The Future of Bad Collectivity By Ali Aslam Mount Holyoke College Email: [email protected]

Presented at University of Connecticut Political Theory Workshop, September 27, 2016 Please do not cite without author’s permission

The ability of the political Left to organize a collective response to recent political and economic crises has been a series of failures. As nativist groups on the Right have rallied to close borders on both sides of the Atlantic and pass laws restricting access to bathroom facilities in the United States, citizens in the wake of Occupy have struggled to translate their anger over police shootings and economic inequalities into meaningful changes. At one level, the worry is that these failures deepen the sense of disenfranchisement that many citizens must already overcome in order to join others in action during an era when the responses to crises that concentrate decision-making in non-democratic bodies that have been justified as “necessary.”1 At another, there is the fear that once the exuberance of episodic democracy passes, quotidian democratic participation is further discredited because nothing changes. The problem of forming Left collectivities and motivating citizens to join them is one with serious stakes for both activists and theorists. Those on the Left have watched as Right- wing groups have been able to mobilize citizens through affect appeals to their fears, anxiety, and feelings of vulnerability. Citizens hearing these messages do not appear to be listening for or much concerned the truth. Rather as the results of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s unexpected ascendency to the Republican nomination suggest, citizens are not moved by the power of rational argumentation but fantasy, illusion, and falsehood if these resonate with their feelings of injury and vulnerability. As expressions of public will-formation, these represent forms of collective identification that do not align with the description of public deliberation and will-formation found in theories of justice based upon desires for mutual understanding and recognition. In the work of Axel Honneth public deliberation and will-formation form the normative basis for critical theory. Honneth has turned to the experience of injustice to develop a theory of social recognition that begins with the desire for self-realization. By identifying the ethical conditions necessary for self-realization, Honneth is able to establish a normative standard for social critique that is grounded in existing social conditions.2 For Honneth, that normative standard centers on the pre-conditions for social recognition, in which individual self-realization is mirrored in larger societal structures that include the family, market relations, and the state. Undergirding the normativity of Honneth’s theory is an appeal to evidence of social learning and progress over time. He points to the progressive development and use of human reason as well as the expansion of freedom across a range of social relationships to argue that these values and norms reflect our normative commitments. From his perspective, expressions of public will-formation that reflect one- sided, non-reciprocal understandings of individual autonomy by denying the intersubjective conditions of freedom are “pathological” developments. In other words, because these express desires for individual autonomy that involve withholding the conditions necessary for self-

1 For an overview of this shift see Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 2 Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. The summary of Honneth’s research that appears in the next paragraphs is drawn from this work.

2 realization for others, they misdevelopments that must be corrected through the processes of democratic will-formation and exercise of public reason. But this corrective circuit is compromised if citizens do not accept Honneth’s claims about historical progress and social learning. If they do not agree because they do not feel free, then the communicative pathways to public will formation will feel blocked to them and will not support political action in the ways that Honneth argues they should. In Lauren Berlant’s analysis, contemporary subjects are wary of promises of progress. They have discovered their aspirations and visions of the good life do not represent conditions of individual self-realization, but injury. As promises of post-war prosperity and economic security, intimacy, and political and social equality have become more unachievable, Berlant finds feelings of political impasse rather than optimism reflect how citizens feel about their agency. She recommends detachment and silent protest against social conditions that diminish individual flourishing.3 In this paper, I develop an account of collective identification and will formation that not only acknowledges pathological developments that have citizens more isolated and rendered their understandings of freedom more one-sided, but also begins with the experiences of injury that leave them skeptical about claims of progress. I argue that the concept of “bad collectivity” in Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 represents a form of collective identification that is an alternative to both silence and will formation based upon reason and reason-giving. 10:04 reveals individuals alienated from public life, navigating increasingly privatized spaces and fragmented publics and newsources, frustrated in their desires for collective action and belonging, and unsure on how to act on them. Amidst these conditions, Lerner identifies short- term instances of bad collectivity as the only experiences of collective identification that allow subjects to relate to and communicate with one another. Bad collectivities represent forms identification between individuals and other citizens as well as larger imagined communities such as the nation originating in feelings of injury.4 In 10:04, examples of bad collectivities include the Challenger disaster, and the image of American excellence it represented, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose participants felt estranged from established political institutions and promises of upward mobility. I turn to these examples along with the movement in order to indicate how bad collectivities might be transformed into expressions of democratic will formation that do not minimize injury or rely on notions of historical progress that feel false. In particular, I argue that the Agenda to Build Black Futures and the “I imagine” project represent forms of collective identification that acknowledge injury, anger, and moral outrage, but seek to move beyond feelings of impasse. Both projects offer a future-oriented vision of progress as the basis for collective identification that is not merely expressive but which seek to educate citizens on how existing laws and institutions must be reformed, often from the ground up, so that they reflect futures in which black lives matter. The social nature of freedom is a recurrent theme in these efforts. Black Lives Matter consistently links black freedom struggles to the struggles of other marginal groups; especially those marginalized within the black community such as queer and transgender individuals.

3 Lauren Berlant. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 4 Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 1983.

