THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF DIS-ORDER
space-creation, movements and bodiesa political ethnography of OWS
REGULATING LINES
An inevitable element of ArchitectureThe necessity for order. The regulating line is a guarantee
against willfulness. It brings satisfaction to the understanding. The regulating line is a means to an end; it is not a recipe.Its choice and the modalities of expression given to it are an
integral part of architectural creation. –Le Corbusier1
One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the spaceover which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as means of
communication in service of striated space. It is a vital concernof every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control
migrations, and, more generally, to establish a zone of rightsover an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the
ecumenon.—Gilles Deleuze2
A TREATISE ON WRITING:
In writing I attempt to find resonances between themes within the fields ofpolitics, philosophy, social choreography, and geography.
The reader should sit with each theme—unpack each impression, each aphorism.
1 Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. BN Publishing, 2008. 3.2 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 385-386.
We don’t think with precise logos, with structured and ordered thought. Wethink rhizomatically—linking themes that don’t obviously connect except by
lines-of-flight. We create connective-tissue only after the fact.
My endeavors to write are therefore connected to this: the brain is arhizomatic network of seemingly unhinged thoughts and bodily behavior.
Thus, writing needn’t be read linearly. It can be read in-parallel motions,out of order, looking for abstract interconnections.
In my thesis I write against the order of things: the police and cartographicforces that order bodies and space. I desire to reflect this impulse in myform as a thinker and writer. I am trying to find the resonances betweenprojects in politics, philosophy, and geography, and therefore I can only
justly place in-parallel my findings. Linearizing it would be undermining thestrength in the smoothness of thought.
INTRO
Politics is dis-order.
The American Empire is on the decline.
Politics is radically excluded.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a singularity among a multiplicity of
alternatives that embody political, economic, philosophical, and
topological critiques of neoliberalism. The value of examining
OWS is to explore its political ontology: what structures it has
and what formal human relations it troubles in its radical
openness and indeterminacy.
The stakes are incredibly high for today’s political movements:
late-stage Capitalism has dismantled the world economic-political
structure in irreparable ways, rising threats of a major
ecological crisis loom, and neoliberal State apparati have
instituted the most repressive restrictions on civil rights,
employing unchecked police-force that increasingly has the power
to reduce rights-bearing citizens to homo sacer, to bare life.3
However, the American Empire is on the decline.
Neoliberalism hides less and less every day.
3 (((Signaling the contemporary Capitalist model that includes increased abstraction of finance Capital, the breakdown of international boundaries by globalization, and the greatest disposability of labor.)))
While a long genealogy of social movements exists, OWS is unique
within the contemporary American context. OWS focuses on space in
a way that expands the very concept to include not just physical
space, but also political space, economic space, psychogeographic
space, safe(r) space, and idea space, etc. OWS is responsible for
a broad breaking-down of privatized, commodified and regimented
territories—by liberating both physical and ideological space.
This deterritorializing force, coupled with a radical political
framework, allows OWS to entirely reconstruct the valuation of
life, the ways that bodies interact, the way movement(s) occur(s)
in space, the etho-politio-economic relations, and the essence of
how being-in-common occurs.4
This paper sets out to trace the restrictive police-force that
orders/organizes bodies and keeps private space private in
Zuccotti (fences/ barricades/ walls), and see these forces in
4 (((Although exceeding the breath of this paper, many issues have arisen out of the questions of bodies and oppression. A strong critique exists for the exclusivity of OWS and much activism-at-large, for it being more a venue for self-forgiving whites and not establishing of cross-racial solidarity. My point in addressing this issue isn’t to marginalize this question, but to acknowledge that any short analysis would remain tokenizing, and that out of respect, the issue of brownness needs to be charted in full.)))
contrast to the opening/ dis-order/ indeterminacy of OWS. The
freedom of movement in space makes the 'commons' happen, and is
an incredibly rare event—a clear example of 'politics’ in the
contemporary US.5
OWS reminds us of what is at stake when we speak of politics,
socially and ontologically—our fundamental understanding of
humanness.
* *
*
On September 17th, 2011, a rag-tag collection of approximately
2000 bodies assembled in then-named, “Zuccotti Park,” located in
New York City’s Financial District. Protesters hammered through a
week-long process of learning how to use consensus for collective
decision-making and how to occupy space. Within days Zuccotti
Park transformed into Liberty Square, harmonizing with, but not
re-creating that Spring’s protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo, and
5 (((Again, politics is not Statism, nor is it found in the election booth— politics is dis-order, it is resistance to policing and repression.)))
allowing for a radical resignification, redefinition and
reenchantment of space.6 It was by this point that Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) had truly begun. Many of the New York Occupiers
focused their attention to space: to redefining and reclaiming
public space.
Drawing upon the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Erin Manning,
Jacques Rancière, Jean Luc-Nancy and many others enables us to
explore in depth the political and ontological impact of the
creation of space that has destratified and deterritorialized by
the unmeasurable shifting of movement-through.
It is deeply generative to understand OWS’s political ontology,
its essential political qualities. OWS’s political ontology thus
is located in its radical indeterminacy—its essential and
political openness to be moved, to be creative and creative in-
relation, and to allow for singular sharing (out) to occur as
part of a larger network of bodies and desire. All of these
formulations oppose OWS with the State and police-force.
6 (((Its important to keep in mind the major difference between OWS and Egypt,on the scale of mass protest and actualized police violence.)))
OWS exists in limbo. OWS is not reactive to the existing
legislative structure, and instead, creates a new political
project that links public space to a critique of Capitalism and
the State in such a complex way that leaves OWS in a period of
becoming. This powerful unifying essence is its very
indeterminacy: the fact that anyone can interpret what OWS is,
can have their own OWS, and can share (out) within it. Radically
linearized spacio-socially are the forces of the State: hard-
borders, territories, and hierarchies. This linearity is space-
restrictive—commons-destructive—apolitical. Therefore, in
opposition to OWS is becoming-solidified, becoming-recognizable.
