to my untrained eye it looks like it could just as well have been motion blur + her hair in her face (you can see her brushing it aside after hitting the window.
also the window was already smashed.
and the worst violent event was the fire extinguisher thrown at the cop -- no one in the media really seems to care much about the property damage.
can understand the distaste re: the nerdy english grad students clamoring for blood on twitter, and i know about the agent provocateurs that go to these things, but if the violence was (as it seems to have been) not just some sort of fake vanguard thing it wouldn't be any different from other recent protests/occupations of a similar scale.
there was no violence. there was mess and filming, that's it. A lot of filming and some very good photos with all the elements of photos in a certain tradition in terms of picture - the colour of flame, broken glass, papers on the floor.
That the key element of an injured person or confrontation is missing seems not be noticed.
So there tons of filming and no violence (apart from the infamous fire extinguisher) at all in evidence, nothing, not a "frame" to suggest that the demonstrators were violent at all or even that the most active at any time escalated from vandalism to violence.
it's customary for the mainstream defenders of the status quo to try to call things like graffiti and window breaking "violence" but I think this is the first time that the progressive pundits and demonstrators' advocates are making those claims for clearly non-violent actions.
It's strange that the only people who claim to have actually witnessed "violence" are the pundits of the left supposedly participants in the demos who get to write in the press and the NUS chief. In the pages of the Guardian, the left argues about whether the violence was constructive or not.
It's Orwellian in vagueness - those alleging violence are utterly unspecific. What is scaring Laurie Penny?
Look at her opening image:
inside 30 Millbank, the headquarters of the Conservative Party, a line of riot police with shields and truncheons are facing down a groaning crowd of young people with sticks and smoke bombs
But there was too much film to let this pass. There is no evidence of the kind of confrontation she described, a battle between police and demonstrators.
Screams and the smash of trodden glass cram the foyer as the ceiling-high windows, entirely broken through, fill with some of the 52,000 angry students and schoolchildren
that's pretty sly...she's describing a crowd of about 50 people, but the "some of the 52,0000" makes it sound a lot bigger:
who have marched through the heart of London today to voice their dissent to the government's savage attack on public education and public services. Ministers are cowering on the third floor, and through the smoke and shouting a young man in a college hoodie crouches on top of the rubble that was once the front desk of the building, his red hair tumbling into his flushed, frightened face.
She paints a picture of a scene of violent struggle.
The third and most salient point is that the violence kicking off around Tory HQ -- and make no mistake, there is violence, most of it directed at government property -- is not down to a "small group of anarchists ruining it for the rest."
This is frankly very odd, don't you think? The supposed participants in the anti-goverment actions describing "violence against property"? Why is Penny working to give capital and the state it's long sought victory in language and in criminalisation? And it's not just her - this fairly common across all the "progressive" media.
Things have changed now. Ptovocation is not about provoking what until six months or so age was understood by the english word "vciolence". Now it is about staging pictures and coordinating pundits to describe whatever is in them - graffiti, the dismantling of a surveillance camera, the holding of a placard, kicking broken glass - as violence.
It's not a motion blur - the picture is clear in other broadcasts of this tape (RT's for example).
Her photo was one of the first in the Guardian - very nice photo, her face covered by the curtain of her beautiful hair. It was up initially as a kind of pair with the hooded kicking figure with the flame behind (which on one film you can see being set apparently for the photo) - like "girl and boy". But they took her picture down.
"Come on, sit down," he says. "If we're going to be kettled, we may as well get comfy."{New Statesman]
Twitter reports indicate that some have taken a sofa from inside Millbank and put it outside, with the quite reasonable argument that "if we're going to be kettled we may as well be comfy". [Guardian]
The third and most salient point is that the violence kicking off around Tory HQ -- and make no mistake, there is violence, most of it directed at government property -- is not down to a "small group of anarchists ruining it for the rest." [New Statesman]
It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority [Guardian]
The defendants, the students who have been arrested for nothing, for milling around in an office building that got trashed, are going to have a hard time now with a public opinion about what they participated in and assisted at determined by these supposed ultra left voices of their comrades, cheering on their alleged "violence".
And the strangest is, there is tons of film; everything was filmed, the film all proves that these "reports" are inaccurate for whatever reason, but some kind of spectacle-mind allows the very absence of any of this menacing atmosphere and violence on the film to appear as some kind of confirmation - as if all these photos of messed up lobby just confirm that just off-screen there is a violent showdown between cops and some of the 52,000 angry demonstrators armed with sticks.
Penny: We're back at Millbank and bonfires are burning; a sign reading "Fund our Future!" goes up in flames. Nobody quite expected this. Whatever we'd whispered among ourselves, we didn't expect that so many of us would share the same strength of feeling, the same anger, enough to carry 2,000 young people over the border of legality.
It's not illegal to walk over broken glass into the lobby of an office building. Were there really 2000 demonstrators who could reasonably be charged?
What a crazy thing to allege, without putting forward any evidence at all, but of course capital and the state agree wholeheartedly - 2000 lawbreakers! - and a career for the producers of this kind of stuff is assured.
but you can still see it after she walks away in both videos, the youtube transfer of the murdoch-owned one is just blurrier overall.
but how do you think the window got broken in the first place? all the videos i've seen clearly show 'black bloc' looking people breaking stuff.
i think a good bit of the left/participant commentary -- even including the hystericism you just mentioned -- can be read in light of efforts by david graeber and others to convince activists to accept property damage and similar law-breaking tactics as part of direct action and not to distance themselves from those who do that sort of thing. the desire to defend the 'violence' as a means of defending property damage from charges of 'extremism' that adopts too much of the media's hyperbole.
this equation of property damage with violence is getting worse and i agree with / am alarmed by this: "Now it is about staging pictures and coordinating pundits to describe whatever is in them - graffiti, the dismantling of a surveillance camera, the holding of a placard, kicking broken glass - as violence" though i don't think it's all that recent...
but there's exaggeration and there's fabrication - it's hard for me to believe that 100% of what we're seeing is due to either.
but how do you think the window got broken in the first place? all the videos i've seen clearly show 'black bloc' looking people breaking stuff.
Yes, I think it's fair to say there is a 'black bloc' everywhere, they are longstanding gubmint employees and kids manipulated by them, and they got everyone over to the tory hq.
i would say they might have been hoping to provoke some violence but the fact is, these were mild mannered people and they just couldn't get riled up enough to do anything violent.
The media was there to make pictures that would be sufficient to illustrate the claims of violence. Reality TV has had such an effect that people can no longer judge anything; pictures that share elements, such as color and composition, with old documentary evidence of rioting are taken as signifying "riot" and "violence."
Look at Leninino, he writes about 'violence' -
Some will inevitably try to paint imaginative, militant action as 'violent'. So let me say this about the 'violence' yesterday.
Incredible - prose written to avoid meaning rather than to convey it, to evade all possible attributions of sense and content. Deliberately evasivce - just a move in a discursive game of irrational and antirational insinuation and suggestion. He wants at once to support Nina Power's and Laurie Penny's allegations of violence against the demonstrators but also suggest that he is not going to take responsibility for producing the evidnece of grounds for these allegations. He's not going to make any case against the accused, just chime in as accepting their guilt and liking them all the better for it.
Look art the popular photo of the window breaking - the entire crowd behind that figure is media practially. He's a generic rebel. He's serving as generic image to cover the absence of images of violence that should exist if there were violence since there were cameras - pro and amateur - everywhere. Someone from one of the camera crews set that fire for the look.
the thing is, the UK police murdered someone at the G20 protest last year and they need an excuse to beef up again and be tough. Now they have a public deploring them for their laxity, and self-appointed spokesmen for the ultra left radicals among demonstrators who also happen to have columns in the liberal press (that's new lawd knows) affirming that acts that have never been considered even misdemeanors - like watching someone spraypaint a wall - are intended violently and are forms of violence.
This is all happening while things like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sC2YDi1eVM
real violence, are placed in an odd relation to these discussions of the fanatasy of violence of the Zizneycorp type. http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/zize-n12.shtml
Something is really being achieved here in the transfer of reality to the spectacle and the management of experience, the abstraction promoted and the loss of concreteness,
can be read in light of efforts by david graeber and others to convince activists to accept property damage and similar law-breaking tactics as part of direct action and not to distance themselves from those who do that sort of thing.
I would say these articles by columnists in the liberal mainstream press can be read as reactions to what graeber participates in, disruptions of the kind of pedagogy and organising which characterised altermondialism "before 911" and which is rebuilding now, as is the level of youth anticapitalist education (enhanced by the last and most profitable bush regime oopsie). The ruling class of course is ready and they have promoted culture products and hired young people in media to disrupt the process of rebuilding the kind of effective anticapitalist momentum and understanding that was derailed by the "Bush era" policies and events.
These infantile declarations about violence are there partly to attach themselves to Naomi Klein and David Graeber and other celebrities of the altermondialist movement. It's going to be difficult but really necessary to insist on distinctions, clarity, sense and meaning.
they seem rowdy but no different than the students at any NY prep school on a full moon friday. They are cracking off the remnants of windows the 'black bloc' broke, like picking at scabs. Everyone seems to be behaving pretty charmingly to one another. Nobody is threatening; nobody is hurting anyone; there is no blood visible anywhere, quite extraordinary with all that broken glass, people were being quite cautious and considerate of one another evidently.
We see how you operate. I'm informing them privately of what you tried to do the other day, I mean the ones I know. They can fucking DEAL with it. I know what you're trying to do in your frustration, and you're NOT going to convince anybody who doesn't want to become a Lesbian like you. Dejan was right: "in the wimmern's world, everybody's a wimmern". Precisely, you hideous old dried-up bag.
"but you can still see it after she walks away in both videos, the youtube transfer of the murdoch-owned one is just blurrier overall."
Hm; no the Skynews one is altered to disguise her face. You can't recognise her. In the RT video you can, which just proves the video itself is not motion blurred- the blurring was done by Skynews.
A photo of this girl stabbing the window was initially a prominent image at the Guardian. She is not masked, she is not "black bloc", her face was concealed by her hair. She was shown in the act of breaking the window.
It's "reality tv" - it's infotainment, it's fashion photography. If you see her face it becomes evidence and that's a can of worms.
That's no longer any of your business. You deleted all of my comments that were even about the discussion, so I just wrote the appropriate parties privately. I don't care whose 'friendship' I lose if they let you bully them. You're just petty and indolent.
should also be noted that occupying the building, strong, emphatic, non-violent expression of opposition, was a smart and reasonable thing to do, especially since it was accomplished without violence.
The efforts to portray it as violent, and all actions of this kind as necessarily violent, are obviously well coordinated and backed by immense resources, and marshalling fantastic rhetorical talents and a spectrum of attractive personae, and take in everything from Skynews to through the New Statesman to leftist bloggers, but they could still fail because there were so many people who were witnesses and participants, not all from one clique or city, who know there was no violence, whose friends and friends of friends will know because they will tell them, and there are of course no victims to claim they were the objects of violence. Luckily the fire extinguisher didn't hit anyone.
