Who was responsible for the violence?

Vale la pena difundir esta pelicula asombrosa de lo que ocurio el 15 de junio fuera del parlamento Catalan. Nos recurda de la anxiedad que tienen las autoridades para prevenir la formación de un movimiento popular. La legitimidad del 15M depende de el apoyo que recibe. En este momento es como el gato de Schrodinger, en un estado de posibilidades no-resueltas. Una asistecia masiva mañana podría ser un punto de inflexión hacá la formación de un movimiento verdaderamente popular.

It's worth spreading this astonishing film from the disturbances outside the Catalan parliament to remind ourselves of the lengths to which the authorities will go to undermine the emergence of a popular movement. The legitimacy of 15M depends on people identifying with it. At the moment it's a bit like Schrodinger's cat, in a state of unresolved possibilities. A massive turnout for the demonstration tomorrow could be a defining moment in the formation of a genuinely popular movement.

Globalisation, Space-Time Compression and Symbolic Exchange. Part Three.

Seeing as so much time has elapsed since my last posting under the title of “Globalization, Time-Space Compression and Symbolic Exchange”, I think it’s as well to provide a brief reminder of the terrain.* My intention with this cycle of postings is to think about globalisation, paying particular attention to the way in which the apparent transparency of the term conceals assumptions regarding the character of the globe which is being globalised. On the one hand the process of globalisation, influenced by the demand for capital accumulation, is an indisputable reality that is affecting every area of our lives (See “What is Social Acceleration”). On the other, it conceals and disseminates, Eurocentric assumptions about the nature of space, time and subjectivity. I approached these themes first by highlighting a distinction, made by Heidegger, between the concepts of Earth and World. ‘World’ refers not necessarily to a physical reality, but rather to a field of meaning and signification, in the sense of ‘the world of medicine’ or ‘the world of football’. It is really, first and foremost, a world in which we live. Earth, superficially, might be described un-problematically as a physical entity, one planet amongst others in the solar system. The difficulty is that, no matter how much we may prioritise the foundational nature of Earth, to insist that it is the Earth upon which we live, it remains an entity which we do not, in fact, encounter, as such. Images of the Earth abound. However, in this sense, the Earth is only ever one more sign within the plethora of signs and meanings which constitute our worlds. My intention was, and is, to render the notion of ‘Earth’ questionable in order to then gain a different sort of purchase on ‘Globalisation’. Specifically I want to foreground the notion of ‘World’, as a system, or systems, of significations, references, and meanings, within which materiality plays a role, but not a founding role. In the last post I sought to highlight this by characterising the Yir Yoront’s relation to time in terms of social ‘homeostasis’. The ‘history’ of the Yir Yoront was determined not by objectively verifiable facts, but by what it was expedient to remember. To forget something is to annihilate it in its entirety, such that it never did occur. The only problem with this is that it is grammatically untidy. A related position can be adopted with regard space and geography, namely that the particular model of universal space with which we operate is very much a consequence of our literacy, which has enabled us to abstract from the immediacy of our apperception**.

I would imagine that, for many people, raising questions about our notion of space might seem like a rather pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. We don’t practically have a problem with space. We aren’t bumping into things due to an unreliable model of space, and our model of space seems to provide us with a very functional and effective way of representing territory. The problem, I believe, relates to the second of these examples, not to the first. Our phenomenal apprehension of space, when making coffee for example, is of a categorically different order from the way we represent space, just as our unreflective apprehension of time is quite distinct from the ways in which we measure it. The point is that there is nothing “natural” about the notion of absolute, objective, quantifiable space which we take so much for granted and which is central to our ideas of territory and property. Once again, examples of resistance to, or alternatives to Eurocentric representations of space abound among pre-literate peoples. Marshall McLuhan cites Guinean born Prince Modupe who, in his autobiography, tells how he had learned to read maps at school and of how his father had been decidedly unimpressed by the flimsy sheet of paper which presumed to represent territory.