3 I.

Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition is an attempt to normatively ground a theory of justice in existing social reality. Honneth begins by observing freedom is at the center of modern political orders. The desire for individual autonomy operates across three distinct but overlapping fields, the family, legal rights, and social esteem, and each field contributes to our experience of freedom, according to Honneth. Although justice takes on a different meaning in each field, the feeling of moral disrespect that accompanies misrecognition is common across each of them. The desire for individual freedom informs the normative framework of society-at-large according to Honneth and the moral legitimacy of modern social orders are measured by the degree to which they guarantee individual rights to self-determination. Honneth argues the link between justice and individual autonomy is not merely a historical artifact, it is the product of social learning. Over time, “justice” has come to be defined in terms of that what protects and encourages autonomy for all members of society across the three fields of social experience. This social learning is reflected in the refinement of both the use of reason and reason- giving by individuals to justify their actions and the rationalization of social institutions. For Honneth, this means that freedom has been progressively realized in the family, the market, and the state. In Honneth’s historical reconstruction, the idea of freedom develops from incomplete forms of negative and reflexive freedom to the more complete form of social freedom. Social freedom refers to individual choice that is free of external influences as required by the definition of negative freedom, reflective of the agent’s free will, and which, crucially, is supported by the existing social conditions. Evidence of this shift to the more complete form of social freedom in which desires for individual freedom are mirrored in the institutions of the lifeworld allows Honneth to argue not just that freedom and justice are linked, but that they ought to be linked, too. Honneth’s reconstructive approach to identifying the immanent normative grounds for freedom and justice is indebted to Hegel, but his emphasis on the historical progressive development of human reason and mutual understanding sets his account from Hegel’s teleological claims about the inevitability of progress. By arguing that our normative commitments are already embedded in existing social conditions, Honneth is able to conclude that these norms and institutions deserve our support.5 At the same time, Honneth acknowledges that the social conditions for realizing the normative conception of freedom includes counterforces that slow the process of social learning. These counterforces encourage more egotistical and narrow understandings of

5 As Amy Allen argues, historical evidence of progress and social learning underlie Honneth’s normative project. This concept of progress looks backwards at history and sees social learning that has resulted in the expansion of social freedom in present era—Honneth’s example is the cultural and legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Western Europe. This notion of progress is self-congratulatory because it sees the present as morally superior to the past as well as contemporaneous cultures that do not share these norms. It also minimizes the persistence of domination in the social world to the extent that Honneth leans towards a narrative of inclusion. See Amy Allen, The End of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 108.

4 freedom that distort social relations. At their heart these counterforces draw humans away from cooperative engagements in all three social fields, rendering the concept of freedom more one-sided and incomplete. This weakens the role these institutions play in realizing and fostering an intersubjective understanding of freedom. These counterforces are diverse but a key driver has been the focus on legal freedoms in the liberal tradition at the cost of appreciating how complex social relations, norms, and customs, affect the exercise of individual freedom. Explaining how legal rights can distort the understanding of social freedom, Honneth notes how subjects who view themselves as the “passive beneficiaries “of liberties can claim legal rights within the private sphere or these rights can authorize citizens to act collectively in shaping the laws through a process of collective will-formation.6 Honneth believes that the administrative complexity of liberal democratic states discourages citizens from participating and thus developing the habits of social cooperation. Individual freedom thus becomes encapsulated in legal rights and private interest minus the demands of mutual obligations. Norms and habits of social cooperation and informed discourse that are the basis of collective will formation have further declined thanks to publics that have splintered, grown more private in their orientation, and less educated as profit-driven media companies have shifted from educating audiences towards entertaining them. Pathological forms of freedom reflecting declines in the democratic public sphere are these results of these changes. They render freedom in individualistic terms, as venues and outlets for the exercise of participatory and associational freedoms disappear from public life. Namely, citizens come to understand the rights conferred upon them without appreciating the social struggle, learning, and cooperation that made those rights possible, leaving those skills to atrophy and potentially endangering the rational development of institutions going forward.7 Pathological desires for freedom are those detached from the desire for collective forms of life that take the form of moral absolutism and moral terrorism,8 the growth of ego-centric social behaviors,9 and the transformation of the marketplace from a relation based on cooperative exchange to one premised on optimization pursued by the rational actor.10 Honneth repeatedly turns to fictional works, both literature and film, for evidence of these transformations in how individual freedom is understood. The film Kramer vs. Kramer, for example, is used to illustrate the pathological developments in legal freedom summarized above. The film, according to Honneth, “reveals the general course the first pathology of legal freedom can take” as the parents restrict from view the practices of social cooperation and communication that co-raising children will require even after the end of their marriage and focus exclusively on their legal rights in the custody battle.11 In other cases, literary characters

6 Freedom’s Right, 79. 7 By rational development, I am referring to processes of public will formation indebted to the use of reason and reason-giving. 8 Freedom’s Right, 117-118. 9 Ibid, 151; pornography, for example. 10 Ibid, 184. 11 Freedom’s Right, 91.