"Yes, I think it's fair to say there is a 'black bloc' everywhere, they are longstanding gubmint employees and kids manipulated by them"
it seems unbelievable to me that every single black bloc person everywhere, and every person who breaks things at protests, is a plant or a dupe. this is also the argument that graeber specifically argues against.
the issue seems to me to revolve around the successful manipulation of this term 'violence' so that even leftists end up accepting it to refer to property damage. that is a major liability in the ideological battle over how to interpret the transgressions of left-wing activists. but to say that they simply don't happen or are entirely the fault of the teenagers in masks is highly unconvincing and divisive for the left itself. i don't understand how the left wins this battle unless it simply stops mattering to the audience that windows to corporate and official party offices are broken (which is also to say i'm with you in relief that the fire extinguisher didn't hurt anyone).
i would also suggest that protests would simply not appear on the news if they were in practice as mild-mannered as you say they are in authentic intent ('they' here includes everyone, even those who may or may not be covert operatives, as it inevitably must for anyone not a fellow traveler). spectacular destruction is an occupation of airwaves just as much as taking over buildings is an occupation of physical space.
on the video, i just watched it again and her face (when she's walking back into the crowd) is no more blurry than the rest of the video -- it's the lo-res transfer vs. the high-res RT transfer.
black bloc person everywhere, and every person who breaks things at protests, is a plant or a dupe.
of course. you only need a few agents to organise all the groups like that, because they are semisecretive. Of course they don't start everything, they steer, just like they always have, always. And now there are more resources and skills than ever to do this.
"successful manipulation of this term 'violence' so that even leftists end up accepting it to refer to property damage."
Well how many people has this successful manipulation required? Not a lot. Not every single journalist and pundit has to be involved in this manipulation for it to work. The left picked it up recently, maybe from one book. Maybe one or two manipulators were all that was needed to manipulate a lot of progressive and leftist pundits, virtually all under 35.
Seems to be the case.
sheepdog and sheep proportions.
"how to interpret the transgressions of left-wing activists"
But the left is not violent and has no power to be. I don't see why this is even discussed except that some posers like to grapple with the question "theoretically" in classrooms and things.
"i don't understand how the left wins this battle unless it simply stops mattering to the audience that windows to corporate and official party offices are broken"
It's always going to matter to the ruling class and their courtiers. It's not really clear that it does matter especially to anyone else, though violence does.
I think it's important not to feed this extreme law and order discourse, death penalty for jaywalking, any deviation at all places you in the unlawful combattant category. But I'm not sure how popular it really is. It's very hard now, but one has to resist supposing acquiescence means approval.
And the propertied classes "care" about the smashed windows not because they dislike broken glass. The conflict doesn nto arise due to failed pr.
I think public opinion, despite so much effort to paint a frightening and exaggerated picture and all the creepy Heideggerian language in use on the side of the protestors and the outraged scolding on the other, in the UK shows that if nobody gets really hurt, most people are okay about the windows and the rowdiness if the cause seems reasonable, which in this case to most people it does.
"I would also suggest that protests would simply not appear on the news if they were in practice as mild-mannered as you say they are in authentic intent"
They are mild-mannered. Nobody not one person was deliberately harmed by a demonstrator. They could have set the building on fire, theyc ould have attacked MPs and police, they had the numbers. Instead they danced around and wrote things on the walls. If they'd been skinhead fascists people would have had their teeth kicked in. Because violence is possible. It's that thousands of people there were disinclined to it.
"('they' here includes everyone, even those who may or may not be covert operatives,"
you make it sound like that would be odd at a demo of this size when a governent is carrying out a shock doctrine plunder of unprecedented proportions. Of course there are covert operatives in every organisation,more importantly there are out in the open employees of capital and the state. It's not unknown that the actual event organiser is a toady of those he's purportedly organising against and that he was quick to issue a statement about despicable violence before anyone had even seen the extensive footage of the day. I don't think it's a mystery that Jeremy Paxman works for the BBC or that the liberal mainstream press is dependent on advertising.
" spectacular destruction is an occupation of airwaves just as much as taking over buildings is an occupation of physical space."
yes, but you can have spectacular destruction and not much airwave occupation and you can have very little violence and a lot of airwave occupation - compare how many times footage of a bleeding businessman getting in a limo played in the days leading up to the coup against Chavez to how much you have seen of the violence inflicted on falluja.
"whoever threw the extinguisher was not thinking (or a plant!) and should not have done it."
yes it was dumb, and lucky it didn't hit anyone. I didn't suggest it was "a plant" - when you say "plant", you give the impression that like everyone who works for the government is hired the day before a demonstration and micromanaged. "Memo to Jake12, drop a fire extinguisher!" I mean its silly.
do you think the ITV management who published that Fikrit Alic photo were all put on the intelligence payroll a week before that came out? It's just an existing network of professionals, they exist, they are there, there is no point in trying to think about historical reality pretending you don't know this feature. It would be like pretending not to know that there are a certain number of doctors everywhere.
if it is reported in the coming days that attempts at arson were made on the upper floors of the building, what will you think? Surely that would have changed everything, and such things can and do fail.
"that is a major liability in the ideological battle over how to interpret the transgressions of left-wing activists. but to say that they simply don't happen or are entirely the fault of the teenagers in masks is highly unconvincing and divisive for the left itself."
Okay so seriously then. Let's examine the best documented left wing violence over the past ten years in contexts like these - not armed struggle, but crowds of unarmed demonstrators in big cities. Let's really see what kind of thing happens and who commits them and what the results are.
What do you think are the ten or so most representative cases?
We were talking about word-abuse earlier, and here it is again.
"Violence" happens when a few hundred white people smash windows owned by some company or other in a half-assed and seemingly disinterested manner. But "violence" also ensues when a black man gets arrested for loitering- not because the cops beat him up for no reason, but because he "resists arrest" and forces the cops to bear down on him. Or when working class people engage in choreographed "fights" on reality TV shows. When Saddam Hussein tortures his people, he's being "violent", but when we torture them we're just gathering intelligence.
"Violence" means so many things these days to so many people that it's almost meaningless in political discussions. How do you even begin pick through the mess?
(Ugh, and the way some people use the word "imaginative"... I just groan thinking about it...)
yeah, that was using the extremely subjective style to suggest what could not be truthfully stated
it's just very striking the difference between what appears on the videos and what most participants describe and the impressions given Nina Power in the Guardian so quickly, before any other participants could publish:
Her emphasis is on "violence" by the demonstrators. She suggests the demonstrator's violence caused injusires to other demonstrators and police. She hints at crowd mania, mass ecstasy - we realised we were all one! the violence expressed the essence of the whole demo!
no mention of police violence. police have made arrests that's all.
it's a bizarre and, from the film clearly innacurate portrait and its a pretext for this self display of an infantile "political" mysticism.
What she masks with this vision - which is expertly vague and equivocating, expertly irrational and insinuating (spontaneous direct action?) - is the reality of the day. Direct Action was planned by the most left and militant section of the protest. An occupaton of the HQ was planned in advance. This was an excellent idea and was going to get the press and the attention while giving an accurate and appealing impression of the opponents of the cuts and their politics.
About fifty people carried it out, including Clare Solomon, entering the building to occupy it.
Some others obviously got wind of this plan and planned to add a show of generic "riot" to overshadow this planned direct action. the media of course was immediatemly helful in the production of images of "dionysian" youth going wild.
This vision of an explosion of "spontaneous" "violence" from the demonstrators is false and propagandistic. What really happened was level headed and determined action by people who do have alternatives, are sane and informed, and not just acting out in ecstatic "violent" irrational irresponsible tantrums.
Happily the effort to obscure the intelligence, responsibility, rationality and justice, as well as the determined militancy, of the opposition behind this curtain of generic "anarchy" failed, indeed it seems even to have backfired.
it's unclear to me what you think i'm saying -- yes all this talk about 'violence' on the side of protesters is hyperbole. no one seriously attacks cops. some of the protesters are also breaking stuff, and seem generally happy to do it. i think this behavior should be defended. i wouldn't call it 'violence' but i can understand why some on the left would adopt that language to defend the 'vandalism,' despite its ideological manipulation, reactively given how hysterical the media is on the subject and the necessities of speaking in sound bites. on the pr issue, 'propertied classes' doesn't include everyone who watches tv, reads news websites, or otherwise learns about these events through official corporate media. but your point about insisting on the protests as mild-mannered, non-violent, etc. is well taken, as long as it covers the same direct action activity the media likes to use to represent 'violence' and doesn't join in demonizing them.
"What do you think are the ten or so most representative cases?"
not sure about represnetative so i'll just name 10 off the top of my head -
geneva wto
g20 london
g20 pittsburgh
g20 toronto
the greek riots following Alexandros Grigoropoulos 's murder by police
the iranian election protests
the student occupations at berkeley
the protests in paris against sarkozy's attack on pensions
i have to run soon so i'll let you pick the other two.
at g20 pittsburgh some anarchists did an unauthorized march, were ordered to disperse by police, refused, were attacked with tear gas and sound cannons, and in response they pushed some trash bins at the cops and broke some windows and this was called violence.
i was at g20 toronto and police cars were set on fire, starbucks and american apparel were attacked, etc. pretty good probability the police let it happen for the cameras before moving in and busting heads.
anyway, aside from the greek riots where people were throwing molotovs, the other ones had no 'real' violence (no attacks on humans) and middling to fair amounts of spectacular 'violence' (property damage, blockades that refused to disperse). in toronto there were some (for me, justified) complaints about local businesses getting damaged as well as insured corporate chain stores.
i think these actions should be defended, and i can see how it might be difficult for underfunded, undertrained minority voices in the media to avoid the temptation of using ideologically charged words like 'violence' (or 'imaginative,' or 'creative acts of resistance') in the course of fighting public acquiescence, or of feeding into the (powerful, attractive) romantic image of spontaneous anarchy.
also the question of what counts as violence and when to use it isn't some rarefied topic -- it's openly discussed in planning meetings for actions, at activist retreats, even out on the street.
I don't see what you think you gain by abolishing the distinction the law makes and everybody but reactionary propagandists made up until ten minutes ago between the acts of violence and non violent acts.
Hyperbole? No. I'm sure if someone was burning your car, you would not feel that the difference between locking you in it first and burning it empty was just a difference of degree. It's a completely different act.
i can understand why some on the left would adopt that language to defend the 'vandalism,'
How does it defend vandalism to accuse the perpetrators of violence (or terrorism)? Do you think people arrested who spraypainted walls or kicked at broken windows or stood nearby watching others do so should plead guilty to assault (or reckless endangerment) to better defend spraypainting as a legitimate political tactic?