“He refused to identify the stream he had crossed at Bomako, where it is no deeper, he said, than a man is high, with the great widespread waters of the vast Niger delta. Distances as measured in miles had no meaning for him. . . . Maps are liars, he told me briefly. From his tone of voice I could tell that I had offended him in some way not known to me at the time. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it. I had best not put my trust in anything as inadequate as a map, he counseled. ... I understand now, although I did not at the time, that my airy and easy sweep of map-traced staggering distances belittled the journeys he had measured on tired feet. With my big map-talk, I had effaced the magnitude of his cargo-laden, heat-weighted treks. (1)

This represents a striking illustration of the adage “the map is not the territory”.

Similarly, Daniel Everett, in his book, Don’t Sleep there are Snakes, describes how the Amazonian tribe, the Pirahã, have no conception of things that fall outside of their immediate experience, or the experience of someone with whom they have directly spoke (2). Hence their reluctance to listen to his evangelising about Jesus Christ on learning that Everett had never actually met the man. More relevant to a consideration of space is the Pirahã notion of xibipíío. This word might be used to describe a boat coming into view from around the bend in the river, a candle flame extinguishing or a plane appearing on, or disappearing, over the horizon. Everett managed to establish that xibipíío picked out a culturally specific concept relating to experiential liminality; that’s to say the state of something’s being on the border of existence and non-existence, experientially speaking. The contention is that the Pirahã don’t extrapolate from what is presented immediately in their experience and that concepts of arrival and departure presuppose the existence of a territory or space which lies beyond the field of their immediate experience. Things don’t so much appear from around the corner, as come into being. If that sounds impossibly improbable, imagining it from the point of “view” of the deaf person may make it slightly more comprehensible. It doesn’t offend against intuition quite so much to suggest that the plane pops into existence if ones only means of perceiving it is sound. This disjunction between the fact that experiential liminality is unacceptable when related to the visual field and yet plausible when related to the aural field illustrates another contention of McLuhan’s, that the absolute primacy of the visual is a characteristic of literacy.

What characterises the oral cultures that I have discussed in this and the previous posting is that their societies are not grounded on absolute notions of time and space, which means that they provide a radical counterpoint to Eurocentric, or literate, historiography and geography. *** What they reveal, and what gets concealed within literate cultures, is the homeostatic nature of society and culture. Time and space are not containers into which we are thrown and in which we set about constructing culture and society. Rather time and space are inseparable from our practices. Just as the Yir Yoront collectively conspire to adjust their past to the exigencies of the present, so Europeans collectively conspire to sustain their historiographies. **** Of course we are a little uncomfortable with the idea of adjusting them to meet the demands of the present and yet all recounting and dissemination of the past is clearly carried out in the present and must serve some current purpose. Sarah Palin’s recent reinterpretation of American history, and the way it is being defended by her acolytes, provides a cheap, but illustrative, example of this. The principal differences between the Yir Yoront’s mythological past and the historical past of European peoples, leaving aside the crucial divisions we make between personal and public history, are:

· the externalisation of knowledge (knowledge is not contained in the body of the knower, but on parchment, manuscript, in book or database form)

· the degree of coordination involved in reinforcing and disseminating that history (the homogenising effect of the media through which that history is narrated, be that books, academic disciplines and museums or more recently, and more shakily, docu-dramas, quiz shows and internet forums *****)

· the regulatory mechanisms through which relevance or obsolescence are determined (selective memory in the case of oral cultures, academic coherence, political expediency and potential for commodification in ours)

· The mythological past of the Yir Yoront is unapologetically symbolic in nature, whereas the goal of European thought has been to replace the symbolic with the factual. A better way of stating this might be to say that the aim has been to systematise the symbolic such that it becomes undeniable, unquestionable and, hence, impersonal.