5 are cited to support how the focus on individual rights can liberate humans from feeling responsible or obligated to anyone else.12 Literature and origins of the democratic public sphere in the expansion of the reading public who came to see themselves as members of a shared community committed to the exchange of reasons also plays an important role in Honneth’s reconstructed history of social learning and progress.13 The rapid development of the public sphere was made possible by improvements in media technology and the communicative spaces they created, as print, radio, television, and now the Internet have become more accessible.14 These technologies were crucial instruments in rationalizing state institutions by allowing information “to flow from top to bottom but also bottom to top.”15 For Honneth, the institutionalization of public debate over political actions within these organs of national communication is central to the process of encouraging social freedom. Social freedom is enlarged through participation in shaping the public will, as citizens “commonly explore appropriate solutions and work cooperatively towards the experimental consummation of their community.”16 Individuals gain confidence in their powers of self-legislation and in governing institutions to the degree the latter reflect the former. To the extent that media no longer facilitate the exchange of reasoned argument, the public sphere is fragmented and characterized by mistrust of government institutions and officials, Honneth labels these as misdevelopments that can nonetheless be corrected through pursuit of the norms embedded within each them. Laurent Berlant does not share Honneth’s optimism or his faith in the rational development of modern institutions given their entwinement with and the pressure they face from the forces of contemporary capitalism. For her, these attachments are a source of injury and barriers to self realization. The freedoms and images of the good life they represent, whether bourgeois materialism or cultural recognition and social equality for sexual minorities, are receding horizons towards which individuals struggle but cannot reach. According to Berlant, these aspirations represent forms of cruel optimism and frustrated agency that leave subjects worn out. Cruel optimism refers to ideas and objects of desire that have become injurious rather than delivering on the better forms of living they promise. For her, cruel optimism describes relationships to images of the good life that have turned sour. Impossible to read as signs of progress, Berlant observes evidence of the “retraction… of the social democratic promise of the post-Second World War period in the United States and Europe.”17 Her review of contemporary fiction and film yields evidence of blocked desires and agency directed into lateral outlets, ranging from personal improvement to criminal activity. These alternatives speak to a detachment from traditional collective forms of belonging that are seen as no longer capable of fulfilling their promised freedoms or roles educating citizens. These collective bodies have been transformed into depoliticized forms of togetherness that privilege affective identification and immediacy over critical-reflective processes.

12 Ibid, 92. 13 Ibid, 256. 14 Ibid, 263. 15 Ibid, 269. 16 Ibid, 274. 17 Cruel Optimism, 3.

6 Berlant points to how post-9-11 discourse sought to bind Americans in the “feeling political together.” Emphasizing blame and victimhood so that the 9-11 attacks and support for the government’s response would appear unambiguous minimized rational discourse and inquiry.18 She sees broken norms of reciprocity in these shifts. None of the bottom to top flows of information and social learning that give hope to Honneth are present; the governing relationship between public and elite has become one-sided, political speech has become a form of “noise.” Ceremonies and rituals like voting recommit to the terms of these new arrangement and Berlant wonders why these attachments persist given their futility. She notes resistance to this noise increasingly takes the form of silent protests,19 underscoring doubts about the role of rational discourse and possibilities for meaningful participation in the modern state that is the foundation of Honneth’s progressive account of freedom. Silent protests represent a withdrawal from discourse-based civil society, sometimes with the aim of reconceiving its terms, and are not intelligible to the state or its police forces.20 Silence points to “modes of mainstream political power so corrupted as to defy optimism about political speech as such.” Silence and speechlessness is the only possible response citizens can muster when they believe politics has failed, failed them. Silence, according to Berlant, registers “politics itself is a lost object, a foregone conclusion, concluded.” 21 In contrast to Honneth and Berlant, who turn to literature as evidence for their claims about the desire for mutual attachment in the social world, Lerner uses literature as a means of attending to the conditions of the social world. This interpretation draws on Theo Davis’ argument about literature, which he argues does not represent social phenomena, but offers a way of paying attention to the social world that exceeds its immediacy. According to Davis, writers such as Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman, focus attention on ornamental objects in their writing not to understand them, but to examine how the mind is positioned in relation to the object and to readers or viewers who are fellow members of a shared public. Unlike appeals in which literature represents or embodies stable forms, thinking about literature in terms of ornament offers, “not a gentle respite from critical interpretation but an occasion to rethink what an immediate perception is, and what it might contain.”22 Lerner draws attention to conditions characterized by neither rationally-guided will formation or the retreat into silence but aphasia. His novel portrays subjects speaking past one another, unable to face one another and make eye contact, to find the right words or any words, carrying on internal monologues with questions they wish they were capable of voicing to others. On my reading, the desire to communicate, to be heard, and connect with others persists but is blocked because subjects lack contexts and experience to practice these skills. The novel records desires for mutual attachment that have few pathways as individuals disconnected from one another thanks to increasingly fragmented and privatized publics struggle to identify ways of creating and maintaining connections with others. Lerner draws attention to these overlooked experiences by ironizing his own identity in 10:04. By

18 Ibid, 225. 19 Ibid, 228. 20 Ibid, 229-231. 21 Ibid, 232. 22 Theo Davis, Ornamental Aesthetics, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 12.

7 complicating the question of his own identity, Lerner makes unsteady and uncertain features of the existing social world that initially appear stable. Though it is only a gesture in the novel, Lerner suggests that bad collectivities are what remain as a potential site of collective identification given the distortion and one-sidedness of existing associational and participatory spaces and habits.

II.

