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Boring Politics

Concrete demands on the state are overrated – shifts in discourse and in modes of political involvement best produce resistance and effect change

Millner-Larsen, 13 – Lecturer, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London (Nadja, “Demandless Times,” Vol. 41, Nos. 3 and 4, 113-115)
Way back in September 2011, when a burgeoning movement at Zuccotti Park was still suffering from a dearth of mainstream reportage, Academy Award–winning actress Susan Sarandon paid a visit to the fledgling occupation. Sarandon offered her support, but was notably befuddled by the scene on the ground. Most irksome to Sarandon was the lack of a clear message: “Your weakness is that there are so many issues,” she said. “Is everyone here registered to vote? Are you having people sign petitions?” (Gray 2011). Sarandon’s queries were soon echoed across many media outlets as observers on both the left and the right struggled to make sense of Occupy Wall Street’s (OWS’s) resistance to naming demands (see Kristof 2011). In the weeks following Sarandon’s dubious offerings to the Zuccotti encampment, a palpable about-face occurred across news outlets, precisely over the efficacy of OWS’s refusal to issue demands. Initially dismissed as mere naïveté, the logic of demandlessness and even the anarchist ethos it reflected were increasingly hailed as successful strategy (see Pepitone 2011; Schneider 2011). This was largely a result of the enormous success of the slogan “We are the 99 percent” and of the ensuing swells of occupations across the country and the globe. This discursive shift was also an effect of the curious potential embedded in the refusal to represent a collective body as always already locatable or identifiable. The radical openness of “the 99 percent” belied the processes of division, classification, and interpellation to which our bodies are typically subjected via the laws of appearance in a neoliberal state. Yet with the passage of two winters since the New York Police Department’s violent ousting of the Zuccotti encampment in the early hours of November 15, 2011, OWS’s death knell has been repeatedly sounded. Despite enormous evidence of a coordinated government effort to undo OWS, demandlessness has often taken the blame for the perceived failures of this movement (see Madrick 2013; Frank 2012). Even as the movement flourishes in numerous community-organizing campaigns and a highly effective relief effort in the immediate wake of Hurricane Sandy, demandlessness (and its attendant modes of horizontal decision making) has endured the brunt of OWS-weary finger-wagging from Left and Right alike.1 But following Lauren Berlant, reflecting on OWS’s demandlessness allows us to engage the question “How might political breakdown work as something other than a blot, or a botched job?” (1994, 127). In the short life span of this movement thus far, demandlessness has embodied an ever-shifting status: from object of vilification and anxiety, to celebration, and back again. This essay attends to the ways in which demandlessness has interfaced with a wide range of political desires over the course of OWS’s short history. Affective responses to OWS have run the gamut between extreme hostility and exuberant congeniality. On the one hand, OWS’s demandlessness is held responsible for relegating the movement to the realm of the “merely symbolic” (Michaels 2012). The joining of “symbolic” to the adjective “merely” is itself a curious indictment, suggesting that the symbolic is clearly and definitively cut off from the real. On the other hand, many register this symbolic shift as one of great significance. For example, Rosalyn Deutsche has lauded OWS “for injecting the scandal of extreme economic inequality into what is commonly referred to as ‘public political discourse’” (2012, 42). How might we make sense of such a range— between Deutsche’s congenial gratitude and the sneering hostility of others? While the lasting effects of the OWS movement remain to be seen, the tactical adherence to demandlessness raises the issue of how to sustain a movement that disidentifies with sanctioned modes of political engagement. Moving beyond normative forms of political involvement— including demands for inclusion, equality, and visibility—demandlessness’s refusal of typical representational protocols demands new modes of relationality that challenge liberal conceptions of representation. The notion of such a movement emerges from, and extends—at times unwittingly—the critiques that racial justice movements, feminist, and queer of color activism have leveled against the viability of rights discourses.2 In this essay, I demonstrate how OWS’s mobilizations of abstract ideas like “Equality” and “Justice” (in place of particular demands) might be productively augmented by the insights of trans, queer, and critical race politics, which have waged refusals of representational protocols alongside robust critiques of power. I begin with a discussion of the historical and theoretical genealogies of demandlessness, its aspirations and pragmatics.

