NOTES
Introduction
1 In 1926, Gramsci asked: “How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents; if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant—has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?”
2 As James Baldwin recounts with respect to white people in
The Fire Next Time, “The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes” (1964: 57).
3 And here it is useful to remember that “utopia” literally means “no place.” As I will make clear, this fantasy (which arises from and is made possible through a disavowal of material grounding) is for the white middle class simultaneously a site of great opportunity and great fear.
4 For a good breakdown of the techniques of power brought about in the moment of governmentality, including the audit, insurance, training, and security, see Nikolas Rose’s (1999)
Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. 6 In their
Terrorism 2002-2005 report, the FBI found that 22 of the 24 recorded “terrorist incidents” from 2002 to 2005 were allegedly perpetrated by “special interest extremists active in the animal rights and environmental movements.” Many of these activists were subsequently rounded up in the “green scare.” Their political sensibilities often emerged through engagement with the anti-globalization movement. For more on the green scare, see Monagham and Walby (2008).
7 For readers of Walter Benjamin, this approach will be instantly familiar. As Benjamin noted to himself in Convolute N of
The Arcades Project, “it is not the economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible
Urphenomenon” (2003: 460).
8 On this point, Shulamith Firestone remains exemplary in her fearless assertion of what most people remain too squeamish to admit: “Pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species” (1970: 180). The violence of the situation is undeniable. However, as Firestone notes, this violence has been dramatically concealed by the “School of the Great Experience,” which allows people to indulge in the perverse pleasure of conceiving what’s necessary as though it were chosen freely.
9 To cite but one example, Michael Barnholden (2005) summarizes how, during the early twentieth century, white workers in Vancouver effectively strengthened the position of white capitalists by rioting against Chinese and Japanese workers and businesses. By keeping these groups in check through extra-legal means, white workers effectively sided with their employers. Although some of these riots were marked by anti-capitalist sentiments, the racist distortion (the resolution of the problem at the level of representation) meant that these sentiments were ultimately harnessed to purposes at odds with working class interests.
One: Semiotic Street Fights
10 The November 30, 1999 demonstrations against the World Trade Organization’s Millennial Round meetings in Seattle were, for many, the starting point of the anti-globalization movement. Although the demonstration was larger than anything many had seen up until that point, its significance was to be found elsewhere. By physically blocking delegates from accessing the meeting and by engaging in limited forms of property destruction, activists managed, in some small fashion, to shift the definition of “protest” itself
11 The April 21, 2001 demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas meetings in Quebec City represented the high point of anti-globalization activism on this side of the Atlantic. During these demonstrations, several thousand activists challenged and occasionally succeeded in tearing down an enormous security perimeter fence. Throughout the demonstration, police—numbering in the thousands—fired more than 5000 tear gas canisters at demonstrators. Quebec City is also significant in that it represents the first major attempt by anti-globalization activists in Canada and the US to organize a mass action along openly anti-capitalist lines.
12 Hansard: 1st Session, 37th Parliament, Vol 139, Iss. 27. Tuesday, April 24, 2001.
14 Perhaps the greatest historical example of this exhortation can be found in Leon Trotsky’s attack on the hypocrisy of bourgeois moralists (represented with ambassadorial fanfare by John Dewey) in his work
Their Morals and Ours (1973).
15 Foucault reminds us of the significance of the word “monster” when, in
Madness and Civilization, he points to its etymology. “The Monster” is literally something in need of being shown (1988, 70).
16 Demonstrators demanded that the province reverse a 20% welfare cut, reintroduce the landlord-tenant act (replaced by the egregiously named “tenant protection act”), and put an end to “community action policing”—a form of targeted policing that systematically intimidated and bullied the poor, the homeless, and people of color.
17 The fear of anthrax poisoning that gripped the United States in the months following September 11, for instance, recast the gas mask as a kind of security blanket. For a brief period of time, gas masks were as American as apple pie.
18 Jackson’s report was prompted by demonstrations against the World Petroleum Congress taking place in Calgary that summer.
19 The Keeper is a reusable menstrual cup noted for its economic and environmental benefits, its demystification of menstrual blood, and its role in the prevention of toxic shock syndrome associated with tampons.
Three: Bringing the War Home
20 “Where Was the Color in Seattle?: Looking for reasons why the Great Battle was so white” by Elizabeth Martinez (
Colorlines: Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2000). All citations from this article have been taken from the online version found at
http://www.colours.mahost.org/articles/martinez.html 21 The PGA hallmarks emphasize: 1) A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promote destructive globalisation; 2) We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the full dignity of all human beings. 3) A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only real policy-maker; 4) A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles, advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’ rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism; 5) An organisational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy (
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en/).
22 According to a scathing article widely circulate on the Internet: “The US based sub-cultural cult ‘Crimethinc’ (CWC) who mix anarchism with bohemian dropout lifestyles and vague anti-civilisation sentiment would have you believe that capitalism is something from which you can merely remove yourself by quitting work, eating from bins and doing whatever ‘feels good.’” The author of the rant, written without paragraph breaks, disagreed (
http://www.illegalvoices.org/apoc_blog/apoc_blog/rethinking_crimethinc_2.html).
