benjamin arditi, "insurgencies don't have a plan: the are the plan"

8/11/2019 Benjamin Arditi, "Insurgencies don't have a plan: the are the plan"

1/19

JOMECJournalJournalism, Media and Cultural Studies

Insurgencies dont have a plan they arethe plan:Political performatives and vanishingmediators in 2011

Facultad de Ciencias Polticas y Sociales,UNAM Mexico

Email: [email protected]

Benjamin Arditi

Keywords

InsurgenciesProgrammesPoliticsPerformatives

Arab SpringChileMarshall McLuhanFredric Jameson


2/19


3/19

1

www.cf.ac.uk/JOMECjournal @JOMECjournal

In Shoplifters of the World Unite (2011),an article whose title might be a play ofwords on Marxs Proletarians of theworld, unite! or a homage to the song by

The Smiths with that same name, Slavojiek characterizes the riots in the UK asa zero-degree protest, a violent actiondemanding nothing. Participants had nomessage to deliver and resembled morewhat Hegel called the rabble than anemerging revolutionary subject. Theproblem for him is not street violence assuch but its lack of self-assertiveness,impotent rage and despair masked as adisplay of force; it is envy masked as

triumphant carnival.

iek then shifts his focus to the Arabuprisings that toppled ruling dynasties ofcorrupt autocrats and on the Spanishindignados (the outraged) who campedin public squares just before the May2011 elections to protest against thedisconnect between elected officials and

the bleak life prospects of theunemployed youth. iek is openlysympathetic towards these revolts butalso pessimistic about their prospects.He asks us to avoid the temptation of

the narcissism of the lost cause: it is tooeasy to admire the sublime beauty ofuprisings doomed to fail.

What makes this piece of advice so

disconcerting is that it comes fromsomeone who wrote a book titled InDefense of Lost Causes. Why are his lostcauses worth defending and othersnarcissistic dead ends? Why are Egyptand Spain false positives ofemancipation if the lost causes iekendorses fail just as unceremoniously?His criterion is whether they have a plan,a programme of change. The recent ones

didnt, which is why they express anauthentic rage which is not able to

transform itself into a positiveprogramme of sociopolitical change.

They express the spirit of revolt withoutrevolution. Their failure is the failure to

come up with a proposal to replace thegiven. Without a plan, revolts lack thedignity of revolutions and are doomed tobecome lost causes of the narcissistickind.

This is unconvincing. The insurgencies of2011 provided political thought with theopportunity to come to terms with theloss of the loss, a Hegelian trope that

iek once described most elegantly andpersuasively as the realization that wenever had what we thought we had lost.It is a loss without mourning, anaffirmative loss because it dislodges

thought from essentialist argumentsabout the plenitude of freedom,oppression, evil, justice, identity and soon. There is no such thing as a robbed,distorted or misplaced core of freedom

and so on to be reclaimed. This isbecause these concepts never had acore anyway. In the case of insurgencies

the loss of the loss means parting wayswith a grammar of emancipation thatwas never there to begin with, at leastnot in actual uprisings: an alternative to

the existing order comes in handy buthas rarely played a central role inrebellions. One can then begin to think

the difference between insurgencies andprogrammes as a difference in natureinstead of framing their relationshipwithin a hierarchy of stages thatcommits us to place programmes aboverevolts in the political food chain.

The nod to Marshall McLuhansUnderstanding Media (1994) in the titleof this article is a cue for displacing our

understanding of insurgencies: it tells usthat their happening is significant in


4/19

2


itself. McLuhan contended that byfocusing on the message or content onemisses the more radical impact of newmedia, namely, that the medium itself is

the message: it creates a newenvironment or modifies the pre-existingone by changing the way people do

things and relate with one another. Heillustrates this by reference to the lightbulb, a medium without a message: thelight bulb redefined the way we partition

the day by making the regime thatallocates work, play and rest inaccordance to daytime and nighttimelargely irrelevant. Insurgencies from theNorth of Africa to New York endeavor toperform a similar re-partitioning of thegiven. They arethe plan in the sense that

their occurrence is meaningfulregardless of what they propose.Demands, manifestos, programmes andother things we associate with contentare figured out on the go becauseinsurgencies are more about opening uppossibilities by challenging our politicalimaginaries and cognitive maps thanabout designing the new order. To put itslightly differently, and perhaps morestrongly given that it involves somethingin excess of programmes, policies andpolicymaking are not the higher momentof insurgencies markers of theirpassage from revolts to revolution but

signs that insurgent activism has beentaken over by mainstream politics.

