Demonstration – what's next?

Gewaltfreier Kampf

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:49 +0000

Auch gewaltfreier Kampf ist Kampf, eine Alternative gegenüber Krieg und dem Töten. Den Begriff prägte der Politikwissenschaftler und Aktivist Gene Sharp. Er vertritt die Position, gewaltfreier Kampf läge der Aggression näher als dem Pazifismus, da er auf Fähigkeiten wie Sturheit, Lästigkeit und unnachgiebigem Engagement fußt. Der polnische Künstler Paweł Althamer machte den Vorschlag, anstelle von SoldatInnen eine Armee aus tausend KünstlerInnen in Konfliktregionen zu entsenden, denn sie seien an schwierige Situationen und permanentes Reisen gewöhnt und brächten Verständnis mit für eine »spezielle Mission«, die an den Forderungen des Marktes ansetzt. Althamers Konzept könnte man als Teil der langen Geschichte des gewaltfreien Kampfes betrachten. Dies ist ein mächtiges Werkzeug im Einsatz um sozialen und politischen Wandel. Die Samtene Revolution in der Tschechoslowakei, Solidarnosc in Polen und die Montagsdemonstrationen in Ostdeutschland waren Auslöser für die Welle der gewaltfreien Revolutionen von 1989, die in Osteuropa einen Übergang von Diktaturen zu Demokratien brachten. 2011 ereignete sich im Mittleren Osten der Arabische Frühling. Im Moment wird in Europa auf den Märschen von Les Indignés und ¡Democracia Real YA! beziehungsweise im Zuge globaler Bewegungen wie Occupy Wall Street gegen die Plutokratie und damit gegen einen Staat demonstriert, der wie ein Unternehmen geleitet und von den Banken beherrscht wird. Slogans wie »We are not merchandise for bankers and politicians«, »People over profit«, »We are the 99 %« oder »Fuck May ’68 – act now« vereinen Menschen verschiedener politischer Einstellungen unter demselben Ziel. Das bietet Anlass, Begriffe wie repräsentative Demokratie, »Multitude« beziehungsweise die Verflechtung von Staat und Kapital zu überdenken. Diese Manifestationen wirken wie die Selbstbefreiung des Prekariats – jene kurzlebigen Augenblicke, in denen alles möglich erscheint: politischer Karneval. Performances, Tanz und Kunst sind hierbei wichtige Kräfte, mit denen neue Hilfsmittel entwickelt werden, wie beispielsweise das menschliche Mikrofon, bei dem die Worte gemeinsam wiederholt werden, selbst wenn die oder der Einzelne der Botschaft nicht zustimmt. Die Kunst – mit all ihrer Fantasie und ihrem linken Engagement – sollte solchen politischen Wandlungsprozessen zur Seite stehen und dem gegenwärtigen weltweiten Kampf ihre Hilfe anbieten. Galit Eilat, ehemalige Direktorin des Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon, verfolgte ein klares Ziel: die Aufhebung der Besetzung des Westjordanlandes und des Gazastreifens und die Abschaffung der »exklusiven Idee einer Demokratie für Israelis«. Hinter einer Fassade der Kunst brachte sie KunstproduzentInnen ins Westjordanland beziehungsweise schmuggelte sie israelische KünstlerInnen nach Palästina ein und spielte so mit den Grenzen des Gesetzes. Khaled Jarrar stellte einen palästinensischen Stempel her, den er an Grenzübergängen anbot. Damit verwandelte er seine individuelle Deklaration des »Staates Palästina« in eine kollektive Entscheidung, für die jede und jeder »Stempeltragende« ein Stück weit die Verantwortung mit übernahm. In beiden Fällen bot die Kunst eine Möglichkeit für Aktionen und für die Entwicklung wirksamer Hilfsmittel für spätere, größere Kontexte – und zwar ohne dass man sogleich als Feind eingestuft wurde. Srđa Popović ist Autor des Buches Nonviolent Struggle. 50 Crucial Points. Für ihn ist die Kunst unmittelbar mit einer Art von gewaltfreiem Widerstand verbunden und damit ein Weg zur Selbstermächtigung. Er glaubt, dass echter Wandel nicht aus dem Feld der Politik entsteht, sondern durch Menschen, die Irritation und Wut spüren: durch die Frauen in Kenia oder Belgien, die in Sexstreik gehen, durch die UnterstützerInnen von ¡Democracia Real YA! oder durch die BürgerInnen in den amerikanischen Occupy-Bewegungen und wahrscheinlich auch durch viele KünstlerInnen mit politischer Fantasie, die sich den Anti-Vermarktungsprozessen dicht an die Seite stellen können. KünstlerInnen, KuratorInnen und DenkerInnen zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie Dinge in einem neuen Licht zeigen, Kritik üben und den Status quo hinterfragen können. Das Paradoxe ist jedoch, dass ihre Kritik und Vorschläge sich dabei selten von ihrem Unschuldsstatus lösen und somit der Politik keine wirklichen Alternativen entgegenbringen. Fragenstellen allein reicht nicht. Auch für die KünstlerInnen ist die Zeit gekommen, wütend zu werden. Schon die situationistische Bewegung forderte: »L’imagination au pouvoir!« – die Fantasie an die Macht!

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien anlässlich der Publikation „Forget Fear“ der 7. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst (27. April – 1. Juli 2012), hrsg. von ArturZmijewski und Joanna Warsza, Köln 2012, S. 38–39.

Pussy Riot! Ein Punkgebet für Freiheit

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:44 +0000

Schlusserklärung von Nadja
Im Großen und Ganzen sind es nicht die drei Mitglieder von Pussy Riot, um die es in diesem Prozess geht. Wäre es so, hätte der Fall nicht eine solche Bedeutung. Es geht darin vielmehr um das gesamte politische System der Russischen Föderation, das es, zu seinem großen Unglück, genießt, die Grausamkeit des Staates gegenüber dem Einzelnen und seine Gleichgültigkeit gegenüber menschlicher Ehre und Würde vorzuführen – es wiederholt damit die schlechtesten Momente der russischen Geschichte. Zu meinem tiefsten Bedauern kommt dieses armselige Gerichtsverfahren Stalins Troikas ziemlich nahe. Auch wir haben nur einen Vernehmungsbeamten, einen Richter und einen Ankläger. Darüber hinaus basiert dieses repressive Theater auf politischen Anweisungen von oben, die diesen drei Justizfiguren ihre Worte, Handlungen und Entscheidungen vorschreiben.
Was steckt hinter unserer Performance in der Christ- Erlöser-Kathedrale und dem nachfolgenden Prozess? Nichts anderes als das autokratische politische System. Man kann die Auftritte von Pussy Riot Dissidentenkunst nennen oder politische Aktionen, die Kunstformen einsetzen. So oder so, unsere Performances sind eine Form ziviler Aktivitäten inmitten der Repressionen eines korporativen politischen Systems, das seine Macht gezielt gegen grundlegende Menschenrechte und zivile und politische Freiheiten richtet. Junge Menschen, zermürbt von der systematischen, in den Nullerjahren betriebenen Ausrottung von Freiheiten, haben sich jetzt gegen den Staat erhoben. Wir waren auf der Suche nach wirklicher Ehrlichkeit und Einfachheit und haben diese Eigenschaften im jurodstwo [heilige Dummheit] des Punk gefunden.
Leidenschaft, totale Ehrlichkeit und Naivität sind Heuchelei, Verlogenheit und falscher Bescheidenheit überlegen. Die benutzt man dazu, Verbrechen zu verschleiern. Die sogenannten Führungspersönlichkeiten unseres Staates stehen mit rechtschaffenen Mienen in der Kathedrale, aufgrund ihrer Arglist aber ist ihre Sünde viel größer als unsere. Wir haben politische Punkauftritte als Reaktion auf eine Regierung veranstaltet, die voller Härte, Verschlossenheit und kastenartiger Hierarchiestrukturen ist. Sie werden derartig durchschaubar dafür eingesetzt, den eigenen korporativen Interessen zu dienen, dass uns schlecht wird, wenn wir russische Luft atmen. Wir lehnen Folgendes kategorisch ab, und das zwingt uns dazu, politisch aktiv zu werden und zu leben: den Einsatz von Zwangs- und Gewaltmaßnahmen zur Regulierung sozialer Prozesse, ein Umstand, in dem die meisten wichtigen politischen Einrichtungen die Disziplinierungsstrukturen des Staats sind; die Sicherheitsbehörden (Armee, Polizei und Geheimdienste) und ihre dazugehörigen Instrumente zur Gewährleistung politischer »Stabilität« (Gefängnisse, Präventivhaft sowie alle Mechanismen zur strikten Überwachung der Bürgerschaft); gewaltsam erzwungene zivile Passivität bei einem Großteil der Bevölkerung; die totale Dominanz der Exekutive über Legislative und Judikative.
Darüber hinaus sind wir zutiefst enttäuscht vom skandalösen Mangel an politischer Kultur, der eine Folge von Angst ist und durch bewusste Anstrengungen der Regierung und ihrer Knechte aufrechterhalten wird (Patriarch Kyrill: »Orthodoxe Christen nehmen nicht an Kundgebungen teil«), enttäuscht von der skandalösen Schwäche horizontaler Verbindungen in unserer Gesellschaft. Es gefällt uns nicht, dass der Staat so mühelos die öffentliche Meinung mit den Instrumenten seiner peniblen Kontrolle des Großteils der Medien manipulieren kann (ein besonders anschauliches Beispiel für diese Manipulationen ist die beispiellos unverfrorene und verzerrte Kampagne gegen Pussy Riot in praktisch jedem russischen Medium).
Obwohl wir uns in einer grundlegend autoritären Situation befinden und unter autoritärer Herrschaft leben, sehe ich dieses System angesichts von drei Mitgliedern von Pussy Riot bröckeln. Was das System erhoffte, ist nicht eingetreten. Russland verurteilt uns nicht, und mit jedem Tag, der vergeht, glauben mehr Menschen an uns und daran, dass wir frei sein sollten statt hinter Gittern. Ich erlebe das bei den Menschen, denen ich begegne. Menschen, die für das System und in seinen Institutionen arbeiten, aber auch inhaftierte Menschen. Jeden Tag begegne ich unseren Unterstützern, die uns Glück und vor allem Freiheit wünschen. Sie sagen, was wir gemacht hätten, sei gerechtfertigt. Mit jedem Tag, der vergeht, sagen uns immer mehr Menschen, dass nach anfänglichen Zweifeln, ob wir das Recht zu unserer Aktion gehabt hätten, die Zeit gezeigt habe, dass unsere politische Geste richtig gewesen sei – dass wir die Wunden dieses politischen Systems geöffnet und direkt ins Wespennest gestochen hätten, sodass man hinter uns her war, aber wir…
Diese Menschen versuchen so gut sie können, uns unser Leid zu erleichtern, und dafür sind wir ihnen dankbar. Wir sind auch jedem dankbar, der draußen zu unserer Unterstützung auftritt. Es gibt viele Unterstützer, und ich weiß es. Ich weiß, dass sich eine große Zahl orthodoxer Christen für uns ausspricht, insbesondere diejenigen, die sich in der Nähe des Gerichts versammeln. Sie beten für uns, die eingesperrten Mitglieder von Pussy Riot. Wir haben die kleinen Broschüren mit Gebeten für die Inhaftierten gesehen, die Orthodoxe verteilen. Allein das beweist schon, dass es nicht eine einheitliche geschlossene Gruppe von orthodoxen Gläubigen gibt, worauf der Staatsanwalt gerne beharrte. So eine geschlossene Gruppe existiert nicht. Heute verteidigen immer mehr Gläubige Pussy Riot. Sie glauben nicht, dass das, was wir getan haben, fünf Monate Untersuchungshaft rechtfertigt, ganz zu schweigen von drei Jahren Gefängnis, die der Staatsanwalt gefordert hat.
Jeden Tag begreifen mehr Menschen, dass, wenn das System drei junge Frauen, die vierzig Sekunden lang in der Christ-Erlöser-Kathedrale aufgetreten sind, mit derartiger Vehemenz angreift, dies nur bedeutet, dass dieses System die Wahrheit, Ehrlichkeit und Geradlinigkeit fürchtet, für die wir stehen. Wir haben in diesem Verfahren nie zu einer Täuschung gegriffen. Unsere Gegner dagegen allzu oft, und die Menschen spüren das. Allerdings besitzt die Wahrheit eine ontologische, existenzielle Überlegenheit gegenüber der Täuschung, das steht schon in der Bibel, vor allem im Alten Testament. Die Wege der Wahrheit triumphieren immer über die Wege der Täuschung, Arglist und Irreführung. Mit jedem Tag wird die Wahrheit siegreicher, auch wenn wir hinter Gittern bleiben – und das vermutlich für lange Zeit.
Gestern ist Madonna in Moskau mit dem Schriftzug »Pussy Riot« auf dem Rücken aufgetreten. Immer mehr Menschen erkennen, dass wir hier rechtswidrig und unter falschen Vorwänden festgehalten werden. Das erstaunt mich. Ich bin überrascht, dass Wahrheit tatsächlich über Täuschung triumphiert. Denn obwohl wir physisch hier sind, sind wir freier als alle, die uns hier neben der Staatsanwaltschaft gegenübersitzen. Wir können alles sagen, was wir wollen, und tun es auch. Die Staatsanwaltschaft kann nur sagen, was ihr von der politischen Zensur zu sagen erlaubt ist. Sie können nicht »Punk-Gebet« sagen oder »Jungfrau Maria, heilige Muttergottes, räum Putin aus dem Weg!«, sie können nicht eine einzige Zeile unseres Punk-Gebets in den Mund nehmen, das sich mit dem politischen System auseinandersetzt.
Vielleicht glauben sie, es wäre gut, uns ins Gefängnis zu stecken, weil wir den Mund gegen Putin und sein Regime aufmachen. Sie sagen es nicht, weil sie es nicht dürfen. Ihre Lippen sind zugenäht. Dummerweise sind sie hier bloß Attrappen. Ich hoffe aber, dass ihnen das klar wird und sie am Ende den Weg von Freiheit, Wahrheit und Ehrlichkeit einschlagen, weil dieser Weg dem Weg der totalen Stagnation, der falschen Bescheidenheit und Heuchelei überlegen ist. Stagnation und die Suche nach der Wahrheit stehen schon immer im Widerspruch zueinander, und in diesem Fall, im Verlauf dieses Prozesses, sehen wir auf der einen Seite Menschen, die versuchen, die Wahrheit zu erkennen, und auf der anderen Seite Menschen, die versuchen, dies zu verhindern.
Ein Mensch ist ein Wesen, das ständig irrt und niemals perfekt ist. Es sucht nach Weisheit und kann sie nicht besitzen; deshalb ist die Philosophie entstanden. Deshalb ist der Philosoph derjenige, der die Weisheit liebt und sich nach ihr sehnt, sie aber noch nicht besitzt. Und das fordert letztlich ein menschliches Wesen zum Handeln auf, zum Denken und zu einer bestimmten Lebenshaltung. Es war unsere Suche nach Wahrheit, die uns in die Christ- Erlöser-Kathedrale führte. Ich denke, dass der christliche Glaube, wie ich ihn bei meinem Studium des Alten und besonders des Neuen Testaments verstanden habe, die Suche nach Wahrheit und einer ständigen Überwindung seiner selbst unterstützt, die Überwindung dessen, was man zuvor gewesen ist. Nicht umsonst sagte Christus, als er bei den Prostituierten war, den Gestrauchelten müsse geholfen werden: »Ich vergebe ihnen«, sagte er. In unserem Prozess, der ja unter dem Banner des christlichen Glaubens steht, kann ich diesen Geist nicht erkennen. Ich habe vielmehr den Eindruck, dass die Anklage die Religion mit Füßen tritt. Die Anwälte der »moralisch geschädigten Parteien« haben diese sitzenlassen – so sehe ich es jedenfalls. Vor zwei Tagen hielt Alexej Taratukhin [einer der Anwälte der Nebenkläger] eine Rede, in der er darauf bestand, man dürfe unter keinen Umständen annehmen, dass er mit den von ihm vertretenen Parteien übereinstimme. Anders gesagt: Der Anwalt findet sich in einer moralisch unangenehmen Position wieder, er möchte nicht für die Menschen stehen, die Pussy Riot gerne eingesperrt sehen wollen. Ich weiß nicht, warum sie wollen, dass wir ins Gefängnis kommen. Vielleicht haben sie das Recht dazu, aber ich möchte betonen, dass ihr Anwalt sich offensichtlich schämt. Vielleicht haben ihn auch die »Schämt euch, ihr Henker!«-Rufe der Menschen getroffen. Ich möchte darauf hinweisen, dass Wahrheit und Güte immer über Täuschung und Groll triumphieren. Außerdem habe ich den Eindruck, dass die Staatsanwälte unter dem Einfluss irgendeiner höheren Macht stehen, weil sie sich immer wieder versprechen und versehentlich uns »die geschädigte Partei« nennen. Fast alle Staatsanwälte haben das schon einmal gesagt, und sogar die Anwältin der Nebenkläger, Larissa Pawlowa, die uns gegenüber sehr negativ eingestellt ist, scheint nichtsdestotrotz von einer höheren Macht getrieben zu werden, wenn sie sich auf uns als »die geschädigte Partei« bezieht. So nennt sie nicht diejenigen, die sie vertritt, sondern nur uns.
Ich möchte niemanden abstempeln. Es kommt mir so vor, als gebe es hier keine Gewinner, Verlierer, Opfer oder Angeklagte. Wir müssen nur aufeinander zugehen, eine Verbindung herstellen und miteinander ins Gespräch kommen, um gemeinsam die Wahrheit zu finden. Gemeinsam können wir Philosophen sein und nach Weisheit streben, statt andere zu stigmatisieren und in Schubladen zu stecken. Das ist das Letzte, was ein Mensch tun sollte. Jesus Christus hat das verurteilt. Mit diesem Prozess missbraucht uns das System. Wer hätte gedacht, dass ein Mann und der Staat, den er regiert, immer und immer wieder absolut unmotiviert Böses tun? Wer hätte gedacht, dass die Geschichte, insbesondere Stalins gar nicht so lange zurück liegender Großer Terror, uns nichts lehren konnte? Die mittelalterlichen Inquisitionsmethoden, die im Strafvollzug und im Justizwesen dieses Landes herrschen, sind zum Heulen. Aber seit unserer Verhaftung haben wir aufgehört zu heulen. Wir haben die Fähigkeit dazu verloren. In unseren Punkkonzerten haben wir verzweifelt geschrien. Aus Leibeskräften haben wir die Gesetzlosigkeit der Machthaber, der Führungsorgane angeprangert. Doch jetzt hat man uns unserer Stimmen beraubt. Man hat sie uns am 3. März 2012 genommen, als wir verhaftet wurden. Und tags darauf hat man uns und Millionen anderen bei den sogenannten Wahlen unsere Stimmen und unsere Wahlstimmen gestohlen.
Im Verlauf des gesamten Prozesses haben es einige Leute abgelehnt, uns anzuhören. Das hieße ja, offen zu sein für das, was wir zu sagen haben, aufmerksam, nach Weisheit zu streben, ein Philosoph zu sein. Ich glaube, jeder Mensch sollte das anstreben, und nicht nur diejenigen, die an irgendeinem Philosophischen Institut studiert haben. Eine formelle Ausbildung bedeutet gar nichts, auch wenn Nebenklagevertreterin Larissa Pawlowa ständig versucht, uns unsere mangelnde Bildung vorzuhalten. Wir sind der Überzeugung, das Wichtigste, wonach man streben sollte, ist Wissen und Verstehen. Denn beides kann ein Mensch auch unabhängig und außerhalb der Mauern einer Bildungseinrichtung erwerben. Ornat und höhere akademische Grade bedeuten nichts. Ein Mensch kann jede Menge wissen und trotzdem nicht wie ein menschliches Wesen handeln. Pythagoras sagte, viel Lernen lehre noch keine Weisheit. Leider befinden wir uns hier, um das zu bestätigen. Wir sind hier lediglich zur Dekoration, leblose Elemente, nur Körper, die im Gerichtssaal abgeliefert wurden. Unseren Anträgen wurde – nach tagelangem Nachfragen, Verhandeln und Kämpfen – keine Beachtung geschenkt, sie wurden prinzipiell abgewiesen. Bedauerlicherweise – für uns und unser Land – hörte das Gericht einen Staatsanwalt an, der unsere Worte und Aussagen fortwährend ungestraft verdreht und neutralisiert. Ungeniert und demonstrativ wird gegen das grundlegende Rechtsprinzip der Gleichheit und Waffengleichheit der gegensätzlichen Parteien verstoßen. Am 30. Juli, dem ersten Prozesstag, haben wir unsere Antwort auf die Anklageschrift der Staatsanwaltschaft vorgelegt. Damals hat uns das Gericht das Rederecht verweigert, und unsere Verteidigerin Violetta Wolkowa hat unsere Texte verlesen. Nach fünf Monaten Haft war dies unsere erste Gelegenheit, uns zu äußern. Bis dahin waren wir inhaftiert und eingeschränkt; von dort aus kann man nichts unternehmen, wir können keine Aufrufe oder Einsprüche verfassen, nicht filmen, was in unserer Umgebung passiert, wir haben kein Internet, und unsere Anwälte können uns nicht mal mit Papier versorgen, weil das verboten ist.
Am 30. Juli haben wir zum ersten Mal öffentlich gesprochen; wir haben Kontaktaufnahme und Gesprächserleichterungen gefordert, nicht Streit und Konfrontation gesucht. Wir haben den Menschen, die uns aus irgendeinem Grund für ihre Feindinnen halten, offen die Hand gereicht, und sie haben hineingespuckt. »Ihr meint es nicht ehrlich«, hat man uns gesagt. Schade. Beurteilt uns nicht nach eurem eigenen Verhalten. Wir waren aufrichtig, wie wir es immer sind. Wir haben gesagt, was wir denken. Wir waren unglaublich kindlich, ja naiv in unserer Wahrheit, trotzdem bedauern wir unsere Worte nicht, auch nicht die Worte an jenem Tag. Und wenn man uns verleumdet hat, wollen wir als Antwort darauf andere nicht auch verleumden. Wir befinden uns in einer verzweifelten Situation, aber wir verzweifeln nicht. Wir sind angeklagt, aber nicht im Stich gelassen. Es ist einfach, Menschen zu entwürdigen und zu zerstören, die so aufrichtig sind, aber »wenn ich schwach bin, bin ich stark«.
Hören Sie auf das, was wir sagen, und nicht, was der [Putin-freundliche Fernsehjournalist] Arkadi Mamontow über uns erzählt. Verzerren und verfälschen Sie unsere Worte nicht. Gestatten Sie uns, in einen Dialog, in Kontakt zu diesem Land zu treten, das auch das unsrige ist, und nicht nur das Putins und des Patriarchen. Genauso wie Alexander Solschenizyn glaube auch ich, dass zu guter Letzt das Wort den Beton sprengen wird. Er schrieb: »Deshalb ist das Wort wichtiger als der Beton. Deshalb ist das Wort kein geringes Nichts. Auf diese Weise beginnen edle Menschen zu wachsen, und ihr Werk wird Beton sprengen.«
Katja, Mascha und ich sitzen vielleicht im Gefängnis, aber ich halte uns nicht für besiegt. Wie die Dissidenten sind wir nicht besiegt. Auch wenn sie in Irrenhäusern und Gefängnissen verschwanden, brachten sie ihr Urteil über das Regime immer zum Ausdruck. Die Kunst, das Profil einer Epoche zu schaffen, kennt keine Gewinner oder Verlierer. So war es auch mit den Dichtern der Gruppe OBERIU, deren Mitglieder bis zum Schluss Künstler blieben, unerklärbar und unverständlich. Alexander Wwedenski, der 1932 einer Säuberungsaktion zum Opfer fiel, schrieb: »Das Unverständliche gefällt uns, das Unerklärbare ist unser Freund.« Laut der offiziellen Sterbeurkunde starb Alexander Wwedenski am 20. Dezember 1941. Niemand kennt die Todesursache. Es könnte die Ruhr gewesen sein, auf seinem Transport ins Lager; oder die Kugel eines Wachmanns. Jedenfalls passierte es irgendwo auf der Bahnstrecke zwischen Woronesch und Kazan.
Pussy Riot sind Wwedenskis Schülerinnen und Erbinnen. Sein Prinzip des schlechten Reims bedeutet uns viel. Er schrieb: »Ich denke mir hin und wieder zwei Reime aus, einen guten und einen schlechten, und ich entscheide mich immer für den schlechten, weil der immer der richtige ist.«
»Das Unerklärbare ist unser Freund«: Die anspruchsvollen und raffinierten Werke der Dichtergruppe OBERIU und ihre Suche nach einem Denken an den Rändern des Sinns fand ihre Verkörperung schließlich darin, dass sie für ihre Kunst mit dem Leben bezahlten – durch den sinnlosen und unerklärbaren Großen Terror. Mit diesem Tod bewiesen diese Dichter ungewollt, dass ihre Epoche im Kern aus Irrationalität und Sinnlosigkeit bestand. Das Künstlerische wurde dadurch zur historischen Tatsache. Der Preis, an der Schaffung von Geschichte teilzuhaben, ist für den Einzelnen unermesslich hoch. Und doch liegt das Eigentliche der menschlichen Existenz genau in dieser Beteiligung. Ein Bettler zu sein und andere doch zu bereichern. Nichts zu haben und doch alles zu besitzen. Man hält die OBERIU-Dissidenten für tot, aber sie sind immer noch lebendig. Sie wurden bestraft, aber sie sterben nicht.
Wissen Sie noch, warum der junge Dostojewski zum Tode verurteilt wurde? Seine ganze Schuld bestand darin, dass er von sozialistischen Theorien fasziniert war, und bei seinen Zusammenkünften mit Freidenkern und Freunden – man traf sich immer freitags in der Wohnung von [Michail] Petraschewski – diskutierte er über die Schriften von [Charles] Fourier und George Sand. An einem der letzten dieser Freitage las er den Brief von [Wissarion] Belinski an [Nikolaj] Gogol vor, der laut Gericht, das Dostojewskis Fall verhandelte – man höre! –, vor »schamlosen Bemerkungen über die orthodoxe Kirche und die Staatsregierung« nur so strotzte. Nachdem die Exekution schon vorbereitet war und nach »zehn qualvollen, unendlich entsetzlichen Minuten des Wartens auf den Tod« (Dostojewski), wurde bekanntgegeben, dass die Strafe in vier Jahre Zwangsarbeit in Sibirien und anschließenden Militärdienst umgewandelt worden war.
Sokrates war angeklagt, mit seinen philosophischen Diskussionen die Jugend zu verderben und sich zu weigern, die Götter Athens anzuerkennen. Dabei hatte er einen lebendigen Bezug zur göttlichen Stimme und war, worauf er viele Male bestand, in keinerlei Hinsicht ein Feind der Götter. Aber was für eine Rolle spielte das, wo er doch mit seinem kritischen, dialektischen und vorurteilsfreien Denken die einflussreichen Bürger seiner Stadt erzürnte? Sokrates wurde zum Tode verurteilt, und nachdem er sich geweigert hatte, aus Athen zu fliehen (wie seine Schüler ihm vorschlugen), leerte er mutig seinen Schierlingsbecher und starb. Haben Sie vergessen, unter welchen Umständen der Heilige Stephanus, der Jünger unter den Aposteln, sein Erdenleben beendete? »Da stifteten sie einige Männer an, die sprachen: Wir haben ihn Lästerworte reden hören gegen Mose und gegen Gott. Und sie brachten das Volk und die Ältesten und die Schriftgelehrten auf, traten herzu und ergriffen ihn und führten ihn vor den Hohen Rat und stellten falsche Zeugen auf, die sprachen: Dieser Mensch hört nicht auf, zu reden gegen diese heilige Stätte und das Gesetz.« [Apostelgeschichte 6, 11-13] Er wurde schuldig gesprochen und gesteinigt. Ich hoffe auch, dass Sie sich alle daran erinnern, was die Juden Christus geantwortet haben: »Um des guten Werks willen steinigen wir dich nicht, sondern um der Gotteslästerung willen.« [Johannes 10, 33] Und zum Schluss täten wir gut daran, nicht zu vergessen, wie Christus geschildert wurde: »Er hat einen bösen Geist und ist von Sinnen.« [Johannes 10, 20]
Wenn Behörden, Zaren, Präsidenten, Premierminister, das Volk und Richter wirklich verstünden, was »Ich habe Wohlgefallen an Barmherzigkeit und nicht am Opfer« [Matthäus 9,13] bedeutet, würden sie keine Unschuldigen vor Gericht stellen. Unsere Behörden jedoch fallen mit Verurteilungen über uns her und lassen niemals Gnade walten. An dieser Stelle möchte ich mich gerne bei Dmitri Anatoljewitsch Medwedew bedanken, der uns folgenden großartigen Aphorismus lieferte. Er fasste seine Amtszeit als Präsident mit den Worten zusammen: »Freiheit ist besser als Nichtfreiheit.« Dementsprechend ließe sich, in Übereinstimmung mit Medwedews trefflichen Worten, die dritte Amtszeit Putins sehr schön mit dem Aphorismus »Gefängnis ist besser als Steinigung« charakterisieren. Ich bitte Sie, Folgendes aus Montaignes Essais gewissenhaft in Betracht zu ziehen. Sie wurden im 16. Jahrhundert geschrieben und predigen Toleranz und die Ablehnung jeglicher Einseitigkeit und Doktrin: »Es misst den eigenen Mutmaßungen einen sehr hohen Wert bei, wenn man ihretwegen einen Menschen bei lebendigem Leib verbrannt hat.«
Ist es das wert, Menschen zu verurteilen und ins Gefängnis zu stecken, allein auf Grundlage von Mutmaßungen, die die Anklage nicht bewiesen hat? Da wir wirklich nie Hass oder Feindseligkeit hegten, sind unsere Ankläger auf falsche Zeugen angewiesen. Eine von ihnen, Matilda Iwaschenko, begann sich zu schämen und erschien nicht vor Gericht. Daneben gab es falsche Zeugenaussagen von Herrn Troitski, Herrn Ponkin sowie von Frau Abramenkowa. Es gibt keinen Beweis für Hass und Feindseligkeit bei uns, ausgenommen das sogenannte »Gutachten«. Dieses müsste das Gericht, wenn es ehrlich und fair ist, als Beweismittel eigentlich als inakzeptabel ablehnen, da es sich dabei nicht um einen schlüssigen und objektiven Text handelt, sondern um ein niederträchtiges und falsches Stück Papier, das an Inquisition erinnert. Einen anderen Beweis, der die Existenz eines solchen Motivs bestätigen würde, gibt es nicht. Die Anklage hat es abgelehnt, Auszüge aus Interviews von Pussy Riot vorzutragen, da diese nur ein weiterer Beweis für das Fehlen irgendeines Motivs gewesen wären. Warum wurde auch der folgende Text von uns – der im Übrigen Bestandteil unserer eidesstattlichen Versicherung ist – von der Staatsanwaltschaft nicht angeführt? »Wir respektieren Religion im Allgemeinen und den orthodoxen Glauben im Besonderen. Deshalb macht es uns besonders wütend, wenn der christliche Glaube, der voller Licht ist, auf eine derartig schmutzige Weise ausgenutzt wird. Uns wird schlecht mitanzusehen, wie diese großen Gedanken in die Knie gezwungen werden.« Dieses Zitat stammt aus einem Interview, das im Russian Reporter erschienen ist und am Tag nach unserer Performance mit Pussy Riot geführt wurde. Uns ist immer noch schlecht, und es tut uns wirklich weh, das alles zu sehen. Und schließlich wird das Fehlen von Hass oder Feindseligkeit gegenüber Religionen und dem Religiösen von den Aussagen sämtlicher Leumundszeugen bestätigt, die unsere Anwälte geladen haben.
Neben diesen Leumundszeugnissen bitte ich Sie, auch die Resultate der psychologischen und psychiatrischen Gutachten im Untersuchungsgefängnis Nummer 6 zu berücksichtigen, die auf Anordnung der Gefängnisbehörde erstellt wurden. Der Bericht stellt Folgendes fest: Die Werte, die ich mir zu eigen mache, sind Gerechtigkeit, gegenseitiger Respekt, Menschlichkeit, Gleichheit und Freiheit. Das schrieb ein Gerichtsgutachter, der mich nicht persönlich kennt, obwohl es sein könnte, dass Ranchenkow, der Ermittler, sich ein anderes Fazit gewünscht hätte. Doch anscheinend gibt es in dieser Welt doch mehr Menschen, die die Wahrheit lieben und schätzen, als andere, die es nicht tun. Darin hat die Bibel recht. Zum Abschluss möchte ich aus einem Songtext von Pussy Riot zitieren, der sich, so merkwürdig es sein mag, als prophetisch herausgestellt hat. Wir haben vorhergesehen, dass »der Chef des KGB und der Oberheilige des Landes die Demonstranten unter Geleitschutz ins Gefängnis abführen lassen« wird. Dabei ging es um uns. Weder bei mir, noch bei Aljochina, noch bei Samuzewitsch wurden starke und dauerhafte Affekte oder andere psychologische Ausprägungen gefunden, die sich als Hass auf etwas oder jemanden interpretieren ließen.
Also:
Macht alle Türen auf, streift eure Epauletten ab
Kommt, kostet die Freiheit mit uns.
Pussy Riot
Das ist alles.
Nadeschda Tolokonnikowa

