Six years later, we find ourselves grappling with a similar story. Last week, images of three US Marines urinating on, defacing, and taunting the bodies of three dead Afghan civilians surfaced online. Since their emergence, they have circulated widely, eliciting responses of disgust, revulsion, horror, and grief. Just as with the Abu Ghraib case, we have since witnessed a wave of ritual admissions of guilt and harsh condemnations from our political elites. All of this, of course, is entirely predictable and necessary. The images and the actions that they represent are vile and grotesque, reminding us that even as Obama engineers yet another ‘savior’ maneuver by withdrawing troops from the region, the horrors of war are as real, as common, as visceral as ever.

Yet I’m troubled by a particular aspect of the way in which this story has been reported, or, rather, something that seems to be missing from the coverage altogether: an account of the deaths that anticipated the acts of desecration. That is to say, everyone seems (rightly and justifiably) outraged at the pervese abuse of the bodies, but apparently unbothered by the presence of the bodies; the state-sanctioned murder of civilians that must be the grisly antecedent to the photos. The problem, it seems, is the desecration of the dead Afghanis, not the dead Afghanis themselves. The horror at what anticipated the scene that we actually see—murder in the name of peace—is nowhere to be found.

One might respond to this observation by contending that, of course the deaths themselves are atrocious, but the death of innocents is perhaps to be expected. It has, after all, been normalized (even standardized) within the visual lexicon of war. This assessment is at least partially true. It is right to draw attention to our desensitization to the victimized and murdered body. It is a grim and necessary reminder of the Hollywoodization of war; that ensemble of representative practices that conspire to erase from the visual register the affective qualities of loss.

But it must be repeated that this interpretation, understandable as it is, remains sorely incomplete. The lack of horror expressed at deaths that preceded the desecration speaks to something more political, more systemic, and more deeply troubling than simple desensitization. How is it that our horror, revulsion, and condemnation emerged only after, and not in direct response to, the murder of innocents? Where is the outrage for the original crime? When we start to think on such questions, a disquieting proposition creeps up on us: these lives were only apprehended as such, as specifically human lives (and even this remains questionable), when the myth of the righteous American was breached. The bodies in the images, it seems to me, have become less the bodies of murdered citizens and more points of departure from which we might explore the rupture of the American military psyche. Only when the ‘nobility’ of the military project was interrupted by an apparently anomalous act of disrespect, were these Afghanis apprehended as subjugated subjects. We have been left, in turn, with a distinctly Amero-centric and deeply troubling reaction to the photos: ‘how could they do that?’ ‘how could this happen’ ‘they must be punished for their actions’ ‘they will be held accountable.’

In almost every permutation of this reaction, the pathogenic perversity of the Marines in question has been made central. The murdered Afghanis become, at best, grim foils to an overly psychologized reading of the soldier. The desecration of the bodies, it follows, has become another opportunity to reflect upon the psychological violence of the military-industrial complex. The political consequences of this shift in focus should not be understated, and will be my subject here.

Judith Butler, in her 2009 volume, Frames of War, provides us with an effective lens through which to understand just why the invisibility of the depicted deaths ought to trouble us more than it has. Throughout her text, Butler attempts to address the general question of why, in times of war, certain lives are grievable and mournable, while others are not? How is it that Americans can express revulsion and outrage at the death of their own at the hands of terrorists while failing to apprehend as horrific the murder of Iraqis and Afghanis by their own government? What institutional, political, and social forces act on our bodies and our senses to regiment grief, and to what ends (or into whose service) is this regimentation put?

In response to this daunting set of questions, Butler suggests that, through the differential operation of practices, norms, and institutions, certain lives in this world are constantly produced and reproduced—framed—as non-lives, not-quite-lives, or lives not fully living. To expunge a body from the world by force becomes of little ethical trouble when that body is neither apprehended nor understood as a life per se. If a particular body is never a subject—that is, if it is never seen to inhabit those conditions under which it may flourish and contribute to our own networks of survivability—it need not, indeed cannot, be grieved. This is what Butler calls “the differential distribution of grievability.” Far from being absolute or automatic or purely affective, as we often assume it to be, our capacity to experience grief over the loss of another is powerfully regulated by the conditions of our sociality. This means that whether or not we perceive a life as such, and by extension, whether or not we see the loss of that life as worthy of our grief is, in some measure, produced rather than inherent.

The ideological work of producing and sustaining war, then, which can ultimately be distilled to the policing of the border between those allegedly under threat of elimination and those seen to perpetuate that threat, is the work of regulating grief. It is the work of “framing” certain groups as non-lives so as to block our capacity to grieve them, for to grieve them is to accept their ontological significance. And for Butler, to accept this significance is to recognize our shared condition of precarity, or the fact that there is no life that escapes destructibility. As she puts it:

War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others. This is why war works to undermine a sensate democracy, restricting what we can feel, disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another (p. 52).

Butler, I think, is quite right in locating this regulation of affect as the very basis of the discursive, political, and institutional frames used to justify the American incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. And with that in mind, it is possible to return to the question at the center of this essay: why do we show horror and revulsion at the desecration of bodies, but not mourn the loss of the lives that once resided therein? Why do we (or perhaps how can we), out of disgust, spring to the defense of these particular bodies while continuing to expunge lives from the planet by military force?

In my estimation, the lifelessness of the bodies depicted elicits no horror or revulsion in itself because, viewed through the frame that began and sustained a decade of war, they were never alive, to begin with. How can one mourn that which never lived; that which never appeared within an affective or political frame that invested it with the qualities of living—precarity, contingency, interdependency? The bodies, in this circumstance, are just that—bodies. It becomes difficult to look at these images and see murdered civilians. To do so would require us to accept that they were once engaged in and alive to the world, an interpretation that prevailing perceptual frameworks attempt to render impossible. Rather, our focus is racked toward the ‘honorable soldier’ figure as he fractures, ruptures, and diverges from his socially sanctioned moral station. We pathologize and internalize, pondering the incidental failures of the military-industrial complex, ruminating on the ways in which it normalizes and divorces from the burden of consequence the actions of particular soldiers.

And this is why, like the photos from Abu Ghraib, these images are not as incendiary (to use one of Butler’s evocative terms) or threatening to the powers-that-be as our revulsion might suggest. Certainly, they have a powerful affective quality, but the disruption they engender can only ever partial, insofar as the frame of interpretation, apprehension, and affect that enables the war itself—that there are lives in the world that are not lives—remains stable. Even in our disgust, we seem to mourn not the life that has been eradicated, but the violation of the body that remains. That is to say, we remain inside the frame established for us by the architects of war. Far from being deeply politically disruptive, then, our sharp outcry over these particular images (while certainly warranted and necessary) does little to trouble the assumption that there is some ‘better’ way to conduct war. Our collective guilt and shame, then, regardless of our good intentions, will remain politically blunt if we fail to connect the disgraced body to the life that was torn from it.

Of course, it would be irresponsible and authoritarian to suggest that we have somehow ‘grieved wrong.’ This essay is not meant to suggest that this is the case. Rather, I am asking that we consider seriously where and how our grief moves; what it apprehends, what it fails to see, what it establishes as memory, and what it seems to forget. To follow our grief in this way, to think about and remark upon where it drifts and more importantly, where it does/dares not, is to begin to sketch the contours of the frame in which we reside; an exercise of uncovering guided by the hope of undoing.