The cover of 10:04 features an aerial photo of Lower Manhattan.23 Taken after Hurricane Sandy hit the New York City region, the street grid is dark with the exception of the illuminated, newly constructed Goldman Sachs tower, which stayed operational during and through the storm thanks to its backup generators while the surrounding areas lost electric power. The image captures the lopsided distribution of freedom in contemporary America, where corporate power is ascendant and where the lights are out everywhere else. 10:04 is takes place over twelve months from 2011-2, bracketed between Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy and set against the backdrop of the Occupy Movement that sprang to life in Lower Manhattan and across the country during the same period. 10:04 begins with the author celebrating a “six-figure” advance with his agent over an expensive meal. Lerner ironizes his own position within the novel by constructing an alter-ego version of himself, in order to dramatize the sincerity of his desire to connect with readers of the novel despite the cultural transformations that have left citizens more cynical and even skeptical about those desires. This “author” is a semi-fictionalized version of Lerner who both is and is not the same Lerner whose achievements are being celebrated.24 By identifying himself as a budding celebrity author—he reminds readers that he is the author of Leaving the Attocha Station, named by several critics as the best debut work of 2011—and telling readers that his advance for 10:04 is large enough to live off for the next few years in New York City, Lerner is winking at the “pathological” developments that have splintered reading publics. From the start, Lerner suggests to his reader that 10:04’s prominence is thanks to in part to a robust marketing department and the cycles of media promotion that he participates in, even as he is wary of their effect on reading and public culture more broadly. Lerner is signaling the problematic nature of the novel, the public that it inaugurates, and his agency within both, in order to flag these for readers. From the outset the novel appears, from this perspective, a damaged form of collective identification that Lerner is trying to rehabilitate. The uncertain identity of the narrator has a second effect. Along with stories within the novel that are later revealed to have been borrowed from others and told as if they were his own, the readers is left unsteady and unsure about the reliability of this narrator. They must pay attention to him and, by extension, the phenomena that he describes because neither is a stable representation. The narrator’s persona simultaneously undercuts his authority while also forcing readers to make judgment about the “real” Lerner and the veracity of the events

23 All in-text citations in this and the following section refer to: Ben Lerner, 10:04, New York: Faber and Faber, 2014. 24 I will alternatively refer to Lerner’s narrator as author and narrator to reflect his dual status.

8 that the novel describes. The resulting confusion draws the readers’ attention not just to the intelligibility of the novel but the social world more broadly. The portrait of social freedom that emerges in 10:04 differs from the accounts in both Honneth’s and Berlant’s writing. The pathways to social freedom, freedom that is realized intersubjectively, appear consistently blocked, distorted, or denied. This is especially the case in market and state relations. Early in the novel, the author meets his closest friend, Alex, at Whole Foods to buy groceries and storm supplies before going home to await Hurricane Irene’s landfall. They find the shelves empty, shoppers frantic and avoiding eye contact, even as the commodities on their lists—coffee, bread, and fruits—are evidence of economies of interdependence and connectedness. An echo of the same scene occurs after Hurricane Sandy one year later. The author and then-pregnant Alex are spared injury but the next day they must venture to Manhattan for doctor’s appointment. Unable to hail a cab to take them back to Brooklyn, they must walk. They marvel how life beyond the storm zone continues as if nothing had happened while less than a mile away, residents are without water and power. The storm exposes a stubborn egoism that finds ways to deny or disavow shared experiences. 10:04 focuses on attempts to connect with others and come to mutual understanding despite these conditions. This egoism extends deep into the sphere of intimate or family relations, where Lerner portrays efforts to overcome individual isolation in fraught terms. 10:04 reveals not just blocked norms of communication and recognition, but even blocked desires for the kinds of social freedom that Honneth insists exist across the family, market, and state. Consider the conversation the author has with Alex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while viewing a painting in which their eyes never meet. Alex, who the author considers an “inseparable presence” in his life even going as far to say that he shares silence with her even when she is not present (8), asks whether the author might serve as a sperm-donor (“because fucking you would be bizarre”). Through out the novel, they struggle to have a conversation about the nature of their friendship and how it will change if a child were to be born. Lerner’s narrator continually imagines and worries over his relationship to Alex’s unborn child even as he longs for some form of co-parenting that he cannot articulate to her or himself.25 They cannot name their desire for one another, even after it becomes physically intimate, because each fears the other would see commitment of any kind, as a co-parents or as a couple, as an unwanted restriction upon their individual freedoms. They struggle to square their egotistical understandings of freedom with parental relationships that involve social cooperation and mutual dependence. Blocked communication and misrecognition among friends, siblings, and colleagues is also expressed in the experience of talking past one another. Lerner relays the story of a man who, after years of simmering resentment and humiliation, finally finds the courage to tell his brother how he feels only to discover that the cell phone had dropped the call after he had begun speaking and his brother had not heard what he had to say. Due to both technological constraints and individual psychology, the episode suggests how difficult it is for individuals to

25 For example, during a conversation with Noor, a fellow shiftworker at the Park Slope Coop, the author finds his thoughts drifting to the following questions: “I was distracted by a vision of Alex in the future, falling in love with someone, maybe moving out of the city with ‘our’ child. Would I be thought of as the father? Just a donor? Not at all?” (106)