Concrete political demands fragment resistance – multiple empirical examples prove that abstractness and focus on discourse are key to resisting institutional power

Millner-Larsen, 13 – Lecturer, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London (Nadja, “Demandless Times,” Vol. 41, Nos. 3 and 4, 116-117)
While U.S.-based university occupations presented a clear articulation of demandlessness in tandem with the practice of occupation, OWS has cited Tahrir Square (and other rebellions that fell under the banner of the “Arab Spring”) as an inspiration (see Ahmed 2012), alongside recent revolts in Britain (see Hancox 2011), Puerto Rico (Ocup(arte) 2010), Spain (see Castañeda 2012) and Greece (see Graeber 2013; Ribellarsi and Weill 2011). While the “movements of the squares” across the Mediterranean rim (Smith 2012) did not all have the same relationship to demandlessness, the global resonance of public occupations coincided at a remarkable rate (see Hardt and Negri 2012). Spain’s movement mobilized the abstract signifier indignado (indignant) as their slogan, instead of specific demands. The alchemical indignado is reminiscent of a slogan originating in May ’68: “We are all German Jews.” Kristin Ross argues that “the ‘we’ of the slogan assembles a collective subject through the identification with a group—German Jews—that, through its proclamation as a shared name, becomes no longer sociologically classifiable” (2002, 57). In both 1968 and 2011, thousands of people embraced names without matching sociological categories. Such discursive events shift bodies from where they are “supposed” to be located (by, for example, the law) in order to produce collective subjects that cannot be counted, rather than affirming preexisting “identities.” This desire to indict the social and cultural divisions required by the representational rubric of liberal democracy is at the root of the need to transcend the logic of the demand. The tactical efficacy of resistance to representational logic entailed in the combination of demandlessness and occupation has perhaps been displayed most visibly by Zapatismo—itself highly influential for the antiglobalization movements that began in 1999 (see Hardt and Negri 2012). Zapatismo spokespersons have largely resisted “speaking for” other residents of the Chiapas territories that they have collectively occupied since the mid-1990s. Instead, they adopt the abstract signifier of the black mask as a marker of the nameless, the voiceless, the uncounted. Thomas Nail (2013) has suggested that the use of masks by Zapatistas, and OWS occupiers, actualizes a kind of “third person subjectivity.” Rather than representation of a constituency through a series of demands, a network of alliance in the space of occupation is preferred. Simon Tormey has hailed Zapatismo as “symptomatic of a more general shift in the underpinnings of the political ‘field,’ one that problematizes and points beyond ‘representation’” (2006, 138). The assumption here is that acts of representational mediation risk delimiting a subject’s political experience. Presumably, if one refuses to represent oneself as immediately recognizable, one cannot be called out, named, and thus subjected to institutional power. The challenge to the epistemological status of representation, in effecting a different mode of authorizing the human subject, provides the underlying edifice by which institutional power might be ruptured. This concept was clearly invoked by the students of the 2008 New School occupation, whose December communiqué “Pre-Occupied: The Logic of Occupation,” spelled out the need to undermine representational logic at both individual and rhetorical levels: “Identities that clouded our communication evaporate before our eyes and we see each for the first time as not who we are but how we exist. Adverbs replace both nouns and adjectives in the grammar of this human strike, where language is made to speak for the very first time without fear of atrophy. . . . Indiscernible, we sever the addiction to visibility that only guarantees our defeat. Thought has no image, and neither shall we.” The resistance to legibility imbricated in demandlessness and its possibility of inducing new social relations is framed as “something that has no relation whatsoever to its enemy, something whose development and trajectory is completely indifferent to the nonlife of governance and capital” (Inoperative Committee 2009, section III). The territory of the occupation is thus imagined as a space where subjects are formed rather than found. OWS operates under a similar set of assumptions. As Jodi Dean and Jason Jones have noted, “Occupy is said to be post or anti-representation with respect to the individual subjects participating in the movement and with respect to the movement’s own relation to its setting in communicative capitalism.” And this antirepresentationalism corresponds to the horizontalist method of organizing that has itself been the object of much debate (see Beltran et al. 2012). According to Dean and Jones, “The consensus-based practices of Occupy are premised on a rejection of the idea that anyone can or should speak for another person. To speak for another, it is claimed, effects a kind of violence or exclusion, repressing individual autonomy.”