Schlusserklärung von Mascha
Dieser Prozess ist äußerst typisch und spricht Bände. Die derzeitige Regierung wird noch sehr lange Gelegenheit haben, sich für ihn zu schämen. In jedem Stadium verkörperte er ein Zerrbild der Justiz. Wie sich herausstellte, wuchs sich unsere Performance, anfangs eine kleine und ein wenig absurde Shownummer, lawinenartig zu einer Riesenkatastrophe aus. In einer gesunden Gesellschaft würde so etwas ganz offensichtlich nicht passieren. Russland als Staat glich lange einem Organismus, der bis ins Mark krank ist. Und diese Erkrankung bricht aus, wenn man mit seinen entzündeten Abszessen in Berührung kommt. Am Anfang und für lange Zeit wird in der Öffentlichkeit über diese Krankheit geschwiegen, aber irgendwann wird sie durch Dialog doch immer überwunden. Und sehen Sie – dies ist die Art von Dialog, zu der unsere Regierung fähig ist. Dieser Prozess ist nicht nur ein bösartiges und groteskes Maskenspiel, sondern er offenbart das wahre Gesicht des Dialogs der Regierung mit dem Volk dieses Landes. Um auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene die Diskussion über ein Problem anzustoßen, braucht es oft die richtigen Voraussetzungen – einen Anstoß.
Es ist interessant, dass unsere Situation von Anfang an depersonalisiert wurde. Denn wenn wir über Putin sprechen, haben wir zunächst einmal nicht Wladimir Wladimirowitsch Putin im Sinn, sondern das System Putin, das er geschaffen hat – die vertikale Macht, in der die gesamte Kontrolle faktisch von einer einzigen Person ausgeübt wird. Und diese vertikale Macht interessiert sich nicht, und zwar kein bisschen, für die Meinung der Masse. Was mich dabei am meisten stört, ist, dass die Meinung der jüngeren Generationen außer Acht gelassen wird. Wir sind überzeugt, dass die Unfähigkeit dieser Regierung in praktisch jedem Bereich offenkundig ist.
Und genau hier, in dieser Schlusserklärung, möchte ich gerne meine eigenen Erfahrungen schildern, wie ich mit diesem System in Konflikt geraten bin. Unsere Schulausbildung, in der sich die Persönlichkeit in einem sozialen Kontext zu entwickeln beginnt, ignoriert quasi alle individuellen Eigenarten. Es gibt keinen individuellen Ansatz, man erwirbt keine Kenntnisse zu Kultur und Philosophie oder ein Grundwissen über die Zivilgesellschaft. Offiziell gibt es diese Themen zwar, sie werden aber immer noch nach dem Sowjetmodell unterrichtet. Im Ergebnis sehen wir eine Ausgrenzung der Gegenwartskunst, fehlende Anregung zu philosophischem Denken und eine klischeehafte Zuordnung der Geschlechterrollen. Die Vorstellung vom Menschen als Bürger wird in die hinterste Ecke gefegt.
Die heutigen Erziehungsinstitutionen bringen Menschen von klein auf bei, als Roboter zu leben und nicht die entscheidenden Fragen zu stellen, die ihrem Alter entsprächen. Sie impfen einem Grausamkeit und Intoleranz gegenüber jeder Abweichung ein. Schon in der Kindheit vergessen wir unsere Freiheit.
Ich habe persönliche Erfahrungen mit psychiatrischen Kliniken für Minderjährige gemacht. Und ich kann wirklich sagen, dass jeder Teenager, der auch nur irgendein Anzeichen aktiver Nonkonformität zeigt, dort landen kann. Ein gewisser Prozentsatz der Kinder darin stammt aus Waisenhäusern. In unserem Land wird es nämlich als völlig normal angesehen, ein Kind, das versucht hat, aus einem Waisenhaus auszureißen, in eine psychiatrische Klinik einzuweisen. Dort werden sie mit extrem starken sedierenden Medikamenten wie Chlorpromazin behandelt, das in den 1970ern auch bei Sowjet-Dissidenten eingesetzt wurde.
Angesichts der allgemeinen Tendenz zur Bestrafung in dieser Umgebung und dem Fehlen wirklicher psychologischer Hilfe ist diese Erfahrung besonders traumatisierend. Sämtliche Interaktionen basieren auf der Instrumentalisierung kindlicher Ängste und dem Zwang zu Unterordnung und Gehorsam. In der Folge potenziert sich diese Grausamkeit noch um ein Vielfaches. Viele dieser Kinder sind Analphabeten, aber niemand unternimmt etwas dagegen – im Gegenteil, jedes letzte Restchen Motivation zur persönlichen Entfaltung wird entmutigt. Der Einzelne schließt sich völlig ab und verliert seinen Glauben an die Welt.
Ich möchte anmerken, dass diese Art und Weise der Persönlichkeitsentwicklung die Herausbildung individueller und religiöser Freiheiten bedauerlicherweise eindeutig massenweise behindert. Die Folgeerscheinungen des Prozesses, den ich gerade beschrieben habe, sind ontologische Demut, existenzielle Demut und Verstaatlichung. Ich halte diese Transformation oder diesen Bruch insofern für bemerkenswert, als wir, vom Standpunkt der christlichen Kultur aus betrachtet, sehen können, dass Bedeutungen und Symbole von solchen verdrängt werden, die ihnen diametral entgegengesetzt sind. Dementsprechend wird einer der wichtigsten christlichen Begriffe, die Demut, inzwischen im Allgemeinen nicht mehr als ein Weg zu Erkenntnis, Festigung und endgültiger Freiheit verstanden, sondern im Gegenteil als ein Instrument der Versklavung. Den [russischen Philosophen] Nikolai Berdjajew zitierend, könnte man sagen: »Die Ontologie der Demut ist die Ontologie der Sklaven Gottes und nicht die seiner Söhne.«
Während ich am Aufbau der Ökologiebewegung mitarbeitete, gelangte ich zu der festen Überzeugung, dass innere Freiheit die wichtigste Grundlage für Handeln darstellt und Handeln als solches von ganz unmittelbarer Bedeutung ist.
Bis zum heutigen Tag finde ich es erstaunlich, dass wir in unserem Land die Unterstützung von mehreren tausend Menschen brauchen, um der Willkür einer Handvoll Bürokraten ein Ende zu setzen. Ich möchte hervorheben, dass unser Prozess die sehr beredte Bestätigung der Tatsache ist, dass wir die Unterstützung Tausender Menschen aus aller Welt brauchen, um das Offensichtliche zu beweisen: Wir drei sind unschuldig. Das sagt die ganze Welt. Sie sagt es bei Konzerten, im Internet, in den Medien, sogar im Parlament. Der englische Premierminister empfängt unseren Präsidenten nicht mit Worten zu den Olympischen Spielen, sondern mit der Frage: »Warum sitzen drei unschuldige Frauen im Gefängnis? « Es ist beschämend.
Noch erstaunlicher finde ich allerdings, dass Leute nicht daran glauben, Einfluss auf die Regierung nehmen zu können. Im Laufe der Streiks und Demonstrationen [im Winter und Frühjahr], als ich Unterschriften sammelte und Petitionen vorbereitete, haben mich viele Leute – mit ehrlicher Verwunderung – gefragt, warum sie sich um alles in der Welt für dieses kleine Fleckchen Wald in der Region Krasnodar interessieren sollten oder was sie das denn anginge – selbst wenn es möglicherweise einzigartig in Russland ist, vielleicht sogar urzeitlich? Was sollte es sie kümmern, dass die Frau von Ministerpräsident Dmitri Medwedew dort einen offiziellen Amtssitz bauen lassen will und damit das einzige Reservat für Kriechwacholder zerstört? Diese Leute … sie sind nur eine weitere Bestätigung dafür, dass die Menschen in unserem Land das Bewusstsein verloren haben, dass dieses Land uns gehört, den Bürgern. Sie empfinden sich nicht mehr als Bürger, sie empfinden sich nur noch als die automatisierte Masse. Sie haben nicht das Gefühl, dass der Wald ihnen gehört, selbst wenn er direkt neben ihren Häusern liegt. Ich bezweifle sogar, dass sie für ihre Häuser so etwas wie Besitzerschaft empfinden. Wenn irgendwer mit einer Planierraupe vor ihrer Veranda vorführe und ihnen erzählte, sie müssten evakuiert werden – »Bitte entschuldigen Sie, aber wir müssen Ihr Haus plattmachen, um Platz für eine Bürokratenresidenz zu schaffen« –, würden diese Leute gehorsam ihre Habseligkeiten zusammenraffen, ihre Koffer holen und auf die Straße hinausgehen. Und dort würden sie exakt so lange stehen bleiben, bis die Regierung ihnen sagt, was sie als Nächstes tun sollen. Sie sind völlig gestaltlos, es ist unendlich traurig. Nach einem knappen halben Jahr in Haft bin ich zu der Erkenntnis gelangt, dass das Gefängnis nichts anderes als Russland im Kleinen ist.
Man könnte auch mit dem Regierungssystem beginnen. Es weist die gleiche vertikale Machtstruktur auf, in der jede Entscheidung einzig und allein durch direkten Eingriff des gerade Verantwortlichen getroffen wird. Es gibt darin keinerlei horizontale Delegierung von Aufgaben, was jedem das Leben spürbar erleichtern würde. Und es mangelt an persönlicher Initiative. Denunziation gedeiht neben gegenseitigem Misstrauen. Im Gefängnis, wie in unserem Land als Ganzem, ist alles darauf angelegt, den Menschen ihre Individualiät zu nehmen und sie mit einer bloßen Funktion gleichzusetzen, sei es die Funktion eines Arbeiters oder die eines Häftlings. Der straffe Rahmen des Tagesplans im Gefängnis (an den man sich schnell gewöhnt) gleicht dem Gerüst des Alltags, in das alle hineingeboren werden.
In diesem Alltagsgerüst fangen Menschen an, großen Wert auf bedeutungslose Kleinigkeiten zu legen. Im Gefängnis sind solche Kleinigkeiten Dinge wie eine Tischdecke oder Plastikgeschirr, die man sich nur mit persönlicher Erlaubnis des Gefängnisdirektors beschaffen kann. Außerhalb des Gefängnisses verfügt man entsprechend über einen sozialen Status, auf den ebenfalls größter Wert gelegt wird. Das hat mich immer gewundert. Ein weiteres Element dieses Gerüsts besteht darin, sich bewusst zu werden, inwiefern diese Regierung wie eine Theaterinszenierung funktioniert, als Bühnenstück. Derweil verwandelt sie sich in der Realität in Chaos. Die Oberflächenstruktur des Regimes bröckelt und offenbart die Desorganisation und Ineffizienz des Großteils seiner Arbeit. Es liegt auf der Hand, dass das nicht zu irgendeiner Form tatsächlichen Regierens führt. Im Gegenteil, die Menschen empfinden ein immer stärker werdendes Gefühl des Verlorenseins – einschließlich des Verlorenseins in Raum und Zeit. Im Gefängnis und überall im Land wissen die Menschen nicht, wohin sie sich mit dieser oder jener Frage wenden können. Deshalb wenden sie sich an den Boss des Gefängnisses. Und außerhalb des Gefängnisses gehen die Menschen dementsprechend zu Putin, dem Oberboss.
In einem Text ein Gesamtbild des Systems zum Ausdruck zu bringen … nun, generell könnte ich sagen, dass wir nicht gegen … wir sind gegen das Putin-erzeugte Chaos, das nur oberflächlich betrachtet eine Regierung genannt werden kann. Ein Gesamtbild des Systems, in dem unserer Auffassung nach praktisch sämtliche Institutionen einer Art Mutation unterzogen werden, während sie dem Namen nach noch intakt erscheinen. Und in welchem die Zivilgesellschaft, an der uns so viel liegt, zerstört wird. Wir verwenden in unseren Texten keine direkten Bibelzitate; wir benutzen lediglich ihre Form als künstlerisches Stilmittel. Das Einzige, was gleich ist, ist unsere Motivation. Unsere Motivation entspricht tatsächlich der Motivation eines direkten Bibelzitates. Am besten bringen die Evangelien diese Motivation zum Ausdruck: »Denn wer da bittet, der empfängt; und wer da sucht, der findet; und wer da anklopft, dem wird aufgetan.« [Matthäus 7, 8] Ich – wir alle – glauben aufrichtig, dass uns die Tür geöffnet wird. Aber leider Gottes ist im Moment das Einzige, was passiert ist, dass wir ins Gefängnis gesperrt wurden. Es ist sehr seltsam, dass die Behörden in ihrer Reaktion auf unsere Aktionen die historische Praxis der abweichenden Meinung vollständig ignoriert haben. »Wie bedauernswert ist ein Land, in dem einfache Ehrlichkeit im besten Fall als Heldenmut verstanden wird und im schlimmsten als Geisteskrankheit«, schrieb in den 1970er Jahren der Dissident [Wladimir] Bukowsky. Und obwohl es noch gar nicht so lange her ist, verhalten sich die Menschen heute so, als hätte es den Großen Terror nie gegeben und auch keine Versuche, ihm Widerstand zu leisten. Ich vermute, dass wir von Menschen ohne Gedächtnis angeklagt werden. Viele von ihnen haben gesagt: »Er ist von einem Dämon besessen und redet im Wahn. Warum hört ihr ihm zu?« Das waren die Worte der Juden, die Jesus der Gotteslästerung anklagten. »Wir steinigen dich … wegen Gotteslästerung.« [Johannes 10, 33] Interessanterweise benutzt die Russisch-Orthodoxe Kirche genau diesen Vers, um ihre Auffassung von Gotteslästerung zum Ausdruck zu bringen.
Diese Auffassung ist schriftlich bestätigt, das Dokument liegt unserer Strafakte bei. Mit dieser Auffassung bezieht sich die Russisch-Orthodoxe Kirche auf die Evangelien als eine feststehende theologische Wahrheit. Sie werden nicht mehr als Offenbarung verstanden, was sie von Anfang an gewesen sind, sondern als ein monolithischer Klotz, der sich in einzelne Zitate zerlegen lässt, um diese wo immer nötig hinzuschieben – in jedes Schriftstück, für jeden erdenklichen Zweck. Die Russisch- Orthodoxe Kirche hat sich nicht einmal die Mühe gemacht, den Zusammenhang nachzulesen, in dem »Gotteslästerung« hier erwähnt wird – dass der Begriff in diesem Fall auf Jesus selbst angewendet wird. Ich glaube, religiöse Wahrheit sollte nichts Statisches sein, und dass es unbedingt notwendig ist, die Umstände und Wege geistiger Entwicklung zu begreifen, die Schwierigkeiten des Menschen, seine Doppelzüngigkeit, seine Zersplittertheit. Dass es für das eigene Selbst lebenswichtig ist, diese Dinge wahrzunehmen und zu erleben, um sich zu entwickeln. Dass man diese Dinge wahrnehmen und erfahren muss, um eine Persönlichkeit herauszubilden. Dass religiöse Wahrheit ein Prozess und kein fertiges Produkt ist, das sich jederzeit und wohin man will verschieben lässt.
All diese Dinge, über die ich gesprochen habe, all diese Prozesse – sie erlangen Bedeutung in der Kunst und in der Philosophie, auch in der Gegenwartskunst. Ein künstlerischer Akt kann und, wie ich meine, muss einen eigenen inneren Konflikt beinhalten. Und was mich wirklich ärgert, ist, wie die Anklage das Wort »sogenannt« in Bezug auf Gegenwartskunst verwendet.
Ich möchte darauf hinweisen, dass während des Prozesses gegen den Dichter [Joseph] Brodsky sehr ähnliche Methoden zum Einsatz kamen. Seine Gedichte wurden als »sogenannte« Gedichte bezeichnet; die Zeugen der Anklage hatten sie in Wirklichkeit gar nicht gelesen – genau wie mehrere Zeugen in unserem Fall die Performance selbst gar nicht gesehen, sondern nur den Videoclip im Internet angeschaut haben. Auch unsere Entschuldigungen werden von der kollektiven Anklage anscheinend zu »sogenannten« Entschuldigungen erklärt. Das ist beleidigend. Und ich bin erschüttert von den moralischen Verletzungen und psychischen Traumata [, die wir offenbar verursacht haben]. Unsere Entschuldigungen waren aufrichtig. Es tut mir leid, dass so viel geredet wurde und Sie alle das immer noch nicht begriffen haben. Oder es ist absichtliche Hinterhältigkeit, wenn Sie behaupten, unsere Entschuldigungen seien unaufrichtig. Ich weiß nicht, was Sie noch von uns hören müssen. Aber für mich ist dieser Prozess ein »sogenannter« Prozess. Und ich habe keine Angst vor Ihnen. Auch keine Angst vor Falschheit und Unechtheit, vor schlampig getarnter Irreführung im Urteilsspruch des »sogenannten« Gerichts.
Denn alles, was Sie mir nehmen können, ist »sogenannte« Freiheit. Es ist die einzige in Russland existierende Form. Doch meine innere Freiheit kann mir niemand nehmen. Sie lebt im Wort und wird weiterleben dank der glasnost [Offenheit], wenn das hier von Tausenden Menschen gelesen und gehört wird. Diese Freiheit wird weiterleben mit allen, die nicht gleichgültig sind und uns in diesem Land hören. Mit allen, die in diesem Prozess Bruchstücke von sich selbst entdeckt haben, so wie andere sie in früheren Zeiten bei Franz Kafka und Guy Debord entdeckt haben. Ich glaube, dass ich aufrichtig und offen bin, ich dürste nach der Wahrheit; und diese Dinge werden uns alle nur noch ein wenig freier machen. Wir werden schon sehen.
Maria Aljochina