On this last point, the heyday of factual, objectively verifiable knowledge was from the renaissance to the late 20^th century; a period which coincided with the invention of the printing press, the extensive dissemination of books, the rise of mass literacy and the technological innovations that facilitated first a Europe-wide and then a global reconfiguration of culture and society. However, for all the coordination and dissemination of Eurocentric concepts and practices, they remain no better grounded than the mythological past of the Yir Yoront and no more compelling as a model for living than that of the Pirahã of the Amazon. In each case, each one of us embody and are the product of the entirety of our culture. Technological changes within the culture give rise to more or less subtle reconfigurations of that culture in its entirety and concomitantly reconfigures us and our mental conceptions, histories and value systems.

The social structure of the Yir Yoront was irreparably disrupted by the encounter with European people, not because Europeans colonised their territory or spread disease, but rather through the introduction of alien technologies and associated mental conceptions. The paradigm example used by Lauriston Sharp is the introduction of the steel axe into the world of the Yir Yoront by missionaries (3). The Yir Yoront had been using stone axes for millennia. The stone axe was not simply a utilitarian object, it held a key position in the symbolic economy of the Yir Yoront. There were implicitly understood codes which governed how the axe was produced (involving intricate trading relationships with other tribes and rituals for its fabrication) and who had ownership and access to the axe (women and children could not own an axe but had to borrow it from the male head of the family). Introducing steel, factory made, axes into this symbolic economy had the effect of de-structuring the economy and the social relations that it implied.

In subsequent postings I will consider how technological innovations in Europe generated a reconfiguration in its symbolic economy that accelerated and intensified with the development of money as a universal medium of exchange (clearly symbolic, and yet sufficiently standardised and universalised to conceal its symbolic nature). This, along with the reconfiguration of mental conceptions that this transformation implied (in the fields of geography and cartography, for example), contributed to what David Harvey refers to as space/time compression and the elaboration of a symbolic economy which annihilates geographical distance.

* Notice how territorial metaphors suggest themselves so readily (map out, chart, navigate). This is neither incidental in terms of language, nor in terms of the project that I am engaged in. Can the ideas I’m describing be rightly equated with a territory? They probably can if I will insist on that highly abstracted and literate practice of developing ideas over a series of postings / chapters / paragraphs, etc…

** I choose ‘apperception’ as opposed to ‘perception’, because whereas the later has a clear visual bias, the former refers to a much broader field which makes no clear distinction between the sensory and the cognitive.

*** This ‘Eurocentric’ / ‘literate’ division is interesting. By choosing the former term as the opposition to oral cultures, a whole discourse of cultural relativism is activated along with its concurrent limits to thought. If the later term is chosen, I feel the nature of the European colonial project is better revealed. Europe is not one culture among others in the cultural soup that makes up the world. Rather, the world becomes world to the extent to which it can be metabolized within the structures and terms of a totalising conceptual / system, the source of which is overwhelmingly European. From this perspective, America is also essentially European.

**** I use the word ‘historiographies’ to highlight the heterogeneous nature of the writing, recounting and dissemination of the past.

***** Also important are strategic devices for reinforcing certain narratives, such as using bullet points.

1. McLuhan, M. 1962, The Guttenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press

2. Everett, D. 2008, Don't Sleep there are Snakes, Profile Books

3. Sharp, L. (1952). Steel axes for stone age Australians. Human Organization, 11(1 )

Impersonal Transparency

In a posting a few days ago I mentioned the ambiguity of standing with thousands of other people on the outside of a thin police cordon all looking in on the events unfolding in the square. Many people were filming what was happening, but in that moment of suspended animation, the roles and motivations of the onlookers were no longer self evident. Activists film to remind the police that they too are under scrutiny. Tourists film so that they can later demonstrate that they were indeed where they claim to have been. Protesters film to project the events in the square to the wider on-line audience, and thereby prove to the world that what they subjectively experienced in some transient moments really did form part of an objectively verifiable reality. I think there is a difference between these categories. However, the line dividing them occasionally blurs.

