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1 Squatter capital Excerpt from interviews: Frederick: In the beginning it’s restricting [not being Dutch]. It’s hard to say where it comes from but in general, new people have to prove themselves in the activist community, I mean, you don’t get a place like this, you know, it’s not for free. When you want to come into a certain group, you need to do stuff for this group that the rest appreciate. It depends on which collective you are working with. Just being there also for a long time and showing that you are constantly interested and that you are willing to do the shittiest jobs in the beginning and then start- ing to do more pro-active organizing projects by yourself, or whatever. You need to come in and that takes time and it is certainly restricting if you are a foreigner, not knowing a lot of things, not knowing a lot of codes. Not understanding how people communicate culturally cause it’s sure, another culture, but there is a big difference between activist culture where I’m from and the activist culture here, which is not the same as the normal culture or the hegemonic culture or whatever you want to call it. Dirk: The second time I ran away [at age sixteen], I went to Den Haag where there was a guy from my village who had been squatting there since he was fourteen. I thought, I am young, can I live here? Which is not how it works, of course. It’s not how it works. Of course people give you shelter for a while but that’s not the same as just joining living groups. It’s not that easy. So they advised me to go to Amsterdam to get my act together. Despite their differences in class, education, and their structural loca- tions in the world, both of these squatters agree that one must prove one- self to be accepted in an activist community and that activist culture has its own set of standards that are difficult to understand and fulfill at first glance. Frederick, employed as a strategic planner in an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), came to Holland from Denmark in his early twenties to study intellectual history, bringing with him a Nazima Kadir - 9781784997564 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 05:44:47AM via free access 46 THE AUTONOMOUS LIFE? background in radical left activism in Copenhagen. Dirk, who works for an organic produce distribution company, grew up in a deeply religious, con- servative, Catholic family in a village in the south of the Netherlands, and ran away from home as a teenager to find himself squatting in Amsterdam. While Frederick clearly articulates what he perceives as the hidden codes and expectations of activist culture, Dirk refers to the same set of hidden codes by emphasizing, “it’s not how it works … it’s not that easy,” and that he had to get his “act together” before he could be accepted as a member of a squatters’ community. What does it mean to prove oneself as a “real” or authentic squatter? What are the practices, conventions, and actions that constitute this fragile authenticity? Authenticity is complicated and fraught because it is a double process of inhabiting a location, whether that is a claimed and performed identity or a seemingly natural “habitus,” while simultaneously being recog- nized by others as authentic. Thus, the process of being named as authentic is constantly in flux because it depends on the actors involved: those who are or consider themselves authentic and those who then recognize (or do not) that authenticity. I argue that the act of living in a squat is not enough to be recognized as an authentic squatter. Authenticity is, rather, a status that one achieves through a lengthy process of practices, actions, and life- style performances that must then be evaluated by the squatters movement as authentic. Achieving the status of authentic squatter requires, first, the ability to demonstrate a complicated mix of functional skills and activist perfor- mances with a sense of naturalness and ease – which I term squatter capital. The second characteristic of authenticity is how a squatter defines them- selves in hostile opposition, to a series of imagined Others: from the most external, such as the police, to internal squatter communities within the movement. Activist squatters share animosity towards various groups of imagined Others who are part of “the Mainstream” and perform a stance of hostility, which alters in intensity depending on whom this aggression is waged against. However, activist squatters feel restricted and are unable to display hostility during interactions with particular groups classified as “neighbors,” immigrants, and undocumented people. When interacting with these groups, squatters tend to feel uncomfortable because they are exces- sively authentic. As a result, squatters feel challenged in their oppositional identities by becoming aware of their privileges. This sense of restriction and paralysis results in moments of rupture. I will further explain this dynamic in the last part of the chapter. To help analyze how squatters negotiate authenticity, I will use the work