I don't see how this helps, honestly. It seems to me ridiculous to imagine this distinction cannot be maintained in a more straightforward way, that the only thing left for leftists is to try some sly subversion of the right's discourse by excessive identification or something. But perhaps I underestimate the condition of the videogamers.
There's a petition where the arrested are now complaining that they are accused of violence in the press. Clearly they would rather not have their dancing described that way. Since it's wrong and also they could be fined or go to jail if it weren't. Is that petition unreasonable, do you think?
You may well be right. He DOES seem most cultivated sometimes, downright canny. He won't tell me his name because he thinks I'll fuck up his job, rather he thinks that I'd want to give him a fucking job. Although I'd want to think it over carefully.
The wilful infliction of injury on human beings is violent and must not be condoned. Hurling a fire extinguisher into a crowd is clearly wrong, but the broken glass and bonfires of Wednesday were more visually spectacular than actually harmful. It is the coalition's policies that are going to generate bloody mayhem.
easy enough to understand. this is not that arcane. she doesn't want to posture and brand herself, its not about the author's exhibitionism and theology, so she can convey sense and make a case.
by calling the glass breaking and the occupation itself violent, you also make the use of violence by the cops against the protestors seem like a symmetrical reaction instead of an aggression. In Power's article there is a clear attempt to make it seem as though demonstrators' violence and not the cops caused the injuries to the injured and also to make it seem as though these were serious injuries.
Now this is the impression people have of what happened and of what the accused participated in - the injuring of more than a dozen people, fellow demonstrators and police. The cops have implicitly been cleared of harming anyone. At the G20 the left media was all plain and unequivocal that the demonstrators were the victims of police attacks; now this has been lost and the police are painted as being attacked by angry violent demonstrators.
Now see how clever that tactic is because the reactionary media could not accomplish the service to the cops that the lefyt media has now accomplished - that is, the reactionary media has never succeeded in getting ordinary people to blame non violent demonstrators when cops brutalize them.
But now see the rhetorical game you are operating - now you say if I correct your facts, if I say no that crowd in in the video committed no violence, and say no the police attacked peaceful demonstrators, you can say well what actually happened doesn't matter, I am just a spineless liberal who hasn't the stomach for demos attacking police and I am participating in the demonization of legitimate use of force against the state. Like if I say but Lavalas didn't necklace the rich in their gated communities you can say I am just holding up some standard of nonviolence that serves the ruling class and demonizing the violence of the poor.
So you can say now the demonstrators attacked police and injured their fellow protestors. and I say that's wrong, look at the video. But you will win this one rhetorically no matter what the evidence is because I seem to be "condemning violence" and you seem to be boldly supporting it, though if it were specific actual violence (say, bombing the underground) you wouldn't. What's happened here is replacing "violence" with something that isn't violence is serving to replace the concrete with an abstraction - this "stands for" violence, though it isn't violence. and you create some case about "violence in principle" rather than violence in fact. So having decided violence in principle shouldn't be demonized, if you have to return to the concrete tory hq, the only violence available to justify is that of the state against the demonstrators.
" on the pr issue, 'propertied classes' doesn't include everyone who watches tv, reads news websites, or otherwise learns about these events through official corporate media"
I wasn't referring to everyone as the propertied classes. I was saying something about the propertied classes in contrast to everyone else:
It's always going to matter to the ruling class and their courtiers. [that is, the propertied] It's not really clear that it does matter especially to anyone else, [that is, not the properties but other people] though violence does.
I think it's important not to feed this extreme law and order discourse, death penalty for jaywalking, any deviation at all places you in the unlawful combattant category. But I'm not sure how popular it really is. [that is, not sure that everyone, not just the propertied, is persuaded by this discourse] It's very hard now, but one has to resist supposing acquiescence [by lots of people, not the propertied alone] means approval.
And the propertied classes [as opposed to everyone else] "care" about the smashed windows not because they dislike broken glass. The conflict [between the propertied and those who threaten their property] doesn not arise due to failed pr.
I think public opinion, [the opinion of the majority which includes the propertied minority and everyone else] despite so much effort to paint a frightening and exaggerated picture and all the creepy Heideggerian language in use on the side of the protestors and the outraged scolding on the other, in the UK shows that if nobody gets really hurt, most people [not the propertied] are okay about the windows and the rowdiness if the cause seems reasonable, which in this case to most people [not the propertied] it does.
I mean what kind of easy posturing is it to champion "violence" boldly and daringly if your specific example is actually non-violent? You don't want to undertake to justify the 7/7 protests against the Iraq war, even though its very clear there is no comparison between the amount of violence and destruction the Iraq invasion and occupation has caused and that caused by the London underground bombings. But that is violence. The window smashing isn't violence. The distinction isn't hard to see and why it's easier to champion the non violence of spraypainting and trespassing than it is to champion the violence of the massacre of random pt passengers.
You know and when there is real violence one always does wonder whether the protagonists really were trying to accomplish laudable goals; and the agents of the state usually do eventually turn up in the evidence of anti-state (Irish, Italian, Chechen) violent protest.
So what kind of sophistry is one engaged in claiming to defend violent protests from "demonization" but only if they're not actually violent?
I mean it's not hard to understand why the ruling class has tried for centuries to convince ordinary people that interfering with their control of the material world and their rule over others through that control is violent. This has always failed, but it seems there has been a recent breakthrough due to the spectacle's erosion of rationality and logic and language.
I am surprised you don't see the sophistry here...
saying well the problem is that the media shows breaking glass and this gets public opinion against the demonstrators
well no, what gets public opinion against demonstrators is violence which can be suggested mendaciously but convincingly with the aid of certain kinds of images.
that is, what puts people off is the idea of other people who hurt you, who intimidate and frighten and are likely to hurt you.
so now you have these participator/pundits insisting this - this was not just some window breaking, but people who frightened me, who I thought would hurt me, who hurt other people, rthis was violence and people not in control of themselves, a crowd overcome with a destructive impulse to vent frustration, injuring eachother and scaring me.
that's a) false and b) exactly the problem not the solution to the problem.
What distrubs me is how this is complicated suddenly and not obvious anymore. It's like you are saying there is no rational public discuourse at all left, no grasp of reality and history possible anymore, not even for progressives, there is only manoeuvring with affective jolts and imagery and insinuation associations.
and also...I would venture to guess the plan for direct action was to occupy the buidling and make the police forcibly remove and arrest the occupiers. that's newsworthy and would take up far more newstime too, since it could go on for days at least.
If the plan was, as one must assume, a prolonged and intransigent occupation of tory offices, then it was sabotaged by the 'spontaneous' vandalism.
this
http://tinyurl.com/345ypsb
also seems clear enough and i don't think the author is that much, if at all, better funded and trained than the Guardian editors:
In discussing the events at Millbank, it is important to distinguish between “violence” and direct action. Conflating the invasion and occupation of Millbank, with the idiotic throwing of a fire extinguisher off the roof, confuses a legitimate tool of direct action and protest, with a mindless act of aggression, and is especially unhelpful coming from those, like Will Straw, who are sympathetic to the protesters. It is possible for a protest to be both unlawful and non-violent – traditionally, the police have deliberately confused this point, allowing them to respond in the same manner to acts of civil disobedience as to acts of violence.
Now, clearly there were acts of vandalism that accompanied the occupation of Millbank, but the instinct of the crowd was decisively against violence.
to the opposite earlier reportage:
As I write, about 200 people have occupied the building, and bonfires burn outside. Some arrests have been made and eight people – protesters and police officers – have been injured. Protesters have broken windows and made their way on to the roof.... It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority – it is a genuine expression of frustration against the few who seem determined to make the future a miserable, small-minded and debt-filled place for the many.
and consider the one at the top now has to laboriously undo the impression created by the Guardian, and is at a disadtvantage - smaller audience, coming later.
Zizneycorp is capable of doing a lot of damage. Here as usual the main tactic is the creation of a cultural object to interpret - debate this spectable! - and every discussion about the opposition to the cuts now has to happen through and with these culture commodities, both promoting them and being steered and managed, framed and shaped by them.
Look how now a new assumption has been established - that the alternatives are breaking windows or polite pointless lame marching. What's been erased here is the direct action that was subverted by the vandalism - civil disobedience, sitting in, the kind of show of determination and creation of inconvenience that has proven track records of success. Now that's not even on the table, because the media right and left are agreed
"this is direct action!" messy, noisy, but fun for kids and all over in an hour.
and the alternative is an ineffectually obedient stroll carrying a banner on a sunny day.
both lack the basics of political engagement and the established methods of successful activism; both take spectacle form, brief, isolated, unconnected to anything before or after.
this is the zizney method. to say there is no alternative to this, to putting on a thirty second show. activism is advertising.
look, as i've said repeatedly i understand the difference between violence and property damage. my 'defense' if it can even be called that ("can understand why some on the left would adopt that language") of left editorialists who adopt this language amounts only to features of what is evidently allowed/disallowed in corporate-dominated media.
of your counterexamples, writers who avoid/attack the conflation of militancy and illegality with violence, two things are noticeable:
1) only one published in the guardian and one ended up on TV; the rest are only visible to a much less mainstream readership
2) none (probably for good reason) actively defend the property damage. they say the cuts are worse, but they don't defend it as a legitimate tactic, they call it a distraction from the real issues. they downplay its importance. i think that interview shows how unconvincing and weak-seeming this approach is.
even this: Now, clearly there were acts of vandalism that accompanied the occupation of Millbank, but the instinct of the crowd was decisively against violence.
leaves it open whether the difference is one of kind or degree - the "instinct of the crowd" is against violence, but was it against vandalism?
so that when you vituperatively attack those who defend the property damage in its ideological form as "violence" (while also, along with everyone else, criticizing the fire-extinguisher guy, the only activist who committed actual violence) you objectively are left-bashing, regardless of how correct your argument is. what you call the double-sidedness of seymour's rhetoric there i think is an attempt to deal with this problem in a way retains the distinctions you want to make (only a bad reader could ignore all those scare quotes) while also being a forceful, all-inclusive statement.
i think it's different with zizek because he's so absurd it's less and less difficult to insist he's a neolib clown and not a real leftist. especially when he straightforwardly takes right-wing positions like we shouldn't go after BP, we need to revive eurocentric mysticism, etc.