9 be heard even when they summon the energy to address one another. In a reflection upon the culture of individual isolation, the narrator wonders whether it even matters that the man’s brother actually heard what he had to say for the conversation to serve its purpose for the speaker. In another exchange with a graduate student named Calvin, words seem to fall apart, blocking mutual understanding:

“Okay, wow. Wow. You want to pathologize me, too. I guess that’s your job. You represent the institution. The institution speaks through you. But let me ask you something”—I sized Calvin up physically; he was taller than I was, nearly as tall as the protestor, but thin, almost lanky; I involuntarily visualized punching him in the throat if he attacked me—“can you look at me and say you think this,” and here he swept the air with his arm in a way that made “this” indicate something very large, “is going to continue? You deny there’s poison coming at us from a million points? Do you want to tell me these storms aren’t man-made, even if they’re now out of the government’s control? You don’t think the FBI’s fucking with our phones? The language is becoming marks, drawing of words, not words—you should know as well as anybody…” (219)

This excerpted scene conveys Calvin’s sense that the university and other state institutions do not reflect his autonomy and well-being. They have become a site of domination rather than one that secures his autonomy thanks to phenomena that are not limited to government surveillance and bureaucracy. Democratic institutions associated with the state, including university where the author teaches, have become unresponsive even to the point of turning against citizens, in Calvin’s view. The author’s instinctive move to size up Calvin as a physical threat dramatically symbolizes how retreat into private defensive positions has replaced social cooperation as a norm, as mistrust of social institutions has grown. Withdrawal and retreat have reshaped how individual subjects view freedom and the progressive development and normative potential of social institutions. This change in orientation has drained the potential of institutions to serve as sites of social learning. Lerner’s narrator is a member of the Park Slope Cooperative Market, the largest consumer cooperative in the US. While he values the co-op for sustaining the idea of a plural “We,” he acknowledges the coop’s appeal among many members who are privileged liberals is the chance to give their self-care via consumerism the gloss of political radicalism. The result of these transformations is a profound ambivalence towards social institutions. That ambivalence carries over to new forms of collective identification that appear in 10:04. Lerner is interested in what he calls bad collectivities because they are experiences of collective identification that are able to transcend, however briefly, habits of individual isolation. They are bad collectivities not just because they have their origins in injury, but also because they do not exceed momentary identification. That is, they only make possible identification with others for short periods, and then in ways that can be de-politicized. The most enduring and powerful instance of bad collectivity for the author is the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It is an event that is crystallized in the author’s memory as defining his

10 generation.26 Lerner observes two forms of collectivity that the explosion made possible. The first was President Reagan’s address to help the nation process and heal from the disaster. The crude jokes that circulated afterwards were the second. Given how the space program had been a source of national pride during the Cold War, the Challenger explosion was a traumatic loss for citizens who identified with the state as an embodiment of their own autonomy. Reagan’s address borrowed from a poem titled High Flight written by an American pilot named John Gillespie Magee, who was killed during the Second World War: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’

The author reports feeling these last lines in his body as much as hearing them. Reagan’s address exemplifies Berlant’s observations about the emergence of new affectively intense and immediate, depoliticized forms of identification. The crude jokes that circulated after the Challenger disaster (for instance: What does NASA stand for? Need another seven astronauts) contrast with top-down memorialization because they emerge from the bottom-up. They represent a form of identification with a shared event and communication that has the potential to engage ordinary citizens who are otherwise settled into patterns of isolation and mistrust. For this reason, such bottom-up efforts deserve greater attention. They represent a starting place for effort to build democratic movements given the barriers to collective identification outlined earlier, including patterns isolation and distrust that block communication and mutual understanding. They also suggest that citizens are more responsive to identifying with shared events that reflect the experience of injury absent narratives of citizen norms that rely on strong appeals to progress. That is because bad collectivities respond to feelings of injury that resonate with and feel true to citizens that Honneth’s normative reconstruction of freedom does not match. In other words, bad collectivities are closer to feelings of cruel optimism than a belief in progress but they have the potential to resist depoliticized forms of identification or withdrawal into silence. In the next section, I turn to the most significant example of bad collectivity in 10:04, Occupy Wall Street in order to map the potential of bad collectivities. Acknowledging their ambivalence, I draw attention to how they can better engage citizens by comparing Occupy Wall Street with Black Lives Matter. Both have their origins in protesting conditions of cruel optimism and feelings of injury that present appealing alternatives to collective will formation based upon reason-giving. I suggest Black Lives Matter’s willingness to engage the electoral

26 Lerner notes many Americans knew of the launch because among the astronauts was Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire school social science teacher. McAuliffe had been selected to join the mission as part of Ronald Reagan’s Teacher in Space Project, a project designed to broaden public interest and support in the space program. As part of the Teacher in Space Project, McAuliffe was scheduled to teach several classes to students on earth, many of whom had written her letters in anticipation of her journey.

11 process and to enlist citizens in offering a vision of the future in which Black Lives Matter provides citizens the basis of social learning that sets it apart from not only Occupy but also Honneth’s faith in the normative potential of existing institutions. That is because Black Lives Matters challenges claims suggesting evidence of progress over time resulting in the enlargement of freedom for greater numbers of the population and calls for the radical abolition of institutions of criminal justice as we know it.