Wiederabdruck
Die beiden Texte erschienen zuerst in: Pussy Riot! Ein Punkgebet für Freiheit. Aus dem Englischen von Barbara Häusler. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2012, S. 105–129.

Manifest von Occupy Museums

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:39 +0000

WIR BESETZEN MUSEEN, UM RAUM FÜR EINE SINNVOLLE KULTUR DER 99 %, ZURÜCKZUEROBERN. FÜR UNS SIND KUNST UND KULTUR DIE SEELE EINES GEMEINWESENS. KEINE LUXUSARTIKEL!

Am 17. September 2011 besetzten wir die Wall Street, weil die reichsten 1 %, die die Banken und Großkonzerne kontrollieren, Treuebruch gegenüber dem amerikanischen Volk begangen haben. Getrieben von Machtgier haben sie unsere Staatskasse geplündert, unsere Demokratie gekauft und unser Rechtssystem verhöhnt. Sie haben uns keine andere Wahl gelassen, als auf die Straße zu gehen, einander zu finden und mit dem Entwurf und Aufbau eines neuen Systems zu beginnen.
Wir sehen eine direkte Verbindung zwischen der Korruption der Hochfinanz und der der „Hochkultur“. Im Verwaltungsrat des MoMA sitzen zum Teil dieselben Leute wie im Aufsichtsrat von Sotheby’s, wo der Wert von Kunst eine Spekulationsangelegenheit ist. Das Auktionshaus sperrt jetzt das gewerkschaftlich organisierte technische Personal aus, weil es in einem Jahr der Rekordgewinne nicht für seine Gesundheitsvorsorge aufkommen will. Als KulturarbeiterInnen erklären wir uns mit ihrem Kampf solidarisch. Unsere Arbeit wird nur gewürdigt werden, wenn wir uns aus der Abhängigkeit von dem obszönen Reichtum befreien, die heute die amerikanische wie internationale Kunstszene prägt. Darum begannen wir, Museen in New York City zu besetzen. Wir tanzten und sangen vor ihren Toren und hielten auf ihren Stufen offene Versammlungen ab, um einen Raum des angstfreien Dialogs für die 99 % zu schaffen. Dabei sind wir immer mehr geworden.
Museen müssen der Öffentlichkeit verantwortlich sein. Sie arbeiten an unseren historischen Erzählungen und gemeinsamen Symbolen mit. Sie üben enormen Einfluss auf unsere Kultur und den gesamten Kunstmarkt aus. Wir besetzen Museen, weil sie uns im Stich gelassen haben. Sie haben sich wie die Regierung, die das Volk nicht mehr vertritt, an den Höchstbietenden verkauft.
Der Kampf wird nicht leicht werden. Wir schicken uns an, ein ungleiches, ausbeuterisches Kultursystem aufzudecken, das über alte, tiefreichende Wurzeln verfügt. Aber wir wollen nicht auf künftige Generationen warten, um diesen Kampf aufzunehmen. Wir wollen gemeinsam daran arbeiten, den Kapitalaustausch durch den Austausch schöpferischer Ideen für und durch die 99 % zu ersetzten. Auf unserer Suche nach horizontalen Räumen des Dialogs und der Zusammenarbeit werden wir die Hohlheit des kapitalistischen Kunstmarkts allmählich mit der Wärme des Sinns und der Überzeugung füllen, dass Kunst eine Notwendigkeit und kein Luxusartikel ist.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien online unter: http://www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/allgemein/manifest-von-%E2%80%9Eoccupy-museums%E2%80%9D-21619 [22.03.2013].

Besetzt ein Museum in Eurer Nähe!

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:39 +0000

JW/FM: Du bist der Initiator der mit Occupy Wall Street assoziierten Gruppe Occupy Museums. Als Erstes habt ihr einen Protestmarsch zum MoMA organisiert, später dann das New Museum und andere von den 1 % beherrschten Kunsteinrichtungen besetzt. Ihr habt eine Generalversammlung vor den Museen abgehalten und dabei ein Manifest verlesen, in dem die Ungerechtigkeiten des Kunst- und Kultursystems benannt werden. Als der Direktor des MoMA nach euren Forderungen fragte, war eure Antwort, ihr hättet keine, aber wolltet das Museum weiterhin besetzen, um ein Gespräch über ökonomische Ungerechtigkeiten und den Missbrauch öffentlicher Werte zugunsten der 1 % im Kunstbetrieb anzustoßen. Warum sollen wir Museen besetzen?
NF: Occupy Museums ist ein auf Konsens setzendes Kollektiv. Ich habe die erste Aktion von Occupy Museums im Oktober 2011 initiiert. Kurz darauf entstand unsere Gruppe. Jede Aktion und jeder offizielle Text hat uns alle als Urheber. Einen Sprecher gibt es bei uns nicht, sondern wir handeln solidarisch – ganz im Geist der Occupy-Wall-Street-Bewegung. Wir versuchen, den Drang zu Individualismus und Hierarchie, der so sehr Teil der kapitalistischen Herrschaft ist, hinter uns zu lassen. Wir glauben aber an die Autonomie des Einzelnen. Ich möchte also klar stellen, dass ich hier meine eigene Meinung zum Ausdruck bringe, ich kann nicht für die ganze Gruppe sprechen.
Warum besetzen wir Museen? Museen sind ein wichtiger Bestandteil des neoliberalen Systems, gegen das wir auf der Wall Street protestieren. Museen sind im Grunde wie Tempel dieses Systems; sie reproduzieren die Logik des Systems, verdinglichen seine Symbole, und hängen finanziell davon ab. Die Aktionen von Occupy Museums haben den Sinn, ein umfassendes, ehrliches, die Dinge grundlegend veränderndes Gespräch über Geld und Macht im Kunst- und Kulturbetrieb anzustoßen.
Warum aber Museen und nicht Privatgalerien? Weil Museen eine kulturelle Autorität genießen und vermeintlich eine rein öffentliche Funktion erfüllen, die Galerien und Kunstmessen nicht besitzen. Das vorrangige Paradigma der Kunstwelt in den USA ist das eines Marktes von Privatkünstlern, vertreten durch eine Hierarchie an Galerien, die alle ihre Pferdchen in die Whitney Biennale, ins New Museum und schließlich ins Museum of Modern Art bringen wollen. Künstlerkarrieren und -märkte werden also mithilfe der kulturellen Autorität von Museen aufgebaut. Was zählt, ist einzig und allein die symbolische und finanzielle Position, und Museen besitzen die Macht, diese mitzugestalten. Das Problem ist, dass die reichsten 1 % der 1 % – wie auf der Wall Street – nahezu alles kontrollieren. Sie geben sich natürlich philanthropisch und sitzen im Aufsichtsrat von Museen, sind aber oft zugleich die Großsammler, welche die Märkte beeinflussen. In Wirklichkeit hat sich in den letzten 30 Jahren die gesamte Kunstinfrastruktur rund um diese paar Figuren organisiert. Mehr noch als Geld – so das überhaupt möglich ist – konzentriert sich in ihren Händen politische Macht und soziales Prestige. Echte Kultur aber benötigt Distanz von dieser Macht, um sich entwickeln zu können; sonst wird sie zum bloßen Luxusartikel. Occupy Museums wird hoffentlich zu einem Überdenken dieses gegenwärtigen Zustands der Kultur als Luxusgut für die Allerreichsten führen. Wie können wir mit unserer Arbeit als Künstler wieder an die Erfahrungen normaler Menschen – der 99 % – anknüpfen? Eine Möglichkeit, uns als Künstler dem in der Luft liegenden Protest anzuschließen, haben wir bereits gefunden. Im ersten Stadium definieren wir öffentlich kulturelle Ungerechtigkeiten – fordern Leute auf, sie in offenen Versammlungen vor den Museen zu benennen. Von Teilnehmern dieser Versammlungen kommen viele Informationen über Korruption und Interessenkonflikte in den Verwaltungsräten der Museen. Die wichtigste Tätigkeit von Occupy Museums aber besteht darin, durch Solidarität zu demonstrieren, dass wir Künstler uns durch diese Institutionen, die so große kulturelle Autorität genießen, nicht mundtot machen lassen, bloß weil die 1 % in ihren Verwaltungsräten sitzen. Wir lernen, uns nicht mehr zu fürchten, sondern zu handeln.

Die ersten Museen, die ihr aufgesucht habt, waren das MoMA und das National History Museum. Warum diese beiden?
Das MoMA ist eine New Yorker Museumsikone, weil es als »das« Museum für moderne Kunst gilt. Zudem ist New York eine Stadt, die ihren internationalen Ruf nicht zuletzt auch der modernen Kunst verdankt. Das MoMA ist also in hohem Maße ein Tempel, ein Heiligtum für Lokalgötter wie Pollock und Newman. Es ist auch ganz offensichtlich finanziell korrupt. Zwei MoMA Verwaltungsräte, James Niven und Richard Oldenberg, stehen auch in Verbindung zum Aufsichtsrat von Sotheby’s. Diese Verwaltungsräte tragen dazu bei, die Preise bei Kunstauktionen in die Höhe zu treiben, und dürften auch einen gewissen Einfluss darauf haben, was im Museum gezeigt wird. Dieser Interessenkonflikt sollte als unannehmbar und als Missbrauch gelten, aber in den USA ist sowas heutzutage akzeptiert. Wir sehen das auch am Drehtüreffekt zwischen der US-Regierung und Großunternehmen wie Banken. Für die meisten ist es vielleicht überraschend, diesen Problemen auch im Zusammenhang mit Museen zu begegnen, selbst wenn der Kunstmarkt extrem dereguliert ist. Eben weil das MoMA diesen Kultstatus besitzt und die Wertschätzung und das Vertrauen von so vielen Menschen genießt, haben wir es uns als Exempel vorgeknöpft. Wir wollten ganz oben anfangen, »den Tempel stürmen«. Eigentlich aber besetzen wir keine physischen Orte, sondern eher Bewusstsein, Symbole.

Aber das Natural History Museum hat nicht sonderlich viel mit Kunst zu tun.
Hier ging es uns um die potenziellen Gefahren von Philanthropie. Wir besetzten den Dinosaurier-Flügel im American Museum of Natural History, dessen Förderer, David H. Koch, die zweitreichste Person in New York und ein wichtiger Geldgeber der Ultrarechten in den USA ist. Bei dieser Aktion sprachen wir mit den Museumsbesuchern über die mit seinen »Gaben« verbundene Ideologie. David H. Koch ist einer der Hauptgeldgeber der Tea Party, rechtsgerichteter Thinktanks und zahlreicher Initiativen zur Leugnung der Erderwärmung. Er hat in den von ihm unterstützten Ausstellungen häufig Klimainformationen zensuriert. Schon sein Vater, der das Familienvermögen angehäuft hat, betätigte sich in der McCarthy-Ära als rechter Ideologe, der die Gefahr des Kommunismus als Vorwand zur Schaffung einer vor Rassismus und Bigotterie strotzenden politischen Plattform benutzte – eigentlich sowas wie ein Vorläufer der Tea Party. Wir sprachen darüber, wie das Kultursponsoring von denen, die schmutziges Geld machen (Koch macht sein Geld im Öl- und Energiegeschäft, und seine Firmen sind bekannte Umweltsünder), häufig zum Aufpolieren ihres Images verwendet wird. Im Museum of Natural History veranstalteten wir eine Reihe von Performances mit anschließender Diskussion über alternative Fördermodelle wie höhere Regierungssubventionen oder die Unterstützung durch viele kleinere Beiträge. Natürlich steht diese Diskussion gerade erst am Anfang.

Als der Direktor des MoMA kam, um mit euch zu reden, habt ihr das verweigert. Warum? Seid ihr nicht an einem konstruktiven Dialog interessiert?
Bei der ersten Aktion hielten wir eine Generalversammlung vor dem MoMA ab und verlasen ein Manifest, worauf der Direktor mit einigen Mitarbeitern herunterkam, um mit uns zu reden. Sie waren ausgesprochen höflich, sagten, sie unterstützten die Bewegung zu einem gewissen Grad und wollten wissen, warum wir hier seien. Ich antwortete weitgehend im Einklang mit dem Manifest, dass wir das MoMA für einen Tempel der 1 % hielten und dass es unser Ziel sei, diese Konzentration von Macht und Reichtum, die unsere Kultur und unsere Zukunft als Künstler kaputtmacht, zu bekämpfen. Sie waren überrascht und fragten nach unseren Forderungen. Ich sagte, wir hätten keine, aber wir würden ihr Museum weiter besetzen, was in diesem Fall hieß: Wir würden immer wiederkommen und das Gespräch ausbauen, bis es mehr Sichtbarkeit erlangt und größere Verbreitung gefunden habe. Tatsächlich hat uns auch die Presse die längste Zeit mit Fragen nach den Forderungen von Occupy Wall Street gelöchert. Bisher hat sich aber das Fehlen von Forderungen als sehr nützlich erwiesen. Sobald man Forderungen hat, bittet man diejenigen, die über die Macht dazu verfügen, um ein paar begrenzte Änderungen, wo doch das Problem nach Meinung vieler eher ein strukturelles ist. Ohne Forderungen arbeiten wir mehr an der Entwicklung einer eigenen Stimme und an der Solidarität der Bewegung, die die Basis unserer Macht bildet. Die Probleme ökonomischer Ungerechtigkeit sind so gewaltig, dass es einfach keinen Sinn macht, im Modus der Negation zu beginnen.

Später habt ihr auch eine Aktion am Lincoln Center durchgeführt …
Das war unser größter Triumph! Das von David H. Koch und dem New Yorker Bürgermeister Michael Bloomberg unterstützte Lincoln Center ist ein mächtiges Symbol der Privatisierung öffentlichen Raums und des Missbrauchs kultureller Autorität. In der Pressemitteilung für die Aktion formulierten wir es so: »Sicher ist es reiner Zufall, dass Philip Glass’ Oper ›Satyagraha‹, die die Anfänge von Gandhis Kampf gegen die Kolonialherrschaft in Indien schildert, ausgerechnet im Revolutionsjahr 2011 wiederaufgenommen wurde. Wir sahen sofort einen eklatanten Widerspruch darin, dass ›Satyagraha‹ gerade zu einem Zeitpunkt wiederaufgeführt wird, da seit Wochen Demonstranten von Occupy Wall Street verhaftet werden. Was für ein Kontrast. Während Bloomberg die Darstellung von Gandhis bahnbrechender Taktik gewaltlosen bürgerlichen Ungehorsams in der Metropolitan Oper finanziert, ordnet er zugleich eine quasi-paramilitärische Razzia der friedlichen Besetzung von Liberty Park an, bei der Demonstranten verprügelt, mit Tränengas bekämpft und unter Gewaltanwendung festgenommen werden.« Daraufhin versammelten sich eines Abends Hunderte Demonstranten vor den Stufen des Lincoln Center, durch Polizeisperren vom Platz ferngehalten. Einige, die es wagten, die Sperre zu durchbrechen, wurden festgenommen, was sofort »Schande«-Rufe auslöste. Wir zogen unsere Schuhe aus – ein Gandhi’sches Symbol der Würde – und standen bei unserer Versammlung barfuß auf dem kalten Pflaster. Als die Oper aus war und die Opernbesucher auf den Platz herausströmten, fanden sie diese unheimlich theatrale Szene vor – einen leibhaftigen, live stattfindenden, gewaltlosen Protest, barfuß auf der Festtreppe! Einige der Protestierenden skandierten »We are the 99 %«, was zum Gefühl der Trennung zwischen den beiden Gruppen beigetragen haben mag. Unsere Anwesenheit hinter der Polizeisperre lähmte die Opernbesucher, hemmte sie, auf uns zuzugehen, obwohl wir aufforderten, sich uns anzuschließen. Dann tauchte Philip Glass selbst in der Occupy-Wall-Street-Versammlung auf. Er war gekommen, um mithilfe des »menschlichen Mikrofons« eine Stellungnahme abzugeben: Es waren die letzten Textzeilen der Oper, eine Paraphrase auf eine Stelle aus der »Bhagavad Gita«:
Wenn die Rechtschaffenheit verfällt und das Böse das Land regiert, treten wir, Zeitalter um Zeitalter, in Erscheinung, nehmen sichtbare Gestalt an und stellen uns, Mensch unter Menschen, schützend vor das Gute, werfen das Übel zurück und setzen die Tugend wieder ein.
Da schloss sich uns das Opernpublikum an. Die Pufferzone verschwand. Wir waren jetzt eine große Menge, hielten bis spätnachts eine Generalversammlung ab, auf der viele Menschen das Wort ergriffen: Opernsänger, die vom Lincoln-Center in seinem neoliberalen Kampf gegen Arbeitnehmer kürzlich gekündigt worden waren, und auch Lou Reed war da und brachte seine Solidarität zum Ausdruck.