1. Do not take unpaid work: Do not take unpaid work. Do not take unpaid work. Do not take unpaid work. This will be packaged, as I’ve mentioned, in more ways than you can imagine. Shimmering internships and ‘amazing opportunities’ will yawn out before you with a surprising frequency. Don’t take them. When you accept unpaid work, you are demeaning your labour, undervaluing your time, dismissing the years of training you’ve accumulated, forgetting the thousands of dollars you’ve sunk into education, and telling your employer that they are right in thinking you worthless. What’s more, every time we take an unpaid gig as a ‘job’ (excluding charitable donations that we choose to make), we undervalue the profession and throw our colleagues under the bus. How can a skilled knowledge worker expect to be paid when there is someone waiting in the wings, perhaps free of the burden of debt or loans or rent or what-have-you, willing to step in the instant you defend your labour? Of course, we need to distinguish here between concepts like ‘work,’ ‘gift,’ ‘practice,’ and ‘development.’ This blog is where I practice writing and where I develop my skills. It is voluntary and part of my ongoing training. I could choose, as an individual, to gift my writing services to an acquaintance in exchange for services they might render. However, were this blog being written for an employer, I would expect compensation, and that is not an unfair, unreasonable, nor unrealistic expectation. 
2. See your work as work: Many people think that tasks such as design, writing, editing, and performance are a mere matter of talent or genius; that us creatives just do, that the products we create just appear. This is wrong, in every way, and you know it’s wrong. Musicians spend years in rehearsals, thousands on instruments and equipment, countless nights playing to empty rooms; designers sink huge amounts of money into Byzantine software suites that demand years of constant practice to master; writers labour over periods and hyphens and dashes for endless, infuriating ages; most of us went to school, investing untold dollars in textbooks purchased with the measly wages we scraped from dead-end McJobs. All of this is labour. All of this is training. All of this is experience. All of this should be compensated fairly. Your work is not flippant, it is not easy, and it is not to be demeaned.
3. Be honest with potential clients: Many potential clients will tell you, as if they know your craft, the parameters of your payment and performance. They will impose unrealistic deadlines, ask you to complete tasks in restrictive hours, and will refuse to pay you outside of those conditions. Rebuff these clients. You know your work, and once again, you know that it is work. If your client demands that you bill for no more than 15 hours per week while tackling on project that you know demands 30, tell them so. Tell them to either up your pay, adjust their timeline, or expect work of a lesser quality. There is no such thing as fast, good, cheap creative work. Any attempt to satisfy all three of those qualities will invariably end up just like you’d expect- done quick, feeling cheap.
4. “You’re not alone, this is very normal:” Other well-meaning people will tell you that your frustrations are common, that it is absolutely usual to feel slighted by clients, and that there are many out there who struggle with the same situation. These well-meaning people are right- it is exceptionally common. This does not make it acceptable. If anything, the absolute banality of unstable, precarious, temporary, underpaid, and unpaid work in the knowledge industries should alert us to the fact that the labour and exchange process is rotted through. The commonness of a condition does not eradicate its wrongness, and we should not be expected, nor wear it as a badge of honour, to be undervalued and exploited as workers.
5. Get Political: All of this is ultimately to raise a question and issue a rallying cry of sorts- we must discover, as knowledge workers, colleagues, and often as friends forced into direct competition with one another, what solidarity looks like in our industry and in our time. Solidarity and collective organizing made perfect sense in the factory; people were gathered together, hammering away at the same mass-produced commodities, subjected to the same miserable conditions. The experience of collectivity, and more importantly,collectivity-in-exploitation was palpable. This seems to evaporate when we consider the knowledge and creative industries. We work largely on our own contracts, are paid directly by small clients, and produce (what appear to be) emphatically unique knowledge objects- songs, performance pieces, articles, sculptures, posters, pamphlets. But what we have to remember is that our ideas are informed by our culture, what came before us, what unfolds around us, and what we expect to come after us. The concepts and proto-visions that inspire our labour reside in that classical Marxian category of the ‘General Intellect.” Ideas, products, discussions, and knowledge wheel through our networks and flash across our screens. They are all the products of someone else’s creative labours. Eventually, some combination of these forces congeals into our own knowledge products, which then re-enter general circulation. While it may appear individual and isolated, then, our labour is built on the backs of and contributes to the labour of others. Contemporary creative labour may indeed be described as fragmented, but in this sense, it remains in some measure collective. As such, it must be defended collectively. This means new approaches to unionism, collectivity, collaboration, and mutual defense. This means swapping the uncertainty of unpaid and precarious work with uncertainty of another kind–that of moving toward an as-yet undefined territory of knowledge solidarity. While both are fragile and perhaps not especially appealing, at the very least, the latter holds out some kind of promise of change. The former does nothing but guarantee its own reproduction, and by extension, the reproduction of our devaluation.

Knowledge workers of the world unite?

But with such openness and contingency comes the very real experience of confusion. Zizek, as he usually does, says it best when we writes:

Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous. We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free.’ We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss, in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the new, just to keep the machinery going and maintain what was good in the old—education, healthcare, basic social services. In short, our situation is like what Stalin said about the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves. Or as Gramsci said, characterizing the epoch that began with the First World War, ‘the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

It seems fitting, then, as we come to the end of this tremendous year, to make some attempt at stability by way of reflection; to think about what this year and its changes have meant, what new ways of thinking they have opened us to, and what paths we might break as we continue to step toward the abyss that Zizek so presciently points out.

If there is a phrase that has served me well this year in thinking about the world and my place within it, it comes from German revolutionary and organic intellectual par excellence, Heinrich Blucher. Blucher and his wife, Hannah Arendt, lived in the passionate pursuit of thought, working tirelessly throughout their academic careers to secure spaces within which we might make ethical judgments, free of the burden of programmatic, mechanistic, or procedural politics. Having witnessed and fled the horrors of Nazi rule, and perhaps more devastatingly, the ways in which average citizens can become tragically complicit in evil and wrongdoing, they consistently inveighed against declaring allegiance to any ossified political position, yet were themselves politically active throughout their lives. How does one balance the two? How are we to refuse a means-and-ends politics that closes down the possibility of thought and dissent while still finding a route to action? More generally, how do we even retain the category of ‘action’ in the absence of ends? Doesn’t action imply the achievement of a thing? Blucher sums up this tense position and the politics that it implies in a wonderful, pithy phrase that I think we would do well to bear in mind as we enter 2012:

Pessimists are cowards. Optimists are fools.

I think that 2011 has proven Blucher quite right. The stubborn resilience of the Occupy movement, for example, continues to prove early skeptics incorrect, offering us a real reason for hope in grim times. They called us spoiled, incoherent, deadbeat losers in an attempt to dismiss out of hand our righteous indignation at the excesses of capital. But in the mere three months since protesters first took to Zucotti Park in New York, as Canadian activist Judy Rebick recently noted at Media Democracy Days Vancouver, the occupiers have done more to change political discourse than the organized left has in forty years. The early pessimism of the naysayers, to me, was little more than bourgeois pearl-clutching; a knee-jerk reaction to the unpleasantness of anger and inequality. Take the Occupy Vancouver site, for instance. Vancouver is home to the nation’s richest and poorest area codes. The income gap here is acute and devastating, fuelled by the ongoing financialization of our housing market, which transforms livable homes into nothing but vacant sinks for global capital. Every night, there are hundreds of people sleeping on city streets, no homes to return to, no shelters in which to find refuge, no end in sight to the gutting of their neighbourhoods in the name of private wealth. Yet this homelessness only seemed to become a problem for our city’s rich when it converged in front of the art gallery at the occupy site.

Suddenly confronted with the sheer unpleasantness of homelessness, poverty, and inequity, many turned away from the movement, called for the demolition of the encampment, decried fire hazards and public safety threats, recycled the same tired complaints about the protesters’ ‘lack of message’ (as if we’re all supposed to be policy experts with PR degrees). A suffocating pessimism spread across the surface of the city’s political discourse, like a fungus spreading out over a stone- an utterly shallow and opportunistic critique that managed to swallow the spirit of the protest; a pessimism that, following Blucher’s words, was simply cowardice parading in political robes. It was nothing but an unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of a critique that it would be more pleasant not to hear. Hundreds of people sleeping on the streets is fine, as long as no one has to look at it, apparently (see Michael Stewart’s amazing column on this for Rabble.ca).