I will substantiate these claims with twoadditional arguments. One is thatinsurgencies are passageways betweenworlds and therefore ways of enacting

the promise of something other to come.They show us political performatives atwork activities through which onealready lives what one is fighting for and the fleeting nature of politics and

the people, both of which are seen asevents rather than as representations.

The other argument looks atinsurgencies as vanishing mediators yet

modifies this notion by reloading FredricJamesons original arguments. I will finishwith a discussion about the materialremainder of two revolts, the Arab Springand the student revolt in Chile.

About programmes and insurgencies

The insurgencies of 2011 spearheadedby a very diverse and eclectic mixture ofrebels from the Maghreb, Yemen andSyria to Spain, Chile, Israel, New York andelsewhere generated a stage for a verypublic articulation and mise-en-scne ofgrievances and desires. Protesters were

fed up of living in places where thepowerful are unaccountable and social

justice is a farce. They spoke of humanrights and democracy, free and seculareducation, affordable housing, theaccountability of financial companiesresponsible for the crisis, the obscenityof massive income inequality, the lack of

jobs and life prospects for most people,the dissatisfaction with corrupt andincompetent politicians, and so on. Theirrage manifested itself in poeticinscriptions like If you dont let us dream

we wont let you sleep, Just because youcant see it doesnt mean that its nothappening and Nobody can predict themoment of revolution as well as inidentity-forging cries like We are the99% and Wall Street is Our Street. What

you dont find in these protests is aprogrammatic outline of what a futuresociety will look like. This is because theinsurgents of 2011, like others who have

embarked on emancipatory struggles,were moved into action by the belief that


5/19

3


present-day conditions harm equality,freedom and social justice and that theycan make a difference by acting to makeanother, more equal and just world

emerge from this one. They might havewanted to have descriptions of how adifferent order might look, but organizing

the future was not their top prioritybecause they were already making adifference by merely demonstrating,occupying and generally defying thegiven.

The paradox is that critics are right when

they say that the revolts of 2011 lack asociopolitical programme, but they dontrealize that this is not necessarily a faultor a weakness. Paul Krugman put itnicely: when one looks at something like

the Occupy Wall Street protests in NewYork (and its subsequent replication on aglobal scale) we shouldnt make toomuch of the lack of specifics because

their main thrust is to change the

political climate; the specifics will befilled in later (Krugman 2011).

Insurgencies that preceded these oneshad no discernible plan either. You wont

find one in the Venezuelan Caracazo of1989 which Jon Beasley-Murray (2010:285, 289) describes as the first of thesocial ruptures indicating the end ofmodernitys social pact, an index of the

continued presence of the multitude anda presage of the left turns in Latin

America nor in the Water and Gas warsthat undermined the privatization ofutilities in Bolivia in 2000 and 2003. Norwas there one in the protests thatmobilized Argentinean society in 2001,encapsulated in the chant Que se vayantodos, que no quede ni uno solo (All of

them must go, not a single one can stay,

where all stands for corrupt andincompetent politicians) and that

eventually led to the resignation of thepresident. The same is true of pro-democracy movements in theMediterranean rim, Latin America and

Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s.These had a hazy understanding ofdemocracy, a term that functioned lessas the name of a regime than as asurface of inscription for a variety ofdemands and desires. Democracy meant

that they wouldnt risk losing their jobs,going to prison or having various parts of

their anatomy beaten to a pulp forexpressing opposition to the ruling Junta,party or strongman. It was also seen as ameans to empower people to demandaccountability to authorities. Butsystematic proposals about what ademocratic regime would look like wererare. Those who gathered under thebanner of democracy were fighting for

their dignity and their future and had noprogramme of what would come later.Like the participants in the revolts thatmade 2011 memorable, they wanted tore-partition the given to have their voicescounted.

These experiences remind us that torebel is to say enough! because youdont want things to go on as they are.

Talking points about greaterparticipation, justice or the prospect of abetter life hardly count as a plan or

alternative to the existing order. This isthe norm rather than the exception. Tothink otherwise is to look at the poetry ofrevolts through the rear mirror of

traditional narratives of emancipation.

What Jacques Derrida described as thepromise of justice, democracy andhospitality to come is closer to the frameof mind of rebels. To come doesnt

mean that today we have no justice,democracy and so on but that in the


6/19

4


future we will. This would be a passiveand thoroughly religious view of thepromise, something that oscillatesbetween waiting for Godot and praying

for the Messiah to show up. You act tomake it come about. This is how WalterBenjamin, Franz Rosenzweig and otherswho dissented from mainstreamrabbinical Judaism saw messianicity.