of three scholars, Pierre Bourdieu, Sarah Thornton, and Howard Becker. According to Bourdieu (1984), class is not merely an economic phenom- enon, but one that is exhibited culturally and socially through taste and “habitus.” Nazima Kadir - 9781784997564 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 05:44:47AM via free access SQuatter capital 47 Habitus is a set of subtle micro-behaviors that derive from a common his- torically produced set of dispositions of a particular social or ethnic group. It is the result of one’s family, class position, status, education, race/ethnicity, gender, and ideology (Behler, n.d). Habitus includes how one stands, moves, dresses, eats, and smiles – micro-behaviors that communicate one’s history and status. Hence, class and social position are reproduced through subtle, unconscious recognitions of affinity that are demonstrated through habitus and taste. This understanding of habitus is essential to how Bourdieu distinguishes between various forms of “capital,” looking beyond monetary wealth to larger cultural and social articulations of class and social position. He classifies eco- nomic capital as one’s amount of financial wealth. Cultural capital refers to the amount of cultural and educational knowledge demonstrated through habitus and taste that is often associated with wealth without requiring actual finances. Finally, social capital is the strength of one’s social networks. In the book of essays, The Field of Cultural Production (1993), Bourdieu builds upon these formulations of capital to discuss spaces in social life that have alternative definitions of capital that may superficially reject those val- ued in the Mainstream but actually refract them. Using the art world as an example to elucidate this process of refraction, in the essay, “The Production of Belief,” Bourdieu discusses how the financial success of an artistic prod- uct, which has value in capitalist social worlds, is inverted in the art world whereby commercial success actually has a lower status than more sub- tle, exclusive means of valorization among those in certain elite sections of the art world. For those within these alternative milieus, the values within the subculture dominate and those values considered external are rejected. Thus, there is a subtle process of mastery and rejection in which one under- stands the values of the Mainstream, masters them, and then rejects them to both conform to and reify the values of the alternative milieu (Bourdieu and Johnson 1993). To complement Bourdieu’s more theoretical work, Howard Becker’s study of jazz musicians (1963) and Sarah Thornton’s study of ravers in the UK (1996) use ethnography to describe the social worlds of subcultures, their particular values, the process of hierarchical stratification within sub- cultures, and how subcultural participants define themselves opposition- ally in relation to others within their social worlds. Heavily influenced by Bourdieu, Thornton appropriates the term “capital” and modifies it to apply to social worlds within subcultures: Subcultural capital would seem to be a currency which correlates with and legitimizes unequal statuses … Subcultural capital is the linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which the axes of age, gender, sexuality, and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay. (Thornton, 1996: 104–5) Nazima Kadir - 9781784997564 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/30/2021 05:44:47AM via free access 48 THE AUTONOMOUS LIFE? Thornton critiques how the literature of subcultural studies often focuses on how people in subcultures identify themselves in relation to an over- whelming Other that they call “the Mainstream.” First, she states that researchers mirror subcultural participants’ characterization of themselves and their worlds uncritically. Second, researchers often reveal a bias through their representations. That is, researchers often reify subcultural participants as resistant and avant garde versus an imagined Mainstream that both researchers and subcultural informants regard as banal and conformist. She further charges that such classifications have a hidden classed and gendered disdain, since many of the subjects of subcultural research tend to be articulate middle-class men, hiding behind a classless subcultural guise. In Thornton’s research of ravers in the UK in the 1990s, clubbers, who con- sidered themselves heterogeneous and difficult to stereotype, uniformly clas- sified and disdained the “Tracys and Stacys dancing around the handbag;” that is, an imagined Mainstream female Other who attended dance clubs that were not considered as hip and exclusive as the carefully marketed rave parties that ravers proudly attended. In this instance, the Mainstream Other is a denigrated working-class female. The handbag signifies a mature woman – “the symbol of the social and financial shackles of the housewife” who exemplifies, therefore the anti-youth who “do not enjoy the classless autonomy of “hip youth” ” (Thornton, 1996: 101).

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