A key threat that looms over OWS is stratification. Understood by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, “The
function of deterritorialization is the movement by which “one”
leaves the territory”7 Deterritorialization is the movement that
cuts through territory, that breaks down existing urban spaces
and relations. It destratifies borders, destabilizes hierarchy
7 Ibid., 504.
and, dis-organizes order. Deterritorialization is space-creative
—allowing for the birth of new ideas, new worlds, new politics.
OWS is exactly this deterritorializing force required to
challenge the logic of police-force and Late-Capitalism.8
OWS’s operations have greatly re-organized the Political
Community’s relationship to public and private space. Those
occupiers have psychogeographically and semiotically transformed
space from Liberty Square to Zuccotti Park. Functions such as
police-force and barricades hierarchize and limit movement,
whereas the more open-ended and multitudinous political-movements
of a full time occupation, with tents and stands, all change and
morph space and its use. All of these factors: bodies, geography,
and space all change in relation with one-another and are highly
interconnected.
Crucial in OWS is the expression of radical excess: excess to
Capitalism’s restrictive organization and efficient flows.
Excessive is the creative potentiality channeled toward multiple
8 (((Later in this paper we will deal in greater depth the idea of OWS as deterritorializing.)))
ends: art, economy, and most essentiality, to a new political-
being—a new horizontality—a new democracy of consensus. It is
here that this ideological rhizome grows, into small farming
communities and megacities that would otherwise not have General
Assemblies or occupied space.9
Political and ethical life explored by radicals, of which OWS is
one network, troubles the very essence of what it means to be
human. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, what is essential to true
political and ethical life is adherence to being-in-common, the
project of recognizing the fundamental similarities that occur in
human life. This project requires an understanding of sharing
(out)—the space for us to all express our ideas and beliefs. We
find in OWS congruence—the many becoming one.10
THE STAKES
9 (((According to Deleuze, a rhizome is a decentralized, non-hierarchical, horizontal network (of roots, bodies, or concepts) that runs counter to a linear and arboresque relationality.)))10 (((Again, further on in this paper, we will address in far greater depth Jean-Luc Nancy’s notions of sharing (out) and congruence.)))
Capital’s axiom is all encompassing: the axiom of Capital is the
force that dominates all forms: all ‘so-called politics,’
advertising, ideology, human-rights projects, etc. These forms
all subversively, invisibly, and roguishly contribute to nothing
else but the end of goal of Capitalism, toward promoting the
expansion of consumption.
The stakes of today’s social paradigm are that EVERYTHING IS IN
PLACE TO EXCLUDE POLITICS: from the desiring-producing machines
that interpellate us as good consumers, to the police-force that
keeps a society moving morally, to the machinations of biopower
that keep us voting and producing, and finally, to the mediated
spectacles that distract us from whats real—from what’s
politics.11
11 (((What’s unbearable is that people who self-ascribe as “very Liberal” on their virtual presentations of self can offer vivid critiques of Capitalism, suggest to us that the solution is to consume more green products, to buy locally, as though this world can remain exactly the same as long as we consume differently, that hybrid-car ads can rest next to Chanel ads... We know were fucked when a US radical publisher, semiotext(e) can publish and sell a book for $15.00, The Coming Insurrection, which was both written and banned in France for its connection to “The Invisible Committee” and the “Tarnac Nine,” anti-Capitalist groups identified as a “Terrorist organization by both French and US officials.)))
The Neoliberal paradigm is the most subversive force in history.
Capitalisms axiom literally has no limit, is it itself a limit, the
limit. All concepts and ways of being are coextensive with
Capitalism—live within it. Police-force is in place to smother
the threat of politics, which is the only true threat to
Capitalism: the threat that keeps Western ideology out of
religious Muslim States (for example): values—living-in-adherence
—prefigurative politics.The stakes of re-claiming public space—
reclaiming the commons, are massive. To create space outside of
the all-encompassing axiom of Capital is to create politics.
HISTO
In some senses, OWS began on Sept. 17th 2011. What began as a
public-private park in lower Manhattan has gained an entirely new
topology—a new organization with a new set of functions. OWS
began as a tentative occupation of a ‘privately owned public
space’ in NYC’s Financial District.12 Over the course of 2 short
12 (((Zuccotti Park is owned by Brookfield properties, directed by Diana L. Taylor, former NYS Superintendent of Banks, and partnered to Mayor Michael
weeks, OWS had completely transformed from a tentative encampment
to a full-time occupation, with a major dining-operation, at
least twenty working groups, each with daily meetings and info-
boards/tables, and eventually tents. The occupiers of Liberty
Square resignified space, transforming the park into a highly
politicized zone, becoming a hub and model for the other
occupations that would begin that Fall.
In some sense, OWS began long before September 17th. In July
2011, a call was put out by the activist-oriented magazine
Adbusters to occupy Wall Street, an action that would symbolically
attack Finance Capitalisms’s stranglehold on global resources and
that would resonate with the other recent anti-State and anti-
Capitalist protests around the globe.
My participation in OWS goes back to September 17th, where I
attended the first OWS GA as a skeptical-yet-intellectually-
radical grad student—ready to camp for the first few days, but
unsure as to what I was participating in and its efficacy. I
Bloomberg.)))
quickly learned what it takes to be an activist: I started to
understand consensus processes and gained organizing skills. I
helped to set up the Direct Action Working Group, which
facilitates marches, events, and foster OWS’s more tactically
radical protesters.13 Around the same time I was beaten by the
NYPD and arrested on several occasions for being in the wrong
place at the wrong time, or, more accurately, for even
considering to express my beliefs—for trying to find consistency
between my acts and thoughts, which galvanized my (and many
others’) radical stance against the NYPD and other forces of
order and oppression. We were looking to live ethics.