"What distrubs me is how this is complicated suddenly and not obvious anymore. It's like you are saying there is no rational public discuourse at all left, no grasp of reality and history possible anymore, not even for progressives, there is only manoeuvring with affective jolts and imagery and insinuation associations."
do you really think print is so liberated from the spectacle that effective rhetoric doesn't for the most part work exactly like this? people will follow the association of romantic images between nonviolent but rowdy student protesters and sporadically violent greek anti-austerity protesters as long as the images are produced (and as long as protesters refuse to be well-behaved). if the associations are going to be made anyway, it seems more effective to me, if only within the already-fixed ideological frame of corporate media spectacle, to make them look heroic and attractive rather than engage in what is always made to look like hair-splitting and/or left-bashing. i mean in that interview solomon says all the right things but aside from a few good lines she mostly gets steamrolled. i don't think that's only because she's outnumbered.
one does not have to abdicate reality but not all media outlets work the same way, or reward the same tactics.
it would also be nice to be able to discuss this "rhetorical game" (i would call it a double bind) without being accused of "operating" it.
Yet at least 32 people have now been arrested, and the police and media appear to be launching a witch-hunt condemning peaceful protesters as “criminals” and violent.
A great deal is being made of a few windows smashed during the protest, but the real vandals are those waging a war on our education system.
We reject any attempt to characterise the Millbank protest as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement.
how complicated this all is comes out very clearly in these lines -- since the vast majority of the protesters damaged no property, and since all but the one were non-violent, asserting that these 32+ arrested individuals were 'violent' or even 'criminal' ahead of any actual investigation is fantastical slander. but at the same time, everyone has to be defended, including those who damaged property, in order to maintain solidarity and a certain idea of what confrontational direct action is supposed to do.
and again, i don't want to defend laurie penny or owen or lenin or whomever unconditionally, merely to recognize how they are constrained and to rethink how they're most likely to be read by their various audiences.
I think our disagreement has to do with judging the aims. I admit to bashing but not the left. Though maybe I was unfair to Seymour, but to illustrate the position he is put in by the bashee, who I don't consider to be "left".
I'm sorry (truly) if I unfairly accuse you of unfarily accusing me of "condemning violence".
"2) none (probably for good reason) actively defend the property damage."
I think we disagree whether assimilatng it to violent crime is defending it or not. It seems to me a great many people will hesitate to believe an overt reactionary who declares a crowd of protestors to have been violent. This lack of credibility is a problem. There are proven solutions that every professional knows - that everyone will believe a supposed cheerleader who writes "the violence of the crowd was so beautiful!"
Especailly if they're staged sortof breathlessly just leaving the scene, and get a jump on everyone desiring to portray the events accurately.
People are not going to be influenced by whether or not this or that nobody columnist says "buy coke!" or "pepsi's better!" Or "wasn't that violence lovely and for good reason?" or "there's no excuse for that violence!" People don't take direction from individuals like this. We learned a lot from "give the isnpectors time to find those wmd!" right? So let's not forget it so fast.
is that the aim of the Power and Penny pieces? Let the inspectors have the time they need to find the hidden weapons?
To contribute to the media wide effort to convince an audience that the crowd of protestors went into a frenzy and harmed people? That there were wmd, even though the speaker, about whose opinion on these things nbobody cares, thinks the way to deal with it is not invasion?
I don't know but I have to assume so. Otherwise it's odd they should both have chosen to insist in nearly the same words on the "violence" of the spirit of all 52K demonstrators.
Not only this - they both include sympathetic defences of the police. The police "are giving as good as they get" writes Penny; Power's scene mentions police only among the injured by "the violence" and as the shadowy implied protagonists of arrests.
Why is this transformation of police into victims acting in self-defence necessary to this defence of demonstrator property damage? If it's not, what other pro-demo purpose can you find for it?
Which brings one to - how much innacuracy, whether pro-police or not, can be really useful? Isn't there a point at which the debunkable misinformation published under the bylines of declaed partisans of the demonstration becomes problematic just for its dishonesty?
Surely professional culture producers could find a way to express approval of the tactics of the black bloc - if indeed they approve of them, which is unclear. And surely this could be done without an apology for or misrepresentation of police brutality.
Clare Solomon I would imagine was actually annoyed by the window smashing because it screwed up her occupation. She was there first, she says. She can't explain for a varietyof reasons but I think she says enough for us to understand that she and others had an action in progress that was derailed. So she may actually not approve of the windwo smashing in thie one instance - which is not the same as saying its never useful to smash a window.
Like a qlip said above one could just say it, right? Why are opinion pieces being written cagily as if they were contained by the limits of speeches written for candidates for public office or characters in films or tv presenters?
And I think Gopal made an important point about what is also being accomplished, the institution of tiers of standards for "violence" to go with the tiers of humanity.
But I am sorry if I sounding accusing - much of the "you" was an imaginary you not you specifically, but confusing I know.
About you instances of left violence - I was trying to actually put together a pictiure of causalties. If you add French riots there will be a fatality to discuss not caused by the repression.
I confess to being unfair to Richard: I don't know what Owen said. Laurie Penny is really young and perhaps was really scared by the flares and the smokebombs (all fx you will notice, brought along - no weapons, just all this set decorating equipment for the photos and the hyped-up atmosphere, the pounding sound, the eggs, the haze, the smell - the set dressing of a "battle").
But also if people are ready to defend violence I don't see why nobody is championing the fire extinguisher kid and threatening next time not to miss. Why isn't he the Rochejacquelin of the scene if it is in fact about not demonising violence and not about redefining non-violent direct action as violent crime?
If the thing is well they are calling this violence so we should too - I think that's conceding really unnecessarily. I think no matter what the reactionaries and their million dollar a year spokesgolems say on tv, the vast vast vast majority of the audience distinguishes between harming people and not harming people. Everyone understands the feeling "take my wallet please don't shoot me"; nobody can't distiguish, or between the destruction of necessities of life which is violence and destruction of insured and replaceable inanimate objects.
also, worryingly, what is encouraged by this way the soodleft is now collapsing this distinction is its all centred on a solipsist individualism - I am frustrated and angry, I swing my arm, it feels good to smash something, I hear the gush, whether its brains or melon is a detail. From a social perspective the distinction is huge, is too big to miss; so the individualism and solipsism is encouraged.
do you really think print is so liberated from the spectacle that effective rhetoric doesn't for the most part work exactly like this? people will follow the association of romantic images between nonviolent but rowdy student protesters and sporadically violent greek anti-austerity protesters as long as the images are produced (and as long as protesters refuse to be well-behaved). if the associations are going to be made anyway, it seems more effective to me, if only within the already-fixed ideological frame of corporate media spectacle, to make them look heroic and attractive rather than engage in what is always made to look like hair-splitting and/or left-bashing.
and I don't know why I think it's still worth fighting against this, but mainly its obvious the msm owns this turf, it can romanticise and demonise irrationally much better, so the thing is to try to stay out of that altogether, to maintain another public discourse, to try to maintain some rationality, some status of evidence and argument, and not just try to play propagandist in the big leagues, thinking some little oh so clever twist will bring the global media's edifice crashing down.
anyway, hairsplitting and leftbashing - perhaps this is whatanything that deviates from this "lets get play propaganist on this playstation" will seem to be hairsplitting. For years this was how my criticism of zizek looked but it just takes time. He hasn't actually become more obvious, its just built up and got boring. You note that now he takes open reactionary positions like about BP, but he's always taken them - his pro-Bombing of Yugo position was more obvious and more outrageous than "lets not persecute BP". He was calling for war crimes alongside T. Friedman. He deployed undisguised racist arguments to urge imperial aggression. It's not brutal imperialist politics that is now turning his fans off, it's more just fashion.
"if the associations are going to be made anyway, it seems more effective to me, if only within the already-fixed ideological frame of corporate media spectacle, to make them look heroic and attractive"
okay, maybe. as a rule i think not - Hezbollah and Hamas will be called fascists but we're not going to start conceding this and trying to recuperate the term fascist. Or maybe that's next after "fanaticism". But it seems to me for the "left" intellectuals - not left activisits, but left pundits with stature in the mainstread liberal media and academia - begin to describe not themselves but left activists as "violent" "fanatics",they're taking a gamble with someone else's strategy, the kind of gamble that naturally appeals to culture producers with secure positions, resemblng as it does the culture commodities they make, but which could be really inconvenient for activists in the sights of the state's repressive mechanisms and institutions.
Remember the fanbase of Buffy likes her genocide and deems it righteous solely because vampires are violent.
And while very possibly causing activists inconvenience, their left intellectual producer champions who cheer their violence will probably just sort of fade into the vast stream of liberals and reactionaries whose terminology they are "subversively" adopting.
of course it is understood there were people who said "let the inspectors find the hidden wmd" even though they didn't believe there was any because to say "there are no undeclared weapons" was to speak a conspiracy theory.
and this is also true now, to say "there was no violence; there was the media fabricating suggestive images" is to speak a conspiracy theory.
But I don't think one needs to buckle under this intimidation. I don't see the point of doing so except for advancing career's sake. And here is another big factor - Penny and Power are mainly writing to advertise and display themselves. They convey little if any content, they care nothing for accuracy, it's all about selfbranding as pundits. (This is not true of Leninino.) So to be marketable, they have to give conspiracy theory a wide berth, which condemns them to the kind of naivete their publications seek to reproduce and enforce.
skeptical.
ReplyDeleteto my untrained eye it looks like it could just as well have been motion blur + her hair in her face (you can see her brushing it aside after hitting the window.
also the window was already smashed.
and the worst violent event was the fire extinguisher thrown at the cop -- no one in the media really seems to care much about the property damage.
can understand the distaste re: the nerdy english grad students clamoring for blood on twitter, and i know about the agent provocateurs that go to these things, but if the violence was (as it seems to have been) not just some sort of fake vanguard thing it wouldn't be any different from other recent protests/occupations of a similar scale.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/11/young-scary-future-riot-crowd
I don't think there was any violence
ReplyDeletethe window was already smashed yes exactly.
there was no violence. there was mess and filming, that's it. A lot of filming and some very good photos with all the elements of photos in a certain tradition in terms of picture - the colour of flame, broken glass, papers on the floor.
That the key element of an injured person or confrontation is missing seems not be noticed.
So there tons of filming and no violence (apart from the infamous fire extinguisher) at all in evidence, nothing, not a "frame" to suggest that the demonstrators were violent at all or even that the most active at any time escalated from vandalism to violence.
it's customary for the mainstream defenders of the status quo to try to call things like graffiti and window breaking "violence" but I think this is the first time that the progressive pundits and demonstrators' advocates are making those claims for clearly non-violent actions.
It's strange that the only people who claim to have actually witnessed "violence" are the pundits of the left supposedly participants in the demos who get to write in the press and the NUS chief. In the pages of the Guardian, the left argues about whether the violence was constructive or not.
ReplyDeleteIt's Orwellian in vagueness - those alleging violence are utterly unspecific. What is scaring Laurie Penny?
Look at her opening image:
inside 30 Millbank, the headquarters of the Conservative Party, a line of riot police with shields and truncheons are facing down a groaning crowd of young people with sticks and smoke bombs
But there was too much film to let this pass. There is no evidence of the kind of confrontation she described, a battle between police and demonstrators.