Occupy Museums achtet sehr darauf, nicht vereinnahmt zu werden. Ihr verweigert jegliche Zusammenarbeit, auch wenn ihr dadurch mehr Menschen erreichen könntet.
Vereinnahmung war von Anfang an ein wichtiges Thema bei Occupy Wall Street, weil der neoliberale Kapitalismus sehr wohl weiß, dass die beste Methode, eine Protestbewegung im Keim zu ersticken, ihre Einverleibung in den bestehenden Markt und ihre Verwendung zu Werbezwecken ist. Wenn wir mit dem MoMA Verhandlungen aufnähmen, bekämen wir zu hören: »Ihr könnt das Erdgeschoss für eine Generalversammlung verwenden, wir stellen es auf unsere Website.« Bevor man sich mit der von uns vorgebrachten Kritik auseinanderzusetzt, würde man erstmal versuchen, uns einen Knochen zuzuwerfen. Und während der Verhandlungen würden wir uns geschmeichelt und als etwas Besonderes fühlen, weil eine berühmte Gatekeeper-Institution uns ein wenig ihre Tore geöffnet hat.
Natürlich ist es in Wirklichkeit nicht so schwarz-weiß, weil viele Leute aus der Bewegung für Kunstinstitutionen arbeiten; manche sind sogar einflussreiche Kuratoren oder Kritiker und bekannte Künstler. Klarerweise brauchen wir auch Verbündete, um die Strukturen der Institutionen von innen heraus zu verändern. Die Frage ist, wie vorgehen, ohne die Klarheit der Kritik zu gefährden? Zur Zeit überlegen wir, wie wir bei der Entwicklung und Umsetzung unserer Vision von ökonomischer Gerechtigkeit mit Institutionen, die ja auch nur aus Gruppen von Menschen bestehen, interagieren können, gehen dabei jedoch sehr achtsam vor.
Meiner Ansicht nach sollten wir uns zuerst in Solidarität mit breiteren Kreisen in New York – weniger privilegierten Künstlern und Kunstliebhabern – üben, ehe wir uns mit den Verwaltern der Museen zusammentun. New York City hat dieselbe Wohlstandsverteilung wie Honduras. Es ist eine der reichsten Städte der Welt, und eine mit den größten Klassenunterschieden. Es gibt keine nennenswerte Mittelschicht, aber eine Menge sehr reicher und sehr armer Menschen. In ihr leben auch viele extrem reiche Künstler, und eine Unmenge von armen. Touristen besuchen die Galerien in Chelsea und bekommen nicht mit, dass sie sich in einer der ärmsten Städte der USA befinden, weil die Armut in den Außenbezirken verborgen bleibt. Es handelt sich um ökonomische und rassisch-bedingte Barrieren, die über Generationen entstanden sind, und die wir durchbrechen müssen. Das ist der Schlüssel zu echtem Wandel. Wir müssen Communities zusammenbringen, die nicht gemeinsam im Kunstbetrieb abhängen, und die Klassen- und Rassenschranken in der Kultur überwinden, auch wenn das viel Arbeit erfordert und eine Menge Zeit kostet.

Und warum nicht einfach versuchen, die 1.000 Besucher zu erreichen, die täglich ins Natural History Museum kommen? Oder die Besucher, die täglich ins MoMA kommen? Das muss doch das gefundene Publikum für euch sein.
Die Museumsbesucher sind immer eingeladen, sich an unseren Aktionen zu beteiligen. Wie beim Lincoln Center zu sehen war, trug der Entschluss des Publikums, sich dem Protest anzuschließen, viel zur Kraft der Aktion bei. Wir versuchen also ganz klar auch dieses vorhandene Kunstpublikum zu erreichen und uns mit ihm auseinanderzusetzen. Wir versuchen aber zugleich, nicht unsere Haltung als Aktivisten preiszugeben. Wir nehmen die Besucher mit, aber wir zwingen niemanden – es muss aus freien Stücken passieren. Seht euch doch an, wie die Leute Kultur als Ware konsumieren. Dieses »konsumistische Unbewusste« homogenisiert und vereint die gesamte Realität unter dem Logo eines konsumierbaren Produkts. Ich halte es für unsere Aufgabe, die Spannung des Augenblicks aufrechtzuerhalten. Dann werden sich die Leute uns auch anschließen.

Was würdest du unter solchen Umständen tun, wenn du Direktor des MoMA wärst?
Cool wäre, wenn sich der MoMA-Direktor unserer Gruppe in einer offenen Diskussion stellen würde. Die Kuratoren am MoMA sind es gewohnt, dass ihnen die Künstler in den Arsch kriechen, aber vielleicht würden sie sich auch für eine neue Dynamik begeistern, in der alle gleich sind und bei der es um Gerechtigkeit und das allgemeine Bewusstsein und nicht bloß um individuelle Wettbewerbsvorteile geht? Würden sie sich an der Diskussion beteiligen, könnten wir herausfinden, was sie – außerhalb der Machtverhältnisse – als Individuen denken. Viele wollen große Veränderungen in der Welt und sicher gilt das auch für einige Museumsdirektoren. Wir müssen alle irgendwo anfangen. Sie könnten das, indem sie sich mit uns treffen. Nichts hindert sie daran – unsere Gruppe ist offen.

Auf was müssten sich Institutionen einlassen, die sich euch anschließen wollen?
Sie müssten bereit sein, sich die Hände schmutzig zu machen. Sie müssten sich auf eine lange, unbequeme Diskussion einlassen. Unsere Bewegung stellt die Struktur von Museumsverwaltungen und die Kapitalströme in der Kultur infrage. Sie ruft alle dazu auf, auf die eigenen Privilegien zu schauen und sich zusammenzutun, um eine Welt zu verändern, die in ihrem Zugang zu Geld und Macht zutiefst gespalten ist. Wir müssen unserere kapitalistischen Konditionierungen ablegen, um zusammenarbeiten zu können. Wir müssen sehr lange miteinander reden, bereit sein zu scheitern, uns vor der Falle der vermeintlich von allen gewollten marktgängigen Ausstellungen und vor Künstlerstars hüten. Wir müssen in unseren Arbeitsprozessen Transparenz und Fairness walten lassen. Wir sollten uns dessen bewusst sein, dass wir es in jeder menschlichen Gesellschaft mit Macht und Hierarchie zu tun haben. Wir müssen sie infrage stellen. Wenn wir nicht bereit sind zu experimentieren und das Chaos zu wagen, können wir uns nicht auf die Suche nach Antworten begeben. Wir können keine Forderungen aufstellen – wir müssen zuerst unser Bewusstsein ändern. Erst dann können wir eine Parallelökonomie schaffen, die auf Freiheit und nicht auf Unterdrückung beruht.

Vor vierzig Jahren gelang es der Art Workers’ Coalition, einem Bündnis von Künstlern, Filmemachern, Kritikern und Museumsmitarbeitern, bei den New Yorker Museen – allen voran dem Museum of Modern Art – eine Reihe von Reformen durchzusetzen. Es ging ihnen zum Beispiel um eine weniger exklusive Ausstellungspolitik, eine, die auch weibliche und schwarze Künstler berücksichtigt, und sie betonten die Notwendigkeit, eine moralische Haltung gegenüber dem Vietnamkrieg einzunehmen. Außerdem brachte die Coalition das MoMA und andere Museen dazu, einen eintrittfreien Tag einzuführen, der in vielen Institutionen bis heute Bestand hat. Ist das eine Inspiration?
Ja, und es gibt noch weitere gute Beispiele: die russischen Konstruktivisten z. B., die mexikanischen Muralisten, Act Up usw. Aber die Art Workers’ Coalition ist natürlich wichtig. Tatsächlich haben wir das MoMA an einem der eintrittfreien Abende, den sogenannten »Target Free Fridays«, ein weiteres Mal besetzt. »Target« ist einer der großen Einzelhandelskonzerne in den USA, und jeder hält die Idee der eintrittfreien Museumstage für deren Erfindung. Eines der Ziele dieser Aktion war, den Besuchern klar zu machen, dass es sich dabei um ein Erfindung von Künstlern (der Art Workers’ Coalition) handelt, und dass das Einstehen von Künstlern für die 99 % eine Geschichte hat, genauso wie die Solidarität mit gewerkschaftlich organisierten Arbeitern. Es gibt eine Gewerkschaft des technischen Personals bei Sotheby’s. Sotheby’s versuchte, ihnen die Gesundheitsvorsorge zu streichen und das Gehalt zu kürzen, und als sie darüber zu verhandeln versuchten, wurden sie ausgesperrt. Da das MoMA eng mit Sotheby’s verbunden ist, besetzten wir das MoMA, um die Mitglieder des Verwaltungsrats unter Druck zu setzen, die Arbeiter zu unterstützen. Wir hielten eine Generalversammlung vor der Diego-Rivera-Ausstellung ab, und verlasen einen von Rivera und André Breton unterzeichneten Text von 1938. Wir hielten eine Versammlung mit Hunderten Künstlern im Hauptatrium des MoMA ab, bei dem eine großes Fahne mit den Worten »When Art Is Just a Luxury, Art Is a Lie!« entrollt wurde. Diesmal ließ uns das MoMA gewähren. Ich denke, ein Rauswurf einer Gruppe von Künstleraktivisten an einem von Künstlern (der Art Workers’ Coalition) initiierten eintrittsfreien Abend wäre für das Museum ein PR-Desaster gewesen. Für ein paar Stunden verwandelten wir das MoMA in ein Diskussionsforum zum Thema Geld und Arbeitsbedingungen im Kunstbetrieb.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien unter http://www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/kommentare/besetzt-ein-museum-in-eurer-nahe-20366 [22.3.2013].
Das gesamte Interview mit Noah Fischer erschien in der von Artur .Zmijewski und Joanna Warsza editierten Ausgabe Nr. 117 von Camera Austria International (Graz/Berlin), März 2012.

Towards a Futurology of the Present: Notes on Writing, Movement, and Time1

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

‘Tomorrow never happens, man’ – Janis Joplin²

Has there ever been a revolution without its musicians, artists, and writers? Could we imagine the Zapatista movement, for example, without its poetry and lyricism? At this moment, I am writing from the specific location of the west coast of Australia, on land known to Aboriginal Australians as Beeliar Boodjar. Across the Indian Ocean, remarkable things are happening in North Africa. I listen on the internet to the songs of freedom being sung in Tahrir Square, as well as to the young hip-hop artists who provided the soundtrack to the revolution in Tunisia. But their YouTube videos are not the only things going viral. Significantly, their mutant desires, of which their music is an expression, are also beginning to ripple outwards. I feel it here at my kitchen table as I type, as viscerally as the caffeine flowing through my body. I also see it on the evening news in Spain and Greece. Perhaps the alterglobalisation movement never died, but was simply laying in wait. Perhaps we are only at the beginning. And perhaps there is little real difference in our movements between making music and making change; between the creation of art and the creation of new social relations through our activisms. Our common art is the crafting of new ways of being, of seeing, of valuing; in short, the cultivation of new forms of life, despite and beyond the deadening, ossified structures all around us.
What I would like to focus on most especially in this piece is the art of writing; more specifically, on the relationship between nonfiction writing and social movements. Movement produces writing which produces movement which produces writing, and so the loop turns; a constant feedback loop between action and reflection, experience and expression. To the relationship between writing and movement, I would like to introduce the added factor of time. Until very recently, radical writing practices have tended to operate in accordance with, and uncritically reproduce, some very particular ideas about time. One such idea is that it is compartmentalised into discrete units. Another is that it is linear and moves only in one direction. These understandings are part and parcel of Gottfried Hegel’s dialectical logic³, which, via Karl Marx, has become the unthinking, taken-for-granted folk theory of generations of activists. They are also part of Enlightenment, or modernist, rationality more broadly – that particular way of knowing that has predominated across the world for the past few centuries. Linear, compartmentalised time has meant that we have come to see past, present, and future as three separate things – a division that lies at the root of the means-ends distinction in traditional leftist politics. It is only when present and future are treated as mutually exclusive entities that means and ends can be regarded likewise. Furthermore, for Hegel and Marx, one must always negate in order to create; that is, the present must firstly be negated before the future is ever able to come into being.⁴ Revolutionary politics is therefore conceived of in purely negative terms, and the job of building a new world deferred until after the revolution. Social movements become equivalent to war rather than creation. When the ends justify the means, the present effectively becomes sacrificed at the altar of The Future – and this for the sake of utopian designs fabricated in the minds of a self-appointed few.
The kind of temporal sensibility outlined above lies at the heart of the manifesto genre.⁵ It seems today, however, that people have grown tired of manifestos. The same is true for any such exhortation from above of what people should or should not be doing. My argument is that the present context of postmodernity⁶ demands of radical writers a fundamental rethinking of their (our) modus operandi. I will, in this article, present a critique not just of the manifesto, but also of the jeremiad – another one of the literary forms most commonly produced by radical writers. Where the manifesto is concerned with the future, the jeremiad centres on the present. The intention of the latter, however, is usually only to serve as a diagnostic description upon which a prescription must be founded; an ‘is’ that must be followed by an ‘ought’. In this way, we are hence led back into the domain of the manifesto. But what happens to radical writing once we reject those dichotomies upon which the jeremiad-manifesto distinction is predicated – namely, those of is-ought, means-ends, and present-future? What happens when the writer treats the present and future not as two separate things, but as conjoined in an indivisible flow within which means and ends are consonant? What I would like to propose, then, is a new writerly practice; one which I have chosen to call the futurology of the present.
Such a practice would involve an unearthing of the many living futures constantly coming into being in the present. Unlike the jeremiad, it does not solely describe what is, but also what is becoming. In other words, it entails not simply ‘a negation of what exists, but also an affirmation of what springs forth’⁷. And it does not prescribe a single path forward, as with the manifesto, but tries instead to reveal the multifarious pathways fanning outwards from any given moment. It starts with the novel innovations and creative insurgencies happening everywhere in our midst, and from there works to build affinities between them. In this endeavour, I find inspiration in Rebecca Solnit’s assertion that ‘the revolution exists in little bits everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities’⁸. This is, of course, an endeavour that necessarily requires a heightened sensitivity toward those ‘moments when things do not yet have a name’; in short, toward newness. The new here is not meant to mean the same thing as ‘fashionable’, but rather refers to those becomings that are constitutive of alternative realities.¹⁰ This kind of sensibility has become especially important of late, given that ours is an era of accelerated social change, pregnant with germinal, as-yet-unnamed phenomena. One cannot continue imposing anachronistic grids upon our ever-complexifying present without exacting an extremely violent and myopic reductionism. Instead, as Félix Guattari writes, the upheavals that define our current conditions of existence call for a method attuned ‘towards the future and the emergence of new social and aesthetic practices’¹¹. My proposal for a futurology of the present is one attempt to concretely think through what such a method might look like. I have certainly not been alone in these efforts. Besides Solnit, other fellow travellers include the members of Colectivo Situaciones whose practice of ‘militant research’ they characterise as the search for ‘emerging traces of a new sociability’¹². Consider too the mode of ethnographic practice proposed by the anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber. One role ‘for a radical intellectual’, he writes, might be ‘to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities – as gifts’¹³.
As has already been hinted at, the articulation of these ideas will necessarily require a confrontation with Hegelian dialectics and ‘the damage it has caused, and continues to cause in political movements’¹⁴. One of the principle reasons for this is that, to really understand the future appearing in the present, it is necessary to strip away the sedimented habits of thought under which becomings are subsumed or rendered invisible. As will be seen over the course of this essay, Hegel’s method could be considered as precisely one of these habits (certainly, capitalism an issue here too, but I take it for granted that my readers are already convinced of this). My contention is that even those who do not consider themselves as having anything to do with Marx or Hegel still unwittingly reproduce many of their assumptions. Indeed, as far as traditional forms of radical politics are concerned, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical schema has become the Sun around which all the other heavenly bodies orbit. For 150 years, we believed this Sun would give us clarity and deliver us from darkness to light. It turns out, however, that it has only served to obscure more than it has revealed. All those other stars, old and new, that have been shielded from view by the blinding, sun-soaked sky are today beginning to demand our attention and sparkle anew. This essay seeks to assist in this efflorescence, since, as Hardt suggests, we cannot hope to achieve any kind of liberation unless we first liberate ourselves from Hegel.¹⁵ One thing must be made clear, though, and that is that I confront Hegel’s legacy not purely by way of negation, which would only mean a perverse reproduction of his dialectical straightjacket, but by proposing and affirming an escape route. My goal is a re-imagining of radical politics and a re-tooling of radical writerly practice.
Having thus far skimmed the surface of my argument, what I would like to do now is go deeper. I will start out by introducing the concept of the ‘perpetual present’ – the temporality within which the futurology of the present is situated. From this basis, I will proceed to elucidate the ways in which such a practice overcomes the limitations of previous modes of radical writing; namely, those premised on compartmentalised, linear time. In the second half of the article, I will link the futurology of the present to a politics of hope, before concluding with some thoughts on the nexus between activist and artistic practices – the very note on which I began.

The Perpetual Present
In today’s social movements, there is an increasing call for a harmonisation between means and ends, now widely understood by way of the notion of ‘prefigurative politics’¹⁶. Such a sensibility cannot but imply a radically different, even ‘amodern’¹⁷, temporal schema. Present and future cease to be treated as two distinct entities (the former but an instrument for the realisation of the latter), but instead become rendered as simply two linguistic signs referring to a common, indivisible flow. Such is also the case with the past. Drawing on Guattari, we could well say that both past and future inhere together in the ‘perpetual present’¹⁸, an enduring liquid moment containing both memory and potentiality; traces of what has been, but also intimations of what could be, each indissolubly connected to the other. With this perspective in mind, there can no longer be said to be a revolutionary before, during, and after. Instead of activist strategy being determined by a stark delineation between discrete stages, means and ends become consonant within a permanent revolutionary process; a continual freeing up of life, desire and the imagination wherever they happen to be imprisoned. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write: ‘We must think of [pre-revolutionary] resistance, [revolutionary] insurrection and [post-revolutionary] constituent power as an indivisible process, in which these three are melded into a full counter-power and ultimately a new, alternative formation of society’.¹⁹
It has occurred to me that the Roman god, Janus, could be taken as figurative of the perpetual present. He had one face looking forward towards the future and one face looking backward towards the past, and yet both belonged to a single head. The term ‘Janus-faced’ has, in modern times, become a synonym for ‘two-faced’ or ‘duplicitous’, carrying with it negative connotations, and yet, for the ancient Romans, Janus had an altogether different meaning. He was the god of thresholds; ‘an important Roman god who protected doorways and gateways’, primarily symbolising change and transition.²⁰ The perpetual present is always a threshold between that which is ceasing to be and that which is coming into being; at once the repository of memories and the font of potentialities; a record of the past and a map to the future. Friedrich Nietzsche is of critical import here: ‘I am of today and of the has-been’, he writes, ‘but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and of the day-after-tomorrow and of the shall-be’.²¹ This may well have been uttered by Janus himself.
A word on Michel Foucault is apposite here as well, particularly regarding his notion of the ‘history of the present’, which was how he described his genealogical method.²² Despite first appearances, the history and futurology of the present are not at all in conflict. Both, in fact, are immanent within the perpetual present. The multifarious routes by which the present is constructed are simultaneously one and the same with those processes by which alternative futures continually come into being. Hence, the history and futurology of the present are not unlike the two faces of Janus. One casts its gaze upstream towards the tributaries and the other downstream towards the delta, but both belong to a common body bobbing upon a single river. While the history of the present challenges linear history and its obsession with the origin, the futurology of the present does likewise with respect to linear futurology and its drive toward the projected end-point of history, or telos. There is no Future with a capital ‘F’; only the delta, opening out onto the infinite expanse of the ocean.
At this point, it must also be made clear that the perpetual present has nothing at all to do with the kind of endless present postulated by neoliberal ideologues. Where the former is the font of infinite alternative futures, of a variable creativity that continually issues forth from the free play of difference, the latter is a present condemned to futurelessness, to an endless reproduction of the status quo. It was in this context that, in response to Margaret Thatcher’s infamous doctrine that ‘There is No Alternative’, the World Social Forum first proposed its counter-slogan of ‘Another World is Possible’. Alterglobalisation activists have since been vindicated in this idea, with the global financial crash of 2008 serving to irreparably discredit the neoliberal experiment. The state bail-out of banks to the tune of trillions revealed the neoliberal discourse (particularly its insistence on minimal state intervention in the economy) to have been fallacious all along. Capital needs the state and has always needed it, not least of all in its policing of unruly citizens. Neoliberalism was never really realised as a system, but functioned only as a legitimating discourse that, in practice, never aligned with what it professed in theory. Following these embarrassing revelations, global elites are increasingly eschewing the concept of neoliberalism, and find themselves conflicted about the way forward. As such, we have now entered into a brand new historical moment; one in which the futurology of the present arguably becomes more important than ever. With neoliberalism staggering along ‘zombie-like’ and ‘ideologically dead’²³, the space has now become wide open for the assertion and enactment of alternatives.
Tying together some of the points I have made thus far, the perpetual present is forever the site of ‘unconsciouses that protest’²⁴, of insubordinate creativity and disobedient desire, of emergent values and practices that lead outwards onto alternative horizons, beyond the mirages conjured up by capitalism, the state, the traditional Left, and all similar such boring and life-denying institutions. It is the work of the futurologist of the present to tease these out from the tangle of everyday life, help increase their visibility, and thereby participate in their propagation. Below, I will seek to expand on these ideas and to further articulate their implications for radical scholarship and writing practices. In so doing, I will focus, first of all, on the challenges that the futurology of the present poses to compartmentalised time (and those modes of writing premised on such a temporality), before proceeding to do likewise with respect to linear time.