In actuality OWS’s roots are even deeper, drawing upon an entire
genealogy of radical grassroots movement-building, anarchist-
(de)-organizing, and NYC’s history of squatting, housing rights—
which all mark moments of politics that deal with habitations and
habitualizations of space. The Occupy Movement gains much of its
structure from recent global protests of power, all of which
13 (((I also met a group of die-hard full-time activist, many of whom came to OWS with anarchist philosophy, who became my OWS friend-base: my new family. As a intellectual anti-Statist and anti-Capitalist, it was easy to find my allegiance to anarchism's call to action.)))
revolve around the issue of space. From the radical Indignados
Movement, where the ongoing protests of banks and the government
turned many Spanish cities into semi-permanent protest
encampments, to similar tent cities in Israel, to more militant
reclamations of public space occurring in the Arab Spring (such
as Tahrir Square), space has become the central question: the
very political ontology of these movements.14
Possibly the most significant moment in OWS’s history since its
genesis is the eviction of Zuccotti Park by the NYPD on November
15th, “#N15.” Two days before the two-month anniversary, a
national sting-operation aimed at ending the Occupy Movement,
facilitated by the Department of Homeland Security, marked the
end of the physical occupation of space in most cities across the
US. No more tents, no more full time occupiers. Well before the
eviction, the movement had already begun drift into squats,
apartments, and off-site meetings, which was furthered by the
14 (((OWS has a strong genealogy, and isn’t singular in its creation of space,or in its political indeterminacy. The point and urgency of thinking through the ways that movement produces space is because we desperately need politicalprojects to break with the harsh and nearly-invisible ordering, stratification, and territorialization of society, necessitated by Neoliberalism.)))
events of #N15. Occasional large events still fill Liberty
Square, but it now stands as a largely symbolic space—actual work
of OWS occurs whether or not there is a a full-time physical
site.15
What we understand from the Occupy Movement is that the use and
conceptualization of space is a both a political and
philosophical question. Mass movements of the politically and
economically disenfranchised are motivated by feelings of a lack
of resources and a lack of access to the political stage.16
People often feel like ‘their voice isn’t heard’ in politics,
which is to say that the highly oppressive political structures
haven’t yet recognized these people as speech-bearing, logos-
wielding individuals.17 History is witness to the fact that
rioting, looting, and property destruction are not meaningless
violent outbursts, but totally legitimized forms of resisting
oppression and expressing a politics.18
15 (((At of the writing of this paper, OWS is still in full force, going on eight months.)))16 (((Obviously, not all activists and occupiers are disenfranchised.)))17 (((Logos here signifies the rational and ordered mind.)))18 Piven, Francis Fox and Richard Cloward. Poor Peoples Movements: Why they Succeeded,How They Fail. New York: Vintage, 1978.
S1. PRIVATELY OWNED PUBLIC SPACE
Zuccotti Park is officially considered a “privately owned public
space,” (POPS) which is a zoning code with a particularly
troubling valence. According to the NYC Department of City
Planning:
A Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) is an amenityprovided, constructed and maintained by a propertyowner/developer for public use in exchange for additionalfloor area. The 1961 Zoning Resolution inaugurated theincentive zoning program in New York City. The programencouraged private developers to provide spaces for thepublic within or outside their buildings by allowing themgreater density in certain high-density districts. 19
Springing up to help abet corporations at risk of being fined for
constructing in excess to legal-agreements, POPS become legal
grey-zones without considerable past-casework, and put the
legality of OWS’s encampment of Zuccotti Park in limbo. At least
two questions remain: does Brookfield Properties, the owners of
Zuccotti Park, get to decide whether occupiers should be kicked
out, and, if so, when and how? And, what legal ground does the
NYPD have to evacuate a POPS?
19 NYC Dept. of City Planning.
There is extreme performative-force behind calling Zuccotti a
‘privately owned public space.’ What a POPS signifies is that
public space can now be taken over by private business, by
private interests, allowing businesses to create and enforce any
regulation they desire. Most significantly, since a POPS is still
a public space—a space for the people—for demos, this public can
be denied access to space at the drop of the hat. The demos
includes the masses, the homeless, the disabled, the poor—the
people for whom there is nothing else except the commons. When
the commons is restricted, which is increasingly the case in NYC,
the poorest, most marginalized, and most nomadic of the masses
are dis-placed. This happens all too much in POPS, and the
eviction(s) of Zuccotti Park is just one example.
The performativity of a POPS is thus dependent on legal weight—
discursive weight. A POPS’ violent discursive force actualizes
the privatization of space. A ‘privately owned public space’ is,
in fact, not unique to NYC, but emblematic of the very conditions
of Late-stage Capitalism. The commons, as public space, is the
space where politics occurs—the space where movement is free to
move itself is privatized, striated, commodified, ordered and
oriented towards Capitalist ends. Privately owned public space is
space that has been reterritorialized—taken from the demos, the
people. In place of the people, only the police remain, restrict
movement, manage bodies. Police-force operates in private space
to squelch politics. Thus the commons is lost when public space
becomes privatized.
POLITIC
S2. THE EXCEPTIONALITY OF THE NYPD
Thinking of the political stakes of OWS is enhanced by a
historically and juridically-minded perspective. Turning to
Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of Sovereignty and the State
helps to digest the ways that legal and juridical slippages
produce a State of Exception (SoE), and how that reflects the
exceptionality of the power of the NYPD. According to Agamben in
State of Exception, a SoE:
Constitutes a ‘point of imbalance between public law and political fact...the State of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in
contemporary politics. The State of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept.20
SoEs are moments of slippage between law, legal protections of
individuals, and the political facts of life. Force doesn't
always correspond to law, certain bodies are removed of their
citizen status. This slippage is violent: the force of law
becomes the force over life: biopower. A SoE is apolitical: it
dissolves civic and political institutions. Agamben hauntingly
uncovers how sovereign power is unchecked by legal restraint.