They were the dohakei haketz, saysMichael Lwy, those who do not wait for

the Messiah but hasten the end of timesby engaging in messianic activism toprecipitate the arrival of the Messiah, aname Benjamin used as shorthand forrevolution (Lwy 2005: 104). One doesnot remain clueless about what iscoming our way either; rebels are notlike expectant parents who prefer not toknow the sex of their unborn child. Everyepoch dreams the next, says Michelet; it

tries to imagine how things will turn out.This dreaming occurs in a polemicalsetting where people experiment withmultiple, contradictory and provisionalimages of thought that circulate amongcommunities of action that arecontinually caught in controversies aboutwhat is to be done. None of this adds up

to a model or a programme, althoughsome might have interpreted it as if itdid. Hence the loss of the loss Imentioned above; rebellions never had

clear plans of what would come later butwe assumed they did. The opening tosomething to come involves a passage

through the experience that we neverhad what we thought we had lost.Democracy, like justice and hospitality, isalways to come in the sense that all

these will never cease to arrive (theyhave no final figure/destination) butalready start to occur as we strive to

make them happen.

To say that things start to occur en routeis not wishful thinking, an embracementof voluntarism or a variation on HumptyDumptys musings: in everyday politics as

in insurgent processes words dont meanwhat we want them to mean and actionsdont happen because we will them tooccur. When I say that things start tohappen as we work for their realization Iam referring to the way in which politicalperformatives work. John Austins speechact theory defines performatives asutterances that are inseparable from theactions they announce, like I swear or Ipronounce you husband and wife. Theyare ritualized utterances that requirespecific contexts of validity a courtproceeding in the example of swearingor a civil ceremony in the case of awedding. What I call politicalperformatives have a family relation with

these. They are actions and statementsthat anticipate something to come asparticipants begin to experience as

they begin to live what they are fightingfor whilethey fight for it. They do so evenif such experience has a precarious lifeoutside communities of action. DavidGraeber expresses this point well withregard to the tactic of direct action in theOccupy Wall Street movement: For thosewho desire to create a society based on

the principle of human freedom, direct

action is simply the defiant insistence onacting as if one is already free (Graeber2011).

This as if of freedom as much as ofequality or justice is the bread andbutter of emancipatory politics. Itprovides us with a bridge to connectpolitical performatives with what iekcalls enacted utopia. To quote him:

in the short circuit between thepresent and the future, we are as


7/19

5


if by Grace for a brief period oftime allowed to act as ifthe utopianfuture were already at hand, justthere to be grabbed. Revolution is

not experienced as a presenthardship we have to endure for thehappiness and freedom of thefuture generations but as thepresent hardship over which thisfuture happiness and freedomalready cast their shadow wealready are free fighting for freedom,

we are already happy while fighting

for happiness, no matter howdifficult the circumstances. (iek

2002: 559, his italics)

It is clear that for him not all utopias arecreated equal. Conventional onesdesignate a universal without asymptom, a non-place forever stuck in

the limbo of discursive purity, whereasthe enacted variant tells us somethingabout the performative layer ofemancipatory politics. It anticipates

something to come as people start toexperience what they aim to become.iek toys with acknowledging theperformative nature of this utopia in theshift from the hypothetical as if of

freedom and happiness to the affirmativewe are already free and happy. It is defacto rather than de jure happiness,although one would have to make thecase that happiness can be anything

other than de facto. None of this calls fora programme to describe the future or aroad map to get there.

Jacques Rancire has his own take onthe absence of programmes. He poses itas a rhetorical question: Do we not need

to frame a specific temporality, atemporality of the existence of theinexistent in order to give sense to the

process of political subjectivization? Hisanswer is very clear: I prefer to reverse

the argument by saying that the framingof a future happens in the wake ofpolitical invention rather than being itscondition of possibility. Revolutionaries

invented a people before inventing itsfuture (Rancire 2011: 13). The framingof the future stands for what I describedas plans and programmes. WhenRancire downplays their role inemancipatory struggles he is not saying

that representations of the future are amere afterthought. He simply wants tounderline that revolutionaries usuallydeal with them later in the game, in theactual process of addressing a wrong.For him politics begins when there is asubject of enunciation such as we thedisenfranchised, we are the 99% or,more generically, we, the people. Thepeople is an operator of difference andnot a sociological given; it is the name ofa pariah, a part that has no part, theuncounted or those that refuse to acceptwhat they are supposed to be, to say orsee. They enact names like equality,liberty or dignity that have no place in

the existing field of experience but couldcome into being in another configurationof sensible experience. This is whatinsurgents do everywhere. Emancipatorypolitics is about opening up newpossibilities and not designing the neworder. They are symptoms of our

becoming other. Like rabbit-holes of theAlice in Wonderlandvariety, insurgenciesare passageways that connect thepresent with the possibility of somethingother to come.