III.

The most significant example of bad collectivity in 10:04 is Occupy Wall Street and it is illustrative of both the possibilities and limits of this form of identification. The author identifies with Occupy’s critique of corporate power and their frustration with conventional political institutions, enough to post a Craigslist ad offering to host an Occupier for a night. The author cooks for the protestor, noting he considers this act of sharing a meal and opening his home a moment of connection with the public that interrupts his otherwise constant focus that he and others around him place on their own affairs (47). As they eat, the protestor shares his story with the author. He had come to New York from Akron, Ohio, where he had been living in his parents’ basement. The author asks what it is like to live in Zuccotti Park and deal with the NYPD. As they discuss his experience participating in the General Assembly and getting chased and beaten by police, the protestor tells the author that the most important lesson he has learned through his participation is how to stop seeing other men as potential threats and adversaries. As he puts, he had learned to size other men up and ask himself: “Can I take him, who would win the fight?” (48). According to the protestor, his preoccupation with male strength and size was learned tacitly while standing at middle and high school urinals. The author agrees, noting that he had also observed the bending-at-the-knees gesture men adopt to make a show of having to lift a great weight. The author laughs, thinking “many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing for a feat of super human strength…” (49). It was during a trip to use the bathroom at McDonald’s close to Zuccotti Park that a fellow Occupier asked the protestor when he would forego the pretense of symbolic virility. The question leads to the protestor to become self-conscious of the practice and give it up. For the protestor, identification with Occupy involved the admission of vulnerability and injury. Research suggests that such admissions were a common thread among those who submitted to the “We are the 99 percent” Tumblr site, where testimonials often documented personal hardship and struggle.27 Although the circumstances that led the 20-something year old protestor to live with his parents are not detailed, other testimonials affirm Berlant’s description of lives caught up in prolonged crisis and paralyzed by a feelings of impasse characteristic of cruel optimism. It suggests that part of Occupy’s popular resonance can be

27 See Tim Recuber, “Occupy Empathy? Online politics and micro-narratives of suffering.” New Media & Society, Jan. 2015, Vol 17, no. 1, 62-77.

12 explained by the degree to which it allowed admissions of vulnerability to serve as the basis of collective identification in the face of American narratives that celebrate self-reliance.28 In addition to making affect the basis of public will formation, a second reason for Occupy’s rapid growth can be attributed to its ability to identify a clear target. By pitting the 99 percent against the 1 percent, Occupy stepped away from the Left’s preference for complexity and nuance. In a recent essay, Stefan Dolgert has argued that the Left should let go of its emphasis on reasoned arguments and emulate the Right’s politically effective use of oversimplification and anger. For Dolgert, eschewing the power of ressentiment means minimizing the initial motivation to act at all.29 My argument for bad collectivities builds on Dolgert’s call, but I note that Occupy embodied a public will based on anger and oversimplification that still seemed to fail in the eyes of many of its supporters given no legal changes in campaign financing or corporate taxation can be traced back to the movement. Occupy’s short duration suggests that affect alone may not be enough to hold the attention of those who could identify with its anger at the 1 percent. Partly that is because while Occupy identified what it was against, and that included a refusal to engage the electoral process, it did not identify what it was for.30 The need to offer vision to inspire and sustain participation grows more urgent if those who feel shut out of institutions do not see within them evidence of progress and social learning or if citizens are too estranged from one another and social institutions to recognize the possibilities of social freedom within them. Even during brief moment of transcending the concentration on private acquisition and affairs during dinner with the protestor, the author’s own desires rush in and during the preparation of the meal he is overtaken by his desire for the first time, a child. Catching himself in the moment, the author reflects. So this is how it works, I said to myself, as if I’d caught an ideological mechanism in flagrant delicto: you let a young man committed to anti-capitalist struggle in the overpriced apartment that you rent and, while making a meal you prepare to eat in common, your thoughts lead you inexorably to the desire to reproduce your own genetic material within some version of a bourgeois household, that almost caricultural transvaluation of values lubricated wine and song. Your gesture of briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic—your bathroom—into the commons leads your redescribe the possibility of collective politics as the private drama of the family. (47)

Lerner’s author cannot be pulled out of his egotistical private freedoms and affairs to join the protestor. They finish dinner and ride the train back to Manhattan, with the fed and showered protestor headed back to Zuccotti Park, and the author headed uptown to meet Alex and see a film.