Outside of law are those conditions that mark the current US
apolitical military State climate and echo the USA Patriot Act—
the stripping of civil rights. The unchecked use of the notion of
a War on Terror has enabled and amplified Ex-president George
Bush’s roguish exceptionalities of power at home and abroad. The
US’s SoE has enabled entirely unfounded modes of warfare and has
erased the legal status of the individual.
20 Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: UChicago Press, 2005. 1-4.
SoE defines NYC’s current police State: the NYPD exists in an
exceptional position, almost entirely invulnerable to meaningful
scrutiny and checks of power. Within the NYPD there is fierce
repression of dissidence and a heavy emphasis on loyalty. Besides
media spectacle, the only significant check on police power are
class-action lawsuits, which are very slow, and complaints
against individual officers, which, like a court martial, almost
always are reviewed by a board of the officer's peers: other
police officers, who are very unlikely to strip a friend of his
or her job. Through the passage of the National Defense
Authorization Act of 2012, the NYPD is now legally-protected in
detaining US Citizens indefinitely without a warrant. If martial
law implies the reduction or negation of legal frameworks that
entangle martial force, then NYC has been in Martial Law at least
since 9/11/2001.
S3. STRUCTURE
OWS’s political structure is formally anarchic,
horizontal/diagonal, rhizomatic, and employs consensus-based
direct-democratic practices to come to collective decisions.21
Decentralized networks of bodies, political-organisms, and social
collaboration shape the way that individuals and the collective,
singularities and the multiplicity interact. This rhizomatic
network extends out to other organs that preexist OWS, like Labor
Unions, (Im)migrant groups, homeless organizations, etc—this
structure allows for a fair amount of autonomy.22
S4: RADICAL LIFE / SHARING (OUT) / BEING-IN-
COMMON
OWS sustains and is sustained by radical life: squatting,
dumpster-diving, freeganism, community-gardens, permaculture, and
mutual aid. These practices promote a sense of “Dual Power.” As a
model, Dual Power suggests that while the goal of anarchist
21 (((The theory of the rhizome will be explained in full later in this paper.)))22 (((OWS is organized around a larger General Assembly (GA) that allocates funds and consents on proposals, and is the most inclusive, and possibly most dysfunctional body in OWS. The GA is designed for people to be able to walk off the street and participate, but offers no system of accountability, and isoften stalled. In response, smaller break-out groups formulated: ideological and identity-based caucuses, working groups (WG’s) and affinity groups (AG’s).Most occupiers participate in one or more WG’s, like Direct Action (DA), whichhave a large amount of freedom in decision making. AG’s are the most autonomously-structured bodies, usually small circles of friends who participate in direct action in and around larger events, like marches.)))
organizing is to block the flows of Capital and to tear down the
State, that what also needs to be proven is that viable
alternatives to Capitalism and the State exist within networks of
people, within a group willing to be radically accountable of the
resources they produce and consume, to take care of each-other,
and to share ideas and life in the commons.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas of “Being-in-Common” and “Sharing (Out)”
elucidate the philosophical depth of an experience of extreme
congruence, communal life, and inclusivity that OWS and other
radical social organizations attempt to adhere to. To start, we
should see ‘being-in-common’ suggesting an understanding of life
that is shared and experienced by all. Far more experientially
rich than a Marxist/ Statist idea of Communism, being-in-common
relates to an ontological position—a way of being fundamental to
humans. Nancy says in his essay on “The Compearance,”
We compear: we come together (in)to the world. It is not that there is a simultaneous arrival of several distinct units...but that there is not a coming (in)to the world thatis not radically common; it is even the “common” itself. To come into the world is to be-in-common.23
23 Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Compearance: From the Existence of, “Communism” to the Community of “Existence.” Political Theory Vol. 20. No 3. Trans. Tracy B. Strong. Sage Publications, Inc, 1992. 373-4.
What is shared is our common co-existence. The most fundamental
condition of life is common-experience. Nancy wants to avoid
seeing common as banal, but instead as the one saving grace of
humanity. Communism isn't a political option, but an ‘ontological
condition,’ one that understands that ‘being’—the essence and
experience of humanness—is in common.24
Many political philosophers argue that politics isn’t located in
voting: in our form of democracy. Following this logic, Nancy
thinks that the political can only be reached by understanding
how it could exist outside the State and within community, and
within the commons.
OWS is able to channel this sense of being-in-common through its
inclusivity and open structure. The notion of in-common is
exceptional for the people of NYC, who so often avoid their very
ontological condition—who, on the train, ignore each-other and
try to sustain their (seemingly) rock-hard interiorities. This
makes New Yorkers less likely to take care of one another and
24 Ibid., 390.
share space. Again, OWS activates the political by exploring new
commonness and by forcing humans to recognize their ontological
position of being-in-common.
