The Crisis of Everything Everywhere — Day 8
Comments Off on The Crisis of Everything Everywhere — Day 8THE CRISIS OF EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE
or WELCOME TO THE NEW PARADIGM
A midwinter retreat, a modular molecular seminar with Everyone
Day 8
(Other) Medias, (Other) Perspectives
Day 8 and 9 will attempt to revisit the discussions we have had and consider together, each day, the potential course these movements could take.
1:00-3:30PM
Over the last decade, many of the most inspiring experiments and political struggles have unfolded in Central and Latin America. To begin our weekend’s reflection on horizons or additional perspectives, we will be joined by Macela Olivera:
Much has been made of privately owned public spaces in the framing of the occupation of Zucotti/Liberty park. But as we wrote in the days directly following the occupation, the terms private and public have in the midst of this crisis, shown themselves to be sometimes indiscernible.
Neoliberalism has involved not so much a process dismantling of the state, but a retooling and repurposing of its functions to serve corporate interests. The challenge of the commons is a challenge to break and contest this binary logic.
The attempts to privatize water and the defense of water as a commons finds itself on the front lines of struggle worldwide. In Italy, this last summer, a powerful referendum movement grew to legally constitute water as a common good, that is, neither public nor private.
The city of Cochabamba became famous for it’s defense and recuperation of water when it kicked out Bechtel in 2000, but what is the situation now?
Please join Marcela Olivera who was a key international liaison for the Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida during the Water Wars and is now is helping an Interamerican water rights network to explore these questions.
She writes: “Water is the one issue where everything intersects; it crosses over into political and economic issues in every region and in every country. People’s struggles over water are also about having their voices heard, having better living conditions…. What we’re fighting for in Bolivia and Latin America now is to put together effective, participatory control by the people over our social resources of water, health and education as an alternative to private control. But we’re not searching for a single model for how to do things all over Latin America. I don’t believe there is one solution to our problems; there are a lot of possibilities out there. Our realities are all so different, so diverse, that it would be impossible to say, ‘This will work for everybody.’”.
The question of inventing strategies toward a reclamation of a common(s) requires this ability to recognize global patterns and respond locally to specific contexts.
Contributors will include Marcela Olivera, Jodi Dean, Doug Hendwood, Marco Deseriis, Jack Bratich and others.
We would like to dedicate one session on indigenous movements and movements of the commons in Bolivia and beyond.
We will also be attempting to dedicate some attention this day to the question of media, press, technology, and various representations of the Occupy Movements.
And we will orient discussions toward different perspectives on the struggles unfolding today, including anti-fracking campaigns and struggles to reassert a commons.
4-6:30PM
Other Medias
One cannot address the concentration of power, without also addressing the way consent is also sometimes doctored or manufactured. The last decade of the Bush Administration and the wars that were created were a case in point. The leaks, the actions of Anonymous, as well as the uses of social networks combined with actions and ecampments on the street have constructed a counter-power. But questions remain about the limits of this power, and more importantly as these movements grow, questions emerge about their strategies and relations to subvert or empty this power of the press and media to represent
en masse. Can this movement continue to think in terms of ‘storylines’ or ‘narratives’ as the mainstream media is so prone to do? How can a movement which purports to create autonomy also break away from the logics which reproduce existing structures and concentrations of power?
The goal of this session is to situate a discussion around the relations of the Occupy Movements to different forms of media and technologies of ‘social networking’. We will try to involve and invite individuals in different and related working groups. Jack Bratich will help situate the conversation, which will open up a space for all who are interested.
Related text:
Occupy the Media
7-9:30PM
Jodi Dean, Doug Hendwood, Marco Deseriis will try to build up our conversation around some questions they would like to pose for the group and the movements at large
Jodi has offered the following as points of departure:
1. Recently a text has been circulating that argues that movement is experiencing a high bounce rate (folks coming to an initial event but, not finding a point of access or engagement, turning away). (http://tech.nycga.net/2012/01/05/three-complaints-about-ows/#close=1) Is this a real problem? Does the movement need to grow and if so how? Can the practices that worked well in the first phase scale up?
2. To what extent has the movement developed a set of guiding principles or commitments that make it no longer appropriate to think of the movement as non-partisan or post-political?
3. What does winning, success, victory look like? Can we imagine possible paths that might take us there? Do these paths provide any guidance when we consider what sorts of actions we undertake and support?
4. Does a wide array of dispersed actions/campaigns/interventions entail a dilution of force and effort, such that they all get lost in the overall flow of images and issues in communicative capitalism? Or does it entail something else entirely: perhaps the establishment of multiple beachheads, the infiltration of multiple issues, the political linking of multiple sites such that their underlying commonality in opposition to capitalism becomes apparent (the red thread)? .
Doug:
“That looks good. I’m interested in talking about how we really need to think about the 99% – and, as Jodi has written, the degree to which the reticence about demands is symptomatic of an unwillingness to focus on fissures within. The whole notion of post-political is also an evasion of that sort, given that politics is about, in Margaret Atwood’s phrase, who does what to whom and gets away with it.
Also, people frequently draw analogies betw OWS & the civil rights movement, which was similarly dispersed and ebbed and flowed. But the civil rights movement was directed against a very specific set of laws and practices – legally enforced segregation. OWS is not. What does that mean?”
Related text:
A Movement without Demands?