months, the questions of bodies, spatial ethics, and economic justice, have exploded around the United States. Sometimes voices were amplified, other times they were manipulated by use of social media and internet communications technologies and all this occurred in the midst of a global pandemic.

The abdication of the state’s responsibility for its citizens could not have been more evident in the wake of these combined and ongoing events. On the one hand, marginalized communities bore the lion’s share of the risk of contamination: filling labour shortages, delivering food and luxury items alike to people fortunate enough to work from home and sequester themselves from the dangers of in-person shopping. The already-existing health and social inequalities endemic to our political systems continue to reveal themselves to us through rising infection rates disproportionately affecting ethnic and racial minority groups as well as low-income communities. On the other hand, the murder of black citizens by police has added injury to the insult of a system that left many Black Americans to die in the COVID-19 pandemic.

For our own part, in July, the CBC reported that 83% of Toronto’s reported COVID-19 cases were contained within non-white communities who make up barely half the city’s population, with over 50% of all cases being borne by the 30% of the population considered to be low income (Cheung).

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For Indigenous Canadians, the numbers are less clear, partially owing to the dearth of health data on First Nations communities (Canadian Press 2020). At the same time, the insistence on autonomous community care by many First Nations communities in Canada has been credited with lower infection rates (Richardson & Crawford).

We have seen protesters make use of their bodies to shield each other from police, we’ve seen a renewed conversation about systemic racism in the United States and Canada. We’ve seen the building of an autonomous zone in the middle of Portland. At play in all of these struggles are many of the tactics and ideas discussed throughout the preceding work: an insistence on relational politics, alternative spatial ethics, and a skepticism towards the state’s technocratic disciplining of the body. And, so, I’d like to return to that question with which I opened this dissertation.

These frameworks and paradigms only feel more relevant today than they did when I began this project. As I look around at reactions to recent protest, at how political activism against the state and property are repeatedly branded as terrorism while the President of the United States congratulates a teenager for walking into a volatile protest with a gun, resulting in two deaths. When the concept of property is mobilized to justify marginalizing whole populations, but eagerly violated in the name of oil pipelines or the commodification of water. When the need is great enough, we will continue to mobilize and find ways to enact, rehearse, and practice alternatives to the status quo. We will continue to seek out ways to make things better. We will struggle with the dominant ideologies that tell us that things must be a certain way, we will question the reasons why. We will find ways to use the technologies that are available to us, and as we do so we must remain vigilant to guard against the way they constrain thought and action. We will still find ways to gather.

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