That morning, as I mentioned in the posting, I had been at a conference at the CCCB. The first speaker, Daniel Innerarity, delivered a paper entitled "The Observing Society". He was equating the proliferation of observation with a new form of democratic accountability. The subjugating gaze of Foucault's Panopticon is no longer uni-directional. It is not just the state that keeps citizens in check through its elaborate system of surveillance. Citizens have learned to turn the camera (or other apparatus of surveillance) around and subject the state to an interrogatory gaze. His thesis, as far as it goes, was born out by the events of Friday the 27th. Every move that the police made was being filmed by protesters and this was up on the blogs and websites in some cases within minutes of it having been taken. The evidence that it provided of the use of excess force contributed to the revitalization of the protest and since last Friday many more people have got involved. In other words, there's whatever happened in the square, in all it's fractured, contingent messiness and there is the mediated construction of that reality after the event across the various media platforms.

Which is fine, except there seemed to something that Innerarity was missing out, something about the inherent danger or uncaaniness, or something about the way immediate reality is so subjugated to the demands of mediation. A friend, "The Amazing Beryl" told me that she had seen a group of protesters filming a bunch of police who were filming them. No need to come to blows, reality is elsewhere, all that was happening there was "content" creation. I had a camera in my pocket and it occurred to me to start filming as I, along with thousands of others, re-entered the square and watched as the Mosos retreated. It would have been a great film- especially the last five Mosos to leave who put on a show of bravado, firing their rubber bullets in the air, before withdrawing. But I felt, as I often do in these situations, that I didn't want to experience what was happening through the prism of what would make a good film and what would tell the story that I would like to be told when the video is played back later. I kind of kick myself now. Sod what was happening, that was essentially transient and meaningless. Far more important was that great vid that would have really "captured" the situation. After all, and to paraphrase Baudrillard, it's not that mediation distorts, undermines or covers up reality. This would in fact leave reality unscathed in the sense that it is presupposed, as if we know what we are talking about. Instead, mediation has supplanted reality, it has become reality. What we care about isn't what happens in the square, but rather the narratives which are constructed out of the "content" which the square provides. And that feeds back into the supposed immediacy of what is going on in the square, such that peoples actions are determined by the knowledge that they are involved in a fight to control the narrative, which largely takes place elsewhere across the various media platforms. So it's not enough to be peaceful, they have to put on a performance of 'being peaceful'. Hence the flowers and free hugs.

Returning to Innerarity's confidence that the prolferation of observation can be seen in terms of an inversion, or leveling out of Foucault's notion of a surveillance society, I wonder whether the significance of this lies not in questions of democracy and accountability, but rather in this question of the totalizing effect of mediation.

Odious Debt

This film explains the idea of "odious debt", which is to say debt that has been incurred by a population without their knowledge, not in their interests and with the complicity of the lender. It is an important weapon in the fight to delegitimise the "there is no alternative" narrative.

Back to the Square

Where was I when Plaça Catalunya was taken back from the police and (bizarrely) the waste disposal trucks? Among the thousands of people who broke through the police lines to join the protesters who remained on the inside of the square, but only just.

In the morning I went to a conference at the CCCB, a cultural centre and exhibition centre in the middle of the Raval district of Barcelona. The talks were entitled, "Post-national Collective Subjectivity", which connects with subject matter of a course that I am struggling to prepare. I received a text from my friend Dirk during the first talk saying that the Mosso d'Esquadra (Catalan Police) were moving on Plaça Catalunya to clear it. I stayed at the conference and listened to what the speakers had to say. Some interesting points were raised, but it all felt a little cosy and self-congratulatory. Mid-way through the last speaker's talk he made a reference to what was occurring in Plaça Catalunya, vaguely holding it up as an illustration of some point he had made. Some one from the floor said that the protesters were in the process of being cleared out of the square. At that point I immediately got up and left the conference (I think I was the only one).

I cycled to the square and found the perimeter of the square, the large central circle, surrounded by a cordon of riot police, they were holding back a thick crowd of people, some of whom were trying to enter the square, others who appeared to watching events like an audience in an amphitheater, many seated. Inside this inner circle there were some 200 protesters, and a similar number of police, plus the incongruous refuse collectors. there was some jostling and shouting, but it didn't seem like the police were about to use violence to clear away the 200.