Also fruitful for our conceptualization of OWS is Nancy’s notion
of sharing (out):
The share of what is without value—the share of the sharing (out) of the incalculable, which is thus, strictly speaking,unshareable—exceeds politics. The element in which the incalculable can be shared (out) goes by the name of love, friendship, or thought, knowledge or emotion, but not politics—in any case, not democratic politics... It is precisely the expectation of a political sharing (out) of the incalculable that leads to disappointment with democracy. 25
What we can garner from Nancy is that in a democracy too much
onus is placed on whether we all experience an equal share (of
goods/ideas). Hatred for democracy stems from never being able to
take what one wants or give what one has, but instead having to
arithmetically divide-up goods and ideology. Nancy seeks a State
that has a separate place for politics (organization) and for
public/ ideological sharing (out). Sharing (out) is incalculable,
qualitative, unmeasurable by arithmetic, and relative to
25 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Truth of Democracy. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brualt and Micael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 17.
individuals. What’s shared out has no absolute value and can only
be experienced on an individual level. Politics should respect
this separate place for sharing (out).26
OWS is a site where an incredible amount of sharing (out) is
experienced. Different than a town gall meeting, a General
Assembly (GA) in OWS, at least in theory, is not run by
individuals who have hierarchical authority over the attendees. A
GA is more open, and allows each member to create topics of
conversation and to vote. A GA is designed to allow every
individual to share (out) their ideas and sense for where the
movement is heading, and what kinds of proposals would help the
occupation along. In the park space was created for autonomous
and group religious-practice, drug-use, performances, teach-ins,
workshops and rituals—further ways that (a group of) individuals
can share (out) what is excessive-to-politics—values—into the
collective.
26 (((Nancy also argues that any State needs two forces to operate, a functional political order, one that organizes bodies and channels the national spirit, and the other force—the civic, theological order that allows for ideology, for individual sharing (outs) of beliefs and resources.)))
S5: RANCIÈRE POLITICS AND POLICE-FORCE
Jacques Rancière’s complicated theorization of the relationship
between politics and police-force helps us to place these two
occurrences in juxtaposition. For Rancière, politics occurs,
“Because, or when, the natural order of the shepard kings, the
warlords, or property owners is interrupted by a freedom that
crosses up and makes real the ultimate equality on which any
social order rests.”27 Politics is a rare event we see in the
moments that break from order, from law, and from ownership.
Politics returns to the ideological premise of democracy/ the
State—a measure of incalculable and (in)equality, or space—just
like that which Nancy speaks of.
Rancière defines the police as, “Essentially, the law, generally
implicitly, that defines a parties share or lack of it....the
police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the
allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of
saying.”28 Police is the ordering force. Rancière uses police in
27 Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 16. 28 Ibid., 29.
a way that underlines to understand a larger juridico-logical
practice that State apparati deploy to restrict, manage, and
manipulate bodies, and to control movement (social and
individual). He positions police-force against politics. Again,
politics is:
Whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration. Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a places’ destination...political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of police order. 29
Politics is the break from rigid order, from rigid organization
of bodies and parts. Political activity changes relations between
populations, movement, and space—politics opens space.
Since the event that triggered total sovereign exceptionality,
9/11, NYC has been completely dominated by a space-restrictive,
rigid police-force, touting anti-terrorist rhetoric and wielding
exceptionality from power, this police-ordering keeps NYC’s flows
of Capital un-breached. OWS radically opens up politics by
tearing open new space(s), redistributing the sensible, impeding
29 Ibid., 29-30.
flows in the street, and challenging the hard logics which
restrict public (use of) space. OWS challenges the privatization
of space on an onto-political level.
S6: DELEUZE—RHIZOMES, DETERRITORIALIZATION,
RETERRITORIALIZATION
Understanding Deleuzian concepts like the rhizome,
deterritorialization and reterritorialization is crucial to
shaping a rich, ontological notion of how politics and movement
oppose, configure, and are re-configured police order and State.
To begin, the rhizome, is a complex relation of forces, bodies,
ideas, language, and time. With interlocutor Felix Guattari, in A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze suggests that, “The rhizome itself
assumes very diverse forms...Any point of a rhizome can be
connected to any other thing, and must be.”30 A rhizome is a
series of interconnected parts with no particular proscribed
form.31 Understood rhizomatically, OWS becomes a network of
30 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 7.31 (((Rhizomes both structured by relations of force that attempt to organize and stratify (laws, rules) and also as the movements that undermine this very
bodies, organizations, and political-economic forces that
challenges hierarchical and arboresque organization. Its parts
operate with a high amount of autonomy; however, they contain
some abstract, but crucial lines of orientation. OWS draws
together a rhizome of rhizomes—an actual rhizome in Liberty
Square, a virtual rhizome of ideas, of internet
interconnectedness, and the many Occupy Movement rhizomes that
populate the whole world.
Deterritorialization is the movement away from structure, logic,
situated social codes, and striation. Reterritorialization is the
process that reinscribes these structures—it stratifies,
solidifies, and returns-from-chaos the unhinging movement of
deterritorialization. These two processes cannot be understood,
nor do they take place, without each-other.32
Furthering a complex analysis notion of the political are the war
machine and the State apparatus, which can be understood as
operating by way of the dual processes of deterritorialization
attempt at organization.))) 32 Ibid., 10.
and reterritorialization. For Deleuze and Guattari, the forces of
the State and law are the forces of empires, structure, clear
identify, defined borders and territories. The war machine
assembles a nomadic band external to the State apparatus’s
territory and law.
The forces of nomadism, of the war machine, and of
deterritorialization are always politicized—operating outside of
the State by traversing borders, breaking laws, and also by
undermining the very meaning that holds up State’s territory and
law. It is here we can locate OWS’s politics, as outside of
politics-at-large, but in the moments that break with order. The
State and law are forces that attempt to reterritorialize this
lost ground— this lost sense. OWS is war-machine—a nomadic band
that fights rigidity, order, political-economic logics, the
State, and police-force. A key goal of OWS is to remain non-
vertical, non-arboresque, but instead open and horizontal.
(((In the following section, we will examine more thoroughly how Deleuze and Guattari’s
concepts of de/reterritorialization, war-machine, and striation/ smooth space enrich a
political analysis of OWS and the NYPD)))
S7: OWS POLITICALLY + ONTOLOGICALLY OPPOSED NYPD
To think how OWS deterritorializes and reterritorializes is to
think of its very political ontology. The destratification,
desegmentation, and smoothing of rigid logics destabilizes the
way we consider politics in the world. No longer are we supposed
to find empowerment in participating in representative democracy—
no longer are we accountable to participate in that system. What
most mass-protests elucidate is that politics happens in the
street. What happens in the street is discursive—when the means
to other politically efficacious action is cut off, riots become
discourse.