Likewise, however, it would be irresponsible to accept optimism on its own as some kind of political ethos. To rework the example already given, the Occupy movement, while inspiring, is rife with internal injustices that are constantly at risk of being marginalized by cries such as “We Are the 99%” How are we to take seriously, within spaces of communal action, the ontological fact of human difference? How can we claim that we are all united in our subjugation to global capital when racism, ableism, misogyny, transphobia, heteronormativity, and colonialism continue to commit violences against marginalized communities with a disproportionate frequency and severity? How do we remain reflexive about the fact that the language of “Occupy” itself resonates with an ongoing history of colonial oppression that continues to devastate indigenous communities? How can we claim that we’re ‘United’ when people of colour are still specifically targeted by the systemic racism of the legal, penal, political, and economic frameworks that we live with (in a video of OWS that I watched a while back, a young black man named Malik put it best: ‘If white people have a cold, black people have the flu’)? How can we create safe spaces for political action without addressing transphobia, gender violence, ableism, and other body-normative discourses and practices?

The short answer is: we can’t. Optimism is not an acceptable political strategy. Politics can’t depart from some sunshine radicalism that claims a kind of post-gender, post-race, post-sexuality, post-difference ethos. To do so is to is to reinscribe historical injustices, to maintain white, cis-male, able-bodied privilege, and to implicitly sneer down one’s nose at those who simply ‘don’t get’ the “99%” message. In an article that I came across last week on how to think about our current ecological crisis, author Alex Steffen writes:

…if we care about the planet, the most important thing we can do is start showing how good a future we still can have. That’s why, right now, optimism is a political act, and a radical one at that.

This is a risky proposition. Envisioning alternative futures is of course an important part of any political strategy. Acts of creativity and imagination resist the pessimism of prescriptive thinking. But they can’t be taken as politics in and of themselves. Optimism–daring to dream of how much more livable and equitable our future could be–seems to me a political practice open only to those not suffering now. Vision can’t come at the expense of active resistance, just as  resistance without vision is a blunt instrument. We have to imagine, but we also have to create; even as we build anew, we have to fight what remains.

So if optimism is for fools, and pessimism is for cowards, what’s left?

Between optimism and pessimism–between imagination and creation, and between construction and resistance–lies thought; that radically contingent domain where the injustices of the present are held in a dynamic tension with the tragedies of our past and the hopes for our future. It is the space, if occupy has done what I hope it has, that we inhabit right now, where revolution and reformation (beginning and continuing; imagining and fighting) have become coterminous even as they retain their conceptual specificity. The space of thought is one of uncertainty and contingency—qualities to which the Western political trajectory has been traditionally allergic, preferring the stability of administration, favoring metaphors of politics as making rather than as acting. To feel at home in this space is, in turn, challenging; it undermines itself at every point where it is momentarily stabilized. But its great virtue is its refusal of the pessimism-optimism binary. It asks us, rather than subscribing to anything, to consider as many things as possible, to crystallize a position out of those factors, and then proceed into political action from that position, while always remaining alert to its incompleteness.

This, to me, is radical. It is the kind of politics that can push back against the way that time and thought have been collapsed to the great benefit of those who create and support inequality. The police-media-government compact that has invested such tremendous effort in discrediting Occupy, for example, ensures an instant and perfect fidelity between the three parties, and so closes down on the possibility for dissent or critique. It becomes an absolute vacuum of meaning because it leaves nothing up for negotiation. It is truly radical, then, to explode that fidelity and force wedges into its weak points. This happens only through thought that waits, only by staking out some position beyond or between the automatic judgments implied by pessimism and optimism.

The opposite is thoughtlessness, a state that leads us to collectively mourn Christopher Hitchens while forgetting the war-mongering rhetoric he engineered to justify the US invasion of Iraq. Thoughtlessness allows us to arrogantly dismiss those living in indigenous communities such as Attawapiskat as ‘financially irresponsible’ while forgetting Canada’s ongoing history of brutal colonial subjugation. Thoughtlessness (armoured, of course, by coercion; by guns and tanks and the excesses of the military-industrial state) leads the Israeli government to build monuments to the memory of the Holocaust on lands cleared by massacre of Palestinian citizens. Thoughtlessness, in short, vaporizes all hope of remaining alert to both our past and our future, and so condemns us to repeat the mistakes of the former to the detriment of the latter.

So as we enter 2012 and reflect on the months we’ve left behind, I suppose the plea I’m making is as simple as it is daunting: a plea for thought. The choice between optimism and pessimism isn’t a choice. It’s a challenge to find something better.

Of course, even at the time of the Olympics, such narratives were obviously disingenuous. But now, with the municipal election looming over a political field littered with broken promises, illusory progressivism, and crass, opportunistic electioneering, they have started to look less and less like the mere banal fictions of political marketing. Rather, they have been revealed as deliberate falsehoods, engineered to obscure the dramatic environmental, social, and human injustices that our city continues to accommodate in the defense of private profit.

As you, Mr. Robertson, trumpet the horn of progressivism to the tune of bike lanes, community gardens, public art, and composting, your refusal (or inability) to curb the influence of developers and adequately protect low-income neighbourhoods has turned Vancouver into little more than a speculative playground for the ultra-rich.

With rents skyrocketing, those without the means to live in luxury are increasingly forced out of the central city or into sub-standard housing that deprives them of safety and dignity. Quite against your grand ambition to make Vancouver the world’s greenest city, and against the tenets of inter- and intra-generational equity so central to conventional definitions of sustainability, this means more commuting, more emissions, more sprawl, more strain on the most vulnerable among us, and the eviction of cultural and economic diversity from the Vancouver community. All your political posturing—encouraging us to cycle to work, to buy local, to participate in the knowledge economy—is hollow, at best, unless you are willing to ask why. Why ecologically devastating industrial agriculture continues to thrive despite the growth of the local food movement, why so many knowledge workers seem to be leaving the city for other markets, why the injunction against Occupy Vancouver has been met with such fierce resistance.

When we ask why, we come across the ugly, difficult fact of injustice, a fact that this city council refuses (or again, has become unable) to confront. We come across a city traced and retraced by the contours of class inequity, racial injustice, and dramatic income disparity. We find a city where indigenous citizens are asked to perform at civic festivals and marquee events, but are brutally relegated to the margins of civic life through such processes as the gentrification of the DTES; where a tragic death at an otherwise beautiful demonstration is seized upon in a crass act of electioneering while the countless deaths that occur in the DTES because of poverty, homelessness, and inadequate access to public health services, go unmarked; where civic engagement, the subject of many a proud boast at City Hall, apparently doesn’t include peaceful assembly (at least not when there’s a football party to be thrown); where the work of our artistic community is relentlessly called upon to gussy up our events while the community itself is forced out of the city by exploitative rents and archaic zoning policies; where the fundamentally collective task of addressing the injustices that ravage our communities is privatized, collapsed completely into the politically suffocating question of how and what we buy.

Certainly, these charges will be met with the correct rebuttal that a Vision city council is preferable to an NPA victory. In short: it is only responsible to choose the lesser evil. I don’t think that this glib assessment, despite its appeal, needs to be the only tenable one at our disposal. If the Occupy movement has taught us anything, it is that we shouldn’t have to settle, and that we can create alternatives, provided we stake out spaces of mutual support in which they can appear. What kind of a choice is the lesser evil when there are clearly more ethical judgments to be made, in exactly the moment when making them seems more possible than ever before?

I’m not sure what, if anything, I’m advocating here, beyond the simple recognition that business in this city simply cannot continue as usual if our political process is to have any meaning whatsoever.

Mr. Robertson, it is my sense that you will win this election (with a split council, without my vote). As such, I urge you to not just act within, but to think about your environment. Political bravery, as our fellow citizens are showing us in this moment, has not simply vanished. If there is any time to seize it, it is now. Over the past few weeks, you have shown yourself to be a tremendous electioneer. But your job, if your authority is to be taken seriously, is not to win. It is to govern, to think, and to judge.