Beyond Compartmentalised Time
As touched upon earlier, my contention is that the past-present-future schema of time has been at the root of a profound disarticulation between means and ends in traditional revolutionary politics. Means and ends have only come to be regarded as mutually exclusive entities because present and future have been treated likewise. There has, as such, been a failure to recognise the necessary correspondence between the two; that is, between how we act in the present and the kind of world we wish to see in the future. It is for this reason that we have ended up with such abominations as the Leninist vanguard party, whereby dictatorial practices are supposed to somehow lead to a democratic society.²⁵
Owing to the fact that the idea of compartmentalised time has been little reflected upon in the past, radical nonfiction has tended to take three principle forms; namely, historical treatises, jeremiads, and manifestos, each mapping with its own discrete domain within the past-present-future trinary. The notion of the historical treatise needs little introduction, and the other two have already been briefly discussed. What I would like to do here, however, is to zoom in a little more closely on the jeremiad form. Diagnostic jeremiads like Marx’s three-volume Das Kapital²⁶ are meant to function only as a set of ‘is’ claims upon which prescriptive ‘oughts’ can be based. Marx’s jeremiad- and manifesto-style writings therefore go hand-in-hand. Had David Hume been alive in Marx’s time, he no doubt would have critiqued Marx for assuming that it is even possible to make valid ‘ought’ statements on the basis of descriptive ‘is’ claims.²⁷ For Hume, all such prescriptions are dubious at best. And yet, the assumption that an ‘is’ must necessarily precede an ethical ‘ought’ is still rife amongst radical scholars. There is an unthinking assumption that a complete and ‘objective’ understanding of the present is a necessary prerequisite for effective political action.²⁸ Some jeremiad writers in fact become so consumed with this task, that they fail to even try to imagine alternative possible futures. What matters to them is to first negate the present; to limit themselves to mere resistance, in other words.
Hence, aside from those jeremiads which function within the is-ought framework, there are also those based on ‘is’ descriptions alone; pure lamentations of, or fulminations against, the present configuration of things.²⁹ For the most part, the intention of the lamentative jeremiad is to raise consciousness about this or that issue, such that the reader might somehow, magically, be spurred into action, as if a detailed knowledge of the evils of society was all that was required for this to happen. Precisely how to act on this knowledge is left up to the reader. Often, however, these works have the unintended and reverse effect of leaving the reader feeling overwhelmed and helpless, even despite their politicisation or conscientisation. The futurology of the present, in contrast, aims not to be merely descriptive or prescriptive, but rather, demonstrative. By this I mean that its concern is with fostering inspiration and hope through the demonstration of alternatives. So many contemporary writers and scholar-activists dedicate their lives, as Marx did, to writing about what is wrong with the world, but far fewer have cared to write about what people are already doing to change the world or to bring to light the many living, breathing examples all around us of how things can always be otherwise. Indeed, Harry Cleaver’s observation that Marx’s ‘historical analysis provided much more detail on capitalist domination than on working class subjectivity’³⁰ is an understatement to say the least. This is one reason that radicals so often end up with a perverse fascination for the ‘creativity’ and ‘dynamism’ of capitalism, thereby reifying that which they claim to oppose. One of the ironies here is that capitalists do not create; they simply orchestrate and marshal the creativity of the commons for their own ends.³¹
In contrast to the jeremiad, the futurology of the present starts not with capitalism (or any other kind of domination), but with the ideas and practices of those challenging it. That is not to say, however, that it fails to offer a critique of the various apparatuses of domination. On the contrary, it offers a critique of a radically different kind – one that operates via the presentation of alternatives, of ‘yeses’ that already carry within them a ‘no’. Every innovation, every ‘yes’, embodies a proposal for a different kind of world, but one that is defined, from the outset, against the world that it is leaving behind. The point is to commence with the affirmative, rather than defer it until after the negative. It is in this way that the futurology of the present becomes a project of fomenting hope. It destabilises the taken-for-grantedness of the present, albeit not in a way which disowns it, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels do when they celebrate the communist movement as that ‘which abolishes the present state of things’³². Disavowing oneself of the present in this manner could be seen to be part and parcel of the disastrous disconnect between means and ends, as discussed earlier. Unlike the jeremiad form, the futurology of the present centres not on the negation of the present-day so much as on its continual reinvention. It necessarily remains within the temporality of the perpetual present. It aligns itself, as such, with the radical challenge that Nietzsche poses to Hegelian thought. In Hegel, negation invariably precedes creation, but in the work of Nietzsche, we are presented with the alternative possibility of creation itself as a means of negation.³³ One creates in order to negate, and not vice versa. In prefigurative politics, we prefigure the world we wish to create through our actions in the present, while simultaneously rendering redundant that which we leave behind. And in our futurologies of the living present, we offer an exposition of these other worlds already in construction without having to first negate. Such texts, furthermore, are themselves self-conscious creations. They are not just about the world, but are also added to it, thereby becoming a part of its workings. The creative act – whether on the streets or on the page – is already subversive. To practice creative subversion is not to overthrow, as with mere resistance, but to undercut and displace. Most importantly of all, it is to cultivate alternative futures in the living present and therefore to affirm life despite capitalism.

Beyond Linear Time
Aside from the compartmentalisation of time, we have also inherited from Hegel the idea that time moves in a straight line from an identifiable origin toward an ultimate end-point. Where the historical treatise usually draws a rigid straight line between the origin and the present, the manifesto does likewise between the present and the projected telos. The origin and the telos alike are both employed in the construction of linear timelines in which the progressions from past to present and from present to future are cast as somehow natural and inevitable. The way in which Marx adapted these ideas is by now the stuff of undergraduate textbooks: Guided by the invisible hand of History with a capital ‘H’, we pass through certain inevitable stages, one of which is our capitalist present, in order to eventually arrive at communism. Hence, even as Marxists angrily denounce capitalism, they ironically naturalise the social injustices that it produces as necessary by-products of the inexorable forward impetus of time. This became ludicrously apparent to me in a recent Facebook debate in which one Marxist tried to reason with me that ‘slavery was a necessary stage in human history’. The history and futurology of the present, as mentioned earlier, each seek to disrupt this kind of linearity in their own ways. The former cares not for the single origin, but for the multiple tributaries which have converged upon the present. The latter, meanwhile, concerns itself not with the single telos, but with the deltaic openings spilling out on to oceanic infinity. In each case, past, present and future – and the pathways between them – are denaturalised and rendered contingent. Here, I will focus most especially on the movement between present and future. Hence, while in the previous section, I sought primarily to problematise the jeremiad, I will now endeavour to do likewise with respect to the manifesto.
The manifesto could be thought of as akin to a children’s colouring book. When we are issued a colouring book with all of the designs already pre-determined, all that remains for us to do is to colour them in. Exactly such an idea was expressed by Marx himself when he wrote: ‘It is not enough that thought strive to actualize itself; actuality must itself strive toward thought’³⁴. What he meant by this was that the telos of history was already known in thought and all that was required was for reality to catch up; that is, for the proletariat to fulfill its historic mission. This is a temporality in which the future, paradoxically enough, actually precedes the present, since the telos is always given a priori. As the French-Russian Hegelian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, puts it, ‘the historical movement arises from the Future and passes through the Past in order to realize itself in the Present’.³⁵ The present is thus held in tow by someone or other’s personal utopia, usually cast as universal. As such, it might well be argued that the manifesto form is inherently authoritarian. Martin Luther King had a dream, but so did Mao Tse-Tung. The difference in the latter case was that the dream had rigidified into a nightmarish Plan. The telos upon which such plans are predicated becomes a transcendental ideal; a mirage on the horizon dictating a single path we are to follow if ever we are to reach it. The question is: Who decides upon such ideals and who is enslaved by them? Do those enslaved by other people’s ideals not have dreams of their own? How might we avoid these dreams being steamrolled in the rationalist march of History?
The tyranny of linear time, according to Rosi Braidotti, is that it ‘functions like a black hole into which possible futures implode and disappear’³⁶. To reject this conception of time is therefore to make ‘an ethical choice in favour of the richness of the possible’³⁷. It means to move from the World Social Forum slogan of ‘Another World is Possible’ to the more open idea that many worlds are possible. In addition to the image of the delta invoked earlier, let us also consider Jorge Luis Borges’ evocation of the ‘garden of forking paths’; a garden in which ‘time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures’³⁸. Change at any given point in time occurs through the aleatory and contingent actualisation of any one of these countless possible futures, not through any kind of rational progression. To proceed in this garden is not to progress, since the paths lead not so much forward, but outward. Contra Hegel and Marx, then, history does not consist of a series of logical stages, nor does it move in only one direction. There is only perpetual movement; a processual and protean creativity that wells unceasingly out of the perpetual present. The kind of writing appropriate to this movement is precisely that which I have been calling the futurology of the present. When revolution no longer has anything to do with linear timelines or the realisation of a pre-ordained telos, those self-proclaimed prophets of the hidden god of History cease to have any relevance. The futurology of the present, as such, could well represent a possible new form of non-vanguardist writerly practice. There are no experts or professional revolutionaries diagnosing the present or prescribing the future, as with the jeremiad and manifesto forms respectively. Rather, the writer takes her lead from the autonomous and creative participation of people in the making of their worlds, in social movements and countercultures of all kinds; ‘those crucibles of human sociability and creativity out of which the radically new emerges’³⁹.
Here, it will be worth lingering for a moment with the question of the new. In the introduction to this piece, I emphasised the point that the futurology of the present necessarily requires a special sensitivity toward newness. This stands in stark contrast to past modes of radical writing, which usually subordinated the new to the ostensibly eternal. In the linear temporal schema of the manifesto, there is no such thing as novelty, since the work of activists is not conceptualised as the creation of new forms of life so much as the gradual fulfilment of an essential humanness, or ‘species-being’⁴⁰. This set of essences is deemed to have always been there, hidden beneath the veil of false consciousness.⁴¹ It is the difference between drawing and simply colouring-in. My contention is that the production of novelty needs to be understood on its own terms. As Maurizio Lazzarato puts forth, ‘the conjunctions and disjunctions between things are each time contingent, specific and particular and do not refer back to an essence, substance or deep structure upon which they would be founded’⁴². Once radical writing is able to successfully dissociate itself from any kind of hidden god or pre-ordained telos, it can become instead a valuable means with which to bring to light the open-ended and indeterministic ways that everyday actors at the grassroots creatively negotiate and construct their worlds. The value of this sensibility towards newness lies in the fact that it charges the imagination with an enriched sense of possibilities and demonstrates how the world is forever open to reinvention. This is an antidote, not just to the sense of historical duty preached by the vanguardists and manifesto writers, but also to the pervasive sense of hopelessness peddled by those whose interests lie with the present configuration of things.

A Note on Hope
In the context of this discussion, hope is that intangible but very real feeling that our struggles remain worthwhile; that it is still worth resisting assimilation into the soul-crushing tedium of the system and persisting in our efforts to prefigure alternative futures. However, it is in the interests of the political and economic elite to maintain and reproduce the status quo from which they benefit – and a huge part of this is the effort to ‘destroy any sense of possible alternative futures’; to stamp out any initiatives which hint to how the world might be otherwise or at least ‘to ensure that no one knows about them’⁴³ As such, the capitalists, politicians, police, media, and so on could even be said to constitute ‘a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness’⁴⁴. As Graeber succinctly puts it, ‘hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced’⁴⁵.
I would like to argue, though, that capitalism has not been alone in producing hopelessness.
Revolutionaries too have been just as culpable. From the perspective of the traditional Left, the story of the twentieth century is one of dashed hopes and unfulfilled dreams. It is not that the prophets of History overlooked the importance of hope to our movements, but rather that they propagated endless false hopes in a tomorrow which never comes. Reality was never really able to live up to their manifestos. The prophets will usually fault reality for failing to fulfill their version of utopia, but it is instead their utopia that must be faulted for failing to correspond to reality. It was situated in the distant future, completely cut off from the living present. It was thought, furthermore, that it could be achieved only by means of negation. In practice, negating the present also meant negating oneself. Sacrifice and discipline were what was commanded. Revolutionaries came to conceive of their practice as war, rather than creation, and their creative desires were endlessly deferred until after the revolution. The point I am getting at is that if people today are mired in cynicism and feel helpless to change the world, it is not only because the elites have perfected their bureaucratic apparatus for the production of hopelessness, but also because the traditional Left offers absolutely no alternative. Many people have grown wary of the vanguardists and self-appointed prophets, whose faith in the inevitability of historical progress now seems more misguided than ever, but at the same time have yet to be convinced that alternative revolutionary practices are viable, worthwhile, or even possible. The result is apathy, but an apathy that could very well be political⁴⁶ – a sensibility, perhaps, of profound antipathy towards the authoritarianism of both capitalism and the traditional Left, but one that lacks sufficient hope to be able to be enacted in alternatives.
Many writers who wish to avoid the authoritarianism of the manifesto tradition might very well feel that their solution is to offer simple critiques, sans prescriptions. I would like to argue here, however, that failing to offer any hope at all is no alternative to offering false hope. Even Foucault, whom earlier I identified as an ally, oftentimes falls into this trap. A detailed knowledge about the workings of various forms of power, most notably ‘discipline’⁴⁷, can only take us so far. What then? What about counterpower? Foucault tends to give the impression that the reach of power is total. His concept of the ‘carceral continuum’⁴⁸ means that we are forever on the backfoot, only ever able to resist in a scattered and piecemeal way. But there are some profound ironies here. The first is that, despite Foucault’s philosophical emphasis on contingency, his writings often leave the reader (well, at least this reader) with the impression that relations of force are an inevitable aspect of social life. The second irony is as follows: Foucault knew as much as anyone that our discourses do not simply emerge from the world, but also serve to produce it. Therefore, if we do not allow enough discursive space in our work for resistance, subversion, and counterpower, we only end up reproducing the very conditions of our own incarceration. What is perhaps needed, then, is to make a subtle, yet profound inversion: that it is power on the backfoot, forever in an attempt to contain our uncontainable vitality.⁴⁹ Where things do cohere together and take on the character of something resembling an insurmountable power structure, we would do well to remind ourselves that the longevity of such social formations is, historically-speaking, much more exceptional than the event of their break-up and dissolution – not vice versa. Certainly, it is of paramount importance to understand the world and the systems of oppression and exploitation that we are up against, but if our writing stops there and avoids giving due attention to what people are doing to undo the status quo, then there is the risk that we will only end up leaving our readers feeling disempowered – armed with knowledge, but starved of the hope necessary to act on this knowledge. An example drawn from personal experience – even despite it being in the context of teaching, rather than writing – will illustrate well the point I am attempting to make here.
A few years ago, I was helping to teach an undergraduate course entitled ‘Environmental Issues in Asia’ – one of my earliest experiences as a university educator. In the last class of the semester, I asked each student, as we went around the room, to share one thing that they would be taking away with them from the course. The response that most stood out to me was that of a young Asian Australian man, the gist being more or less as follows:
Well, I came into this really interested in the environment; interested in learning more about the issues and exploring how I could get involved to make a difference. But I’m left feeling really overwhelmed. The issues are just so big and the scale of the challenges so great that I’ve almost lost hope. We’re all doomed. Indeed, there seems these days to be more and more of an apocalyptic zeitgeist about the place, especially when it comes to the environment and issues around climate change. What I realised from this feedback was that, as educators, myself and my colleagues had given too little thought to mitigating against this kind of counter-productive, fatalistic resignation. The course content covered things like dam construction in China, the effects of glacier melt and rising sea levels in Bangladesh, deforestation and oil palm monocultures in Malaysian Borneo, and so on, but gave scant attention to what can be done about such issues (including what we in Australia can do, especially considering the record of some Australian companies in the Asia-Pacific region), or how indigenous peoples and others are already fighting back. On this last point, local peoples have rarely been treated as agents acting on the stage of world history, only as helpless victims. This, however, must change. I realised through this experience how mistaken I had been in thinking that it was enough to simply convey content about the issues, without also conveying hope – not a false hope premised on some transcendental future utopia, but an immanent hope, grounded in real-life, real-world futures already in construction in the present. I hence resolved from then on that, in both my teaching and writing, I would not limit myself to trying to conscientise people simply by pointing out what is wrong with the world. Equally important would be showing what can be done – indeed what already is being done – about injustices everywhere; that relations of force are never total or inevitable and that new worlds are always in construction. Hope (in the very specific sense in which I have been using the term here) is what makes the difference between empowerment and mere conscientisation. And the propagation of such hope, through the exposition of alternative futures already in construction, is one very important role that both radical educators and writers can play.
The futurology of the present, then, might fruitfully be characterised as a practice of hope. It is not simply about the transfer of knowledge, but more significantly of ‘affect’⁵⁰. It is animated by revolutionary desire, while at the same time acting as a relay for this desire to spread. It does not speak about movements, but with them. It thinks with them, moves with them, and tries to inspire movement in turn. This is exactly what happened with a recent article by the North American-based CrimethInc Collective on the Really Really Free Market (RRFM)⁵¹ – an anarchist initiative best described as a kind of celebratory potlatch in which nothing is bartered or sold and everything is free. The idea is that people bring food, clothes, books, art, music, skills, services, or whatever else to share, and the rest takes care of itself. This is a perfect example of prefigurative politics in that it embodies, in the here and now, what an alternative commons-based society would look like. There is no question of having to wait until after the revolution to begin building a new world. And it demonstrates that we do not have to choose between Josef Stalin and Milton Friedman, but rather, can opt for an alternative politics of liberating the commons from both the state and the market. Indeed, the RRFM (along with other such cooperativist initiatives) acquires a new poignancy in light of the Crash of 2008 – its very name being an irreverent poke at neoliberal free market ideology. Soon after the appearance of the CrimethInc article in print and online, RRFMs began popping up across North America, Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. The latest I have heard is that Philippine anarchists are now beginning to organise such events as well, of course adapting them to local conditions. As the idea parachutes into a new context, it immediately enters into a new set of relations and necessarily emerges transformed in the process. It is a becoming and not a matter of simple repetition (unless, however, we are talking about a McDonalds franchise). I should also add here that it is never a matter of initiatives flowing in a one-way direction from the ‘West’ to the ‘Rest’, since there is also considerable cultural traffic in the opposite direction. Consider, for instance, the sheer global influence of the Zapatista movement or of the World Social Forum initiative originating from Brazil. A more recent example might be the affective vector that traversed the Mediterranean from Tahrir Square, Cairo, to Puerta del Sol Square, Madrid, from there emanating throughout the rest of Spain and beyond.
In each of the above cases, the role of the writer in acting as a relay for hope and inspiration cannot be discounted or underestimated. To foment affect in this way is especially revolutionary considering the ‘veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives’⁵². To actively help in circulating, amplifying and making visible the alternatives being realised all around us is to shatter any sense of inevitability. And by this, I am really referring to two things: firstly, to the inevitability of the present promoted by the political-economic elite, and secondly, to the inevitability of the future posited by the traditional Hegelian-Marxist Left. The former would say that there is no alternative to the present; the latter that there is no alternative to their prescribed future. The futurology of the present, in contrast, emphasises that there are always alternatives. It offers examples of creative subversion, while at the same time refusing to channel movement in a particular direction, as with the manifesto form. To participate in the cultivation and propagation of new liberatory potentials – the ‘production of production’⁵³, in short – is enough. What matters is that creativity, desire and the imagination remain free to flourish, rather than be shut down, domesticated, canalised, or stultified.
In addition to the aforementioned CrimethInc article, another work that I would consider as exemplary of the futurology of the present is The Take⁵⁴, a documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein on the workers’ rebellion in Argentina that followed the financial meltdown of 2001. Here, I depart from my focus on writing for a moment, since the futurologist of the present need not necessarily be bound by the written word. The Take’s activist filmmakers aimed to mobilise their audience not solely by rousing in them an indignation against the local elites and International Monetary Fund, but more importantly by highlighting the real alternatives to capitalist social relations that Argentinian workers are already building in the present. Through their appropriation and collective self-management of abandoned factories, these workers are setting about the task of building a new and different kind of economy without having to first take state power. The bosses are not overthrown, but simply made redundant – completely surplus to the needs of society. This is another instance, like the RRFM, of creative subversion. In demonstrating real alternatives and emergent futures, The Take stands in stark contrast to the long tradition of documentary realism amongst radical filmmakers, the goal of which is simply to raise consciousness and bear witness to a given situation of injustice, in much the same vein as the jeremiad. In this style of documentary, the creative autonomy of people on the ground in responding to their situation is submerged or rendered irrelevant – perhaps because it is deemed a priori that local people are incapable of self-organisation and hence that solutions need to come from elsewhere and be imposed from the outside. It is the self-legitimating discourse of vanguardists and professional revolutionaries. The Take, however, partakes of no such nonsense, nor does it limit itself to merely communicating information about what is wrong with the world. Rather, it offers an inspiring, concrete example of how the world can be, and already is becoming, otherwise. In conveying an immanent hope, it too is exemplary of that which I have been calling the futurology of the present.
Graeber’s Direct Action is also worth mentioning.⁵⁵ Graeber, who sometimes likes to refer to himself as a ‘professional optimist’, describes in his book the proposals for a new society embodied in the practices of North American activists in the alterglobalisation movement. His work takes the form of an ethnography, albeit one that centres not on some supposedly static culture (as with traditional ethnographies), but on culture-in-motion. It strikes me that ethnography in the latter mode seems particularly well-suited to the futurology of the present. This is because embodied participation in people’s social worlds arguably allows us to grasp newness in its very contexts of production and at the very moments of its inception. The ethnographer starts with small things in small places and, from there, learns to appreciate their wider significance and connect the dots between them. The small, therefore, is never to be confused with the insignificant or trifling, since, arguably, it is only ‘through attention to detail that we can find different kinds of collectivity in formation’⁵⁶. Social theorists of the more conventional, desk-bound kind have typically overlooked the small details on the ground in favour of abstract theory, but in so doing, they have often also overlooked those formative processes by which newness enters the world.
Without wishing to indulge too much, my own research project at present is one which combines an ethnographic and futurological sensibility. In short, my work is concerned with the fate of national liberation movements under conditions of globalisation, focussing, most importantly, on the tentative green shoots that are beginning to emerge from their ashes.⁵⁷ My primary case study is that of the Philippines, which, although having been granted formal independence from the United States (US) in 1946, is still considered by many Filipin@s⁵⁸ to be under the thumb of US imperialist control – and with good reason. As such, the Maoist insurgency against the US-backed Marcos dictatorship in the 1970s and early 1980s – led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and their armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA) – was imagined as a war of national liberation, in much the same vein as those which arose in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the same period. Despite having mobilised hundreds of thousands of people on countless fronts for almost two decades, the CPP-NPA was ironically absent in the developments which finally brought down the Marcos regime in February 1986. What toppled the dictator in the end was a military mutiny, accompanied by a popular though bloodless uprising. This dramatic turn of events became known as the People Power Revolution. In adherence with Maoist orthodoxy, the CPP-NPA’s focus was guerrilla war in the countryside, and yet the popular uprising that had swept Marcos from power had taken place in urban Manila. Long accustomed to proclaiming themselves as the vanguard of the movement, these developments came as a severe shock to many. The CPP-NPA’s absence in the midst of an insurrection meant that what replaced Marcos was not the long-prophesised communist seizure of state power, but the restoration, at least nominally, of liberal democracy. These events plunged the entire Philippine Left (in which the Maoist CPP had for so long been hegemonic) into a full-blown crisis. This was only further compounded by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union in the years between 1989 and 1991, therefore dovetailing with the generalised Crisis of the Left that had, by that point, become a global phenomenon. By that time, too, the national liberation movements that had won political independence had proven themselves utterly incapable of improving the lot of the populations they now presided over. One set of bureaucrats was simply replaced by another. The same old problems associated with statism persisted, and imperialist logics were indigenised and perpetuated in the form of exclusionary nationalisms.
In 1993, the CPP-NPA imploded, with two-thirds of its members choosing to defect en masse, rejecting not only its increasingly authoritarian leadership, but also Maoist ideology as a whole. Although many of the defectors still find themselves shackled by old habits, their response to the crisis of the Left, for the most part, is not the rectification and reconsolidation of old orthodoxies (as is the case with those who remained loyal to the Party), but an effort to invent new subjectivities more in consonance with the times. Indeed, in my ethnographic fieldwork in both the Philippines and Filipin@ diaspora, these two contrasting responses to the Crisis of the Left – rectification and reinvention – were what I found to constitute the most significant fault-line in Philippine radical politics today. The flipside to the Crisis of the Left, then, has been a vibrant regeneration of radical political culture. With the Marcos dictatorship gone and the Maoists a spent force, there occurred a veritable flowering of new ideas and practices throughout the 1990s, continuing through to the present day. The disintegration of the CPP-NPA in 1993 in fact coincided with the beginning of a boom period for the environmentalist, feminist, and anarchist movements in the Philippines. Today, the Philippine social movement landscape is home to a diverse array of nascent subjectivities, constitutive of efforts to re-found transformative politics on new grounds. During my fieldwork, I sought out those former CPP activists who had broken with Maoism; those who were rethinking all of the old certainties and endeavouring to enact new modes of activism in tune with contemporary realities. I also sought out the younger generation of Filipin@ activists in order to get a sense of both the continuities and discontinuities between their ideas and those of the older generation. In each of these cases, what I paid special attention to was the new; that is, to intimations of alternative futures arising in the present, which I took to be the same thing. These intimations included all manner of emergent, even insurgent, subjectivities – new political tendencies and ways of seeing, innovations in practices and methods, new modes of cultural identification, alternative values, and so on. It is important to point out, though, that these were most often elemental or larval in form – small becomings that did not necessarily add up to fully-baked ideas or practices, nor to formal theory that was written down or codified into political programmes. This did not mean, however, that they were any less significant. On the contrary, these larval subjectivities turned out to be of paramount importance in my work, since it was at the micropolitical level of identity and desire that some of my most significant insights were gleaned. In addition, the concept of hope that I detailed earlier remained, at all times, extremely pertinent, since the novel imaginings, identities, values, practices, and experiments that I picked up on already point the way beyond the impasse within which many activists have floundered in recent decades. From the ruins of the traditional Left, a new radical politics for the twenty-first century is in the process of being born.
Although having presented a number of examples of the kinds of things that the futurology of the present concerns itself with, each in relation to the idea of immanent hope, I do wish to leave a degree of openness in my formulation so that readers can remain free to take up the practice and carry it in their own directions. Social movements, often the hotbeds of cultural innovation, have been my main focus in this article, but they certainly need not constitute the entirety of what the futurologist of the present looks at. Glimpses and intimations of other worlds in the making are indeed all around us. There is, in all spheres of life, an ‘unceasing creation’ and ‘uninterrupted upsurge of novelty’⁵⁹. Anywhere where there is an autonomous cultural production taking place, outside of the habituated channels by which the status quo reproduces itself, is a potential site for the futurologist of the present to involve herself in and draw inspiration from. Wherever there is disobedience, insubordination, creative maladjustment, play, experimentation, or creation, no matter whether at the micro or macro scale, there is something happening which deserves our attention.