Screams and the smash of trodden glass cram the foyer as the ceiling-high windows, entirely broken through, fill with some of the 52,000 angry students and schoolchildren
that's pretty sly...she's describing a crowd of about 50 people, but the "some of the 52,0000" makes it sound a lot bigger:
who have marched through the heart of London today to voice their dissent to the government's savage attack on public education and public services. Ministers are cowering on the third floor, and through the smoke and shouting a young man in a college hoodie crouches on top of the rubble that was once the front desk of the building, his red hair tumbling into his flushed, frightened face.
She paints a picture of a scene of violent struggle.
The third and most salient point is that the violence kicking off around Tory HQ -- and make no mistake, there is violence, most of it directed at government property -- is not down to a "small group of anarchists ruining it for the rest."
This is frankly very odd, don't you think? The supposed participants in the anti-goverment actions describing "violence against property"? Why is Penny working to give capital and the state it's long sought victory in language and in criminalisation? And it's not just her - this fairly common across all the "progressive" media.
Things have changed now. Ptovocation is not about provoking what until six months or so age was understood by the english word "vciolence". Now it is about staging pictures and coordinating pundits to describe whatever is in them - graffiti, the dismantling of a surveillance camera, the holding of a placard, kicking broken glass - as violence.
It's not a motion blur - the picture is clear in other broadcasts of this tape (RT's for example).
ReplyDeleteHer photo was one of the first in the Guardian - very nice photo, her face covered by the curtain of her beautiful hair. It was up initially as a kind of pair with the hooded kicking figure with the flame behind (which on one film you can see being set apparently for the photo) - like "girl and boy". But they took her picture down.
"Come on, sit down," he says. "If we're going to be kettled, we may as well get comfy."{New Statesman]
ReplyDeleteTwitter reports indicate that some have taken a sofa from inside Millbank and put it outside, with the quite reasonable argument that "if we're going to be kettled we may as well be comfy". [Guardian]
The third and most salient point is that the violence kicking off around Tory HQ -- and make no mistake, there is violence, most of it directed at government property -- is not down to a "small group of anarchists ruining it for the rest." [New Statesman]
It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority [Guardian]
The defendants, the students who have been arrested for nothing, for milling around in an office building that got trashed, are going to have a hard time now with a public opinion about what they participated in and assisted at determined by these supposed ultra left voices of their comrades, cheering on their alleged "violence".
And the strangest is, there is tons of film; everything was filmed, the film all proves that these "reports" are inaccurate for whatever reason, but some kind of spectacle-mind allows the very absence of any of this menacing atmosphere and violence on the film to appear as some kind of confirmation - as if all these photos of messed up lobby just confirm that just off-screen there is a violent showdown between cops and some of the 52,000 angry demonstrators armed with sticks.
Penny: We're back at Millbank and bonfires are burning; a sign reading "Fund our Future!" goes up in flames. Nobody quite expected this. Whatever we'd whispered among ourselves, we didn't expect that so many of us would share the same strength of feeling, the same anger, enough to carry 2,000 young people over the border of legality.
ReplyDeleteIt's not illegal to walk over broken glass into the lobby of an office building. Were there really 2000 demonstrators who could reasonably be charged?
What a crazy thing to allege, without putting forward any evidence at all, but of course capital and the state agree wholeheartedly - 2000 lawbreakers! - and a career for the producers of this kind of stuff is assured.
well i found one version of the RT broadcast, but in this version they've edited out the closer shot of the girl's face:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1bHOFHyEf0&feature=fvwk
but you can still see it after she walks away in both videos, the youtube transfer of the murdoch-owned one is just blurrier overall.
but how do you think the window got broken in the first place? all the videos i've seen clearly show 'black bloc' looking people breaking stuff.
i think a good bit of the left/participant commentary -- even including the hystericism you just mentioned -- can be read in light of efforts by david graeber and others to convince activists to accept property damage and similar law-breaking tactics as part of direct action and not to distance themselves from those who do that sort of thing. the desire to defend the 'violence' as a means of defending property damage from charges of 'extremism' that adopts too much of the media's hyperbole.
this equation of property damage with violence is getting worse and i agree with / am alarmed by this: "Now it is about staging pictures and coordinating pundits to describe whatever is in them - graffiti, the dismantling of a surveillance camera, the holding of a placard, kicking broken glass - as violence" though i don't think it's all that recent...
but there's exaggeration and there's fabrication - it's hard for me to believe that 100% of what we're seeing is due to either.
but how do you think the window got broken in the first place? all the videos i've seen clearly show 'black bloc' looking people breaking stuff.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think it's fair to say there is a 'black bloc' everywhere, they are longstanding gubmint employees and kids manipulated by them, and they got everyone over to the tory hq.
i would say they might have been hoping to provoke some violence but the fact is, these were mild mannered people and they just couldn't get riled up enough to do anything violent.
The media was there to make pictures that would be sufficient to illustrate the claims of violence. Reality TV has had such an effect that people can no longer judge anything; pictures that share elements, such as color and composition, with old documentary evidence of rioting are taken as signifying "riot" and "violence."
Look at Leninino, he writes about 'violence' -
Some will inevitably try to paint imaginative, militant action as 'violent'. So let me say this about the 'violence' yesterday.
Incredible - prose written to avoid meaning rather than to convey it, to evade all possible attributions of sense and content. Deliberately evasivce - just a move in a discursive game of irrational and antirational insinuation and suggestion. He wants at once to support Nina Power's and Laurie Penny's allegations of violence against the demonstrators but also suggest that he is not going to take responsibility for producing the evidnece of grounds for these allegations. He's not going to make any case against the accused, just chime in as accepting their guilt and liking them all the better for it.
Look art the popular photo of the window breaking - the entire crowd behind that figure is media practially. He's a generic rebel. He's serving as generic image to cover the absence of images of violence that should exist if there were violence since there were cameras - pro and amateur - everywhere. Someone from one of the camera crews set that fire for the look.
the thing is, the UK police murdered someone at the G20 protest last year and they need an excuse to beef up again and be tough. Now they have a public deploring them for their laxity, and self-appointed spokesmen for the ultra left radicals among demonstrators who also happen to have columns in the liberal press (that's new lawd knows) affirming that acts that have never been considered even misdemeanors - like watching someone spraypaint a wall - are intended violently and are forms of violence.
This is all happening while things like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sC2YDi1eVM
real violence, are placed in an odd relation to these discussions of the fanatasy of violence of the Zizneycorp type.
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/zize-n12.shtml
Something is really being achieved here in the transfer of reality to the spectacle and the management of experience, the abstraction promoted and the loss of concreteness,
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
the way everything is interpreted as if it were a fictional film.
can be read in light of efforts by david graeber and others to convince activists to accept property damage and similar law-breaking tactics as part of direct action and not to distance themselves from those who do that sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteI would say these articles by columnists in the liberal mainstream press can be read as reactions to what graeber participates in, disruptions of the kind of pedagogy and organising which characterised altermondialism "before 911" and which is rebuilding now, as is the level of youth anticapitalist education (enhanced by the last and most profitable bush regime oopsie). The ruling class of course is ready and they have promoted culture products and hired young people in media to disrupt the process of rebuilding the kind of effective anticapitalist momentum and understanding that was derailed by the "Bush era" policies and events.
These infantile declarations about violence are there partly to attach themselves to Naomi Klein and David Graeber and other celebrities of the altermondialist movement. It's going to be difficult but really necessary to insist on distinctions, clarity, sense and meaning.
"well i found one version of the RT broadcast, but in this version they've edited out the closer shot of the girl's face:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1bHOFHyEf0&feature=fvwk"
they seem rowdy but no different than the students at any NY prep school on a full moon friday. They are cracking off the remnants of windows the 'black bloc' broke, like picking at scabs. Everyone seems to be behaving pretty charmingly to one another. Nobody is threatening; nobody is hurting anyone; there is no blood visible anywhere, quite extraordinary with all that broken glass, people were being quite cautious and considerate of one another evidently.
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ReplyDeleteWe see how you operate. I'm informing them privately of what you tried to do the other day, I mean the ones I know. They can fucking DEAL with it. I know what you're trying to do in your frustration, and you're NOT going to convince anybody who doesn't want to become a Lesbian like you. Dejan was right: "in the wimmern's world, everybody's a wimmern". Precisely, you hideous old dried-up bag.
ReplyDeletewhat did i try to do the other day?
ReplyDelete"but you can still see it after she walks away in both videos, the youtube transfer of the murdoch-owned one is just blurrier overall."
ReplyDeleteHm; no the Skynews one is altered to disguise her face. You can't recognise her. In the RT video you can, which just proves the video itself is not motion blurred- the blurring was done by Skynews.
A photo of this girl stabbing the window was initially a prominent image at the Guardian. She is not masked, she is not "black bloc", her face was concealed by her hair. She was shown in the act of breaking the window.
It's "reality tv" - it's infotainment, it's fashion photography. If you see her face it becomes evidence and that's a can of worms.
"what did i try to do the other day?"
ReplyDeleteThat's no longer any of your business. You deleted all of my comments that were even about the discussion, so I just wrote the appropriate parties privately. I don't care whose 'friendship' I lose if they let you bully them. You're just petty and indolent.
I wouldn't bother explicating, since you just delete and threaten anyway, but nobody's paying attention to you, because they know you're demented.
ReplyDeleteshould also be noted that occupying the building, strong, emphatic, non-violent expression of opposition, was a smart and reasonable thing to do, especially since it was accomplished without violence.
ReplyDeleteThe efforts to portray it as violent, and all actions of this kind as necessarily violent, are obviously well coordinated and backed by immense resources, and marshalling fantastic rhetorical talents and a spectrum of attractive personae, and take in everything from Skynews to through the New Statesman to leftist bloggers, but they could still fail because there were so many people who were witnesses and participants, not all from one clique or city, who know there was no violence, whose friends and friends of friends will know because they will tell them, and there are of course no victims to claim they were the objects of violence. Luckily the fire extinguisher didn't hit anyone.
"Yes, I think it's fair to say there is a 'black bloc' everywhere, they are longstanding gubmint employees and kids manipulated by them"
ReplyDeleteit seems unbelievable to me that every single black bloc person everywhere, and every person who breaks things at protests, is a plant or a dupe. this is also the argument that graeber specifically argues against.
the issue seems to me to revolve around the successful manipulation of this term 'violence' so that even leftists end up accepting it to refer to property damage. that is a major liability in the ideological battle over how to interpret the transgressions of left-wing activists. but to say that they simply don't happen or are entirely the fault of the teenagers in masks is highly unconvincing and divisive for the left itself. i don't understand how the left wins this battle unless it simply stops mattering to the audience that windows to corporate and official party offices are broken (which is also to say i'm with you in relief that the fire extinguisher didn't hurt anyone).
i would also suggest that protests would simply not appear on the news if they were in practice as mild-mannered as you say they are in authentic intent ('they' here includes everyone, even those who may or may not be covert operatives, as it inevitably must for anyone not a fellow traveler). spectacular destruction is an occupation of airwaves just as much as taking over buildings is an occupation of physical space.
on the video, i just watched it again and her face (when she's walking back into the crowd) is no more blurry than the rest of the video -- it's the lo-res transfer vs. the high-res RT transfer.
just to be extra clear, whoever threw the extinguisher was not thinking (or a plant!) and should not have done it.