I peddled home to drop of my bike and had a quick look at some websites to get an idea of what had been going on. There was one particularly nasty clip of police in the cordon repeatedly beating the tightly packed and seated protesters whenever they tried to stand up. That riled me, and I grabbed my passport, camera and some cash and headed back to the square. Approaching from the nearby Plaça Urquinona, I could hear a lot of noise and the sound of rubber bullets being fired. A wave of people scattered from the periphery of the square, just as I was arriving, suggesting that they had been fired upon. I ran up to the cordon, which now consisted of a very thin line of police, backs to the centre of the square, facing the people who had come to support the protesters. It was clear at this point that the police who formed this thin cordon could never have hoped to forcibly prevent the crowd from entering the square, yet the people stood, obediently respecting this imaginary 'line in the sand'. They stood and they gazed and they took photos. The scene was surreal in that the role of the onlooking crowd was ambiguous. For sure many were protesters come to support those on the inside of the cordon, however it seems that others were more motivated by curiosity and there was even a sprinkling of tourists. If the police line had been tighter, the situation may not have felt quite so ambiguous. The roles would have been more sharply defined. We are the demonstrators and we want to enter the square. You are the police and you are charged with preventing us. Everyone knows where they stand. But with the line so porous, there was no escaping the fact that we on the outside were choosing to remain outside, observing, filming, consuming. Just then one of the protesters inside the cordon ran forward, imploring those on the outside to enter the square. Suddenly the spell was broken, someone shouted "Ya!" and we ran between the police into the square. As I reached the centre, I saw, with exhilarated disbelief, how the riot-gear clad Mossos where piling out of the square as fast as dignity would permit. The square was filling up once again and everywhere the police were retreating, not through the force of violence, but simply though the weight of numbers and determination. Overhead a police helicopter droned, ineffectually.

It was a powerful feeling, taking back the square, one that brought me to the brink of tears. It was a surging mixture of joy, strength and solidarity. It was a feeling that has been described in literature. I recognize the same feeling in George Orwell's descriptions of Barcelona in the 1930's. One which enables you to believe that more is possible than we normally permit ourselves to believe. One that also has to be handled with extreme caution.

The Spanish Spring

Over the past couple of weeks something truly impressive has taken place across Spain. The central squares of the major cities have been occupied en-mass by a diverse cross section of people united in their frustration with the status quo which insists that everyday life continue as normal when the political and economic system which regulates everyday life is clearly broken. The immediate cause has been the cuts in social spending that were put in place at the insistence of the financial markets which now determine social policy across Europe. For a short while the protesters have managed to throw off the passivity that characterizes our relationship with power. Places have been established in which people have voiced their anger, discussed alternatives and made their presence felt. The mainstream media took notice for the first few days while it was still breaking news, but gradually lost interest in spite of the fact that these emblematic spaces in the cities continue to be occupied by thousands of people in peaceful and imaginative protest. Perhaps the most important feature of the protests has been the form of organization which has been spontaneous, non-hierarchical and inclusive. Inevitably, as the days pass, the lack of concrete demands or a unified voice will start to erode the initial enthusiasm for the protest, but I think that scale of the protests, their duration, the organizational model which they employed and the symbolic connection they forged with the 'Arab Spring' will leave an impression upon people's sense of what is possible that will out-last the dismantling of the last tent.

The photos were taken by the artist, Dirk Helbig, whose blog you can visit here.

So what's happening in Iceland?

Today Iceland held their referendum on whether to accept liability for the debts of a private bank. This is hugely significant as it represents the alternative to the narrative that has been repeated ad nauseam in the rest of Europe that there is no option but to nationalize these debts, forcing the general public to take the hit that would otherwise be taken by investors. It has gone pretty much unreported, and I still don't know what the outcome was. I was passed this article about the options facing Iceland by the American economist Michael Hudson. He makes the case very convincingly that there are alternatives.