23 A theme lifted directly from Raoul Vaneigem’s Situationist classic
The Revolution of Everyday Life.
Four: You Can’t Do Gender in a Riot
24 Although the Black Bloc was not well known in North America prior to Seattle, anarchists have used the tactic on this continent since the early nineties. Early actions included mobilizations against Operation Desert Storm in 1991 (cf. Ickibob 2003). The Black Bloc finds its origins in the German
Autonomen tradition of the late seventies and eighties. This tradition, which grew out of the failures of the student mobilizations of the sixties, incorporated aspects of Marxist and anarchist politics and developed a number of cultural and political innovations that now inform many contemporary radical political campaigns (cf. Katsiafiacas 2006).
25 Defending the Black Bloc actions that took place during the April 16, 2000 mobilization against the IMF and World Bank in Washington DC, one activist proposed that “proportionately speaking, the black bloc may have been more diverse than the mobilization as a whole” (
http://www.infoshop.org/octo/a16_a_kudos.html).
26 It’s hard to dispute Dominick’s assessment of the relative privilege needed in order to participate in anti-summit actions. However, to reduce the question of
resonance to that of
attendance grossly underestimates the pattern of diffusion that marks radical action. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in his “Critique of Violence,” the acts of criminal outlaws resonate with people who would never commit similar acts (and might even find them repugnant) precisely because they stand as testament to the limits of a sovereign power to which they, too, are subordinated (1978: 281). In
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon described how the circulation of images and stories of struggle or atrocity prompts diverse regional mobilizations that gain political significance from their connection to a common referent (1963: 75-76). On a similar note, Ward Churchill has challenged the notion that people of color are more likely to participate in “inclusive” actions than politically effective ones. Describing the rituals of the predominantly white pacifist scene, Churchill is not surprised to find “that North America’s ghetto, barrio, and reservation populations, along with the bulk of the white working class … tend either to stand aside in bemused incomprehension of such politics or to react with outright hostility. Their apprehension of the need for revolutionary change and their conception of revolutionary dynamics are necessarily at radical odds with this notion of ‘struggle’” (1998: 64).
27 This statement stands generally for liberals and left radicals in North America. The few notable exceptions take the form of ambiguous mobilizations like the Million Man March and groups like the Promise Keepers. However, even in these cases, the gender exclusive character of the phenomena is justified not on the basis of the general inadmissibility of women into politics but rather on what are perceived to be the specific historic responsibilities of the mobilized men.
28 It’s a representational strategy that, as Richard Dyer has pointed out, underscores the constitutive contradictions of white ontology. In
White, Dyer describes how the illumination of white subjects in painting, photography, and cinema discloses two interrelated but conflicting impulses. On the one hand, the illuminated subject is given a transcendental luster that dematerializes the everyday facts of embodiment, thus reiterating the pretense of omniscience underlying white epistemology. On the other hand, the implied transparency achieved by lighting of this kind highlights the spectral anxieties underlying white ontology. The escape from the corporeal realm of everyday experience leaves the white knower anxious about the status of her presence (1997: 208-212). At its limits, this anxiety expresses itself as an association between whiteness and death.
29 Despite this omission, we are entitled to wonder how—if these organizations were as diffuse as he claims—Connolly could proclaim with any certainty that women did not also don white shirts. In
Transgender Warriors, Leslie Feinberg writes the “White Boys” into the history of cross-dressing in an attempt to show the implicit militancy of gender transgression. In Feinberg’s account, the “White Boys” drew upon the matrilineal interest in fairies as oppositional figures in order to oppose the Christian order with which they associated the landlords. The white shirts described by Connolly become women’s dressing gowns (1996: 78-79). Although Feinberg’s account is compelling, by focusing on the dynamics of cross-dressing rather than those of forging a collective “we,” ze misses the possibility that the White Boys were a
cross-gender alliance and not simply a cross-dressing one.
30 This acknowledgement becomes all the more significant when viewed through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of that event in
Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre outlines how the act of storming the prison produced a fused group in which subjects began to realize themselves politically
through the Other (2004: 351-363). Although he does not draw out his conclusions in relation to gender, it’s easy to imagine how—when men and women begin to realize themselves through their counterpart—they simultaneously begin to forfeit the discrete character of their own gender identification.
31 Indeed, this transition seems to play itself out whenever civil disobedience advocates come to recognize the futility of their tactics in light of the intransigence of their opponents. One need only to consider the radical difference between Mario Savio’s 1964 pronouncements during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement occupation of Sproul Hall and those spelled out by Bernardine Dohrn in the first Weatherman communiqué (1970: 509) to see how this is the case. Although both figures were important participants in the American student movement during the 1960s, their divergent political orientations show in no uncertain terms the difference a few years can make.