OWS is deterritorialized, but also reterritorialized—what occurs
when occupations and GAs are set up in towns across the US is the
establishment of a new mode of political organization. By
formulating something concrete, like a direct democracy,
occupations are no longer indeterminate, in-becoming, but become
solid political structures.
Capitalism is deterritorialized by OWS. Those participants of
radical life become examples of the ways that economic
noncompliance works: squatting, dumpster diving, food-autonomy,
growing food, and not having a (wage slave) job are some examples
of how Capitalism is deterritorialized by radical life. Some
structures, such as mutual aid, are built upon the premise of
“Dual Power,” which is to say that anarchist organizing shouldn’t
just attempt to ‘smash the State’ and ‘end Capitalism,’ but also
offer positive and horizontal rhizomatic-networks of aid: free
stores, soup kitchens and organizations like Food not Bombs are
examples of existing nodes of mutual-aid. These examples are
more-or-less structural, and have therefore reterritorialized an
anti-Capitalist economic formation.
Deterritorialized are laws—the need to have regimented and
oppressive legal-juridical frameworks is called into question.
The arrest of 600 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge, with is
massive-global-media-event reverberation, has clogged the jails,
the courts, and makes the entire police-legal infrastructure look
outmoded, unproductive, and abusive.
OWS is very much opposed to the formulations of police-force:
riot squads and barricades are some of the forces that OWS
resists most, both structurally and ontologically. On the other
hand, non-permitted marches that move into the street at will,
flash mobs, creative actions, black-bloc tactics, and riots all
are blockages to the flows of Capital and communication.
Returning to Rancière, we are able to see these moments of urban
resistance, of destratification and deterritorialization as the
moments of politics—the real break from State orderings.
Political, not because it is reactive-against electoral politics,
but political in its open, creative, indetermination—the highest
fear of police-force is indeterminacy, open-structures, and
potentiality. The fear is thus that the forces of the State
apparatuses: police, law, media, and elections might
reterritorialize ground won (deterritorialized) by OWS. Allowing
OWS to become-party is among the most damning reformist and
reterritorializing prospects. Reterritorialization also occurs by
way of microfascisms, small forces of order that attempt to
destroy potentiality within OWS. Leaders popping up in a
“leaderless revolution” would become (or perhaps is already) a
site of lost indeterminacy.
Sovereignty itself becomes deterritorialized by radical
movements. Deterritorialized is not simply sovereign power, but
the very legitimacy and necessity of vertical sovereignty—
arboresque relations of knowledge and power. What we see with
OWS, therefore, is that positive organization (the good kind of
re-organization/reterritorialization) can exist within the
negative spaces deterritorialization carves out: political-space,
economic-space, idea-space, etc. Space-from—liberty is needed
first to allow for the space-to-be-creative: of commons, of new
political-economic formulations, and new political ontologies.
(((Later in this paper we will address later the various ways in which spaces are
specifically opened up by OWS, showing how forces of deterritorialization are space-
creative forces, that reconfigure ways that bodies are assembled, and therefore, how
they resist statist bodily habituations and manipulation via biopower.)))
MOVEMENT
Understanding movement is key to understanding how social-
movements like OWS operate, how bodies and space are (co)created,
and what a politics-in-becoming looks like. According to Deleuze,
movements are creative—they constitute the moments of pure
becoming, of pure change, and rarely occur. Deleuze draws his
notion of movement from Henri Bergson who understands it to be an
experience of time-space that is qualitative and immeasurable.
Here movement already aligns it with the indeterminate nature of
OWS, that opens space, that is space-creative.
S8. MANNING, RELATIONALITY, POLITICS OF BECOMING
Deleuzian theorist Erin Manning, in her recent text Relationscapes,
helps us to understand the deeper political resonances between
movement and the space it creates. Manning says, “The dynamic
form of a movement is its incipient potentiality,” arguing that
movement is always in-becoming, assembling the not-yet—
potentiality.33 Becoming occurs only in-relation—(re)constitutive
of the more-than-one that is a body. Relational movement implies
that there are always at least two bodies (including humans,
space, etc.). About the ontology and force of movement, Manning
continues:
Movement is one with the world, not body/world, but body-worlding. We move not to populate space, not to extend it orto embody it, but to create it...space is a duration with a difference. The difference is my body-worlding, always more than one...This coming-together proposes a combination of form forces.34
Manning understands how movement creates the world, always as a
relation between bodies and world/space. This creation is
conditioned by objects that are in-becoming. Movement is a
measure of whats unmeasurable, only qualifiable, and exists as a
33 Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009. 6. 34 Ibid., 13.
coming-together or congruence. Space is created in this
relationality.
Can’t we see space as literally and metaphorically reconstituted,
as always in-becoming? The potential of movement to create space
can also be linked to OWS, which exists as a set of relations of
bodies. Individual desires, collective strategies, spatial-
topological sites and virtual arenas all change in relation to
one another. This kind of movement can’t be mapped.
There are many OWSs. Each is world-creative for an individual-
group, tying into Manning’s theory of concrescence, which is,
“Literally, growing together... concrescence can be a political
moment: the interval we are dancing is always more than the
qualified ‘we.”35Acknowledgment of concrescence, of the many-
becoming-one, requires an openness to destabilization that is
ontologically-political. Like being-in-common, embracing
concrescence forces us to remain radically open to otherness. OWS
is a multitude of voices united not under a common goal, but
35 Ibid., 22.
under common orientations, under an ability and readiness to be-
in-common—to be moved in relation.