28 For this point, see Ali Aslam, Ordinary Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 (forthcoming). 29 Stefan Dolgert. “In praise of ressentiment: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Donald Trump,” New Political Science, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2016), 354-370. 30 This critique is made by Tom Malleson. See his book, After Occupy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

13 Black Lives Matter must work against the same egoistic habits, but it sharpens and directs the feelings of injury that originate in moments of bad collectivity. Paralysis, defeat, and self- protection could be the appropriate response to the Charleston murders, the acquittals of police officers in the deaths of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, the and and so many others who have been killed at the hands of law enforcement. Black Lives Matter has tried to organize around these moments of injury. While this organizing taps into feelings of moral outrage that it shares with Honneth’s theory of recognition, it does not rely on the same record of historical progress to motivate political action or social critique. Black Lives Matters sees the past as evidence of state terrorism and violence aimed at breaking the black body, theft of black wealth, and tearing apart the black family, not progress. The movement turns instead to the future and it invites people to contribute their own visions of the future in order to inspire political action. Narrating this future becomes a site of social learning within the movement that underlines the social dimensions of freedom. Compared to the banner of the 99 percent, Black Lives Matter has tried to educate the public about the issues that matter to the movement. Its 2016 Black Futures Month took place during February, traditionally Black History Month. On each day, Black Lives Matter published essays and accompanying artworks depicting the feelings of injury and invisibility that the movement seeks to address. From securing voting rights to wellness and reproductive justice, the marginalization of immigrant and queer folks within the Black community, access to food and a safe environment, and ending the school-to-prison pipeline, the Black Futures Month identified many different forms of bad collectivity. By placing these examples along side one another on the calendar, this visual arrangement suggested commonality among the various constituencies identified.31 The artwork and accompanying essays went further by offering a kind of literacy to readers whose ability to recognize themselves as members of bad collectivities is a by-product of their estrangement from other forms of collective identification and belonging. In an essay entitled “The Movement for Voting Rights Is a Movement for a Better Future,” Rashad Robinson of the voting-rights group ColorofChange.org insists on the need to roll back voter suppression laws in US states. Robinson points to the danger of detachment, writing: “The key is to transform these moments of unfettered racism into organizing moments.”32 As Honneth notes that estrangement produces a form of illiteracy over time that compounds the ability of citizens to effectively participate in social institutions. A central theme in the essays and artwork featured during Black Futures Month are the conditions of social dependence that define individual freedom. The entry for February 4, 2016, is titled “Black Trans Lives Matter, Too.” The author of the accompanying text links the Black Lives Matter movement to the protection of black transgender persons. Other days focus on affirming the contributions of black women and older folks, who have also been invisible in past movements. These statements suggest that the conditions for individual self-realization cannot be gained by minimizing those same conditions for others. Or as it is stated in the

31 http://agendatobuildblackfutures.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/black-lives-matter-at- work-young-worker-media-project.pdf (accessed August 12, 2016). 32 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rashad-robinson/voting-rights-is-a-movement-for-a-better- future_b_9198304.html?1455110892

14 movement’s Guiding Principles, “to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a necessary prerequisite for wanting the same for others.”33 For Black Lives Matter, the work of educating the public spans both identifying the problems in the existing social order and sketching visions of the future. The Agenda to Build Black Futures published by the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100) in cooperation with Black Lives Matter, explicitly identifies Occupy’s failure to link economic justice to racial justice as problematic. Occupy Wall Street fought for policies aimed at fundamentally restructuring the American economy and eliminating the corrupting power of money in our political system. From the outset, Occupy Wall Street used radical tactics such as the occupation of public spaces and a group-center approach to its leadership; its lack of a message that centered on the experiences of Black folks was be [sic] a significant impediment to the movement’s ability to grow, sustain, and transform.34 (6)

Writing “The ‘American Dream’ of meritocracy has never guaranteed prosperity for Black people in America,” the authors of The Agenda identify structural changes that appear “radical, but not impossible.”35 The structural changes include calls for payment of reparations for slavery, the restoration of voting rights for those who have been incarcerated, the implementation of a living wage with guaranteed leave for sickness and new parents, protection from job discrimination, divestment from the for-profit prison industry, an end to fines and administrative fees related to processing individuals in the criminal justice system, equal pay for all workers, and access to universal child care and high quality public education. It proposes to pay for these programs by defunding the current criminal justice system. It builds on BYP 100’s 2014 Agenda to Keep US Safe, which called for measures to ensure and to end mass incarceration. Taken together, BYP 100’s policy agendas seek to radically transform the institutions that structure social reality as it exists today for Black Americans. The experience of misrecognition that Black Americans experience in their interactions with these institutions is so profoundly injurious that it is difficult to identify normative grounds for action in the record of social learning and progress embedded within them. They turn instead to visions of the future in which freedom is a genuine possibility to fuel political activity and participation Along with the detailed set of structural changes outlined in The Agenda, Black Lives Matter has sought to solicit from it supporters positive visions of the future. Its “I, imagine” project invites visitors to its website to record a short video in which they can share their vision of the future in a 1-2 minute statement responding to the following prompt: “In a world where Black Lives Matter, I imagine…”. The project is inspired by Robin D.G. Kelly’s Freedom Dreams, in which he writes, “It has been the poets—no matter the medium—who have succeeded in…rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing.” Respondents are asked to imagine their future in a “world where black life is valued by everyone, our rights are upheld, and the beauty and power that is your blackness is

33 http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ 34 Agenda to Build Black Futures, 6. 35 Ibid, 3.