I find this a strange question for two reasons. First, I simply cant imagine anything more tangible or substantive than millions around the world flooding the streets of their cities, day after day, and reasserting their bodies in space. There is just nothing–no policy, no piece of legislation, no electoral victory–that could be more real, more substantive, more sensible, and more symptomatic of radical change than the overwhelming appearance of human action in the global public realm. Second, the very question “what tangible change can these movements produce?” contains within it a strange conceptual understanding of ‘the real.’

When people talk about “tangible changes,” they are, I think, talking about policy, legislation, the reformation of existing political institutions and principles on a mass scale. What is important to remember is that all of these things (policy, etc.) should be understood in some measure as “texts;” codes that are given form and meaning by the words and deeds that we share with others. In this sense, they might be understood as representations. Policy instruments, laws, constitutions, charters, and the like represent human action and the ‘public will.’ Thus when we ask what “tangible” change the occupation movement can produce, we really ask what new forms of representation might arise out of our actions, and simultaneously assert that these representations are somehow more real than the actions to which they refer. The “image” of human action in the form of the policy instrument, in this way, has come to take on a truth of its own that supplants the truthfulness of human action itself. We seem to have forgotten Godard’s famous formula: “A picture of a man on a horse is not a man on a horse. It is a picture of a man on a horse.” That is, we have become seriously inclined to replace reality with its own image, to trade that which represents our bodies and our words in for our bodies and our words, in general.

This substitution of the truth of representation for the truth of action is becoming increasingly common, even among allies of the movement. I think the popularity of this formulation throws a harsh light of just how radically restricted our political horizons have become. While many are quick to celebrate the resurgence of consensus-based, direct democratic decision-making processes within the occupation zones, few are willing to accept this resurgence as a stand-alone phenomenon that need not be up-scaled or incorporated into existing institutions to be “real.” We celebrate the dawn of a new conception and practice of politics, but in the very same breath, critique it for not adhering to the very evaluative categories that it has made obsolete. If occupations are radical in their openness to possibility contra tightly sealed political systems that operate through rigid prescription and mandate, then we must judge them accordingly and understand them on their own terms. If any attempt at quantifying their “success” is to be made, it should shirk the question of how effective they have been at inspiring policy changes at the level of institutional politics. That is, it should resist the temptation to locate the reality of the occupation within its own image instead of in the action that constitutes it in space and time.

This is, of course, another way of stating the argument I made in my last post: to corral these demonstrations into narrow sets of instrumental demands or to reduce them to programs for change forecloses on the tremendous power that lies in their indeterminacy. However, reframing this argument through the discussion above raises another issue that deserves attention. If, as I seem to be suggesting, we can’t (or shouldn’t) evaluate the occupation movement on its ability to effect policy or institutional change, and if as I’ve suggested before, we should resist the urge to collapse its radical openness into a set of demands, then where do we go?  This is all a way of raising another question that I get asked a lot these days: “Where do you see this going? What’s your vision for what it could become?”

This is a much more interesting and (I think) reasonable question than the first one I addressed. This is a question that asks what politics means rather that what it does. It demands that we come up with new criteria for evaluating and theorizing, rather than allowing us to defer to established categories of understanding. In short, it’s a question that opens us to judgment instead of restricting us to a few choices.

Here’s the best answer I’ve been able to come up with: André Duarte (2010) writes that, following the 2008 financial collapse, a number of occupation-style protest movements appeared around the globe that anticipated the surge we are seeing today. He talks specifically about a group called Espai en blanc:

Espai en blanc, much as many other Spanish political collectives is tied up with the illegal practice of…occupying abandoned public and private spaces, which are then transformed into new free spaces for critical thinking, for intellectual discussions, for the organization of subversive political actions; briefly, new spaces open to experimentation and to the development of new forms of life among equals (p. 15, my emphasis).

Espai en blanc, writes Duarte, has little interest in achievement or “change” in any conventional sense of the term. “Their name is not to be understood as the possibility or the ‘promise of a better future,’ but as the ‘passion for conquering places in which it is possible to live in another way’” (p. 16). While they stop short of any anarchic attempt to dismantle the State, in fact addressing the State and existing institutions as the entities “to which social and political demands are directed,” they don’t do so “in the expectation that these demands will be heard and satisfied.” As a result, “they are not especially interested in formulating demands, but primarily in acting politically and thus manifesting what they want and need” (p. 16,  my emphasis).

Duarte refers to organizations like  Espai en blanc–and by extension, the global occupation movement–as “islands of freedom.” In a vision for the future, he imagines the multiplication of these islands across and within extant political entities. In this way, we can extend the invigorating and challenging experience of consensus-based, radically participatory democracy to as many people as possible while retaining the kind of intimacy and physical proximity that it demands. After all, if we try to extend this experience to everyone through extant mass institutions like State bureaucracies, we end up with parliamentary democracy by unending referenda. This is a system that not only produces massive administrative headaches, but seems conceptually untenable. It is the attempt to open the experience of radical democratic process by collapsing it into its exact opposite: ossified bureaucracies that reduce political life to the individual act of voting.

This is a moving proposition, but I think it still needs one qualification. Just as the scaling out of direct democracy into non-stop referenda can’t be a solution, neither can the unending multiplication of islands of freedom. These islands can only be multiplied so many times before they must necessarily start to divide. Without some consideration of how these islands might take on a measure of resilience, what is stopping them from continually fracturing off into smaller and smaller entities? Under the centrifugal force of creation, all the pieces might just fly off in all directions. Doesn’t this give us exactly the same kind of radical individualism that we live with and fight against today?

I think there’s a middle ground here, though, that Duarte doesn’t consider. While at a salon on Occupy Wall Street some weeks ago, a participant reminded us all of an incredible tool at our disposal: the network. If, as islands of freedom appeared on the political horizon, there were a way to link them together in a kind of dynamic equilibrium, within which the messages, priorities, models, activities, experiences of one could inform and be adapted by all the rest (and vice versa), might this not serve as a compelling vision of the future? Could this not ply some middle course between the need to retain the intimacy of radical democratic spaces and the desire to extend that experience to as many people as possible? Could the network rescue the multiplication of islands of freedom from the downward spiral of endless fracturing while also rescuing from bureaucratization the very real need for structure and permanence in political life?

Of course, for any of this to have any chance, the network itself needs to be restructured and preserved as an open space, free of the influence of private profit, enclosure, and the like. But if this kind of communicational infrastructure could be secured, could we not use it to create an intricate mesh of publics that stretched all the way around the world? Publics that push and pull on one another constantly, that hold each other in place while being constantly reinvigorated by the actors inhabiting them; drawn together yet always held apart at a certain distance, so as to allow for the development of independent judgments? In such a world, we would leave behind the necessity of deferring to abstractions such as policy instruments as the only institutions capable of giving our dynamic movements stability, memory, and resilience. Rather, the continued existence of any one island of freedom would be confirmed and guaranteed by the presence of others. The witness of human action would animate and enliven truth, while pushing back against the urge to displace this truth with its own image.

This is one rather vaguely formed vision of where the occupation movement might lead. But it is certainly not ordained and should not be taken as a teleological “end point” for the movement. Rather, this piece is meant to suggest that the future of any political action has no inherent need to lie in extant political establishments, that the creation of alternative ways of living that preclude or make irrelevant our established understanding of politics might be taking place as we speak, in directions we simply can’t predict. If we want to avoid losing what is so invigorating and inspiring about these demonstrations, we must approach them with the same openness of thought with which they have approached us.

It would seem that the honeymoon period has worn off when it comes to the occupation of Wall Street (which has now spread to several other cities on a global scale), now entering its twelfth day. Even as the demonstration continues to grow in scale and scope, with massive unions such as the New York Transit Worker’s Union officially joining and endorsing the occupiers, those sympathetic to the cause seem to be displaying a peculiar frustration with the project.