Manning then directly acknowledges the political nature of
movements:
When articulation becomes collective, a politics is made palpable whereby what is produced is the potential for divergent series of movements. This is a virtual politics, apolitics of the not-yet. These are not politics of the body,but of the many becoming one...These are politics of that many-bodied State of transition that is the collective.36
The very nature of politics, according to Manning and Deleuze, is
its capacity to move, to be creative of spaces, to be open and
indeterminate. The only real potentially to have a politics that
opposes the State and police-force is by way of movement, of
prefigurative politics, politics of becoming. This politics is
world-creative, it sets new rules by which life is valued and
action is judged. OWS again operates as a collective articulation
that exists, and can only exist, as a multiplicity of sharing-
outs of politics and ideas—a multiplicity of spaces, and a
multiplicity of politics prefigured: ethics and radical life.
36 Ibid., 27.
S9. POLITICAL MOVEMENT(S)
How can we think of the movement of political movements? How does
the cutting-through/ recombination relate to movement-in-space?
Political movement is thus micropolitical. What concerns
micropolitics are the becoming-becomings, sites of
deterritorialization, moments of preacceleration...
Political movement creates space. Space is created by new
relationalities, new gestures, concrescence of bodies—political
excesses expand the political space
CONCLUSION OF MVMNT SECTION:
Movement is creative. Movement is becoming space-time—reordering
particles, bodies, actants, and relationality in an experience of
space-time. Political movement is creative of spaces with
political ontological formulations. Movement is creative just
like “real” Politics, the kind that political philosophers have
been attempting to define for eons. Rancière comes close in
understanding the political to be the breaks in ordering of
society. Politics is outside of representative politics. It’s
that which radicalizes and redefines our notion of what politics
is. True politics is space-creative.
SPACE
S10. STRIATION, SMOOTHNESS, POLICESpace-creation is crucial to prefigurative political projects
that aim to incorporate radical politics into a life, into an
ethics. Useful to help locate these micropolitical fights are
Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizations of space in A Thousand
Plateaus, which view striation and smoothness as onto-political
metaphors. About space, they argue:
One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as means of communication in service of striated space. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities, or commerce, money or Capital, etc... That is why Paul Virilio’s thesis is important, when he shows that, ‘the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, management of the public ways,” and that “the gates of the city, its levies and duties are barriers, filters against the fluidity of masses, against the penetration power of migratory packs,” people, animals and goods...in this sense,
the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform.37
Space becomes striated, codified, and linearized by the State.
Lost are moments of pure smoothness: trans-boarder-migrations,
nomadism, etc. Instead, the State limits smooth flows of movement
to regulate the functions of efficient flow of Capital, which
requires a system of categorization, relativity, and certain
restrictions to be a system of exchange. Drawing in Virilio,
Deleuze and Guattari show how the polis, the police-force is the
force of management, of ordering space, bodies, and distributing
the sensible. Fluidity and movement are thus juxtaposed against
the polis. The polis is map-creative and world-creative.
THERE IS NO MORE STRIATED SPACE THAN THAT OF THE BARRICADED
OCCUPATION, THE KETTLED-GROUP, or any other form of police-force.
Police-force is what keeps space ordered and regimented, which
defines the regime of visibility, that establishes logos.
S11. EXCESS=RIOTS=DISCOURSE
A list of tactics employed by OWS is a choreography of protests:37 Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 385-386.
Riot: A tactic used while protesting. Technically, a riot can be anything from a mobile dance party to full on mass-looting. Rioting is the type of bodily behavior that makes wildly inefficient the smooth flows of Capital. Rioting is life-affirming, wherein intensive affect becomes extended into the world around it. Riots usually begin by moving marches into the streets, blocking vehicular traffic, throwing objects into the streets/ at cops, breaking windows... For those who are politically disenfranchised, rioting is political expression—it is discourse. Blockade: A specific riot tactic, blockading includes creations of barriers that prohibit civilian traffic and police from movingor catching up to a protest—creating blocks in Capital’s flow. This practice includes the removal of any objects, such as trash-cans, mail boxes, signs, construction material—followed by the balletic swirling of protesters’s bodies—an urban dance of wits—before they launch any and all objects into the streets, in frontof a garage, or any other important site to blockade. Extensive affective re-locations of order in space. Removing Barricades: The final tactic to be described here is theremoval of the harsh, metal police barricades used to imprison and trap bodies on marches or in Zuccotti Park. Creators of anxiety, dread, alienation, and other negative psychogeographic affects, barricades are what order and segregate bodies and movement. Removal of said barricades is a highly dramatic gesturethat liberates a space, is space-creative—world-creative.
Rioting, removing barricades, and blockading are viewed as purely
impulsive. While the incredible rush in-the-moment exists,
movements like blockading are tactically essential behaviors that
require considerable foresight and accountably. These mechanisms
are creative of new space—are empowering and highly political
gestures of destratifying dis-order.
If Rancièrian politics is that stuff which breaks from police
order, from the common distribution of the sensible, then it is
the breaking-down of striations of space, territorializations,
borders, and organization that combats, politically and
ontologically, the polis. Movement, the simultaneous breaking-down
and creation of space—deterritorialization and
reterritorialization—is the force that disrupts the otherwise
endless juridco-legal-political monopoly of violence employed by
the State, and by extension the NYPD. The violence of subtraction
from society becomes a well-needed injection of ethics and values
into the political.