ReplyDeleteblack bloc person everywhere, and every person who breaks things at protests, is a plant or a dupe.
ReplyDeleteof course. you only need a few agents to organise all the groups like that, because they are semisecretive. Of course they don't start everything, they steer, just like they always have, always. And now there are more resources and skills than ever to do this.
"successful manipulation of this term 'violence' so that even leftists end up accepting it to refer to property damage."
Well how many people has this successful manipulation required? Not a lot. Not every single journalist and pundit has to be involved in this manipulation for it to work. The left picked it up recently, maybe from one book. Maybe one or two manipulators were all that was needed to manipulate a lot of progressive and leftist pundits, virtually all under 35.
Seems to be the case.
sheepdog and sheep proportions.
"how to interpret the transgressions of left-wing activists"
But the left is not violent and has no power to be. I don't see why this is even discussed except that some posers like to grapple with the question "theoretically" in classrooms and things.
"i don't understand how the left wins this battle unless it simply stops mattering to the audience that windows to corporate and official party offices are broken"
It's always going to matter to the ruling class and their courtiers. It's not really clear that it does matter especially to anyone else, though violence does.
I think it's important not to feed this extreme law and order discourse, death penalty for jaywalking, any deviation at all places you in the unlawful combattant category. But I'm not sure how popular it really is. It's very hard now, but one has to resist supposing acquiescence means approval.
And the propertied classes "care" about the smashed windows not because they dislike broken glass. The conflict doesn nto arise due to failed pr.
I think public opinion, despite so much effort to paint a frightening and exaggerated picture and all the creepy Heideggerian language in use on the side of the protestors and the outraged scolding on the other, in the UK shows that if nobody gets really hurt, most people are okay about the windows and the rowdiness if the cause seems reasonable, which in this case to most people it does.
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ReplyDelete"I would also suggest that protests would simply not appear on the news if they were in practice as mild-mannered as you say they are in authentic intent"
ReplyDeleteThey are mild-mannered. Nobody not one person was deliberately harmed by a demonstrator. They could have set the building on fire, theyc ould have attacked MPs and police, they had the numbers. Instead they danced around and wrote things on the walls. If they'd been skinhead fascists people would have had their teeth kicked in. Because violence is possible. It's that thousands of people there were disinclined to it.
"('they' here includes everyone, even those who may or may not be covert operatives,"
you make it sound like that would be odd at a demo of this size when a governent is carrying out a shock doctrine plunder of unprecedented proportions. Of course there are covert operatives in every organisation,more importantly there are out in the open employees of capital and the state. It's not unknown that the actual event organiser is a toady of those he's purportedly organising against and that he was quick to issue a statement about despicable violence before anyone had even seen the extensive footage of the day. I don't think it's a mystery that Jeremy Paxman works for the BBC or that the liberal mainstream press is dependent on advertising.
" spectacular destruction is an occupation of airwaves just as much as taking over buildings is an occupation of physical space."
yes, but you can have spectacular destruction and not much airwave occupation and you can have very little violence and a lot of airwave occupation - compare how many times footage of a bleeding businessman getting in a limo played in the days leading up to the coup against Chavez to how much you have seen of the violence inflicted on falluja.
"whoever threw the extinguisher was not thinking (or a plant!) and should not have done it."
ReplyDeleteyes it was dumb, and lucky it didn't hit anyone. I didn't suggest it was "a plant" - when you say "plant", you give the impression that like everyone who works for the government is hired the day before a demonstration and micromanaged. "Memo to Jake12, drop a fire extinguisher!" I mean its silly.
do you think the ITV management who published that Fikrit Alic photo were all put on the intelligence payroll a week before that came out? It's just an existing network of professionals, they exist, they are there, there is no point in trying to think about historical reality pretending you don't know this feature. It would be like pretending not to know that there are a certain number of doctors everywhere.
ReplyDeleteif it is reported in the coming days that attempts at arson were made on the upper floors of the building, what will you think? Surely that would have changed everything, and such things can and do fail.
"that is a major liability in the ideological battle over how to interpret the transgressions of left-wing activists. but to say that they simply don't happen or are entirely the fault of the teenagers in masks is highly unconvincing and divisive for the left itself."
ReplyDeleteOkay so seriously then. Let's examine the best documented left wing violence over the past ten years in contexts like these - not armed struggle, but crowds of unarmed demonstrators in big cities. Let's really see what kind of thing happens and who commits them and what the results are.
What do you think are the ten or so most representative cases?
"But the left is not violent and has no power to be."
ReplyDeleteIn whut respeck, Charley?
We were talking about word-abuse earlier, and here it is again.
ReplyDelete"Violence" happens when a few hundred white people smash windows owned by some company or other in a half-assed and seemingly disinterested manner. But "violence" also ensues when a black man gets arrested for loitering- not because the cops beat him up for no reason, but because he "resists arrest" and forces the cops to bear down on him. Or when working class people engage in choreographed "fights" on reality TV shows. When Saddam Hussein tortures his people, he's being "violent", but when we torture them we're just gathering intelligence.
"Violence" means so many things these days to so many people that it's almost meaningless in political discussions. How do you even begin pick through the mess?
(Ugh, and the way some people use the word "imaginative"... I just groan thinking about it...)
The blog post in the New Statesman is terrible.
ReplyDeleteComp 101 called: it wants its overwritten diary entries back.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"overwritten diary entries"
ReplyDeleteyeah, that was using the extremely subjective style to suggest what could not be truthfully stated
it's just very striking the difference between what appears on the videos and what most participants describe and the impressions given Nina Power in the Guardian so quickly, before any other participants could publish:
Her emphasis is on "violence" by the demonstrators. She suggests the demonstrator's violence caused injusires to other demonstrators and police. She hints at crowd mania, mass ecstasy - we realised we were all one! the violence expressed the essence of the whole demo!
no mention of police violence. police have made arrests that's all.
it's a bizarre and, from the film clearly innacurate portrait and its a pretext for this self display of an infantile "political" mysticism.
What she masks with this vision - which is expertly vague and equivocating, expertly irrational and insinuating (spontaneous direct action?) - is the reality of the day. Direct Action was planned by the most left and militant section of the protest. An occupaton of the HQ was planned in advance. This was an excellent idea and was going to get the press and the attention while giving an accurate and appealing impression of the opponents of the cuts and their politics.
About fifty people carried it out, including Clare Solomon, entering the building to occupy it.
Some others obviously got wind of this plan and planned to add a show of generic "riot" to overshadow this planned direct action. the media of course was immediatemly helful in the production of images of "dionysian" youth going wild.
This vision of an explosion of "spontaneous" "violence" from the demonstrators is false and propagandistic. What really happened was level headed and determined action by people who do have alternatives, are sane and informed, and not just acting out in ecstatic "violent" irrational irresponsible tantrums.
Happily the effort to obscure the intelligence, responsibility, rationality and justice, as well as the determined militancy, of the opposition behind this curtain of generic "anarchy" failed, indeed it seems even to have backfired.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteit's unclear to me what you think i'm saying -- yes all this talk about 'violence' on the side of protesters is hyperbole. no one seriously attacks cops. some of the protesters are also breaking stuff, and seem generally happy to do it. i think this behavior should be defended. i wouldn't call it 'violence' but i can understand why some on the left would adopt that language to defend the 'vandalism,' despite its ideological manipulation, reactively given how hysterical the media is on the subject and the necessities of speaking in sound bites. on the pr issue, 'propertied classes' doesn't include everyone who watches tv, reads news websites, or otherwise learns about these events through official corporate media. but your point about insisting on the protests as mild-mannered, non-violent, etc. is well taken, as long as it covers the same direct action activity the media likes to use to represent 'violence' and doesn't join in demonizing them.
ReplyDelete"What do you think are the ten or so most representative cases?"
not sure about represnetative so i'll just name 10 off the top of my head -
geneva wto
g20 london
g20 pittsburgh
g20 toronto
the greek riots following Alexandros Grigoropoulos 's murder by police
the iranian election protests
the student occupations at berkeley
the protests in paris against sarkozy's attack on pensions
i have to run soon so i'll let you pick the other two.
at g20 pittsburgh some anarchists did an unauthorized march, were ordered to disperse by police, refused, were attacked with tear gas and sound cannons, and in response they pushed some trash bins at the cops and broke some windows and this was called violence.
i was at g20 toronto and police cars were set on fire, starbucks and american apparel were attacked, etc. pretty good probability the police let it happen for the cameras before moving in and busting heads.
anyway, aside from the greek riots where people were throwing molotovs, the other ones had no 'real' violence (no attacks on humans) and middling to fair amounts of spectacular 'violence' (property damage, blockades that refused to disperse). in toronto there were some (for me, justified) complaints about local businesses getting damaged as well as insured corporate chain stores.
i think these actions should be defended, and i can see how it might be difficult for underfunded, undertrained minority voices in the media to avoid the temptation of using ideologically charged words like 'violence' (or 'imaginative,' or 'creative acts of resistance') in the course of fighting public acquiescence, or of feeding into the (powerful, attractive) romantic image of spontaneous anarchy.
also the question of what counts as violence and when to use it isn't some rarefied topic -- it's openly discussed in planning meetings for actions, at activist retreats, even out on the street.
I don't see what you think you gain by abolishing the distinction the law makes and everybody but reactionary propagandists made up until ten minutes ago between the acts of violence and non violent acts.
ReplyDeleteHyperbole? No. I'm sure if someone was burning your car, you would not feel that the difference between locking you in it first and burning it empty was just a difference of degree. It's a completely different act.
i can understand why some on the left would adopt that language to defend the 'vandalism,'
ReplyDeleteHow does it defend vandalism to accuse the perpetrators of violence (or terrorism)? Do you think people arrested who spraypainted walls or kicked at broken windows or stood nearby watching others do so should plead guilty to assault (or reckless endangerment) to better defend spraypainting as a legitimate political tactic?
I don't see how this helps, honestly. It seems to me ridiculous to imagine this distinction cannot be maintained in a more straightforward way, that the only thing left for leftists is to try some sly subversion of the right's discourse by excessive identification or something. But perhaps I underestimate the condition of the videogamers.