32 Consider, for instance, Fanon’s account of the ontological transformation of the colonized in the moment of political violence as recounted in the opening section of
The Wretched of the Earth: “the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler… All the new revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it” (1963: 45).
33 The political distinction between the filiative (denoting the politics of being) and the affiliative (denoting the politics of belief) is neatly outlined in a recent work by Timothy Brennan (2006).
34 One recent example of this logic can be found in Richard Day’s Book
Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, where he describes how new movement tactics not only “refuse to deploy traditional tactics that seek to alter/replace existing modes of power/signification” but that “their own organizational structures are designed so as to avoid situations where one individual or group is placed ‘above’ others in hierarchical relationship” (2006: 45).
35 This observation accords with the basic premise of historical materialist analysis. As suggested by Marx in
The German Ideology, social research must start with
people—with what they do and what they’ve done—and work its way out. The premises of materialist analysis “are men, not in any fantastic isolation and fixity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions” (1998: 43).
36 In a context where violence has often been unthinkable for women, the content of the “common” tactic is of secondary importance to the mobilization of violence itself. Nevertheless, it’s evident that women’s political use of violence will not be identical to conventional male uses of violence. The division can be understood using Benjamin’s distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence (1978: 287). Since women, historically on the defensive, create a new dynamic in the everyday operations of sexism when they adopt violent means, their act can best be understood as a law making violence. However, in a social context where violence itself—rendered as a categorical abstraction—has been unthinkable, the ontological and political distinction between the two modes has sometimes been difficult to perceive.
37 It is in this context that we can understand how the simple phrase “do it” became an important slogan during the demonstrations against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland during the summer of 2005 (
http://www.counterpunch.org/tina07122005.html).
Five: The Coming Catastrophe
39 In the Introduction to
Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben highlights the connection between post-democratic spectacular societies such as those considered by Guy Debord and the colonial and totalitarian regimes that stand as their putative antitheses. “To become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the accomplishments of democracy,” he states. “It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all why democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest heights, proved incapable of saving
zoë [life as such], to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, form unprecedented ruin” (1998: 10).
40 According to Ignatiev, “an 1847 census taker in Moyamensing-Southwark, describing the black population, wrote ‘My heart is sick, my soul is horror-stricken at what my eyes behold… The greater part of these people live in with the Irish’” (129).
41 Ignatiev describes the situation as follows: “The city relied on volunteers to defend public order… In case of special need, special posses were sworn in, whose members carried neither guns nor wore badges. Behind the ad hoc volunteers stood the militia, a slightly more regular but also non-professional force” (132).
42 It’s on this basis that we are often forced to endure conversations aimed at determining who is committing “the real violence.” The common theme in these discussions is the desire to absolve demonstrators of any contact with violence and keep us innocent. Although framing the discussion in this way might prove to be strategically useful in the short term, the danger is that it makes it impossible to talk openly about violence’s productive character and why activists have little choice but to consider it.
43 Many readers have dismissed Agamben’s thesis as hyperbolic. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that he has not been the only writer to advance arguments pointing to the intimate connection between the Holocaust and the modern world. In the closing passage of
Moments of Reprieve, Holocaust survivor Primo Levi reminds us of how we—contemporary readers—are “so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting” (1995: 128). Adopting a more sociological tone, Zigmunt Bauman recounts how “the unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust … is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration… We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it) that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar, face we so admire… What we perhaps fear most, is that each of the two faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin” (2000: 7). To these accounts, we can add the whole of the critical theory tradition and, in particular, the work of Theodor Adorno whose writing was especially attentive to the threshold at which the rational turned into its other.
44 In the closing pages of
Days of War, Nights of Love, CrimethInc include a poster featuring a hand grenade and a citation drawn from one of Durden’s famous soliloquies.
45 For an excellent analysis of this dynamic, see Augusto Boal’s
Theatre of the Oppressed (1979).
46 CrimethInc even made it the subject of one of their early actions.
Coda: Representation’s Limit
47 In his definitive historical account of the social movement as a discrete phenomenon, Charles Tilly emphasizes how the right to assembly, association, and speech that came into being under bourgeois rule provided the basis for social movement performances and routines, as well as a context for their displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (2004: 64). All told, the social movement as we know it today is a child of the bourgeois revolution.
48 There are, of course, other possibilities. Constituted power could, for instance, act upon the claim maker before they are able to act upon either the public or upon constituted power. However, this schematic account is useful for highlighting the process as it arises in its pure form and in the first instance. It also helps to highlight the extent to which political processes follow predictable courses and how disruption involves elaborating strategies that work to reverse the flow of those processes.
49 As Ward Churchill and others have explained, the modern democratic state has made use of social movements as a kind of informal polling option. In this way, they have been able to repackage policies in order to make them more palatable without ever having to change overall policy direction (1998: 51-52).
50 The problem is analogous to the one arising from the relationship between cause and effect. Logically, the cause precedes the effect. However, in contemplation, effects are always noted first. The cause is thus produced through contemplation and
post festum.