In particular, I continue to hear that the demonstration is sowing the seeds of its own demise through its refusal or inability to produce any concrete set of demands (outside of the beautiful list issued last week). Soft criticisms are being lobbed regarding the importance of coherent and effective messaging strategies in the moment of protest, the necessity of appearing structured, self-consistent, bound by policy and the like. Without definite action items, critics charge, the protest will stall and become incapable of effecting, in even a modest way, any of the changes it advocates for.

This line of critique, I think, is woefully inadequate and misses the point of occupations and encampments as a form of resistance in general. In the first case, it collapses a fundamental distinction—that between protest and occupation as qualitatively different forms of action. When a protest transcends the boundaries of protest as such, its qualitative substance shifts, as well, and this is a fact that needs to be considered. To be certain, an occupation grows out of the same want to resist as the typical rally. A rally though, at least in the conventional sense of the word (to which, of course, there are always exceptions), tends to act as a momentary and deeply symbolic form of resistance, usually accompanied by one or many concrete demands for immediate change. It is typically a large, loud gathering of people meant to show, in a dramatic manner, a sense of solidarity and the strength of numbers. In the language of radical politics, rallys are ‘mind bombs:’  disruptive, dramatic, and symbolic eruptions of support for or resistance to a particular cause.

This is not to diminish the value of rallies or conventional protests—I wouldn’t participate in them if I didn’t believe in them. The first critique made against civil resistance actions, in almost every case I’m aware of, is that they are nice symbolic gestures, but fail to enact any real change. This argument, as far as I’m concerned, is bunk. Of course protests are symbolic. But then so is language, so is clothing, so is art, so is money, but rarely do we think twice about the authority carried by any of these ostensibly artificial forms of representation.

The fact remains, though, that they tend to be designed for maximum cognitive and affective impact in a limited time frame; something to rattle us out of the routine landscapes of the every day, and in so doing, open us up to wonder- the emotional response to the experience of ignorance. Occupations are fundamentally different. Rather than asking us to show up, disrupt, and demand immediate action from the powers that be, occupations ask us to show up, settle in, and start working on our own actions. In a wonderful video that surfaced from Wall Street earlier this week (embedded below), one woman who appears around 4:55 makes a particularly illuminating comment to this effect. She says that Occupy Wall Street isn’t a protest in the sense of being ‘against’ a ‘thing,’ but rather a way of trying to formulate a new kind of society. This, again, is the type of comment typically seized upon as idealistic nonsense by the coherent-messaging line of critique, but I’d like to suggest the opposite. To me, it seems an elegant summary of the practical work of living in a new way, day to day, within an occupied space.

To be certain, in occupying Wall Street, demonstrators engage in debates about ideology, tactics, policy, and ideas, and likely spend a good amount of time in that abstract realm of contemplation. But at the same time, they, by absolute necessity, engage with the questions and challenges presented by daily life: how do we feed ourselves? How do we stay warm? How do we make decisions as a group? What symbolic protest actions are we going to take and why? How are we going to take care of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable among us? How do we respect one another’s space?  Quite literally: how, in a material sense, do we produce a world held in common? How do we stake out, with some measure of resilience, a space in which to live?

This isn’t the stuff of theory or philosophy. This is the stuff of every day life, the very same questions all of us ask out of the will to reproduce ourselves on this earth. To ask the people involved in this process to give “one concrete demand” or to “standardize their messaging strategy” is utterly absurd. Imagine what would happen if a stranger approached you on the street and asked “what is the one, and only one, conviction by which you live your life?” This is, in effect, what leftist critics of Occupy Wall Street are asking of the occupiers. The occupiers are actively engaged in the process of creating alternative modes of living, being, and surviving, not in hammering out programmatic doctrine. This is the heart of the occupation of Wall Street.

At its core, it is not a movement that seeks to win support, to reform policy, or to endorse a particular presidential candidate. It is a movement that is, in every literal sense, wrapped up in the process of living. To predictably draw on a distinction made by Hannah Arendt: rather than focusing on the making of policy or concrete outcomes, they are focused on doing, creating and enacting new answers to the inescapable questions that emerge out of the material facts of life on earth. This is an orientation that refuses to be recruited into the instrumental, means-and-ends project of legislative politics. Its power lies in its indeterminacy, its uncertainty, its complete freedom from prescription and teleology. This power disappears the instant we force it into the confines of ‘demands,’ insofar as demands, by their nature, suggest an end point to the movement, a point at which resistance should naturally stop.

The outcome is not certain. In fact, it doesn’t even exist. And that’s the point.

All along, the Wall Street occupiers have said that their movement is inspired by the Arab Spring and the youth movements that spread across Europe shortly thereafter; in particular, the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo and the encampment movement in Spain. The parallels between these acts of resistance extend beyond tactics. To me, the true revelation of Tahrir Square was not the removal of Mubarak from power (of course, a tremendous victory). Rather, it was the experience—gained by the thousands of occupiers—of actively creating a world of their own, held in common under a spirit of resistance, possibility, and critique. Leaders come and go, despots are installed and deposed, policies made and undone, constitutions drafted and amended, but there is something immutable about the experience of action. After decades of living within the radical restrictions placed upon on action, assembly, and speech under the Mubarak regime, the Egyptians who occupied Tahrir Square opened themselves to the project of remaking the world, by which I mean the substance of every day life. They had to eat, they had to sleep, they had to be clothed and protected, and they had to find ways of doing it anew. In answering these questions for themselves, they literally created a new society. It may have been fleeting in the material sense, with the encampment now largely dismantled, but the experience of deliberation, community self-determination, and the challenge of making decisions in the dense space of common life cannot be so easily swept away.

The experience of an occupation—the experience of doing—is at the heart of the Wall Street movement, not any singular, limited outcome. This experience is inimitable, it is immutable, and it is corrosive.

More than ever, then, it’s time to think big about politics. Not just how we might make electoral systems more efficient or representative, not just about accountability legislation, not just about trying to force financiers and bankers off the shoulders of our elected officials, but about politics itself: what it is, where it can happen, and who we think is capable of participating in it. Our time demands radicalism of a new sort. Many bristle at the mention of the word radical, dismissing it as irrational, disconnected, and perhaps most disingenuously, inherently violent and unaccountable. We’re quick to forget, though, that radical comes from the Latin term radix, meaning ‘root,’ suggesting that a more nuanced interpretation of radical politics is necessary. It is a politics that is rooted, connected to lived human experience, real communities, and the dense interstices of thought, contemplation, and action that take place between human subjects of all sorts, at all times. The possibility of radical change emerges in the space of what Indian Marxist scholar Sunil Sahasrabudhey calls ordinary “knowledge production.” In his words:

Ordinary life in fact is that vast bed where knowledge is produced hourly, daily. Ordinary life is the life without condition. It presupposes no technology, no religion, no state, no university. People constantly produce new knowledge based on their genius, experiences and the needs of everyday life. There has perhaps never been a greater source of knowledge than ordinary life (2008).

If it is even our most mundane interactions that produce the raw materials of the so-called ‘knowledge society,’ then it is within these mundane interactions that the promise of enormous transformation is held. Without being too vulgar in my Marxism, the old axiom applies here: those who control the means of production form the power class. In the lurch towards austerity, where the citizen is asked to pay for the failings of a crisis-riddled global finance system; in the limiting of politics to a professional game of back room deals; in the opportunistic leveraging of manufactured crises; in the reduction of the political imagination to the act of marking a piece of paper every four years; we find attempt after attempt to appropriate, blunt, undermine, eviscerate our ownership of our own mental capacities. Through political marketing and branding, through bald-faced lies about ‘shared sacrifice,’ and through discourses that try clumsily to suture the accumulation of debt (essentially a relation of dominance and dependence; read, slavery) onto the hope for liberation and social mobility, our imaginations are radically restricted.