There's a petition where the arrested are now complaining that they are accused of violence in the press. Clearly they would rather not have their dancing described that way. Since it's wrong and also they could be fined or go to jail if it weren't. Is that petition unreasonable, do you think?
http://adswithoutproducts.com/2010/11/13/notes-on-violence-and-justice/#comments
ReplyDeleteYou may well be right. He DOES seem most cultivated sometimes, downright canny. He won't tell me his name because he thinks I'll fuck up his job, rather he thinks that I'd want to give him a fucking job. Although I'd want to think it over carefully.
And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with defending actual acts of violence of which one approves or deems effective or whatever.
ReplyDeleteBut I am not ready to concede to posthumanist capital supremacism the distinction between humanity and capital.
The wilful infliction of injury on human beings is violent and must not be condoned. Hurling a fire extinguisher into a crowd is clearly wrong, but the broken glass and bonfires of Wednesday were more visually spectacular than actually harmful. It is the coalition's policies that are going to generate bloody mayhem.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/13/student-fees-protest-the-real-vandals
easy enough to understand. this is not that arcane. she doesn't want to posture and brand herself, its not about the author's exhibitionism and theology, so she can convey sense and make a case.
will get to these examples shortly
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ReplyDeleteby calling the glass breaking and the occupation itself violent, you also make the use of violence by the cops against the protestors seem like a symmetrical reaction instead of an aggression. In Power's article there is a clear attempt to make it seem as though demonstrators' violence and not the cops caused the injuries to the injured and also to make it seem as though these were serious injuries.
ReplyDeleteNow this is the impression people have of what happened and of what the accused participated in - the injuring of more than a dozen people, fellow demonstrators and police. The cops have implicitly been cleared of harming anyone. At the G20 the left media was all plain and unequivocal that the demonstrators were the victims of police attacks; now this has been lost and the police are painted as being attacked by angry violent demonstrators.
Now see how clever that tactic is because the reactionary media could not accomplish the service to the cops that the lefyt media has now accomplished - that is, the reactionary media has never succeeded in getting ordinary people to blame non violent demonstrators when cops brutalize them.
But now see the rhetorical game you are operating - now you say if I correct your facts, if I say no that crowd in in the video committed no violence, and say no the police attacked peaceful demonstrators, you can say well what actually happened doesn't matter, I am just a spineless liberal who hasn't the stomach for demos attacking police and I am participating in the demonization of legitimate use of force against the state. Like if I say but Lavalas didn't necklace the rich in their gated communities you can say I am just holding up some standard of nonviolence that serves the ruling class and demonizing the violence of the poor.
So you can say now the demonstrators attacked police and injured their fellow protestors. and I say that's wrong, look at the video. But you will win this one rhetorically no matter what the evidence is because I seem to be "condemning violence" and you seem to be boldly supporting it, though if it were specific actual violence (say, bombing the underground) you wouldn't. What's happened here is replacing "violence" with something that isn't violence is serving to replace the concrete with an abstraction - this "stands for" violence, though it isn't violence. and you create some case about "violence in principle" rather than violence in fact. So having decided violence in principle shouldn't be demonized, if you have to return to the concrete tory hq, the only violence available to justify is that of the state against the demonstrators.
Zizzizm!
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ReplyDelete" on the pr issue, 'propertied classes' doesn't include everyone who watches tv, reads news websites, or otherwise learns about these events through official corporate media"
ReplyDeleteI wasn't referring to everyone as the propertied classes. I was saying something about the propertied classes in contrast to everyone else:
It's always going to matter to the ruling class and their courtiers. [that is, the propertied] It's not really clear that it does matter especially to anyone else, [that is, not the properties but other people] though violence does.
I think it's important not to feed this extreme law and order discourse, death penalty for jaywalking, any deviation at all places you in the unlawful combattant category. But I'm not sure how popular it really is. [that is, not sure that everyone, not just the propertied, is persuaded by this discourse] It's very hard now, but one has to resist supposing acquiescence [by lots of people, not the propertied alone] means approval.
And the propertied classes [as opposed to everyone else] "care" about the smashed windows not because they dislike broken glass. The conflict [between the propertied and those who threaten their property] doesn not arise due to failed pr.
I think public opinion, [the opinion of the majority which includes the propertied minority and everyone else] despite so much effort to paint a frightening and exaggerated picture and all the creepy Heideggerian language in use on the side of the protestors and the outraged scolding on the other, in the UK shows that if nobody gets really hurt, most people [not the propertied] are okay about the windows and the rowdiness if the cause seems reasonable, which in this case to most people [not the propertied] it does.
I mean what kind of easy posturing is it to champion "violence" boldly and daringly if your specific example is actually non-violent? You don't want to undertake to justify the 7/7 protests against the Iraq war, even though its very clear there is no comparison between the amount of violence and destruction the Iraq invasion and occupation has caused and that caused by the London underground bombings. But that is violence. The window smashing isn't violence. The distinction isn't hard to see and why it's easier to champion the non violence of spraypainting and trespassing than it is to champion the violence of the massacre of random pt passengers.
ReplyDeleteYou know and when there is real violence one always does wonder whether the protagonists really were trying to accomplish laudable goals; and the agents of the state usually do eventually turn up in the evidence of anti-state (Irish, Italian, Chechen) violent protest.
So what kind of sophistry is one engaged in claiming to defend violent protests from "demonization" but only if they're not actually violent?
I mean it's not hard to understand why the ruling class has tried for centuries to convince ordinary people that interfering with their control of the material world and their rule over others through that control is violent. This has always failed, but it seems there has been a recent breakthrough due to the spectacle's erosion of rationality and logic and language.
I am surprised you don't see the sophistry here...
ReplyDeletesaying well the problem is that the media shows breaking glass and this gets public opinion against the demonstrators
well no, what gets public opinion against demonstrators is violence which can be suggested mendaciously but convincingly with the aid of certain kinds of images.
that is, what puts people off is the idea of other people who hurt you, who intimidate and frighten and are likely to hurt you.
so now you have these participator/pundits insisting this - this was not just some window breaking, but people who frightened me, who I thought would hurt me, who hurt other people, rthis was violence and people not in control of themselves, a crowd overcome with a destructive impulse to vent frustration, injuring eachother and scaring me.
that's a) false and b) exactly the problem not the solution to the problem.
What distrubs me is how this is complicated suddenly and not obvious anymore. It's like you are saying there is no rational public discuourse at all left, no grasp of reality and history possible anymore, not even for progressives, there is only manoeuvring with affective jolts and imagery and insinuation associations.
and also...I would venture to guess the plan for direct action was to occupy the buidling and make the police forcibly remove and arrest the occupiers. that's newsworthy and would take up far more newstime too, since it could go on for days at least.
ReplyDeleteIf the plan was, as one must assume, a prolonged and intransigent occupation of tory offices, then it was sabotaged by the 'spontaneous' vandalism.
ReplyDeletethis
http://tinyurl.com/345ypsb
also seems clear enough and i don't think the author is that much, if at all, better funded and trained than the Guardian editors:
In discussing the events at Millbank, it is important to distinguish between “violence” and direct action. Conflating the invasion and occupation of Millbank, with the idiotic throwing of a fire extinguisher off the roof, confuses a legitimate tool of direct action and protest, with a mindless act of aggression, and is especially unhelpful coming from those, like Will Straw, who are sympathetic to the protesters. It is possible for a protest to be both unlawful and non-violent – traditionally, the police have deliberately confused this point, allowing them to respond in the same manner to acts of civil disobedience as to acts of violence.
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ReplyDeletecompare:
ReplyDeleteNow, clearly there were acts of vandalism that accompanied the occupation of Millbank, but the instinct of the crowd was decisively against violence.
to the opposite earlier reportage:
As I write, about 200 people have occupied the building, and bonfires burn outside. Some arrests have been made and eight people – protesters and police officers – have been injured. Protesters have broken windows and made their way on to the roof.... It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority – it is a genuine expression of frustration against the few who seem determined to make the future a miserable, small-minded and debt-filled place for the many.
and consider the one at the top now has to laboriously undo the impression created by the Guardian, and is at a disadtvantage - smaller audience, coming later.
Zizneycorp is capable of doing a lot of damage. Here as usual the main tactic is the creation of a cultural object to interpret - debate this spectable! - and every discussion about the opposition to the cuts now has to happen through and with these culture commodities, both promoting them and being steered and managed, framed and shaped by them.
Look how now a new assumption has been established - that the alternatives are breaking windows or polite pointless lame marching. What's been erased here is the direct action that was subverted by the vandalism - civil disobedience, sitting in, the kind of show of determination and creation of inconvenience that has proven track records of success. Now that's not even on the table, because the media right and left are agreed
"this is direct action!" messy, noisy, but fun for kids and all over in an hour.
and the alternative is an ineffectually obedient stroll carrying a banner on a sunny day.
both lack the basics of political engagement and the established methods of successful activism; both take spectacle form, brief, isolated, unconnected to anything before or after.
this is the zizney method. to say there is no alternative to this, to putting on a thirty second show. activism is advertising.
Aaron Porter president of the National Union of Students was unequivocal in his condemnation of the violence that occurred at Millbank. What was your view of the violence and the use of direct action in protests more generally?
ReplyDeleteAs I have said publicly, most of what happened at the Millbank Tower does not qualify as ‘violence’ except in the most cartoonish ways. We live in a world where war and exploitation are routine, as is the loss of life and limb both in inner-cities of the Western world and the killing fields of places like Iraq and Afghanistan (where violence is inflicted by the militaries of countries like Britain and the USA as well as those who claim to resist them). It is actually quite insulting and demeaning to those innocents who lose their lives and limbs in these places to describe smashed windows and minor scuffles as ‘violence.’ We have to ask why ‘collateral damage’ at such a high level—maimed children and bombed wedding parties—are normalised, on the one hand, as something that ‘can’t be helped’ in situations of conflict and on the other hand, such outrage expressed over broken windows? What sorts of hypocrisy, entitlement and double-standards are operating here in the definitions of and acceptance of violence? I think it is actually a kind of ethnocentrism that thinks it is ok for other places to experience violence (at the hands of Britain and its allies) but not okay for the privileged classes of Britain to have windows smashed in occasionally by people questioning what is going on.
Yay for Aaron Porter.
ReplyDeletelook, as i've said repeatedly i understand the difference between violence and property damage. my 'defense' if it can even be called that ("can understand why some on the left would adopt that language") of left editorialists who adopt this language amounts only to features of what is evidently allowed/disallowed in corporate-dominated media.