Revisiting the Art-Activism Nexus
Apart from hope, another point that has resurfaced throughout this article is the vital place of creativity. This idea, however, will now need to be unpacked and expanded upon. It turns out that the ways in which I have been using the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’ have really been operating on three distinct levels. There is, first of all, the ontological creativity of the ‘chaosmos’⁶⁰ – a point alluded to upon my introduction of the concept of the perpetual present. Secondly, there is the creativity of activists and countercultural deviants. Thirdly, there is the creativity of artists and writers in their production and relaying of affect. Although each of these forms of creativity are able to be distinguished from one another, it is the relationships between them, and not the categorical divisions, which are of paramount importance here. To begin with, activist practice aligns with creativity in the first sense in that to forge new forms of life outside of prevailing apparatuses of domination is to allow ontological processes of creation to continue flourishing without blockage or curtailment. From the moment there is an imposition of relations of force, or a reduction of life to either state or market logics, there is creative subversion. ‘Life revolts against everything that confines it’⁶¹, as Suely Rolnik felicitously puts it. The same could certainly be said of creativity in the artistic sense.
Activists and artists alike converge in the figure of the creator – that inventor of new values of the kind celebrated by Nietzsche⁶² as well as by autonomist theorists of ‘self-valorization’⁶³ – in that they self-consciously endeavour to bring newness into the world. Each intervenes into the material-semiotic realm that we have become accustomed to calling ‘culture’ and there, works to shake up and reinvent conventional ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, valuing, doing. Hence, to revisit a point I made in the beginning of this article, perhaps there is little real difference between making art and making change. Perhaps the production of new forms of life by activists is itself an art – not art that simply represents life, but art that is utterly indistinguishable from it.⁶⁴ As such, the futurologist of the present does not simply observe and describe at a distance the alternative futures arising in social movements and countercultural milieux, but rather, participates politically in their production and propagation. In other words, to write of countercultural practice, broadly conceived, need not take the form of a detached reportage, but can alternately become a countercultural practice in its own right. Before there was ever such a thing as viral YouTube videos, there were contagions of revolutionary desire of the kind that spread with lightning speed in 1848, 1968, 1989–1991, and 1999–2001, not to mention the Arab Spring currently underway. The principle, though, is the same. One important role that the radical writer can play, as I have suggested, is to act as a relay through which such contagions can spread – not as a spokesperson or representative of a given initiative or movement, but as a participant; an element amongst others, animated only by the winds of collective desire that fill her sails.
At this point, yet further unpacking of the concept of creativity will be required. Implicit in this article to date has been an idea of creativity defined in opposition to two separate, albeit related, aspects of Hegelian dialectics. The first is the primacy that Hegel accords to negation, which relates to the past-present-future trinary of compartmentalised time. The second, meanwhile, is Hegel’s faith in an ultimate telos, inextricably related to the notion of linear time. I will discuss each of these in turn, zooming in first of all on creation beyond negation, before then turning my attention to creation beyond teleology.
It is only owing to the dialectical schema imported into radical politics by Marx that we have come to conceptualise movement practice as war rather than as creation. Had radical politics been based upon an alternative set of premises, the history of the recent past might have looked very different. From today’s standpoint, Tristan Tzara’s quip in the early twentieth century that ‘dialectics kills’⁶⁵ seems strangely prescient of what was to ensue. ‘It lives by producing corpses, which lie strewn across an empty field where the wind has ceased to blow’, he continued.⁶⁶ Tzara was a key figure in the Dada movement, and what set the Dadaists apart from other avant-garde groups was precisely their staunch anti-Hegelianism. In fact, the Dada Manifesto of 1918 was not really a manifesto at all.⁶⁷ Instead, what Tzara produced was a parody of the very manifesto form, mocking his contemporaries for the Hegelian sense of historical self-importance which they accorded themselves.
Tzara’s distaste for Hegel was likely to have been inherited from Nietzsche, a well-known influence on Dada. The idea that dialectics kills has echoes of Nietzsche all through it, perhaps no better illustrated than when he affirmed: ‘We have art in order not to die of the truth’⁶⁸. For Hegel, truth meant dialectics and the law of negation, to which Nietzsche counterposed an affirmative philosophy of creation. He upheld creativity and the artistic sensibility as alternatives to those modes of thought which attempt to reduce reality to a stable set of laws, axioms, and equations. For Marx and Hegel, creation is always suspended until after the moment of negation, but Nietzsche’s radical contribution was to free creativity from the negative, while at the same time freeing temporality from the past-present-future trinary. Jeremiad writers and documentary realists are amongst those who continue to enslave their creative sensibilities to the negative, their practice bound by an unthinking adherence to Hegelian folk theories. Their overarching imperative of needing to first negate the present means that they fail to appreciate the creativity happening all around them. Blinded by the Sun of Hegel, they lose sight all those other stars out there; those ideas, practices, and intimations of alternative futures continually coming into being in our midst. Once we are able to regain our vision, our actions in the present cease to be rendered simply as means to an end, but instead become ‘means without end’⁶⁹ – a protean creativity and endless becoming that knows no discrete temporal stages, no telos, no hidden god. When means and ends become discordant, we forget that both are in fact immanent within the perpetual present. Creativity needs to be able to flourish, and to do so it must be liberated from negation. This is the place of means without end, of prefigurative politics, of the futurology of the present, and of all art that ceases to become abstracted from life and instead becomes life itself.
Having just discussed the possibility of creation beyond negation, I will now direct my critical gaze to creation beyond teleology. To free temporality from the telos of linear time is to do away with the idea that there is any kind of intrinsic point to history. Earlier, I recounted a Facebook debate I had with one particular Marxist who insisted that slavery was a necessary stage in human history. In this case, the African peoples brought to the Americas were quite literally the slaves of someone else’s future. This trans-Atlantic trade in human lives, however, was a contingent and non-inevitable event, not a progression along a linear timeline toward some ultimate telos – no matter whether the telos of colonial masters or Marxist historiographers. For the prophets of the hidden god of History to naturalise the entire past as inevitable only makes them the strange bedfellows of the slave-masters. And their naturalisation of the future only makes all of us slaves, condemned to playing catch-up with their version of what the future should look like.
In this schema, there can never be anything new, since everything is already given a priori. The future is foreordained and simply awaits realisation. Only when we can unmoor ourselves from hidden gods, illusory tomorrows, and other such stultifying ideas, can we really embrace creativity and appreciate the production of novelty on its own terms. From the instant that the god of History is dethroned by Janus, infinite horizons fan out in all directions. And our creativity suddenly becomes creativity per se, not the mere fulfilment of a telos. This is an idea I characterised earlier in terms of drawing, rather than merely colouring-in. The blank sketchbook knows no a priori designs; only the a posteriori marks that we leave behind as we move. In the realm of activism, this sensibility is embodied in the practice of prefigurative politics – a break not only from the cult of negation, but also from the idea that revolution has to mean fulfilling some programme handed down from on high. As Graeber writes, ‘we’re all already revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new’⁷⁰. What this means for radical writing, meanwhile, is to do away with manifestos and instead tune our attention into the profound creativity everywhere in our midst. Unlike in the manifesto tradition, the futurology of the present does not prescribe a single monolithic future, but tries instead to articulate the many alternative futures continually emerging in the perpetual present. The goal of such an endeavour is to make visible the living, breathing alternatives all around us, while at the same time fomenting an immanent hope that can spread virally and be enacted in other places elsewhere.
To sacrifice today in the name of an illusory tomorrow is just not the point anymore. It is for this reason that I chose to open with those extraordinary words from Janis Joplin – tomorrow never happens. The point is to draw, not simply to colour-in or fulfill some pre-ordained utopian future. It is to continually re-invent reality from within reality, rather than from some external, transcendental standpoint such as that mystical realm where invisible hands and hidden gods reside. As an aside, it has occurred to me, as I sit here at my kitchen table punching out these final words, what a happy coincidence it is that the names Janis and Janus bear such a striking resemblance to one another. If I was a visual artist (not just a writer-cum-artist manqué), I would no doubt enjoy experimenting with ways to combine the two in some sort of installation – perhaps a stone bust of Janus, singing in the unmistakably raw and passionate voice of one of the legends of the hippie movement. But it matters not that I am no artist in any formal sense, since each of us are already artists of the present in our own ways. ‘One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette’, writes Guattari.⁷¹ The parallel he draws between art and social transformation is not to be taken as mere metaphor, however. What he calls for is a merging of art with life, his contention being that global warming and the other great issues of our times cannot be adequately addressed ‘without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society’⁷². To the ends of forging a more habitable and convivial present, the cross-fertilisations between artistic and activist practices need to continue proliferating, and creativity in general must remain free to flourish. Just as the economic crisis in Argentina in 2001 was quickly and creatively responded to by way of a slew of liberatory initiatives at the grassroots (including the occupied factory movement discussed earlier), the same is now happening in response to the current economic crisis, albeit at a global scale. In these conditions, the futurology of the present is needed now more than ever. The question becomes whether to resign ourselves to the life-denying ossification of creativity under capitalism and the traditional Left alike, or, to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned and to participate passionately and deliberately in the production of the new.

1.) Acknowledgements are due first of all to Anamaine Asinas for all her love, support, and inspiration. Ana – I cannot help but think that the kind of intensely passionate, nurturing and mutually-liberating relationship we share is the very stuff that revolutions are made of. I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to Eric Pido and Marta Celletti, since it was in many a conversation with these dear friends that some of the ideas presented in this article were first formed. Sincere thank yous must also go out to Marc Herbst, Rosi Braidotti, Steven Morgana, Suzanne Passmore, and Elmo Gonzaga, each of whom kindly read various incarnations of this work and provided some very helpful and encouraging feedback. Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of the many activists whom I have worked with over the years, since it is really the collective imagination of our movements that is the true author of this work.
2.) Janis Joplin, ‘Ball and Chain’ in Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits, CBS Records, 1973.
3.) See Gottfried Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977 [1807].
4.) As the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève put it: ‘Time in which the Future takes primacy can be realized, can exist, only provided that it negates or annihilates’. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Basic Books, New York, 1969, p. 136. Hegel’s ideas on negation are drawn, in no small part, from physics: ‘In modern physical science the opposition, first observed to exist in magnetism as polarity, has come to be regarded as a universal law pervading the whole of nature’ (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 223). Here he takes the positive-negative opposition found in electrical and magnetic phenomena and adapts it to social relations, elevating it as a mechanical law governing all of history.
5.) See, for example, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992 [1848]; Michael Albert, Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy, AK Press, San Francisco, 2000; and George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, New Press, New York, 2004. The manifestos of the twentieth century avant-gardes (Futurist, Surrealist, Situationist, and so on) are perfectly exemplary too – with the exception, perhaps, of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, which was more a parody of the manifesto form.
6.) See, for example, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992 [1848]; Michael Albert, Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy, AK Press, San Francisco, 2000; and George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order, New Press, New York, 2004. The manifestos of the twentieth century avant-gardes (Futurist, Surrealist, Situationist, and so on) are perfectly exemplary too – with the exception, perhaps, of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, which was more a parody of the manifesto form.
7.) Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A critique of the state-form, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994, p. 6.
8.) Rebecca Solnit, 2009, ‘The Revolution Has Already Occurred’, The Nation, viewed 19 April 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/solnit, p. 13.
9.) Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson & Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, Pluto Press, London, 2008, p. xiii.
10.) Gilles Deleuze, ‘What is a dispositif?’, in T. J. Armstrong (ed), Michel Foucault: Philosopher, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992, p. 163.
11.) Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995, p. 12.
12.) Colectivo Situaciones, 2003, ‘On the Researcher-Militant’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, viewed 28 January 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en, p. 3.
13.) David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2004, p. 12.
14.) Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Multiplicity, Totality, Politics’, Parrhesia, iss. 9, 2010, p. 24.
15.) Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, pp. ix–xv.
16.) See Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory, Pluto Press, London, 2008; and Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization, Duke University Press, Durham, 2008.
17.) Bruno Latour, ‘Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern!: Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 21, iss. 1, 1990, pp. 145–171.
18.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 92. Here, Guattari draws from the concept of ‘duration’ as found in Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, Dover Publications, Mineola, 1998 [1911].
19.) Cited in Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2007, p. 47.
20.) Scott Littleton, Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology, Vol. 6, Marshall Cavendish, Tarrytown, 2005, p. 770.
21.) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Books, London, 2003 [1885], p. 150.
22.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin, London, 1991 [1977], p. 31; Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in P. Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, Penguin Books, London, 1984, pp. 76–100.
23.) Free Association, 2010, How to generate a generation, viewed 25 February 2011, http://freelyassociating.org/2010/10/how-to-generate-a-generation/, p. 1.
24.) Gilles Deleuze cited in Félix Guattari & Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2008 [1986], p. 19.
25.) See Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What is to be Done?, Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1963 [1902].
26.) Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Penguin Books, London, 1986 [1867]; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, Penguin Books, London, 1985 [1885]; Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3, Penguin Books, London, 1981 [1894].
27.) See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007 [1740].
28.) An analogy might help to illustrate the problematic I am dealing with here: Imagine that you are a houseguest at the home of a friend and you get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. The only problem is that there is an electrical storm outside and the power has failed. All is dark. Would it be necessary to have a complete map of the entire household in your mind in order to be able to reach the bathroom, or might it also be possible to feel your way there through the dark? The futurology of the present is not concerned with the map of the house; only with those feeling their way through the dark. Instances of the latter kind are what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has referred to as ‘absorbed coping’. See Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, Merleau-Ponty and ‘Phenomenology of perception’, Routledge, Abingdon, 2011, pp. 96–97.
29.) Examples include Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, Berg, Oxford, 2005; Paul Virilio 2005, The Information Bomb, Verso, London; and Annie Le Brun 2008, The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm, Inner Traditions, Rochester.
30.) Harry Cleaver, 1992, ‘Kropotkin, Self-Valorization and the Crisis of Marxism’, Libcom, viewed 9 March 2010, http://libcom.org/library/kropotkin-self-valorization-crisis-marxism, p. 4.
31.) The commons could be considered as capitalism’s constitutive outside. It is the very lifeblood of capital and yet, even as it is harnessed, it must simultaneously be negated lest it threaten the calcified order necessary for capitalism’s own reproduction. The concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ has been drawn here from Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex“, Routledge, New York, 1993, pp. 3, 8.
32.) Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976 [1847], p. 57.
33.) Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. See also Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Athlone Press, London, 1983 [1962].
34.) Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982 [1844], p. 138.
35.) Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 136.
36.) Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 167.
37.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 29.
38.) Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ in D. Yates & J. Irby (eds), Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, New Directions, New York, 1964, p. 28.
39.) Richard Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, Pluto Press, London, 2005, p. 183.
40.) Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’ in K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1961 [1844], pp. 67–83.
41.) This is an idea expressed in Gottfried Hegel, ‘The doctrine of essence’ in W. Wallace (ed), The logic of Hegel, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1892 [1817], pp. 207–286. ‘[T]hings really are not what they immediately show themselves … there is a permanent in things, and that permanent is in the first instance their Essence’ (pp. 208–209).
42.) Lazzarato, ‘Multiplicity, Totality, Politics’, p. 24.
43.) David Graeber, 2008, ‘Hope in Common’, The Anarchist Library, viewed 1 July 2011, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/David_Graeber__Hope_in_Common.html, pp. 1, 4.
44.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 1.
45.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 1
46.) This formulation of a ‘political apathy’ is indebted to the work of Feeltank Chicago. See Jerome Mast Grand, Amber Hasselbring & Corndog Brothers, 2008, ‘Renaming Bush Street’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, iss. 6, viewed 5 July 2011, http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/6/antiwar/renamingbushstreet.html.
47.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
48.) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 293–308.
49.) Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000.
50.) My thinking on affect is primarily sourced from Brian Massumi, Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation, Duke University Press, Durham, 2002. In short, affect is the capacity to affect and be affected. It is not a personal feeling, but a pre-personal intensity that exists only in flows between people and things.
51.) CrimethInc., 2008, ‘The Really Really Free Market: Instituting the Gift Economy’, CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, viewed 8 July 2011, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/reallyreally.php.
52.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 1.
53.) Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Penguin, New York, 2009 [1972], pp. 4–8.
54.) Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein, The Take, Barna-Alper Productions, New York, 2004.
55.) David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, AK Press, Oakland, 2009.
56.) Penny Harvey & Soumhya Venkatesan, ‘Faith, Reason and the Ethic of Craftsmanship: Creating Contingently Stable Worlds’, in M. Candea (ed), The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments, Routledge, Abingdon, p. 130.
57.) The bulk of my research results are still in the process of being written up, although a few preliminary sketches have so far been published. See, for instance, Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘Sketches of an Archipelagic Poetics of Postcolonial Belonging’, Budhi: A Journal of Culture and Ideas, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2007, pp. 239–246; and Marco Cuevas-Hewitt, ‘The Figure of the “Fil-Whatever“: Filipino American Trans-Pacific Social Movements and the Rise of Radical Cosmopolitanism’, World Anthropologies Network E-Journal, no. 5, 2010, pp. 97–127.
58.) I seek to neutralise gender here by synthesising both the feminine and masculine suffixes (‘-a’ and ‘-o’, respectively) into the new suffix of ‘-@’. The reason that I have chosen this form over the standard ‘Filipino’ is that I wish to avoid using a gender-specific descriptor to stand in for all Filipin@s. This is an unfortunate grammatical inheritance from Spanish colonialism, since pre-Hispanic indigenous languages in the Philippine archipelago were, by and large, gender-neutral. I might have chosen to use the alternative suffix of ‘-a/o’ but decided against it, not just because it reads somewhat clumsily, but more importantly because it perpetuates the rigid binary notion of gender by which genderqueer individuals are marginalised.
59.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 29.
60.) Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London, 2004 [1987], p. 7.
61.) Cited in Guattari & Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, p. 87.
62.) Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1989 [1886].
63.) Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Anti/Theses, Leeds, 2000 [1979], p. 18; Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, Verso, London, 2005, pp. 198–207, 215–230.
64.) See John Jordan, ‘Deserting the Culture Bunker’, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, iss. 3, viewed 10 July 2011, http://www.joaap.org/new3/jordan.html.
65.) Cited in Lee Scrivner, ‘How to Write an Avant-Garde Manifesto (A Manifesto)’, London Consortium, viewed 9 July 2011, http://www.londonconsortium.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/scrivneripmessay.pdf, p. 13.
66.) Cited in Scrivner, ‘How to Write an Avant-Garde Manifesto (A Manifesto)’, p. 13.
67.) Tristan Tzara, 2006 [1918], ‘Dada Manifesto’, Wikisource, viewed 4 July 2011, http://www.freemedialibrary.com/index.php/Dada_Manifesto_(1918,_Tristan_Tzara).
68.) Cited in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Penguin Books, London, 2005 [1942], p. 90.
69.) Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000.
70.) Graeber, ‘Hope in Common’, p. 4.
71.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 7. To interpret Guattari here as saying that the production of novelty is simply a straightforward matter of human intent and free will would be gravely mistaken. Becomings can only occur through ‘heterogenesis’ (pp. 33–57); that is, through a multiplicity of elements in symbiosis. In the case of multiplicities in which human beings play a part, subjectivity is certainly one ingredient in the mix, but it does not assume the role of primary causal determinant. There is always an unpredictability to heterogenesis and we often we end up with entirely different outcomes to what we originally intended. It must furthermore be stressed that human subjectivity does not exist on some separate plane of reality as René Descartes presumed, but must rather be seen to be part of matter.
72.) Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 20.