How do we respond? By reappropriating our imagination. This is the radicalism I’m advocating for. Not programmatic socialisms or scientific utopianisms, but acts of radical imagination, inspired by, thought through, and realized alongside others. Acts that can help us reconsider and rebuild our very notion of ‘politics.’ Politics is conventionally defined as the negotiation and administration of power through both institutional and non-institutional channels. As Sahasrabudhey has so urgently pointed out, though, we produce at all times the resources from which global elites extract value and power  for their own benefit. In other words, we produce the very power that underlies the operation of politics. That is what needs to be reclaimed. To again quote Sahasrabudhey:

Only when producers of knowledge start understanding that their knowledge is turned against them in the new dispensation, the possibility of a new radical politics is born (2008).

For me, this politics of radical imagination demands that we revive the classical feminist notion that the personal is political: that the affective, embodied experience of so-called “ordinary life” is saturated with, inflected by, and determining of the mediation and negotiation of power, or, in other words, politics. By affective and embodied, I mean recognizing that we are moved by things, events, and experiences. When we encounter someone who suffers from a disease, when we comfort a mourning loved one, when we laugh with friends around a table over dinner, we are moved, pushed (or drawn) into a kind of intimacy that dramatically densifies what Kim Curtis, in a beautiful aesthetic interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, calls “our sense of the real.” In this turn, we come to recognize our fundamental commonness, a commonness shared with all people in the world, be they intimate relations or ostensible ‘strangers.’ Before social justice even enters our programs of change, this kind of affective  relationship prefigures a more fundamental form of justice, a kind of ethical (because it is a conscious and necessary and universally shared commitment rather than a completely subjective morality) tie to a world of others, to whom we ourselves are also an other.

The reason I think this is so important is because affect- embodied feeling, personal relations- is the most recent frontier under threat of colonization by the disembodying myths associated with late finance capitalism. As De Cock et al. (2009) have pointed out, finance capitalism, even following the complete meltdown of Wall Street in 2008, tends to default to a narrative of sublime, boundless circulation. Money simply flows through glowing screens and blinking cursors to our mobile devices, while we wade through invisible currents of always-on, always-pulsing market and financial data. Value, labour, work, debt- in the mythology of finance, it all transcends the body, emancipates us from the ‘mere’ experience of material being. Power, to paraphrase Raley (2009) seems to have vacated the streets and become nomadic.

This despite the fact that it is precisely our bodies, precisely our relationships with others and the world that are being constantly foreclosed upon by the engineers of global finance. To use a cliché example, Facebook brands itself as a space of infinite friendship; affect circulating freely, lifted above the restraints of border politics, symbolic confusion, and the like. It allows us to “connect,” befriend, emote, move as we please. Yet as a proprietary platform, those affective relationships are closely monitored and confined to narrow corridors that are scraped clean by advertisers. Our apparently emancipated friendships are then used to build self-consistent spheres of targeted advertising within the networked space(s) through which we so freely move. It is the commodification of one of the few spaces of the world that, for centuries, has seemed too sacred for markets to interfere in: feeling, personal connection, affect (Anderson & Milberry, 2009).

When we turn to a more recent and pressing crisis of the contemporary world- austerity measures- the situation and governing logic is the same. Status quo political economists try to sell austerity measures (cuts to social programming to pay off enormous sovereign debts that result from the bailout packages doled out by national governments to most of the world’s major financial sectors) as a way to fix or correct neoliberal market economies. They’re a kind of ritual admission of guilt that change absolutely nothing. Rather, they powerfully retrench the very same logics that lead to the financial collapse in the first place.

Finance, in the end, is about securitizing futures; investing in reserves of resources, pools of labour, and emerging markets before they fully coalesce, based on prediction, risk analysis, and speculation about projected future earnings. Suhail Malik, in a stunning and dense article for Mute Magazine has beautifully illustrated that austerity is a radical extension of this same impulse. Rather than ‘fixing’ the internal failings of finance, austerity stretches them further than they’ve ever gone. The instant national governments took on the private crisis of finance and turned it into a sovereign crisis of debt, they committed generations to the task of repaying these socialized losses. Children who have yet to enter productive labour relations, children who have yet to be born, children who have yet to be a passing thought in a parent’s mind are now committed to live a life indebted to an unholy union between financial and political elites.

This means a life of internalized austerity. It means a lack of access to healthcare and nutritious food; a lack of access to safe, nurturing educational spaces; a lack of access to community programs that help us discover those rich intersubjective bonds out of which can explode radical imaginative acts and alternative futures. Austerity is the attempt to securitize not fossil fuel futures, not timber futures, nor the future of anything else we’re accustomed to thinking of as a resource, but human futures in the general sense. Austerity is the attempt to securitize the resources mentioned above: affect, imagination, thought, the possibility of change. It is the expansion of the logic of finance capitalism par excellence into the affective domain.

Grim as this assessment is, it is always important that we recall Gramsci’s argument about such hegemonic schemes: hegemony is always a relation of incorporation and dissent; attempted domination dialectically tied to resistance. This means that even while affect is under severe attack (and in many cases, severely outflanked), it becomes, in itself, a pivotal site of resistance. To resist along an affective plane, we must think expansively, broadly, experimentally, and creatively about politics. Think, for example, about people who collect bottles that others have discarded in garbage bins and return them for the recycling deposit. This utterly mundane action is saturated with radical possibilities. The people, events, labour, and relations between all three that constitute such activities are ‘off the record,’ so to speak. It is an autonomous, self-determined, intersubjective relationship that takes shape outside of what ‘official’ economics records as a legitimate transaction.  The same goes for urban and window box gardening. These are powerfully resistant actions that implicitly reject an industrial food system carefully and deliberately crafted to serve the interests of massive agricultural corporations, who profit immensely from a hamstrung government. Even as you read, thousands are organizing an occupation of Wall Street, where they will reassert themselves before the very institutions that have gambled on the futures of their communities, failed, and come out more handsomely wealthy than they were before. The outcome of this demonstration is uncertain, but that’s the point. It’s an imaginative act through which human agents encounter one another in space, time, and feeling. It is in turn an act that resists the prescriptive, predictive, and securitizing violences and enclosures that global finance commits in its own best interest.

What becomes apparent, then, is that our political world is in fact heavily populated by sites of resistance, autonomy, and potentially transformative change. The political economy of the last half-century, though, has so powerfully narrowed the space of ‘politics’ that we struggle to imagine ourselves as political beings. To resist this narrowing, to locate what Arendt elegantly calls the “seeds of boundlessness” that blanket our world, we need a broader sense of what politics is. We need to know just how deeply we participate in its operations as we move through embodied, felt, affective relationships with ourselves, with the material world, and most importantly with the people around us. Lackluster political mobilization is often blamed on a lack of political empowerment, that sense that our actions in the public realm might beget further action, and in the end, a better future. This utter lack of empowerment in contemporary politics is powerfully reinscribed by the denial of the very opportunity to even imagine situations that might empower us; that is, by the enclosure and securitization of affective relations and the radical political imaginary. Consider, then, the political power that might be unlocked if we truly grasped just how radical and transformative we already are. If we understood and acknowledged and owned the political weight of our affective relations, would we not feel more empowered? Would we not understand ourselves as more deeply political beings, capable of creating real change?

