Contentious Subjects: Non/violence as Topic and Trope in the Occupy Movement Shon Meckfessel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Dr. Sandra Silberstein, Chair Dr. Anis Bawarshi Dr. Candice Rai Program authorized to offer degree: English © Copyright 2014 Shon Meckfessel University of Washington Abstract Contentious Subjects: Non/violence as Topic and Trope in the Occupy Movement Shon Meckfessel Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Sandra Silberstein, PhD Department of English Why was there such heated disagreement within the Occupy movement around the word nonviolence, and why was this disagreement so generationally marked? Why were the social movements in the 2011 global wave of unrest so suddenly disruptive, even violent, almost always involving riots? What does this have to teach us about the rhetorical power of embodied, contentious rhetorics, and what does it tell us about the characteristics of movements to come? Social movements are faced with exigencies under neoliberalism to which they often respond differently than the large-scale demonstrations of previous eras: a) protesting counterpublics often make their appeals immediately and intensively rather than extensively through mass media, b) challenging the status quo more in terms of power (in its aspects of agency, capacity, and possibility) than in claims of justice, and c) often do so in part by performing antagonism with existing institutions of enforcement: namely, police. Nonviolence discourse is inconsistent with the rhetorical strategies best suited to these conditions, although in its “strategic” rather than “principled” variants, it shares more in common with them than is usually thought: strategies, social processes enacted, goals, and the aversion to inflicting injury to bodies. Rioting has proved central to recent movements because it is exemplary (though not exclusive) of how such strategies are enacted, and bears out in condensed form their logic: necessarily embodied and risky in the discursive action of transgressing previous semiotic systems, articulating new contentious subjects through physically confronting old foci of power. Like the more confrontational aspects of the Occupy movement, future movements are likely to perform power in similar ways, fostering a complementarity of diverse, innovative approaches, broaching semiotic expectations, and not relying on the categories of victimhood and innocence which have proven central to previous generations of social movement rhetoric. Table of Contents Introduction 1 1.0 Neoliberal Exigences 38 1.1 Managed Dissent: Indirect Rule, Consumerism, and the NPIC 49 1.1a Political Institutionalization of Dissent 49 1.1b Indirect Rule 52 1.1c Consumerism 55 1.1d Institutionalized Dissent as “Civil Society” 56 1.2 Policing as a Non-Tangential Exigency 61 1.3 From Masses to Publics 71 1.3a Why Elizabeth Eckford is Still Alive 71 1.3b We Are the 94% 79 1.3c Hannah Arendt and the Direct Demos 82 2.0 The Strange Magic of Nonviolence 87 2.1 Introduction: What Happened to Nonviolence? 87 2.2 The Nonopposition of Non/Violence 91 2.3 Disavowal by Non/Definition 109 2.4 Condemnatory Equivalizing 120 2.5 Nonviolence as a Strategy of Condescension 130 2.6 Nonviolence as Conflict Aversion 141 3.0 The Eloquence of Targeted Property Destruction 148 in the Occupy Movement 3.1 Introduction 148 3.2 Forced Comparison 153 3.3 Desubjectification 165 3.4 Profanation 173 4.0 The Eloquence of Police Clashes 181 in the Occupy Movement 4.1 Disidentification 181 4.2 Disinvestment 191 4.3 Empowering Reversal 202 4.4 Backlighting 213 5.0 The Characteristics of Movements to Come 227 5.1 Who (and How) Was Occupy? 227 5.1a Who (And Which) are The People? 227 5.1b Topics and their Publics 232 5.2 After Victimhood, Beyond Innocence 236 5.2a After Victimhood 236 5.2b Beyond Innocence 246 5.3 Agency and Possibility in Defigurative Politics 252 5.3a Semiotic Transgression 256 Works Cited 263 Introduction “I have a hard time understanding what their goals are and how they intend to use these tactics to achieve these goals.” – Chris Hedges, September 15, 2012 (“Occupy Tactics” 2012) 1 “I sure wouldn’t dictate what Syrians or Tibetans may or may not do. But petty violence in public in this country doesn’t achieve anything useful.” (Solnit, in Taylor & Gessen 150) On May 1, 2012, I found myself in the glitzy downtown shopping area of Seattle, marching with several hundred protesters in the Anticapitalist Breakaway March as part of a larger Occupy Seattle May Day event. Four and a half months before, many of the marchers had been evicted from the Occupy public encampment and had not seen each other since, so in some sense the event felt anachronistic, even nostalgic. And yet, May Day was something new, a day of profound excitement, a chance to come together through collective grief and rage after the loss of what for so many had proven profoundly transformative. Banners fluttered all around; one announced in glittering, cursive