Trans-Scripts 3 (2013) Technologies of Direct Democracy Nicholas Mirzoeff * In November 2010, the last sentence I wrote in the manuscript of what became The Right to Look (published a year later) was, In short, the choice is between continuing to move on and authorizing authority or claiming that there is something to see and democratizing democracy. Two months later the Arab Spring began in North Africa, which I had concentrated on as the boundary between the global North and global South, specifically in the Algerian revolution. I argued that this revolution was not over but in suspension. Since January 2011, it has once again been active. When the force of this transformation reached the US in September 2011, it was set up a mile and a half from my house on a non-descript stretch of urban park called Zuccotti Park. In the fifteen months since that time, we have intensified the possibilities for what I called in my book countervisuality, the resistances to the ways in which authority claims to visualize history as it happens and derive its legitimacy from doing so. We are now able not only to say that another world is possible, which was always logically true, but what it might look like and how we need to work to get there. Our tools are technologies of direct democracy. What is a technology of direct democracy? It is something that makes direct democracy. We do not yet fully know what that is but it has to invent itself and its technologies. It is not about machines but about how people are extended towards one another and learn to recognize themselves in each other. In short, my proposition is that if we combine militant research with the history of the anonymous and direct action, we form a network of resistance. As these networks have been active since 2011 in the US, we are learning what works and what does not and how to move the movement. * Nicholas Mirzoeff is a Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. His works include The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011), An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999 first edition, 2009 second edition), Seinfeld: A Critical Study of the Series (2007), Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (2001), and The Visual Culture Reader (1998 first edition, 2002 second edition). 259
The History of the Anonymous On a climate-changing rainy day in August 2011, I stood on a Spanish cliff top in the city of Port Bou by the Passages memorial to Walter Benjamin, designed by Dani Karavan. It is located just outside the cemetery where Benjamin was buried in 1940. It was not far to Barcelona with its neighborhood assemblies that were about to spawn a cousin on Wall Street. Half a day on the train to Madrid and the indignados. You felt a sense of change. The piece is a metal hood over a flight of steps leading down to the sea, enclosed by long sheets of steel. At the bottom is a sheet of glass. The result is that the memorial projects your image as you stand there onto the sea beneath the cliffs. For a long time, it was hard to see oneself against the imagined background of European fascism, the imperative to never forget overwriting all other presents and futures, turning the projection into a spectre, erased on the always moving waters below. Since the Arab Spring, we have become visible to ourselves through the glass, on which is written Benjamin s aphorism from On the Concept of History (1940): It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than it is to honor the memory of the famous, the celebrated, not excluding poets and thinkers. The historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous. Who are the anonymous? From the cliffs, you look out to sea, southwest, towards Tunisia, where a fruit-seller named Mohammed Bou azizi immolated himself into history as the person in whose name the Tunisian revolution of 2011 was enacted. Thus Foucault s concept of history of the present in whose name so much academic work has been carried out can be seen to require two steps. First, the construction of a present in which the anonymous can be given a name. Since 2011 we have found some new names for the anonymous such as the indignados or the 99%. To construct the anonymous as a subject that has a name is to make a democracy. So the second part is the elaboration of a history within which to say that name and for it to resonate with pasts, presents and possible futures. Making that history is done by direct action from the reclaiming of public space to the reclaiming of obscured histories and the possibility of living differently. Militant Research Benjamin and Foucault wrote as activists in the aftermath of disasters. Benjamin was part of the long disaster of European fascism, staying in Paris until it was too late to escape. After the collapse of 1968, Foucault worked with the Groupe Information Prison, visiting institutions and doing interviews with inmates that led directly to Discipline and Punish. For forty years we worked in these shadows. When neo- 260
liberalism eroded the space of democratic action, we came to concentrate, perhaps too much, on representation and cultural politics. People calling themselves scholars prefer disinterested contemplation to being an actor. The right to look is always interested, always engaged, always inventing the other and being invented by her. After 2008, we needed our own recovery in our own time, our own language to recover from the financial disaster. The camp at Zuccotti Park was first a disaster response: food, clothing, medical care and mutual aid were the first projects. It embodied the Zapatista concept caminar preguntando: walking while asking questions. The tactic became first: placing your body in space, while thinking. It has now become: doing while thinking. This is the arrival in the North of the militant research practices already underway in the South for over a decade. For the Buenos Aires-based Colectivo Situaciones, militant research is the production of (an) encounter(s) without subject(s), or, if you prefer, of an encounter that produces subjects. [It] refers to experimentation. The feminist group Precarias a la Deriva say it is a desire for common ground when the common ground is shattered. It is the sense that everyday life is the subject to be produced when every day there is an emergency and nothing about the conditions of such an existence seem simply quotidian or banal any more. In these circumstances, argue Colectivo, We think that the labor of research militancy is linked to the construction of a new perception. A countervisuality. The right to look. Direct Action The protesting body that engages in this action makes democracy because it is not known what democracy might be. All we have previously known is that it is the autonomy of the part that has no part, to use Rancière s formula. The movements and encampments seek to prefigure a democracy that is not one of passive representation. We make while moving, performing technologies of direct democracy. Its primary technology is mutual aid. A movement that a year ago was all about occupying public space as a shelter from disaster has become public in its engagement with mutual aid in recovery from financial and climate disaster, which are two sides of the same coin. These new actions have no center, no specific place of occupation, but create a new geography of mutual aid, requiring its own network, its own media and its own citizenship. The Invisible Committee, the French collective that created The Coming Insurrection in 2009, suggest that movements do not spread by contamination, but by resonance between radical moments, and that is certainly what we have seen with the upsurge of popular resistance. Tahrir resonated with Madrid, which resonated with Athens, which resonated with New York. Countervisualities can be felt and explored once again. This moment of rupture 261
may or may not last. It will not be extended from our studies and libraries, or our humanities centers. If you want to see this change develop and extend, you have to find a way to work with it. Where can we do that now? Militant research is being published in the US by Tidal: Occupy Theory Occupy Strategy. It is being practiced in communities across the country and can be found in Strike Debt s report: Shouldering the Cost of Sandy, which describes how FEMA responds to disasters by offering loans. Direct democracy has developed into a platform for the Indignados and their counterparts across Europe: Debt cancellation. A living wage. Democracy by lot (the Athenian model). New histories of the anonymous are being written all the time. 262
Works Cited: Rolling Jubilee. <RollingJubilee.org>. Strike Debt. <StrikeDebt.org>. Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. <Tidalmag.org>. 263