Occupy: a People Yet to Come

Philosophy/Political Occupy: A People Yet to Come to Yet Occupy: A People The term Occupy represents a belief in the transformation of the capitalist system through a new heterogenic world of protest and activism that cannot be conceived in terms of liberal democracy, parliamentary systems, class war Occupy or vanguard politics. These conceptualisations do not articulate where power is held, nor from where transformation may issue. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars of Deleuze and Guattari examines how capitalism can A People Yet to Come be understood as a global abstract machine whose effects pervade all of life and how Occupy can be framed as a response to this as a heterogenic movement Edited by Andrew Conio based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. Seeing the question as a political tactic aimed at delegitimizing their protest, Occupiers refused to answer the question ‘what do you want? Occupy: A People Yet to Come goes a considerable way towards providing the terms upon which this refusal can be understood within a changed landscape of political activism and the rewriting of the conventions of political protest. With essays by Claire Colebrook, Giuseppina Mecchia, John Protevi, Rodrigo Nunes, Verena Andermatt Conley, Nicholas Thoburn, Ian Buchanan, David Burrows, Eugene Holland and Andrew Conio. Andrew Conio is an artist, writer and activist. He is Director of Programmes, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, Kent University and has published on a range of subjects including language, the moving image, architecture, painting, institutional critique and creativity. Cover Image: Declaration Flowchart Rachel Schragis ©2011 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA Conio Series: Critical Climate Change Occupy Critical Climate Change Series Editors: Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibil- ity of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of deple- tion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and re- alignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the in- terface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomor- phic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemo- political mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation. Occupy A People Yet to Come Edited by Andrew Conio OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2015 First edition published by Open Humanities Press Copyright © 2015 Andrew Conio. Chapters by respective authors except chapter 2: Protevi, John. “Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS.”Theory & Event14:4 Supplement (2011). © 2011 John Protevi and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/occupy.html This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-004-7 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-014-6 Cover Art: Declaration Flowchart by Rachel Schragis, Copyright © 2011 CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mis- sion is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Contents Preface 9 Claire Colebrook Introduction 23 Andrew Conio 1. On Anthropolitics: From Capitalism and Schizophrenia to Occupy and Beyond 67 Giuseppina Mecchia 2. Semantic, Pragmatic, and Affective Enactment at OWS 88 John Protevi 3. Pack of Leaders: Thinking Organization and Spontaneity with Deleuze and Guattari 97 Rodrigo Nunes 4. Resistance to Occupy 125 Claire Colebrook 5. Preoccupations 158 Verena Andermatt Conley 6. Minor Politics, Territory, and Occupy 172 Nicholas Thoburn 7. September 17, 2011: Occupy without Counting 191 Ian Buchanan 8. Negative Space War Machines 203 David Burrows 9. Occupy America and the Slow-Motion General Strike 225 Eugene Holland 10. Savage Money 238 Andrew Conio Bios 269 Acknowlegements I would like to thank Claire Colebrook for her generous and steadfast support during the writing of this book; the contributors, Andrew Stapleton, Sigi Jöttkandt and my many friends at Occupy and the Economics Working Group especially David, Tim, Clive, Mary, Ellena, Omar, Janos, Peter, Mike, Obi, Schlack, Nick and Vica whose commitment to finding ways to create a better world prompted the writing of this book. Preface End the Occupation, Long Live Occupy! Claire Colebrook I At the time of this book going to press, amidst all the diverging political theories and commentaries regarding how the twenty-first century might cope with the intertwined complexities of climate change, collaps- ing global finance, wars on terror that are also wars on freedom, potential viral pandemics and increasing disaster scenarios (with increased vulner- ability to disaster for the less fortunate) one thing seems clear enough: end the occupation. The attacks by Israel on Gaza have not received unanimous condemnation; there are still those, especially in the United States, who – for all the disproportionate suffering inflicted on those trapped in Gaza – still see Israel as having some right to defend itself, and still maintain that conflict was instigated by Hamas and therefore not subject to any critique outside the right of Israel to ‘respond.’ Regardless of the competing histories, narratives, conflicting allegiances and complexities, it nevertheless seems clear that ending the occupation would be the best and quickest way to end widespread and ongoing violence. Why does ending occupation, amidst all this complexity, appear to be such a clear and just thing to do? There are two identities – the State of Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza – both of whom can lay claim to having suffered displacement and both of whom can seem to ask quite legitimately for a territory of their own. In the ongoing demands for a sta- ble and peaceful future, perhaps one would support a two-state solution, 10 Claire Colebrook or perhaps there are other alternatives, but ending occupation seems an immediate imperative before anything else might be achieved, and occupation seems to be a simple and unqualified evil: a people were residing in a territory, and that residence was taken over from without. Even if one regards Hamas’s reaction to occupation as terrorism (rather than a war between a funded military force and those who have to find other means) the overwhelming fact is that Gaza is occupied. It was ‘originally’ Palestinian territory by virtue of the presence of those who are now imprisoned in Gaza. Here we strike a small difficulty with the concept of original occupation, which perhaps needs to be thought of as ‘prior’ occupation. The state of Israel is not occupying land that isterra nullius. This might allow us to think of ‘minor’ occupation – whereby a people is formed by occupying a space, with the space becoming the place that it is by way of occupation. This would need to be contrasted with ‘molar’ or ‘majoritarian’ occupation, whereby a world map is already laid out with established nations and agents who then lay claim (or not) to the right to occupy a space. Occupation is – initially – a form of territorialization, a becoming who one is, or becoming ‘a’ people by way of assembling in a spatial zone. Taking away a territory is not only taking away a people’s being – their right to exist and their existence – it is also the creation of a different register. Rather than an earth that is occupied by peoples there is a map of states, polities, geopolitics, markets, relations and nations that overcode and negotiate the distribution of peoples across the earth. To follow Deleuze and Guattari on this question: occupying space is not something ‘a’ people does. Something like a people emerges through the occupation of a field, which in turn becomes a space. If this is so, then one can see history, geopolitics, capitalism and the war on terror as a problem of territorialization and deterritorialization. Most simply, capitalism deterritorializes in many different ways but one way is to gener- ate a field of exchange, markets, finance, debts, and labor flows that pre- clude any territory from being simply what it is.

Load more