When it comes to radicalism, or ‘transformative politics’ more generally, people tend to roll their eyes. They doubt its practicality. They say things like “that’s lovely, but you can’t possibly live those politics.” These people are wrong. We can and do live politics. We live them (and enliven them) through every relationship we develop, from every bit of knowledge that we produce, through every moment in which the state of our fellow humans compels us to think larger and broader than we had before. And the moment we realize this, we realize our own capacities for change. I want to close by returning to the words of Hannah Arendt, one of the most powerful influences on my own politics. Her words, I think, express better than most the expansive power of affect. For Arendt, when we situate ourselves within a plural world characterized by “human interrelatedness,”

the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of…boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation

Almost immediately after the riot broke out, social media networks were alight with photos of rioters posing in front of burning cars, looters running out of stores with armfuls of stolen merchandise, and thugs kicking in windows and doors. It didn’t take long before a Facebook group had been set up that asked users to tag the rioters, if they recognized them. The idea carried over to Tumblr, where a number of “tag-the-douche” blogs caught fire, posting a deluge of crowd-sourced contributions. The idea behind the whole exercise was to help the Vancouver Police track down and arrest those responsible for the destruction of the downtown core following Vancouver’s loss to Boston in game seven of the Stanley Cup finals.

To be sure, I understand the sentiment behind the scheme. Rather than criminalizing a whole crowd, many of whom did no rioting whatsoever, the tag-a-douche system seems to hold the promise of bringing the real perpetrators to justice. All the same, it’s an exercise that simply doesn’t sit well with me.

The link between social media networking platforms with surveillance is nothing new. It’s been a major part of the discourse around information communication technologies (ICTs) for the better part of a decade. But what we saw on Wednesday night seems to signal a disquieting shift in how this relation operates. An entire city was actively encouraged to become a kind of ambient, always-everywhere surveillance wing of  it’s Police Department. For years, people have decried the installation of security cameras in urban cores around the world, denouncing the practice as an Orwellian invasion of public space by unseen private eyes. Yet when the hockey riots broke out, what is essentially the same act- enforcing adherence to the boundaries of civility and legality by (to paraphrase Foucault) shifting power to the visual register- was decentralized, put in the hands of citizens, and transformed into a city-wide haze. What for decades has been scathingly critiqued as an invasion of privacy by pseudo-totalitarian governments went through a whiplash rebranding and emerged out the other side a democratic, crowd-sourced form of justice.

What really happened on Wednesday was the outsourcing of the job of legal enforcement and policing to citizens. I’d say we were drafted or conscripted into taking on the labour of surveillance, but for the most part, it’s a role that has been taken up willingly, even enthusiastically.

I raised this argument with a friend earlier, and she pointed out to me that, while on-side in principle, the acts of the rioters were exceptional. They weren’t rioting in the name of democracy or civil rights, after all. They were hooligans awash in hormones, hive-mind cultural relations, machismo, and shared disappointment*. They needed to be brought to justice, and the city came together to ensure that they were.

Just like my friend, I’m on-side, but only in principle. Even if the cause of this new form of crowd-sourced/distributed/ambient surveillance seems ethically sound, its effects are uniformly distressing. As the work of policing and enforcement is outsourced to us via our smartphones and interaction platforms, the boundaries that define the notion of “criminal” get hazy. We’re not legal or law enforcement professionals, and as such, we simply don’t have the same understanding of what counts as crime as do the Police proper. Yet in this round of riots, a number of people found themselves in the position of having to make just such judgment calls. They were encouraged to send in snapshots of rioters, some of whom were most certainly criminals, but we should always remember that the photographic image has an amazing capacity to disembody and decontextualize. A passer-by caught in the gravity of a photograph of a burning car, for example, while likely legally innocent, is instantly implicated in an ostensibly criminal act.

What happens, then, is that the realm of ‘the criminal’ expands ever outward. Anything that appears criminal or could possibly be criminal gets roped into the domain, regardless of the vagaries of context that the photograph tends to flatten. The boundaries of what counts as a potential threat get wider and wider, and the whole question of ‘crime’ becomes abstract; a kind of fog that turns people into out-of-focus smudges on a smoky horizon.

This is precisely the kind of abstraction that feeds the culture of fear. One need only think of a term like “The War on Terror.” It is, by its nomenclature, a war on a concept, a concept that, if most major media and government messaging is to be believed, is always-already everywhere, deterritorialized, insidious, penetrative. It is a way of framing and mediating ‘the other’ that simultaneously uproots it and places it in your backyards. How often have we heard the scare tactic that the people we trust, our co-workers, our neighbours, our instructors, ad nauseam, could be terrorists? Mobilizing this fear of the insidious, invisible threat is only possible when the threat itself seems diffuse and vague, only when we are encouraged to see the suspicious or non-ordinary as potentially criminal.

Granted, there’s a big gap between hockey riot and global terrorism, but the same gaseous vision of crime underpins both. The decentralization of surveillance, then, while perhaps effective at tracking down the odd hoodlum, seems to me a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a new discourse of criminality, both sustaining of and sustained by a vague fear of the other, wrapped up in disingenuous democratic robes.

The tag-a-douche system might seem like a bid for collective, collaborative justice, but ultimately, it simply lays out the technological and social infrastructure necessary for a society of truly universal surveillance and paranoia. At the risk of sounding too dramatic, it has the capacity to literally turn all of us against one another. If we are all potential criminals at the same time as we are all potential enforcers, then, at least in my estimation, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine an every-man-for-himself, very-near future.

*I should clarify: this is actually how I feel about the rioters. They’re total jerks and suck a lot.

What do I mean by coalition building, and how is it distinct from a “Unite the Left” movement? In the wake of the election, I saw a raft of tweets and blog posts holding Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff solely accountable for the Conservative majority outcome. One could argue, afterall, that without the Unite the Right movement of the early 2000s that brought together the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (PC- a term I will never understand. To poach from Robin Williams, it sounds like a Volvo with a gun rack, but I digress), Harper could never have solidified his support in traditionally l(L)iberal/centrist areas, such as Southern Ontario. The natural response, then, is to assume that if the Left were to do the same- bring together the Greens, the NDP, and the Liberals- it could have a real chance at dislodging a majority Conservative government.

This is a sentiment that surfaces in various forms. A friend of mine rightly mentioned the other day that the Conservative voter base operates as a well-oiled machine. Party members are sent talking points by officials and campaign managers so that, when confronted by hot-headed leftists (aye), they can stand their ground and tow the party line at the local, day-to-day level. How are we to compete when three separate parties, despite their relative closeness in terms of social and cultural values, continue to run three entirely separate messaging strategies? Don’t we need to be a well oiled machine, too? Shouldn’t we Unite the Left?

In my view, no, we shouldn’t. The wonderful, beautiful, invigorating thing about the left is that it is not the right. Harper has been tremendously effective at consolidating his caucus, enforcing ministerial complicity, and scoring electoral victories, but it has all been at the expense of real democratic values and principles. Ministers have lied to parliament, the Senate has been stacked with old-guard Tories, and the Supreme Court is likely about to undergo a similar transition with the recent unexpected retirement of two long-time judges. As my friend observed, the CPC is in every measure a well-oiled machine, a machine that is killing our democracy.

We need to come together, yes, but we need to be diligent about finding alternative ways of doing it. Conservative pundits and politicians are always quick to attack the progressive spectrum for being fractured and caught in a disarray of our own making. In some regard, they’re right (zing?). The 1960s and 1970s shattered the political left, once united under the shared logic of the worker’s struggle against the bourgeoisie. The New Social Movements of the period- feminism, environmentalism, black power, gay rights, the peace movement- made it clear that the authoritarian machinations of conservative institutions could not be totalized into a labour movement. Power and oppression were more multivalent and complex than a vulgar Marxist perspective could accomodate. With these movements organizing independently, and with the spectacular and shocking collapse of state communism in the 1980s and 1990s, we entered the new millenium with a collection of political communities, united by certain shared interests, but pre-occupied with finding their own tenuous footing.

This is not a weakness, like the Stephen Harpers of the world would have us believe. This is an incredible opportunity. The left, unlike the CPC machine, which hums along pleasantly enough, utterly devoid of real democratic process, does not demand complicity and enforced coherence. We are an incredible collection of individuals and communities, often passionately committed to our causes, causes that are frequently (but not always- I’m not quite that naive) supported across group lines through solidarity gestures and collaborative support mechanisms.