ReplyDeleteof your counterexamples, writers who avoid/attack the conflation of militancy and illegality with violence, two things are noticeable:
1) only one published in the guardian and one ended up on TV; the rest are only visible to a much less mainstream readership
2) none (probably for good reason) actively defend the property damage. they say the cuts are worse, but they don't defend it as a legitimate tactic, they call it a distraction from the real issues. they downplay its importance. i think that interview shows how unconvincing and weak-seeming this approach is.
even this: Now, clearly there were acts of vandalism that accompanied the occupation of Millbank, but the instinct of the crowd was decisively against violence.
leaves it open whether the difference is one of kind or degree - the "instinct of the crowd" is against violence, but was it against vandalism?
so that when you vituperatively attack those who defend the property damage in its ideological form as "violence" (while also, along with everyone else, criticizing the fire-extinguisher guy, the only activist who committed actual violence) you objectively are left-bashing, regardless of how correct your argument is. what you call the double-sidedness of seymour's rhetoric there i think is an attempt to deal with this problem in a way retains the distinctions you want to make (only a bad reader could ignore all those scare quotes) while also being a forceful, all-inclusive statement.
i think it's different with zizek because he's so absurd it's less and less difficult to insist he's a neolib clown and not a real leftist. especially when he straightforwardly takes right-wing positions like we shouldn't go after BP, we need to revive eurocentric mysticism, etc.
"What distrubs me is how this is complicated suddenly and not obvious anymore. It's like you are saying there is no rational public discuourse at all left, no grasp of reality and history possible anymore, not even for progressives, there is only manoeuvring with affective jolts and imagery and insinuation associations."
do you really think print is so liberated from the spectacle that effective rhetoric doesn't for the most part work exactly like this? people will follow the association of romantic images between nonviolent but rowdy student protesters and sporadically violent greek anti-austerity protesters as long as the images are produced (and as long as protesters refuse to be well-behaved). if the associations are going to be made anyway, it seems more effective to me, if only within the already-fixed ideological frame of corporate media spectacle, to make them look heroic and attractive rather than engage in what is always made to look like hair-splitting and/or left-bashing. i mean in that interview solomon says all the right things but aside from a few good lines she mostly gets steamrolled. i don't think that's only because she's outnumbered.
one does not have to abdicate reality but not all media outlets work the same way, or reward the same tactics.
it would also be nice to be able to discuss this "rhetorical game" (i would call it a double bind) without being accused of "operating" it.
on that petition:
ReplyDeleteYet at least 32 people have now been arrested, and the police and media appear to be launching a witch-hunt condemning peaceful protesters as “criminals” and violent.
A great deal is being made of a few windows smashed during the protest, but the real vandals are those waging a war on our education system.
We reject any attempt to characterise the Millbank protest as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement.
how complicated this all is comes out very clearly in these lines -- since the vast majority of the protesters damaged no property, and since all but the one were non-violent, asserting that these 32+ arrested individuals were 'violent' or even 'criminal' ahead of any actual investigation is fantastical slander. but at the same time, everyone has to be defended, including those who damaged property, in order to maintain solidarity and a certain idea of what confrontational direct action is supposed to do.
and again, i don't want to defend laurie penny or owen or lenin or whomever unconditionally, merely to recognize how they are constrained and to rethink how they're most likely to be read by their various audiences.
ReplyDeleteI think our disagreement has to do with judging the aims. I admit to bashing but not the left. Though maybe I was unfair to Seymour, but to illustrate the position he is put in by the bashee, who I don't consider to be "left".
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry (truly) if I unfairly accuse you of unfarily accusing me of "condemning violence".
"2) none (probably for good reason) actively defend the property damage."
I think we disagree whether assimilatng it to violent crime is defending it or not. It seems to me a great many people will hesitate to believe an overt reactionary who declares a crowd of protestors to have been violent. This lack of credibility is a problem. There are proven solutions that every professional knows - that everyone will believe a supposed cheerleader who writes "the violence of the crowd was so beautiful!"
Especailly if they're staged sortof breathlessly just leaving the scene, and get a jump on everyone desiring to portray the events accurately.
People are not going to be influenced by whether or not this or that nobody columnist says "buy coke!" or "pepsi's better!" Or "wasn't that violence lovely and for good reason?" or "there's no excuse for that violence!" People don't take direction from individuals like this. We learned a lot from "give the isnpectors time to find those wmd!" right? So let's not forget it so fast.
is that the aim of the Power and Penny pieces? Let the inspectors have the time they need to find the hidden weapons?
To contribute to the media wide effort to convince an audience that the crowd of protestors went into a frenzy and harmed people? That there were wmd, even though the speaker, about whose opinion on these things nbobody cares, thinks the way to deal with it is not invasion?
I don't know but I have to assume so. Otherwise it's odd they should both have chosen to insist in nearly the same words on the "violence" of the spirit of all 52K demonstrators.
Not only this - they both include sympathetic defences of the police. The police "are giving as good as they get" writes Penny; Power's scene mentions police only among the injured by "the violence" and as the shadowy implied protagonists of arrests.
ReplyDeleteWhy is this transformation of police into victims acting in self-defence necessary to this defence of demonstrator property damage? If it's not, what other pro-demo purpose can you find for it?
Which brings one to - how much innacuracy, whether pro-police or not, can be really useful? Isn't there a point at which the debunkable misinformation published under the bylines of declaed partisans of the demonstration becomes problematic just for its dishonesty?
Surely professional culture producers could find a way to express approval of the tactics of the black bloc - if indeed they approve of them, which is unclear. And surely this could be done without an apology for or misrepresentation of police brutality.
Clare Solomon I would imagine was actually annoyed by the window smashing because it screwed up her occupation. She was there first, she says. She can't explain for a varietyof reasons but I think she says enough for us to understand that she and others had an action in progress that was derailed. So she may actually not approve of the windwo smashing in thie one instance - which is not the same as saying its never useful to smash a window.
Like a qlip said above one could just say it, right? Why are opinion pieces being written cagily as if they were contained by the limits of speeches written for candidates for public office or characters in films or tv presenters?
And I think Gopal made an important point about what is also being accomplished, the institution of tiers of standards for "violence" to go with the tiers of humanity.
But I am sorry if I sounding accusing - much of the "you" was an imaginary you not you specifically, but confusing I know.
About you instances of left violence - I was trying to actually put together a pictiure of causalties. If you add French riots there will be a fatality to discuss not caused by the repression.
I confess to being unfair to Richard: I don't know what Owen said. Laurie Penny is really young and perhaps was really scared by the flares and the smokebombs (all fx you will notice, brought along - no weapons, just all this set decorating equipment for the photos and the hyped-up atmosphere, the pounding sound, the eggs, the haze, the smell - the set dressing of a "battle").
ReplyDeleteThe editors are responsible.
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ReplyDeleteBut also if people are ready to defend violence I don't see why nobody is championing the fire extinguisher kid and threatening next time not to miss. Why isn't he the Rochejacquelin of the scene if it is in fact about not demonising violence and not about redefining non-violent direct action as violent crime?
ReplyDeleteIf the thing is well they are calling this violence so we should too - I think that's conceding really unnecessarily. I think no matter what the reactionaries and their million dollar a year spokesgolems say on tv, the vast vast vast majority of the audience distinguishes between harming people and not harming people. Everyone understands the feeling "take my wallet please don't shoot me"; nobody can't distiguish, or between the destruction of necessities of life which is violence and destruction of insured and replaceable inanimate objects.
also, worryingly, what is encouraged by this way the soodleft is now collapsing this distinction is its all centred on a solipsist individualism - I am frustrated and angry, I swing my arm, it feels good to smash something, I hear the gush, whether its brains or melon is a detail. From a social perspective the distinction is huge, is too big to miss; so the individualism and solipsism is encouraged.
"how complicated this all is comes out very clearly in these lines"
ReplyDeleteyou know I think those articles created this complication. Don't you? They exerted the pressure that we see this wording squirming under.
this is a compelling point:
ReplyDeletedo you really think print is so liberated from the spectacle that effective rhetoric doesn't for the most part work exactly like this? people will follow the association of romantic images between nonviolent but rowdy student protesters and sporadically violent greek anti-austerity protesters as long as the images are produced (and as long as protesters refuse to be well-behaved). if the associations are going to be made anyway, it seems more effective to me, if only within the already-fixed ideological frame of corporate media spectacle, to make them look heroic and attractive rather than engage in what is always made to look like hair-splitting and/or left-bashing.
and I don't know why I think it's still worth fighting against this, but mainly its obvious the msm owns this turf, it can romanticise and demonise irrationally much better, so the thing is to try to stay out of that altogether, to maintain another public discourse, to try to maintain some rationality, some status of evidence and argument, and not just try to play propagandist in the big leagues, thinking some little oh so clever twist will bring the global media's edifice crashing down.
anyway, hairsplitting and leftbashing - perhaps this is whatanything that deviates from this "lets get play propaganist on this playstation" will seem to be hairsplitting. For years this was how my criticism of zizek looked but it just takes time. He hasn't actually become more obvious, its just built up and got boring. You note that now he takes open reactionary positions like about BP, but he's always taken them - his pro-Bombing of Yugo position was more obvious and more outrageous than "lets not persecute BP". He was calling for war crimes alongside T. Friedman. He deployed undisguised racist arguments to urge imperial aggression. It's not brutal imperialist politics that is now turning his fans off, it's more just fashion.
"if the associations are going to be made anyway, it seems more effective to me, if only within the already-fixed ideological frame of corporate media spectacle, to make them look heroic and attractive"
ReplyDeleteokay, maybe. as a rule i think not - Hezbollah and Hamas will be called fascists but we're not going to start conceding this and trying to recuperate the term fascist. Or maybe that's next after "fanaticism". But it seems to me for the "left" intellectuals - not left activisits, but left pundits with stature in the mainstread liberal media and academia - begin to describe not themselves but left activists as "violent" "fanatics",they're taking a gamble with someone else's strategy, the kind of gamble that naturally appeals to culture producers with secure positions, resemblng as it does the culture commodities they make, but which could be really inconvenient for activists in the sights of the state's repressive mechanisms and institutions.
Remember the fanbase of Buffy likes her genocide and deems it righteous solely because vampires are violent.
And while very possibly causing activists inconvenience, their left intellectual producer champions who cheer their violence will probably just sort of fade into the vast stream of liberals and reactionaries whose terminology they are "subversively" adopting.
But maybe it really can't be helped.
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ReplyDeleteof course it is understood there were people who said "let the inspectors find the hidden wmd" even though they didn't believe there was any because to say "there are no undeclared weapons" was to speak a conspiracy theory.
ReplyDeleteand this is also true now, to say "there was no violence; there was the media fabricating suggestive images" is to speak a conspiracy theory.
But I don't think one needs to buckle under this intimidation. I don't see the point of doing so except for advancing career's sake. And here is another big factor - Penny and Power are mainly writing to advertise and display themselves. They convey little if any content, they care nothing for accuracy, it's all about selfbranding as pundits. (This is not true of Leninino.) So to be marketable, they have to give conspiracy theory a wide berth, which condemns them to the kind of naivete their publications seek to reproduce and enforce.
Chris Hedges has a pertinent piece recently. He's talking about the US but marketability for anglophone punditry is determined by the big regions of an international market.