pink letters, “Anything is Possible,” beside an image of a fire-breathing unicorn with a police officer impaled on its horn. Within the march of perhaps 500 protesters, perhaps 100 were indistinguishably clad in balaclavas and matching black clothes, the “black bloc” attire associated with anarchists, but adapted by a wide variety of protesters out of a wish to protest without registering themselves on surveillance for doing so, an understandable concern after the legal harassment which had attended Occupy locally and nationally. In one moment, a pronounced, moist thud echoed out, then another. Windows on each side of the street began to cascade like waterfalls, as rioters2 hurled rocks and 1 A separate Introduction Works Cited is attached at the end of the introduction. 2 As an ongoing federal investigation into these events was underway at the time of research and writing, I was careful in my interviews to never ask any of my interviewees about participation in illegal activity. “Participants” in this study refers to movement participants exclusively, and never to participants in rioting. Interviews sought to 1 swung cudgels at the windows of Forever XXI, American Apparel, Niketown, and a Federal Courthouse, among scores of other targets. Police later estimated the damage done in the perhaps 15-minute period at approximately $200,000. As we ducked through gathering clouds from protester smoke-bombs and dodged falling glass and police pepperspray, everyone in the larger march that I observed apparently was gleefully cheering on the destruction. What was happening? As a rhetorical scholar, I could not help asking, “What are these people trying to say?” The issue of protest violence had already proven highly contentious in Occupy before any such event occurred; within days of the loss of the camp, the most devout Occupy Seattle participants had split with each other in intense acrimony over debates on nonviolence – belying, incidentally, the frequent claim that such conflicts are the work of “outside agitators.” Some participants insisted that the movement’s General Assembly meeting sign onto a nonviolence agreement as a sine qua non of continued participation, and could not understand how any person in their right mind might disagree with the idea. Others, generally younger, were mystified by this insistence over a term which held little significance for them; they noted that the nonviolence proponents were unable to even define their term or explain the sudden need for the agreement, given that no single act of public violence had yet occurred in an Occupy Seattle event. The events of May Day only deepened my curiosity: was this what the nonviolence proponents had feared, and if so, why had they not said so? What was it about riot that seemed indispensable to some, abhorrent to others, and unspeakable by all? understand participant subjective and affective processes, rather than any narrative of factual events. Rioters at all events for which I was present were impossible to distinguish, being masked and in rather fastidiously similar attire, so even if I were willing (I am not) to identify riot participants, I would not even be capable of doing so. 2 Scholarly Context Seattle was not alone in such expressions; as political scientists Johnston and Seferiades attest, Since [the youth riots in Greece in] December 2008, violent [though largely noninjurious] protest has broken out in such dissimilar – and ‘unlikely’ – countries as Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, France and Britain in Europe; Thailand, India and Bangladesh in Asia; Mozambique, Tunisia and Libya in North Africa; and Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain in the Middle East – and the list is obviously not complete.” (2012, 149) Since their essay, the trend toward violent protest has continued in a great number of countries, notably including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Bosnia, Ukraine, Turkey, and Brazil, where, for example, the teacher’s union officially declared support for Black Bloc involvement in education protests. (“Brazil: Teacher’s Union declares”) Social movement rhetoric is becoming incontestably more conflictual, although this shift has gone effectively unnoted in most of the scholarly literature on protests and rhetoric. As Frances Fox Piven, whose work is a major inspiration for this study, states: “Violence often is a critical factor in the emergence, development and success or failure of social movements. But we have for some time not given it the attention it merits. American scholars in particular have been reluctant to acknowledge the role of violence” (Piven, 19 in Seferiades & Johnston 2012). She goes on to reprimand this tendency towards scholarly neglect, for: sympathies aside, the effort to justify political movements by ignoring the violence with which protest is associated is a mistake, because the largely unexamined axiom that movements are non-violent distorts our analysis.