This is the reality and the incredible power of of the progressive spectrum, and it’s precisely what we need to throw back in the faces of those who claim that because we respect and encourage difference, we are gutless. This is where coalition building begins.

The diversity of the left should and must be preserved. It is the impulse to subsume and homogenize- “unite”- complex movements such as ours that stands out as the hallmark of the authoritarian right. What needs to get underway, however, is a concerted, honest, and sure-t0-be slow and frustrating attempt to find critical points of contact between our communities. By honest, I mean recognizing that it will be difficult and plodding and complicated. But as Matt Hern, Vancouver-based community organizer, activist, and artist has phrased it, a slow process of dialogue that forces us to take account of one another’s interests seems infinitely preferable to a whiz-bang, paint-by-numbers government that sacrifices real process to preserve the image of democracy.

These points of contact could be macro or micro in scope. They might range from something as small and pragmatic as a shared interest in sourcing better signage for rural transportation infrastructure to something as large as electoral reform. Again- it is the wide-ranging and diverse interests that makes the left vibrant and invigorating. But it is also important that these points of contact be prioritized. If we truly hope to dislodge unaccountable CPC majority leadership, for example, it’s my feeling electoral reform simply has to be among any coalition’s top priorities. Here again we see the need to be honest with ourselves. Some of those places where policy, priority, and resources overlap may have to wait until serious structural changes (like making sure every vote counts. A first-past-the-post electoral system paired with a multi-party democracy is less like putting a round peg in a square hole than putting an agitated appaloosa in a turn of the century pram) can be made that clear the way for those points to get proper consideration in a fair and representative parliament.

Beyond finding points of contact, we must approach the task of coalition building with a second commitment in mind, this one more ethical than pragmatic. There is an enormous list that is yet to be written documenting dialogue-based and collaborative political initiatives that have been killed by vanguardist my-way-or-the-highway stakeholders. On the left, we’re used to hearing squabbles between people who claim others have ‘gone too far,’ and those who claim that most of us ‘don’t go far enough.’ At some point or another, we all seem to become “enemies of the movement.”

There’s no sure-fire way to avoid these kinds of arguments, but I think the best shot we have comes from recognizing and respecting that we all approach politics and political action equipped with different sets of social and cultural resources. Yes, we are capable of coming together and creating new, alternative sites of power and resistance, but we must remember that some people in this world are better equipped to produce power than others. Sitting behind my desk in my office at a left-leaning university in Western Canada, I am much freer to chase down my more radical ambitions than someone who works a 40-hour, sub-living wage job to support a young family. We can’t deny these kinds of facts. When we do, we blind ourselves to the real social, cultural, and economic disparities that must be taken into account in any collaborative process.

When Paolo Friere wrote about radical pedagogy in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, what made his analysis truly radical was his insistence that learning must always begin from the position of the learner. The same goes for politics. We cannot enter negotiations and dialogues with one another on the assumption that we will come together on every agenda item and agree on every detail regarding how those items should be pursued. Coalitions- whether parliamentary and made up of career politicians, or local community organizations made up of regular working folk- must take as almost sacred the value of accommodative difference. Respect for a diversity of opinions, if we really mean it, must cut in all directions.

Some might justly worry that this is an ethic that’s easily co-opted by the right. How far do we accomodate? What if a Harper supporter wants to participate on the basis of shared values? This is something I don’t have a particularly good answer for, outside of the pretty vague contentions that 1) I don’t think this would happen too often, and 2) If the quality and integrity of the dialogue as a progressive project is being compromised, those involved should act in accordance with the values of the group. Who gets to define progressive? Quality? Integrity? I’m not sure. Like I said, this is a mirky area that I don’t have particularly good answers for. More conversations needed, apparently.

During the election, Harper pedalled an anti-coalition smear campaign, calling them anti-democratic. Logic: another thing the Conservatives aren’t very good at. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to spend the next four years honestly confronting and working through the challenges of building vibrant coalitions so that when the next election rolls around we could make real change? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to use real democratic process to pull at the threads of the lip-service democracy over which the CPC now presides? Onward!

For me, and for many of the people I know, the election felt about as good as a kick in the teeth. Here was a government that was held in contempt of Parliament three times in a single year, showed more interest in turning Canada into a prison and military state than supporting healthcare and the environment, carpet-bombed citizens with attack ads for months before an election was even called, slashed funding for women’s rights and health groups, scrapped the long-form census to take the critical teeth out of empirical research, stroked the egos of anti-gay hate coalitions, and more. The list goes on. And yet on Monday evening, the perpetually arrogant Stephen Harper was able to state how truly “humbled” he felt by the support he’d received from Canadians. Harper, a man not above ejecting undecided voters from rallys, refusing to answer reporters’ questions, or killing the access to information protocols that help journalists speak truth to power and hold our government to account, was humbled. Quaint.

There were small victories, though, that many have rightly pointed out as potential sites of resistance and change over the next four years. Elizabeth May became Canada’s first elected Green Party MP, more women were elected to parliament than in any previous election, voter turnout cracked 60% (a modest win, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers), and we ended up with a real, critical, social democratic opposition in the NDP.

But the question remains: what now? How do we leverage those victories- those hugely important feet-in-the-door- to make the next election the one that shows just how pissed off we truly are? How do we make it known that 9 million people voted against Harper, compared to only 6 million who voted for him?

We yell.

In my pre-election post, I wrote that the Left has historically been skeptical of aggressive political maneuvering. Where the Karl Roves and Kory Teneyckes of the world never hesitate to attack, sling mud, and basically shout and shout and shout until we start giving them our attention, more progressive types tend to think of themselves as beyond the fray; operating at a higher level of political discourse. This is noble and important, and again, in no way do I think we should reduce politics to slick ads and out-of-context pull quotes. But as a friend told me last night, “the fuck-yous have to start flying.”

We’re so used to submerging our critiques in wit and narrative that they become, essentially, in-group communication initiatives. Margaret Atwood wrote a stunningly brilliant satirical column for the Globe and Mail just before the election, pleading with Canadians to vote anything but Conservative. It was beautiful and passionate and funny, but I wonder how much of an effect it really had, especially given the Globe’s (not surprising, but deeply gross) endorsement of Harper’s conservatives. While this kind of writing, of course, needs to continue (beauty in writing and art in general is one of our best defences against the input-output, cost-benefit logic of market fundamentalist parties; Lee Stringer says it preserves our right to not be so practical) we also need to make the links between social and fiscal conservatism known, and we need to do it loudly.

For most unengaged voters, the Conservatives are a relatively logical choice. They promise easy decision-making and more money in your pocket. Simple enough. Who doesn’t want a bit of extra spending money? This is the mentality we need to disrupt. Politics isn’t shopping. You don’t go to the voting booth looking for the best deal. For those who don’t follow federal politics, the connections between the “lower taxes” populist rhetoric pedaled by the Conservatives and their very real politices of secrecy, centralization of authority, denial of social rights, and big business back-patting, are obscure. All those tax cuts, all that extra change in your pocket, comes with regressive views on gay rights, women’s rights, social justice, environmental policy, militarism, and law enforcement. A vote for the Conservatives is a transaction: we sell the hope for equality in exchange for enough disposable income to buy more gas for our cars.

These are the links we need to draw. We need to be vocal and relentless and inexhaustible and loud. We need to make it clear that a Conservative majority is not okay. It is not the future of this country. It can’t be the future of this country. At least it’s not the future of my country. Write, shout, argue, don’t be afraid of defending your point of view. Organize, petition, campaign. Small, persistent acts of civil disobedience are hell for whiz-bang neoliberal majorities like the one that Harper now presides over. Make them take account of you. You are not a shopper. You are a voter and a citizen. Make it known.