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Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

In the last months there have been, time and again, mass demonstrations on the street, in the square, and though these are very often motivated by different political purposes, something similar happens: bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space. Now, it would be easier to say that these demonstrations or, indeed, these movements, are characterized by bodies that come together to make a claim in public space, but that formulation presumes that public space is given, that it is already public and recognized as such. We miss something of the point of public demonstrations if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed, and even fought over, when these crowds gather. So though these movements have depended on the prior existence of pavement, street, and square and have often enough gathered in squares, such as Tahrir, whose political history is potent, it is equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture. As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. And when crowds move outside the square, to the side street or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more happens.
At such a moment, politics is not defined as taking place exclusively in the public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street, or in the neighborhood, or indeed in those virtual spaces that are equally unbound by the architecture of the house and the square. So when we think about what it means to assemble in a crowd, a growing crowd, and what it means to move through public space in a way that contests the distinction between public and private, we see some ways that bodies in their plurality lay claim to the public, find and produce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the matter of material environments; at the same time, those material environments are part of the action, and they themselves act when they become the support for action. In the same way, when trucks or tanks are rendered inoperative and suddenly speakers climb on them to address the crowd, the military instrument itself becomes a support or platform for a nonmilitary resistance, if not a resistance to the military itself; at such moments, the material environment is actively reconfigured and refunctioned, to use the Brechtian term. And our ideas of action then need to be rethought.
In the first instance, no one mobilizes a claim to move and assemble freely without moving and assembling together with others. In the second instance, the square and the street are not only the material supports for action, but they themselves are part of any account of bodily public action we might propose. Human
action depends upon all sorts of supports – it is always supported action. We know from disability studies that the capacity to move depends upon instruments and surfaces that make movement possible and that bodily movement is supported and facilitated by nonhuman objects and their particular capacity for agency. In the case of public assemblies, we see quite clearly the struggle over what will be public space, but also an equally fundamental struggle over how bodies will be supported in the world – a struggle for employment and education, equitable food distribution, livable shelter, and freedom of movement and expression, to name a few.
Of course, this produces a quandary. We cannot act without supports, and yet we must struggle for the supports that allow us to act or, indeed, that are essential components of our action. It was the Roman idea of the public square that formed the background for Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the rights of assembly and free speech, of action and the exercise of rights. Hannah Arendt surely had both the classical Greek polis and the Roman Forum in mind when she claimed that all political action requires the “space of appearance.” She writes, for instance, “the polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” The “true” space then lies “between the people” which means that as much as any action takes place in a located somewhere, it also establishes a space which belongs properly to alliance itself. For Arendt, this alliance is not tied to its location. In fact, alliance brings about its own location, highly transposable. She writes: “action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anywhere and anytime.”¹
So how do we understand this highly if not infinitely transposable notion of political space? Whereas Arendt maintains that politics requires the space of appearance, she also claims that space brings politics about: “it is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men (sic) exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.”² Something of what she says here is clearly true. Space and location are created through plural action. And yet, in her view, action, in its freedom and its power, has the exclusive capacity to create location. Such a view forgets or refuses that action is always supported and that it is invariably bodily, even, as I will argue, in its virtual forms. The material supports for action are not only part of action, but they are also what is being fought about, especially in those cases when the political struggle is about food, employment, mobility, and access to institutions. To rethink the space of appearance in order to understand the power and effect of public demonstrations for our time, we will need to consider more closely the bodily dimensions of action, what the body requires, and what the body can do,³ especially when we must think about bodies together in a historical space that undergoes a historical transformation by virtue of their collective action: What holds them together there, and what are their conditions of persistence and of power in relation to their precarity and exposure?
I would like to think about this itinerary by which we travel from the space of appearance to the contemporary politics of the street. Even as I say this, I cannot hope to gather together all the forms of demonstration we have seen, some of which are episodic, some of which are part of ongoing and recurrent social and political movements, and some of which are revolutionary. I hope to think about what might gather together these gatherings, these public demonstrations. During the winter of 2011, they included demonstrations against tyrannical regimes in North Africa and the Middle East, but also against the escalating precaritization of working peoples in Europe and in the Southern Hemisphere, the struggles for public education throughout the United States and Europe, and, most recently, in Chile, and struggles to make the street safe for women and for gender and sexual minorities, including trans people, whose public appearance is too often punishable by legal and illegal violence. In public assemblies by trans and queer people, the claim is often made that the streets must be made safe from the police who are complicit in criminality, especially on those occasions when the police support criminal regimes or when, for instance, the police commit the very crimes against sexual and gender minorities that they were supposed to prevent. Demonstrations are one of the few ways that police power is overcome, especially when those assemblies become at once too large and too mobile, too condensed and too diffuse, to be contained by police power and when they have the resources to regenerate themselves on the spot.
Perhaps these are anarchist moments or anarchist passages, when the legitimacy of a regime or its laws is called into question, but when no new legal regimen has yet arrived to take its place. This time of the interval is one in which the assembled bodies articulate a new time and space for the popular will, not a single identical will, not a unitary will, but one that is characterized as an alliance of distinct and adjacent bodies whose action and whose inaction demands a different future. Together they exercise the performative power to lay claim to the public in a way that is not yet codified into law and that can never be fully codified into law. And this performativity is not only speech, but the demands of bodily action, gesture, movement, congregation, persistence, and exposure to possible violence. How do we understand this acting together that opens up time and space outside and against the established architecture and temporality of the regime, one that lays claim to materiality, leans into its supports, draws from its material and technical dimensions to rework their functions? Such actions reconfigure what will be public and what will be the space of politics.
I push against Hannah Arendt even as I draw upon her resources to clarify my own position. Her work supports my action here, but I also refuse it in some ways. Arendt’s view is confounded by its own gender politics, relying as it does on a distinction between the public and private domains that leaves the sphere of politics to men and reproductive labor to women. If there is a body in the public sphere, it is presumptively masculine and unsupported, presumptively free to create, but not itself created. And the body in the private sphere is female, ageing, foreign, or childish, and always prepolitical. Although she was, as we know from the important work of Adriana Cavarero, a philosopher of natality, Arendt understood this capacity to bring something into being as a function of political speech and action. Indeed, when male citizens enter into the public square to debate questions of justice, revenge, war, and emancipation, they take the illuminated public square for granted as the architecturally bounded theatre of their speech. And their speech becomes the paradigmatic form of action, physically cut off from the private do-micile, itself shrouded in darkness and reproduced through activities that are not quite action in the proper and public senses. Men make the passage from that private darkness to that public light and, once illuminated, they speak, and their speech interrogates the principles of justice it articulates, becoming itself a form of critical inquiry and democratic participation. For Arendt, rethinking this classical scene within political modernity, speech is understood as the bodily and linguistic exercise of rights. Bodily and linguistic – how are we to reconceive these terms and their intertwining here against and beyond that presumption of a gendered division of labor?
For Arendt, political action takes place on the condition that the body appear. I appear to others, and they appear to me, which means that some space between us allows each to appear. One might expect that we appear within a space or that we are supported by a material organization of space. But that is not her argument. The sphere of appearance is not simple, since it seems to arise only on the condition of a certain intersubjective facing off. We are not simply visual phenomena for each other – our voices must be registered, and so we must be heard; rather, who we are, bodily, is already a way of being “for” the other, appearing in ways that we can neither see nor hear; that is, we are made available, bodily, for another whose perspective we can neither fully anticipate nor control. In this way, I am, as a body, not only for myself, not even primarily for myself, but find myself, if I find myself at all, constituted and dispossessed by the perspective of others. So, for political action, I must appear to others in ways I cannot know, and in this way, my body is established by perspectives that I cannot inhabit, but that, surely, inhabit me. This is an important point because it is not the case that the body only establishes my own perspective; it is also what displaces that perspective and makes that displacement into a necessity. This happens most clearly when we think about bodies that act together. No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise, happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerges from the “between.”
It is both problematic and interesting that, for Arendt, the space of appearance is not only an architectural given: “the space of appearance comes into being,” she writes, “wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm may be organized.”⁴ In other words, this space of appearance is not a location that can be separated from the plural action that brings it about; it is not there outside of the action that invokes and constitutes it. And yet, if we are to accept this view, we have to understand how the plurality that acts is itself constituted. How does a plurality form, and what material supports are necessary for that formation? Who enters this plurality, and who does not, and how are such matters decided?
How do we describe the action and the status of those beings disaggregated from the plural? What political language do we have in reserve for describing that exclusion and the forms of resistance that crack open the sphere of appearance as it is currently delimited? Are those who live on the outside of the sphere of appearance the deanimated “givens” of political life? Are they mere life or bare life? Are we to say that those who are excluded are simply unreal, disappeared, or that they have no being at all – shall they be cast off, theoretically, as the socially dead and the merely spectral? If we do that, we not only adopt the position of a particular regime of appearance, but ratify that perspective, even if our wish is to call it into question. Do such formulations describe a state of having been made destitute by -existing political arrangements, or is that destitution unwittingly ratified by a theory that adopts the perspective of those who regulate and police the sphere of appearance itself?
At stake is the question of whether the destitute are outside of politics and power or are they in fact living out a specific form of political destitution along with specific forms of political agency and resistance that expose the policing of the boundaries of the sphere of appearance itself. If we claim that the destitute are outside of the sphere of politics – reduced to depoliticized forms of being – then we implicitly accept as right the dominant ways of establishing the limits of the political. In some ways, this follows from the Arendtian position that adopts the internal point of view of the Greek polis on what politics should be, who should gain entry into the public square, and who should remain in the private. Such a view disregards and devalues those forms of political agency that emerge precisely in those domains deemed prepolitical or extrapolitical and that break into the sphere of appearance as from the outside, as its outside, confounding the distinction between inside and outside. For in revolutionary or insurrectionary moments, we are no longer sure what is the space of politics, just as we are often unsure about exactly in what time we are living, since the established regimes of both space and time are upended in ways that expose their violence and their contingent limits. We see this when undocumented workers gather in the city of Los Angeles to claim their rights of assembly and of citizenship without being citizens, without having any legal right to do so. Their labor is supposed to remain necessary and shrouded from the view, and so when these laboring bodies emerge on the street, act like citizens, they make a mimetic claim to citizenship that alters not only how they appear, but how the sphere of appearance works. Indeed, the sphere of appearance is both mobilized and disabled when an exploited and laboring class emerges on the street to announce itself and express its opposition to being the unseen condition of what appears as political.
The impetus for Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life“ derives from this very conception of the polis in Arendt’s political philosophy and, I would suggest, runs the risk of this very problem: if we seek to take account of exclusion itself as a political problem, as part of politics it-self, then it will not do to say that once excluded, those beings lack appearance or “reality“ in political terms, that they have no social or political standing or are cast out and reduced to mere being (forms of givenness precluded from the sphere of action). Nothing so metaphysically extravagant has to happen if we agree that one reason the sphere of the political cannot be defined by the classic conception of the polis is that we are then deprived of having and using a language for those forms of agency and resistance that focus on the politics of exclusion itself or, indeed, that operate against those regimes of power that maintain the stateless and disenfranchised in conditions of destitution. Few matters could be more politically consequential.
Although Agamben borrows from Foucault to articulate a conception of the biopolitical, the thesis of “bare life” remains untouched by that conception. As a result, we cannot within that vocabulary describe the modes of agency and action undertaken by the stateless, the occupied, and the disenfranchised, since even the life stripped of rights is still within the sphere of the political and is thus not reduced to mere being, but is, more often than not, angered, indignant, rising up and resisting. To be outside established and legitimate political structures is still to be saturated in power relations, and this saturation is the point of departure for a theory of the political that includes dominant and subjugated forms, modes of inclusion and legitimation as well as modes of delegitimation and effacement.
Luckily, I think Arendt did not consistently follow this model from The Human Condition, which is why, for instance, in the early 1960s, she turned her attention to the fate of refugees and the stateless, and came to assert in that context the right to have rights. The right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organization for its legitimacy. Like the space of appearance, the right to have rights predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right; at the same time, it is derived from no natural set of laws. The right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by those who act in concert, in alliance. Those who are excluded from existing polities, who belong to no nation-state or other contemporary state formation, may be deemed “unreal“ only by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality. And yet even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they act. Whether they are abandoned to precarity or left to die through systematic negligence, concerted action still emerges from their acting together. And this is what we see, for instance, when undocumented workers amass on the street without the legal right to do so, when squatters lay claim to buildings in Argentina as a way of exercising the right to livable shelter, when populations lay claim to a public square that has belonged to the military, or when the refugees take part in collective uprisings demanding shelter, food, and rights of sanctuary, when populations amass, without the protection of the law and without permits to demonstrate, to bring down an unjust or criminal regime of law or to protest austerity measures that destroy the possibility of employment and education for many. Or when those whose public appearance is itself criminal, transgendered people in Turkey or women who wear the niqa-b in France, appear in order to contest that criminal status and assert the right to appear.
Indeed, in the public demonstrations that often follow from acts of public mourning, as in Syria in recent months, where crowds of mourners became targets of military destruction, we can see how the existing public space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there, who emerge from zones of disappearance to become bodies exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering and persisting publically as they do. Indeed, it is their right to gather free of intimidation and the threat of violence that is systematically attacked by the police, the army, hired gangs, or mercenaries. To attack those bodies is to attack the right itself, since when those bodies appear and act, they are exercising a right outside, against, and in the face of the regime.
Although the bodies on the street are vocalizing their opposition to the legitimacy of the state, they are also, by virtue of occupying and persisting in that space with-out protection, posing their challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body “speaks“ politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The persistence of the body in its exposure calls that legitimacy into question and does so precisely through a performativity of the body. Both action and gesture signify and speak, both as action and claim; the one is not finally extricable from the other. Where the legitimacy of the state is brought into question precisely by that way of appearing in public, the body itself exercises a right that is no right; in other words, it exercises a right that is being actively contested and destroyed by military force and that, in its resistance to force, articulates its way of living, showing both its precarity and its way to persist. This right is codified nowhere. It is not granted from elsewhere or by existing law, even if it sometimes finds support precisely there. It is, in fact, the right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as the persistence of the body against those forces that seek its debilitation or eradication. This persistence that requires breaking into the established regime of space with a set of material supports both mobilized and mobilizing.
Just to be clear: I am not referring to a vitalism or a right to life as such. Rather, I am suggesting that political claims are made by bodies as they appear and act, as they refuse and as they persist under conditions in which that fact alone is taken to be an act of delegitimation of the state. It is not that bodies are simply mute life forces that counter existing modalities of power. Rather, they are themselves modalities of power, embodied interpretations, engaging in allied action. On the one hand, these bodies are productive and performative. On the other hand, they can persist and act only when they are supported, by environments, by nutrition, by work, by modes of sociality and belonging. And when these supports fall away and precarity is exposed, they are mobilized in another way, seizing upon the supports that exist in order to make a claim that there can be no embodied life without social and institutional support, without ongoing employment, without networks of interdependency and care, collective rights to shelter and mobility. Not only do they struggle for the idea of social support and political enfranchisement, but their struggle is its own social form. And so, in the most ideal instances, an alliance begins to enact the social order it seeks to bring about by establishing its own modes of sociability. And yet that alliance is not reducible to a collection of individuals, and it is, strictly speaking, not individuals who act. Moreover, action in alliance happens precisely between those who participate, and this is not an ideal or empty space. That interval is the space of sociality and of support, of being constituted in a sociality that is never reducible to one’s own perspective and to being dependent on structures without which there is no durable and livable life.
Many of the massive demonstrations and modes of resistance we have seen in the last months not only produce a space of appearance, they seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relations between the public space, the public square, and the existing regime. So the limits of the political are exposed and the link between the theatre of legitimacy and public space is severed; that theatre is no longer unproblematically housed in public space, since public space now occurs in the midst of another action, one that displaces the power that claims legitimacy precisely by taking over the field of its effects. Simply put, the bodies on the street redeploy the space of appearance in order to contest and negate the existing forms of political legitimacy – and just as they sometimes fill or take over public space, the material history of those structures also works on them, becoming part of their very action, remaking a history in the midst of its most concrete and sedimented artifices. These are subjugated and empowered actors who seek to wrest legitimacy from an existing state apparatus that depends upon the regulation of the public space of appearance for its theatrical self-constitution. In wresting that power, a new space is created, a new “between” of bodies, as it were, that lays claim to existing space through the action of a new alliance, and those bodies are seized and animated by those existing spaces in the very acts by which they reclaim and resignify their meanings.
Such a struggle intervenes in the spatial organization of power, which includes the allocation and restriction of spatial locations in which and by which any population may appear, which implies a spatial regulation of when and how the “popular will” may appear. This view of the spatial restriction and allocation of who may appear – in effect, of who may become a subject of appearance – suggests an operation of power that works through both foreclosure and differential allocation.
What, then, does it mean to appear within contemporary politics, and can we consider this question at all without some recourse to the media? If we consider what it is to appear, it follows that we appear to someone and that our appearance has to be registered by the senses, not only our own, but someone else’s. If we appear, we must be seen, which means that our bodies must be viewed and their vocalized sounds must be heard: the body must enter the visual and audible field. But is this not, of necessity, a laboring body and a sexual body, as well as a body gendered and racialized in some form? Arendt’s view clearly meets its limits here, for the body is itself divided into the one that appears publically to speak and act and another, sexual and laboring, feminine, foreign, and mute, that generally is relegated to the private and prepolitical sphere. Such a division of labor is precisely what is called into question when precarious lives assemble on the street in forms of alliance that must struggle to achieve a space of appearance. If some domain of bodily life operates as the sequestered or disavowed condition for the sphere of appearance, it becomes the structuring absence that governs and makes possible the public sphere.
If we are living organisms who speak and act, then we are clearly related to a vast continuum or network of living beings; we not only live among them, but our persistence as living organisms depends on that matrix of sustaining interdependent relations. And yet, our speaking and acting distinguishes us as something separate from other living beings. Indeed, we do not need to know what is distinctively human about political action, but only finally to see how the entrance of the disavowed body into the political sphere establishes at the same time the essential link between humans and other living beings. The private body thus conditions the public body in theories such as Arendt’s, but in political organizations of space that continue in many forms. And even though the public and private body are necessarily the same, the bifurcation is crucial to maintaining the public and private distinction and its modes of disavowal and disenfranchisement.
Perhaps it is a kind of fantasy that one dimension of bodily life can and must remain out of sight, and yet another, fully distinct, appears in public. Is there no trace of the biological in the sphere of appearance? Could we not argue, with Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, that negotiating the sphere of appearance is, in fact, a biological thing to do, one of the investigative capacities of the organism? After all, there is no way of navigating an environment or procuring food without appearing bodily in the world, and there is no escape from the vulnerability and mobility that appearing in the world implies, which explains forms of camouflage and self-protection in the animal world. In other words, is appearance not a necessarily morphological moment where the body risks appearance not only in order to speak and act, but suffer and move, as well, to engage others bodies, to negotiate an environment on which one depends, to establish a social organization for the satisfaction of needs? Indeed, the body can appear and signify in ways that contest the way it speaks or even contest speaking as its paradigmatic instance. Could we still understand action, gesture, stillness, touch, and moving together if they were all reducible to the vocalization of thought through speech?
This act of public speaking, even within that problematic division of labour, depends upon a dimension of bodily life that is given, passive, opaque, and so excluded from the conventional definition of the political. Hence, we can ask: What regulation keeps the given or passive body from spilling over into the active body? Are these two different bodies, and if so, what politics is required to keep them apart? Are these two different dimensions of the same body, or are these, in fact, the effect of a certain regulation of bodily appearance that is actively contested by new social movements, struggles against sexual violence, for reproductive freedom, against precarity, for the freedom of mobility? Here we can see that a certain topographical or even architectural regulation of the body happens at the level of theory. Significantly, it is precisely this operation of power – the foreclosure and differential allocation of whether and how the body may appear – that is excluded from Arendt’s explicit account of the political. Indeed, her explicit account of the political depends upon that very operation of power that it fails to consider as part of politics itself.