15 acknowledged. We want you to live in your wildest dreams.” The testimonials will be warehoused on the Black Lives Matter website and the recordings were played as part of a public exhibition in Los Angeles last May.36 Black Lives Matter differs from Occupy not only in its willingness to outline what it is for by supplying detailed policy agendas and soliciting visions of the future to inspire others to join in common action, but also in engaging the electoral system because “Politicians will only respond when there is pressure.”37 The movement’s engagement with the electoral system differs from Berlant’s suggestion that silence, withdrawal, and detachment represent the best way to respond to conditions of cruel optimism. At the same time, those engagements reveal how the narrative of progress can be operationalized to extend recognition to groups like Black Lives Matter that assimilate their demands to terms already set in place. This renders progress a claim that is more particular and less universal than Honneth admits and compromises social critiques that draw upon values already embedded in existing institutions and evidence of social learning over time.

Conclusion

On August 8, 2015, Black Lives Matter activists seized the microphone at a rally in Seattle where more than 15,000 supporters had gathered to hear the candidate. The activists demanded the candidate and crowd listen to them. Initially, campaign personnel tried to physically block and push the protestors from the stage. The microphone catches snippets of their exchange. The protestors are told they are not being reasonable and that they are being disrespectful to the candidate, to which they can be heard replying that they and their demands to speak are both reasonable and respectable. At this point, one of the protestors closest to the microphone begins to chant “Let her speak” in support of the group’s spokeswoman while an official from Sanders’ campaign threatens to “shut down” the event. The crowd sides with the campaign official against the activists, booing and cursing the protestors and singing along to “Glory,” a song from the soundtrack to the film Selma, which is broadcast over the speakers, to drown out the protestors. A heated dialogue at the microphone continues until finally the campaign official relents and tells the audience, “We’ve always said we are fully supportive of the Black Lives Matters movement. I am asking you to please let them speak,” words which the crowd boo again.38

The candidate’s campaign staff ceded the microphone to the activists. This looks like evidence of the difficult social learning and progress that Honneth describes. That interpretation has merit to the degree Sanders later embraced the movement’s message, but in the moment the candidate, his campaign officials, and supporters gathered to hear the candidate speak are profoundly unreceptive. For several minutes, the audience refuses the spokeswoman’s request

36 http://art.blacklivesmatter.com/i-imagine/ (accessed August 12, 2016). 37 Agenda for Black Futures, 7. Available online: http://agendatobuildblackfutures.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/black-lives-matter-at-work-young-worker-media-project.pdf 38 Unedited video of the event can be viewed online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV- ZSP0zAuI (accessed August 24, 2016)

16 for silence, which she cites as evidence of their racism and intolerance. The activist, Marissa Johnson, is finally able to get them to listen by asking for four and a half minutes of silence to honor the one-year anniversary of the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. She continues her message for nearly twenty minutes as the candidate stands on stage a few feet away. He faces the crowd, away from the spokeswoman who has turned her body towards Sanders to address him directly. In an essay published by the activist who seized the microphone at the Sanders rally, Johnson criticizes the “whitewashed revisionist history” of the incident put forward by the candidate’s staff and his supporters. She rejects the claims that Sanders and his campaign embraced her message or willingly allowed her to speak. She also challenges supporters who wish to assimilate Black Lives Matters by framing “these interactions with protestors as a litmus test for whether candidates are good for Black people.” Such narratives speak to the desire to retroactively “rationalize” processes of recognition from the perspective of those who already hold power that do not match the experiences of those demanding recognition. As Johnson puts it, “Highly controversial and unpopular at the time, our action with Bernie Sanders has very recently been retold as a ‘win’ for candidates.”39 The incident in Seattle suggests that the evidence of progress over time that undergirds Honneth’s normative project may be a more particular and less universal experience of social freedom than he imagines. The faith in public deliberation and will-formation that Honneth believes is necessary to realize social freedom through reform of existing institutions may not be shared by Johnson, Black Lives Matters supporters, or others who feel injured thanks to what Berlant calls the cruel optimism of the present. Feelings of political impasse further strain attachments to social institutions that have become more complicated by societal and technological shifts that have distanced and isolated individuals from one another, rendering their understandings of freedom more privatized and idiosyncratic. Lerner’s 10:04 points to experiences of bad collectivity that offer short-lived experiences of common identification that can momentarily transcend these conditions. These moments originate in feelings of injury and though they can sometimes usher in depoliticized forms of collective identification, they also harbor the potential for durable forms of identification and public will formation. I have argued that Black Lives Matter offers an alternative to both the silence in the face of conditions of cruel optimism recommended by Berlant and the call to reform of existing social institutions that relies on appeals to evidence of social learning and progress found in Honneth’s work. Instead of appealing to a record of historical progress to motivate corrective action, Black Lives Matters has enlisted supporters in envisioning black futures in which the conditions of individual self-realization are social achievements. It has repudiated existing social institutions to the degree they enact systemic violence towards black communities, calling for the end of current policing practices and ground-up reform of the criminal justice system. Compared with Occupy, Black Lives Matter suggests a way to harness feelings of anger, injury, and moral outrage and make them the basis of collective identification

39 Marissa Johnson, “What Killer Mike Got Wrong About My Bernie Sanders Confrontation,” The Establishment, April 11, 2016. Available online: http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/04/11/what-killer-mike-got-wrong-about-my-bernie- sanders-confrontation/ (accessed August 24, 2016)

17 on the Left to rival Right-wing affective assemblies. The need for such alternatives appears greater given the failures of Left wing responses and their traditional appeals to rational argumentation and complexity in guiding public will formation and collective action.

18