Movement, creation-of-space, is a radical political act, an
effort of ontological proportions that express and change the
very nature of humanness. This kind of movement cannot be mapped,
or prefigured. It occurs in real life, in accordance to the
actual patterns of bodies (the practices of everyday life,) and
does not appear in an abstract idealized notion of geography,
cartography, or choreography.38
OWS channels an excessive quality of movement—excessive of space—
it fills (filled) and overflows Zuccotti Park. Protesters are
forced to flow into the streets during marches and break through
police lines and barricades. This breaking-through is a line of
deterritorialization that occurs between protester bodies and
police space. Traversing dis-order allows for a re-organization
and reterritorialization of space. Physical space (park),
economic space (black markets and free-stores), political space
38 (((Fostering being-in-common allows for individual creations of space. A few days after a very violent police eviction on 3/17, wherein over 100 protesters were arrested, a space was created to allow for people to share (out) their stories of jail, and of being beaten.The affective mood was incredibly intense—a large scale (100 people) who were crying and holding ontoeach other with fervor—an experience of truly being-in-common, of sharing a common needs. This was an example of a space-creative function of being-in-common, of mutual aid and mutual support through struggle and breakdown.)))
(GA’s and direct democracy), and discursive space (new writings
and new concepts) are only some of the spaces opened up and
overlaid and overdetermined by OWS. This excess extends to the
excess of ideas, desires, intentions, and overdetermination. Here
we witness the radical concrescence of bodies, the coming-
together of the too-many: compearance and radical willingness to
be shared (out)-with.
EXCESS IS POLITICAL—political because it is movement—excess is
what breaks through police order, what breaks-through
territorialization, set and defined notions/uses of space. Being
is in excess. Excess is politically and ontologically opposed to
order. This excess is best understood by an ethnographic account:
POLITICAL MOMENT IN STREET
One of the first concrete feelings of the political I attempt to engage in this paper I experienced on a night march on 3/17/2012,on OWS’s six-month anniversary, which was celebrated by an attempt to re-occupy Zuccotti Park. All day the park was full of bodies, tents, and holdovers from the occupation like the Medic Station. By 10PM, hundreds of police in riot-gear loomed at the entrances of the park, like stormtroopers. Then they flooded in, beating and arresting as many people as possible. Some Direct
Action folks, myself included, had organized a rowdy night march to take the occupiers to a new park: Union Square, in an attempt to learn from the successful re-occupation attempts that flexibility is essential.
By the middle of March, our night marches had become tactically successful. We had been practicing de-arrests, confusing the police and quickly blockading the street with trash-cans. On 3/17, many of us wearing masks, “Blocked Up,” so the march could turn more riotous without there being clear evidence against a single protester. A bourgeoise boutique in SoHo had its window broken, which, along with battle cries of “A, Anti, Anti-Capitalista,” proved to be incredibly inspiring for the protesters. For hours we took the streets, snaked-around one-way blocks, had the police running, and blockaded the streets with everything we could find at every turn.
The moment that sticks out as the radical break—the opening up ofspace—of politics took place for no longer than a minute, and yet, any performer can tell you that a minute in real-time is a long time. Hastily cutting across two-lane traffic and turning upa block in the direction-of-traffic entirely demobilized the police, leaving their usually highly effective bike-motorcades immobilized. What this, along with a few arrests, bought us was time. The 5-6 blockaders turned into 40-50: people who had never participated in direct action, who were assuredly against violence, understood the moment—the efficacy of the action of blockading, and bought-in. Over the course of a minute, hundreds
of giant trash-bags, dumpsters, traffic cones and heavy construction material were lobbed in the street. With maybe 45 seconds remaining, the protesters began to sing and shout with glee, knowing that they were liberated: autonomous from the one and only threat they have to face in the city, the ordering, stratifying, and territorializing force of the NYPD.
Space was opened up: the street became a free-zone—a zone of politics. The commons was liberated for a brief point, and everyone felt this geographically-produced affect. It is this formof autonomy I am looking for in my search for the political.39
Barricades define space, but also define a body’s affective mood
and potentiality, relating to the way the entire group might be
affected. Humans are social animals: when Liberty Square was free
of barricades, up and running, it was a rather productive space:
various working groups were setting up tents/ tables, giving out
information, hosting meetings, served food, played music, and
39 (((Another key point is that out of the people who, on these marches, participate in blockading and more direct forms of action, are most often non-white.Thus, rioting in the streets symbolizes an effort on behalf of people who have less privilege, who feel disenfranchised by electoral politics, and need to take their frustration out in the streets, in rioting against the police and other markers of societal order(ing) and oppression.This is, and historically has always been, politics. Frances Fox Piven, in Poor Peoples’ Movements, understands that every act of political and economic resistance occurs after an understanding that the mechanisms that exist (elections and ‘the free market’) never benefit the poor, and that real politics only happensoutside of those paradigms.)))
danced. When these anti-Capitalist, (positive) productive and
affective flows were cut off by forces of the State, by
barricading space or invading, affect turned negative.
Being forced into barricade, kettles, and on the sidewalk keeps
forces bubbling up inside intensively, turning positive extensive
affect into negative intensive affect—turning in against
ourselves and each other. When the police kick protesters out,
the momentum often turns an occupation into a hard-core night
march, wherein the extensive affective moods are projected
outwardly onto cops, cops’s automobiles, and soon-to-be-broken
windows. Negative extensive affect is returned, but not
contained.
CONCLUSION
Movement cannot be placed onto a rigid map no less than equality
can be distributed equally. Movement can be navigated and
recorded, but we lose the essence of movement, the freedom of
movement to move toward freedom. As soon as we force onto it
measure, order, or any other geometric/ disciplinary mechanism,
movement is lost.
What is lost when movement is measured and when we attempt to
distribute equally is excess: the excess of bodies, of space, of
relationality—we lose the excess that marks real politics, the
ontological indeterminacy that OWS embodies. Instead, affirming
dis-order, affirming movement, and allowing the shift in
understanding are all paradigmatic for the formulation of
Rancièrian politics, and for the creation of the commons. When
the critique of our so called ‘democracy’ has gone on for two-
hundred years, and when NYPD force is a force of exceptionality,
the only possible paradigm shift, revolution, is necessitated.
What we need is politics.