Hope Key

We maintain a pragmatist hope for the future – this is the only logical political advocacy

Buck-Morss ’13 (Susan Buck-Morss, Professor of Political Science @ CUNY Graduate Center and Professor Emeritus at Cornell, “A Commonist Ethics”, The Idea of Communism vol 2, ed. by Slavoj Zizek, pg. 73 - 75, wcp)

The glow of optimism felt worldwide when Barack Obama won the US presidency in 2008 was a last (and lost) chance to believe that the system was capable of righting itself. In Obama's loyalty to the two pillars of the world order - capitalist economics and national self-interest - his presidency has demonstrated the bankruptcy of both. Given that free markets in a free society have failed to deliver basic human needs, can the world's citizens be asked to hope again? Of course the analogy is exaggerated, and the political emergency is qualitatively different - Obama is, happily, not a fascist, and, sadly, not socialist enough - but one is reminded of an exchange between Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler in March 1945, as the Soviet army closed in on Berlin. Hitler was enraged to discover Speer had blocked his orders, but then calmed down and said 'in a relaxed tone': 'Speer, if you can convince yourself that the war is not lost, you can continue to run your office . . . ' 'You know I cannot be convinced of that,' I replied sincerely but without defiance. 'The war is lost.' Hitler launched into his reflections . . . of other difficult situations in his life, situations in which all had seemed lost but which he had mastered . . . [H]e surprisingly lowered his demand: 'If you would believe that the war can still be won, if you could at least have faith in that, all would be well . . .' Agitated . . . I said: 'I cannot, with the best will in the world . . .' Once again Hitler reduced his demand to a formal profession of faith: 'If you could at least hope that we have not lost! You must certainly be able to hope . . . that would be enough to satisfy me.' I did not answer. There was a long, awkward pause. At last Hitler stood up abruptly . . . 'You have twenty-four hours to think over your answer! Tomorrow let me know whether you hope that the war can still be won.' Without shaking hands, he dismissed me.31 Again, the point of comparison is not one of leadership. It is only to point out that hope, too, can be an ideology. I cannot help feeling that Obama himself is aware of this danger, surely having believed in the democratic process that brought him to electoral victory such a short time ago. Obama was fond of repeating, 'This is not about me.' And he was precisely correct. It was not. But he himself lacked faith in the people who had elected him. Obama is proud to call himself a pragmatist. He just forgot one thing: in attempting to be realistic within the confines of the crazy status quo, he betrayed the pragmatics of the suddenly possible, which is, after all, the force that elected him in the first place. It is a global force, and it desperately wants change. It is the only sane politics the world now has. At this moment, being pragmatic in the sense of being cautious, proceeding reasonably within the irrational whole, is the truly risky path. Will the world's leaders recognize this? Will they wake up to the fact that the system they rely on is bankrupt, and that their power rests on air? As the Egyptian Feminist Nawal Sadaawi urged last spring: make your own revolution. The ways forward will be as varied as the people of this world. Feminists globally have taught us the need for such variety.32 All of these ways forward deserve our solidarity and support. We, the 99 per cent, must refuse to become invisible to each other. The experiments that are going on now in thousands of locations need space, the space that Walter Benjamin called a Spiefrawn ('space of play') to try doing things differently. And they need time, the slowing of time, the pulling of the emergency brake, so that something new can emerge. This is time that state power wants to cut short, and space that old-style political parties want to foreclose. There is no rush. The slowing of time is itself the new beginning.33 Every day that this event continues, it performs the possibility that the world can be otherwise. Against the hegemony of the present world order that passes itself off as natural and necessary, global actors are tearing a hole in knowledge. New forms emerge. They nourish our imagination, the most radical power that we as humans have.

Revolution

Revolutionary politics are useless

Crimethinc ‘1, decentralized anarchist collective (“Days of War, Nights of Love,” http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/selected/asfuck.php, lpc)
The truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest—your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings—are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo. They know that your post-Marxist jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control. They know that your infighting, your splinter groups and endless quarrels over ephemeral theories can never effect any real change in the world they experience from day to day. They know that no matter who is in office, what laws are on the books, what "ism"s the intellectuals march under, the content of their lives will remain the same. They—we—know that our boredom is proof that these "politics" are not the key to any real transformation of life. For our lives are boring enough already! And you know it too. For how many of you is politics a responsibility? Something you engage in because you feel you should, when in your heart of hearts there are a million things you would rather be doing? Your volunteer work—is it your most favorite pastime, or do you do it out of a sense of obligation? Why do you think it is so hard to motivate others to volunteer as you do? Could it be that it is, above all, a feeling of guilt that drives you to fulfill your "duty" to be politically active? Perhaps you spice up your "work" by trying (consciously or not) to get in trouble with the authorities, to get arrested: not because it will practically serve your cause, but to make things more exciting, to recapture a little of the romance of turbulent times now long past. Have you ever felt that you were participating in a ritual, a long-established tradition of fringe protest, that really serves only to strengthen the position of the mainstream? Have you ever secretly longed to escape from the stagnation and boredom of your political "responsibilities"? It's no wonder that no one has joined you in your political endeavors. Perhaps you tell yourself that it's tough, thankless work, but somebody's got to do it. The answer is, well, NO.