So what I accept from Arendt is the following: Freedom does not come from me or from you; it can and does happen as a relation between us, or, indeed, among us. So this is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but rather of understanding the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends upon equality and articulates the principle of equality. Indeed, there is no human, in her view, if there is no equality. No human can be human alone. And no human can be human without acting in concert with others and on conditions of equality. I would add the following: The claim of equality is not only spoken or written, but is made precisely when bodies appear together, or, rather, when through their action, they bring the space of appearance into being. This space is a feature and effect of action, and it works, according to Arendt, only when relations of equality are maintained.
Of course, there are many reasons to be suspicious of idealized moments, but there are also reasons to be wary of any analysis that is fully guarded against idealization. There are two aspects of the revolutionary demonstrations in Tahrir Square that I would like to -underscore. The first has to do with the way a certain sociability was established within the square, a division of labor that broke down gender difference, that involved rotating who would speak and who would clean the areas where people slept and ate, developing a work schedule for -everyone to maintain the environment and to clean the -toilets. In short, what some would call “horizontal relations” among the protestors formed easily and methodically, alliances struggling to embody equality, which -included Ωn equal division of labor between the sexes – these became part of the very resistance to the Mubarak regime and its entrenched hierarchies, including the extraordinary differentials of wealth between the military and corporate sponsors of the regime and the working people. So the social form of the resistance began to incorporate principles of equality that governed not only how and when people spoke and acted for the media and against the regime, but how people cared for their various quarters within the square, the beds on pavement, the makeshift medical stations and bathrooms, the places where people ate, and the places where people were exposed to violence from the outside. We are not just talking about heroic actions that took enormous physical strength and the exercise of compelling political rhetoric. Sometimes the simple act of sleeping there, on the square, was the most eloquent political statement – and even must count as an action. These actions were all political in the simple sense that they were breaking down a conventional distinction between public and private in order to establish new relations of equality; in this sense, they were incorporating into the very social form of resistance the principles they were struggling to realize in broader political forms.
Second, when up against violent attack or extreme threats, many people chanted the word silmiyya which comes from the root verb salima, which means “to be safe and sound,” “unharmed,” “unimpaired,” “intact,” and “secure”; but also “to be unobjectionable,” “blameless,” “faultless”; and yet also “to be certain,” “established,” “clearly proven”.⁵ The term comes from the noun silm, which means “peace, “ but also, interchangeably and significantly, “the religion of Islam.” One variant of the term is hubb as-silm, which is Arabic for “pacifism.” Most usually, the chanting of silmiyya comes across as a gentle exhortation: “peaceful, peaceful.” Although the revolution was for the most part non-violent, it was not necessarily led by a principled opposition to violence. Rather, the collective chant was a way of encouraging people to resist the mimetic pull of military aggression – and the aggression of the gangs – by keeping in mind the larger goal: radical democratic change. To be swept into a violent exchange of the moment was to lose the patience needed to realize the revolution. What interests me here is the chant, the way in which language worked not to incite an action, but to restrain one: a restraint in the name of an emerging community of equals whose primary way of doing politics would not be violence.
Finally, then, to what extent was the revolution a media revolution, and how does that make actual bodies less central to the political action? How important was the locatedness of bodies to the events that took place? Of course, Tahrir Square is a place, and we can locate it quite precisely on the map of Cairo. At the same time, we find questions posed throughout the media: Will the Palestinians have their Tahrir Square? Where is the Tahrir Square in India? That’s to name but a few. So it is located, and it is transposable; indeed, it seemed to be transposable from the start, though never completely. And of course, we cannot think the transpos-ability of those bodies in the square without the media. In some ways, the media images from Tunisia prepared the way for the media events in Tahrir, then those that followed in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya, all of which took different trajectories and take them still. As you know, many of the public demonstrations of these last months have not been against military dictatorships or tyrannical regimes. They have also been against the monopoly capitalism, neoliberalism, and the suppression of political rights and in the name of those who are abandoned by neoliberal reforms that seek to dismantle forms of social democracy and socialism, that eradicate jobs, expose populations to poverty, and undermine the basic right to a public education.
The street scenes become politically potent only when and if we have a visual and audible version of the scene communicated in live or proximate time, so that the media does not merely report the scene, but is part of the scene and the action; indeed, the media is the scene or the space in its extended and replicable visual and audible dimensions. One way of stating this is simply that the media extend the scene visually and audibly and participate in the delimitation and transposability of the scene. Put differently, the media constitute the scene in a time and place that includes and exceeds its local instantiation. Although the scene is surely and emphatically local, those who are elsewhere have the sense that they are getting some direct access through the images and sounds they receive. That is true, but they do not know how the editing takes place, which scene conveys and travels and which scenes remain obdurately outside the frame. When the scene travels, it is both there and here, and if it were not spanning both locations – indeed, multiple locations – it would not be the scene that it is. Its locality is not denied by the fact that the scene is communicated beyond itself and so constituted in a global media; it depends on that mediation to take place as the event that it is. This means that the local must be recast outside itself in order to be established as local, and this means that it is only through globalizing media that the local can be established and that something can really happen there. Of course, many things do happen outside the frame of the camera or other digital media devices, and the media can just as easily implement censorship as oppose it. There are many local events that are never recorded and broadcast, and some important reasons why. But when the event travels and manages to summon and sustain global outrage and pressure, which includes the power to stop markets or to sever diplomatic relations, then the local will have to be established time and again in a circuitry that exceeds the local at every instant.
And yet, there remains something localized that cannot and does not travel in that way, and the scene could not be the scene if we did not understand that some people are at risk, and the risk is run precisely by those bodies on the street. If they are transported in one way, they are surely left in place in another, holding the camera or the cell phone, face to face with those they oppose, unprotected, injurable, injured, persistent, if not insurgent. It matters that those bodies carry cell phones, relaying messages and images, and so when they are attacked, it is more often than not in some relation to the camera or the video recorder. It can be an effort to destroy the camera and its user, or it can be a spectacle for the media produced as a warning or a threat. Or it can be a way to stop any more organizing. Is the action of the body separable from its technology, and is the technology not helping to establish new forms of political action? And when censorship or violence is directed against those bodies, are they not also directed against their access to media and in order to establish hegemonic control over which images travel, and which do not?
Of course, the dominant media is corporately owned, exercising their own kinds of censorship and incitement. And yet, it still seems important to affirm that the freedom of the media to broadcast from these sites is itself an exercise of freedom and so a mode of exercising rights, especially when they are rogue media, from the street, evading the censor, where the activation of the instrument is part of the bodily action itself. This is doubtless why both Hosni Mubarak and Michael Cameron, eight months apart, both argued for the censorship of social media networks. At least in some instances, the media not only report on social and political movements that are laying claim to freedom and justice in various ways; the media also are exercising one of those freedoms for which the social movement struggles. I do not mean by this claim to suggest that all media are involved in the struggle for political freedom and social justice (we know, of course, that they are not). Of course, it matters which global media do the reporting and how. My point is that sometimes private media devices become global precisely at the moment in which they overcome modes of censorship to report protests and in that way become part of the protest itself.
What bodies are doing on the street when they are demonstrating is linked fundamentally to what communication devices and technologies are doing when they “report” on what is happening in the street. These are different actions, but they both require the body. The one exercise of freedom is linked to the other, which means that both are ways of exercising rights and that, jointly, they bring a space of appearance into being and secure its transposability. Although some may wager that the exercise of rights now takes place quite at the expense of bodies on the street, that Twitter and other virtual technologies have led to a disembodiment of the public sphere, I disagree. The media requires those bodies on the street to have an event, even as those bodies on the street require the media to exist in a global arena. But under conditions when those with cameras or Internet capacities are imprisoned or tortured or deported, the use of the technology effectively implicates the body. Not only must someone’s hand tap and send, but someone’s body is on the line if that tapping and sending gets traced. In other words, localization is hardly overcome through the use of a media that potentially transmit globally. And if this conjuncture of street and media constitutes a very contemporary version of the public sphere, then bodies on the line have to be thought as both there and here, now and then, transported and stationery, with very different political consequences following from those two modalities of space and time.
It matters that it is public squares that are filled to the brim, that people eat and sleep there, sing and refuse to cede that space, as we saw in Tahrir Square and continue to see on a daily basis. It matters, as well, that it is public educational buildings that have been seized in Athens, London, and Berkeley. At Berkeley, buildings were seized and trespassing fines were handed out. In some cases, students were accused of destroying private property. But these very allegations raised the question of whether the university is public or private. The stated aim of the protest – to seize the building and to sequester themselves there – was a way to gain a platform, indeed, a way to secure the material conditions for appearing in public. Such actions generally do not take place when effective platforms are already available. The students there, but also at Goldsmiths College in the UK more recently, were seizing buildings as a way to lay claim to buildings that ought properly, now and in the future, to belong to public education. That doesn’t mean that every time these buildings are seized it is justifiable, but let us be alert to what is at stake here: the symbolic meaning of seizing these buildings is that these buildings belong to the public, to public education, and it is precisely the access to public education that is being undermined by fee and tuition hikes and budget cuts. We should not be surprised that the protest took the form of seizing the buildings, performatively laying claim to public education, insisting on gaining literal access to the buildings of public education precisely at a moment, historically, when that access is being shut down. In other words, no positive law justifies these actions that oppose the institutionalization of unjust or exclusionary forms of power. Can we then say that these actions are nevertheless an exercise of a right, a lawless exercise that take place precisely when the law is wrong or the law has failed?
Let me offer you an anecdote to make my point more concrete. Last year, I was asked to visit Turkey on the occasion of the International Conference against Homophobia and Transphobia. This was an especially important event in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, where transgendered people are often served fines for appearing in public, are often beaten, sometimes by the police, and where murders of transgendered women in particular have happened nearly once a month in recent years. If I offer you this example of Turkey, it is not to point out that Turkey is “behind“ – something that the embassy representative from Denmark was quick to point out to me and that I refused with equal speed. I assure you that there are equally brutal murders outside of Los Angeles and Detroit, in Wyoming and Louisiana, or even in New York. It is rather because what is astonishing about the alliances there is that several feminist organizations have worked with queer, gay/lesbian, and transgendered people against police violence, but also against militarism, against nationalism, and against the forms of masculinism by which they are supported. So on the street, after the conference, the feminists lined up with the drag queens, the genderqueer with the human rights activists, and the lipstick lesbians with their bisexual and heterosexual friends – the march included secularists and Muslims. They chanted, “We will not be soldiers, and we will not kill.“ To oppose the police violence against trans people is thus to be openly against military violence and the nationalist escalation of militarism; it is to be against the military aggression against the Kurds, but also to act in the memory of the Armenian genocide and against the various ways that violence is disavowed by the state and the media.
This alliance was compelling for me for all kinds of reasons, but mainly because in most Northern European countries, there are now serious divisions among feminists, queers, lesbian and gay human rights workers, antiracist movements, freedom-of-religion movements, and antipoverty and antiwar mobilizations. In Lyon, France, last year, one of the established feminists had written a book on the “illusion” of transsexuality, and her public lectures had been “zapped” by many trans activists and their queer allies. She defended herself by saying that to call transsexuality “psychotic” was not the same as pathologizing transsexuality. It is, she said, a descriptive term and makes no judgment or prescription. Under what conditions can calling a population “psychotic” for the particular embodied life they live not be pathologizing? This feminist called herself a materialist, a radical, but she pitted herself against the transgendered community in order to maintain certain norms of masculinity and femininity as prerequisites for a nonpsychotic life. These are arguments that would be swiftly countered in Istanbul or Johannesburg, and yet these same feminists seek recourse to a form of universalism that would make France, and their version of French feminism, into the beacon of progressive thought.
Not all French feminists who call themselves universalists would oppose the public rights of transgendered people or contribute to their pathologization. And yet, if the streets are open to transgendered people, they are not open to those who wear signs of their religious belonging openly. Hence, we are left to fathom the many universalist French feminists who call upon the police to arrest, detain, fine, and sometimes deport women wearing the niqāb or the burqa in the public sphere in France. What sort of politics is this that recruits the police function of the state to monitor and restrict women from religious minorities in the public sphere? Why would the same universalists (such as Elisabeth Badinter) openly affirm the rights of transgendered people to freely appear in public while denying that right to women who happen to wear religious clothing that offends the sensibilities of die-hard secularists? If the right to appear is to be honored “universally“, it would not be able to survive such an obvious and insupportable contradiction.
Perhaps there are modalities of violence that we need to think about in order to understand the police functions in operation here. After all, those who insist that gender must always appear in one way or in one clothed version rather than another, who seek either to criminalize or to pathologize those who live their gender or their sexuality in nonnormative ways, are themselves acting as the police for the sphere of appearance, whether or not they belong to any police force. As we know, it is sometimes the police force of the state that does violence to sexual and gendered minorities, and sometimes it is the police who fail to investigate, fail to prosecute as criminal the murder of transgendered women or fail to prevent violence against transgendered members of the population.
If gender or sexual minorities are criminalized or pathologized for how they appear, how they lay claim to public space, the language through which they understand themselves, the means by which they express love or desire, those with whom they openly ally, choose to be near, engage sexually, or how they exercise their bodily freedom, what clothes they wear or fail to wear, then those acts of criminalization are themselves violent, and in that sense, they are also unjust and criminal. In Arendtian terms, we can say that to be precluded from the space of appearance, to be precluded from being part of the plurality that brings the space of appearance into being, is to be deprived of the right to have rights. Plural and public action is the exercise of the right to place and belonging, and this exercise is the means by which the space of appearance is presupposed and brought into being.
Let me return to the notion of gender with which I began, both to draw upon Arendt and to resist Arendt. In my view, gender is an exercise of freedom, which is not to say that everything that constitutes gender is freely chosen, but only that even what is considered unfree can and must be claimed and exercised in some way. I have, with this formulation, taken a certain distance from the Arendtian formulation. This exercise of freedom must be accorded the same equal treatment as any other exercise of freedom under the law. And politically, we must call for the expansion of our conceptions of equality to include this form of embodied freedom.
So what do we mean when we say that sexuality or gender is an exercise of freedom? To repeat: I do not mean to say that all of us choose our gender or our sexuality. We are surely formed by language and culture, by history, by the social struggles in which we participate, by forces both psychological and historical – in interaction, by the way with biological situations that have their own history and efficacy. Indeed, we may well feel that what and how we desire are quite fixed, indelible or irreversible features of who we are. But regardless of whether we understand our gender or our sexuality as chosen or given, we each have a right to claim that gender and to claim that sexuality. And it makes a difference whether we can claim them at all. When we exercise the right to appear as the gender and to claim them at all. When we exercise the right to appear as the gender we already are – even when we feel we have no other choice – we are still exercising a certain freedom, but we are also doing something more.
When one freely exercises the right to be who one already is and one asserts a social category for the purposes of describing that mode of being, then one is, in fact, making freedom part of that social category, discursively changing the very ontology in question. It is not possible to separate the genders that we claim to be and the sexualities that we engage from the right that any of us has to assert those realities, in public, or in private, or in the many thresholds that exist between the two, freely, that is, without threat of violence. When, long ago, one said that gender is performative, that meant that it is a certain kind of enactment, which means that one is not first one’s gender and then one decides how and when to enact it. The enactment is part of its very ontology, is a way of rethinking the ontological mode of gender, and so it matters how and when and with what consequences that enactment takes place, because all that changes the very gender that one “is”.
To walk on the street without police interference is something other than assembling there en masse. And yet, when a transgendered person walks there, the right that is exercised in a bodily form does not only belong to that one person. There is a group, if not an alliance, walking there, too, whether or not they are seen. It is a person there who walks, who takes the risk of walking there, but it is also the social category that traverses that embodied movement in the world, and the attack, when it comes, is clearly on both at once. Perhaps we can still call “performative” both this exercise of gender and the embodied political claim to equality and protection from violence so as to be able to move with and within this social category in public space. To walk is to say that this is a public space in which transgendered people walk, that this is a public space where people with various forms of clothing, no matter how they are gendered or what religion they signify, are free to move without threat of violence. But this performativity applies more broadly to the conditions by which any of us emerge as bodily creatures in the world.
If we are thinking well, and our thinking commits us to the preservation of life in some form, then the life to be preserved takes a bodily form. In turn, this means that the life of the body – its hunger, its need for shelter and protection from violence – all become major issues of politics. Even the most given or nonchosen features of our lives are not simply given; they are given in history and in language, in vectors of power that none of us chose. Equally true is that a given property of the body or a set of defining characteristics depends upon the continuing persistence of the body. Those social categories we never chose traverse this given body in some ways rather than in others, and gender, for instance, names that traversal as well as its transformations. In this sense, those most urgent and nonvolitional dimensions of our lives, which include hunger and the need for shelter, medical care, and protection from violence, natural or humanly imposed, are crucial to politics. We cannot presume the enclosed and well-fed space of the polis, where all the material needs are somehow being taken care of elsewhere by beings whose gender, race,
or status render them ineligible for public recognition. Rather, we have not only to bring the material urgen-cies of the body into the square, but to make those needs central to the demands of politics.
In my view, a shared condition of precarity situates our political lives, even as precarity is differentially distributed. And some of us, as Ruthie Gilmore has made very clear, are disproportionately more disposed to injury and early death than others. Building on the importance of local expertise, there’s something to be said about attorneys who’ve earned respect within the courthouse walls. During my cousin’s case two years ago, we learned that experienced Jersey City criminal defense lawyers with prosecutorial backgrounds can identify weaknesses in the state’s evidence that others might miss. These professionals understand the burden of proof required and know when prosecutors haven’t met it, which becomes crucial during negotiations. Their familiarity with programs like Pre-Trial Intervention and Drug Court opened doors we didn’t know existed, ultimately resulting in charges being downgraded significantly. The transparency they provided throughout the process—keeping us informed at every decision point—made an incredibly stressful situation feel manageable and gave us confidence in the legal strategy being employed.

Racial difference can be tracked precisely through looking at statistics on infant mortality, for example. This means, in brief, that precarity is unequally distributed and that lives are not considered equally grievable or equally valuable. If, as Adriana Cavarero has argued, the exposure of our bodies in public space constitutes us fundamentally and establishes our thinking as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, then our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of that very corporeal interdependency and entwinement. The body is constituted through perspectives it cannot inhabit; someone else sees our face in a way that none of us can and hears our voice in a way that we cannot. We are in this sense, bodily, always over there, yet here, and this dispossession marks the sociality to which we belong. Even as located beings, we are always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our exposure and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social institutions to persist.
After all, in Cairo, it was not just that people amassed in the square: they were there; they slept there; they dispensed medicine and food; they assembled and sang; and they spoke. Can we distinguish those vocalizations emanating from the body from those other expressions of material need and urgency? They were, after all, sleep-ing and eating in the public square, constructing toilets and various systems for sharing the space, and thus not only refusing to disappear, refusing to go or stay home, and not only claiming the public domain for themselves – acting in concert on conditions of equality – but also maintaining themselves as persisting bodies with needs, desires, and requirements: Arendtian and counter-Arendtian, to be sure, since these bodies who were organizing their basic needs in public were also petitioning the world to register what was happening there, to make its support known, and in that way to enter into revolutionary action itself. The bodies acted in concert, but they also slept in public, and in both these modalities, they were both vulnerable and demanding, giving political and spatial organization to elementary bodily needs. In this way, they formed themselves into images to be projected to all who watched, petitioning us to receive and respond and so to enlist media coverage that would refuse to let the event be covered over or to slip away. Sleeping on that pavement was not only a way to lay claim to the public, to contest the legitimacy of the state, but also quite clearly, a way to put the body on the line in its insistence, obduracy, and precarity, overcoming the distinction between public and private for the time of revolution. In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image and discourse for the media, did it finally become possible to extend the space and time of the event with such tenacity as to bring the regime down. After all, the cameras never stopped; bodies were there and here; they never stopped speaking, not even in sleep, and so could not be silenced, sequestered, or denied – revolution happened because everyone refused to go home, cleaving to the pavement as the site of their convergent temporary, awkward, vulnerable, daring, revolutionary bodily lives.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: McLagan, Meg; McKee, Yates (Ed.): Sensible Politics. The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ZONE BOOKS: New York 2012, S. 117–137.

1.) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 198.
2.) Ibid., p. 199.
3.) “The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody.“ Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 217–34. This account differs from his in several respects, but most prominently by virtue of its consideration of body in their plurality.
4.) Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199.
5.) Hans Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 4th ed., ed. J. Milton Cowan (Ithaca: Spoken Language Services, 1994), s. v. „salima“.