Insurgencies as vanishing mediators:

Jameson reloaded

These passageways turn emancipatoryrevolts into vanishing mediators. Fredric


8/19


9/19

7


called felicitous and when they misstheir mark they become misfires orinfelicitous utterances. When applied toinsurgencies we have that those that

usher in a different order and thenvanish are felicitous mediators whereascombats for emancipation that gonowhere in their efforts to modify the

field of experience are misfires. Theoutcome is not governed by necessity.Infelicitous insurgencies are lost causesnot because they dont plan theiritinerary and destination but because

their enemies outsmart them, orbecause they implode under the weightof internal squabbles, or for many otherreasons. Which ones will becomenarcissistic lost causes and which willhave a chance of losing in a dignifiedmanner (or even be felicitous andsucceed) depends on the fortunes ofcontingency.

Let us now examine the force of the

vanishing in the concept of vanishingmediators. For Jameson the fate of thesemediators is to be forgotten oncechange has ratified the reality of theinstitutions. Theres no ambiguity in hisassertion: here today, gone tomorrow,and ultimately forgotten. This is anexcessive claim. Nothing really vanisheswithout a trace not the memory of amessy divorce, not the elation of victory,

not the experience of missedopportunities. What is gone lingers andleaves telltale footprints all over thereality it helped to bring about. This is

true even in the case of misfires, likewhen people develop a melancholicattachment to a lost object: they cant letgo of missed opportunities and museendlessly about what could have been.

Consider transitions to democracy,especially the theory resulting from the

study of democratization sponsored bythe Wilson Center in the 1980s.Guillermo ODonnell and PhilippeSchmitter (1986) wrote the tentative

conclusions. They describe transitions asan interregnum the interval between

two reigns, orders of ruling or regimes, inthis case, the authoritarian anddemocratic ones and outline thecritical path or standard itinerary theywill follow. Transitions begin with theemergence of tensions and divisionsbetween hawks and doves in the rulingcoalition. This reduces the chances ofconsensus among rulers, relaxes theenforcement of prohibitions, enables ahaphazard toleration of civil liberties thatgives some breathing space fordissidents and eventually triggers theresurrection of civil society. Resurrectionis the moment of glory of socialmovements: they lead the struggle fordemocracy because political parties aredisbanded, harassed, in disarray or

tolerated selectively as an alibi for thegovernment to claim a semblance ofdemocracy. Transitions end when newdemocratic rules are in place, politicalparties are allowed to operate freely and

the country holds founding elections. Atthis point parties reclaim what isrightfully theirs the running of politics and social movements, having done what

they had to do, leave the stage andreturn to the social, which is where theybelong.

This narrative conceives movements asunderstudies of political parties, ascaretakers of politics only for theduration of the state of exception of

transitions. I see things differently.Movements functioned as the vanishingmediators of democracy and then stuck

to the political stage instead of going


10/19

8


home after they did their job. This isbecause they didnt know they weredoing someone elses job and had noproprietary habitat despite the qualifier

social preceding the noun. They simplydid what comes naturally, so to speak, if

you want to change a state of affairs you do something or brace yourself formore of the same, usually extra timewith whatever autocrat happens to rule

your life. When transitions were overmovements didnt leave the stage butbecame fixtures of politics alongsidepolitical parties and helped to configureour current post-liberal scenario. By thisI dont mean to say that electoral politicsare over and that we have now movedon to other things. I speak of a post-liberal setting because the democraticpolitics of elections, political parties and

the entire paraphernalia of territorialrepresentation coexists with other waysand means of aggregating wills,processing demands and stagingopposition. Social movements are one of

these ways and means. They are asupplement of representation thatexpands politics beyond the classicalliberal democratic framework.

The continued political presence ofmovements in the aftermath of

transitions is a reminder that mediatorsare more than midwives of a mode of

production, a regime of a newconceptual structure. They dont simplydisappear when their work is done;

things vanish, but rarely without a trace.Vanishing mediators have a spectralafterlife even if they are not thearchitects and engineers of whatever willcome. The Protestant spirit vanishedwhen the means-end rationality requiredby capitalism was firmly in place, but thesense of thrift and the saving for a rainy

day persisted as part of the moraleducation of market agents, at least untilhyper-consumption and by implication,

the generalization of debt became the

engine of capitalism.

Similarly, revolts like the ones I havebeen discussing are passageways thatopen up possibilities of something other

to come, which is why I compared themwith the rabbit holes of Alice inWonderland: they are attempts tonegotiate passageways betweenincommensurable worlds, to connect

existing and possible ones. To ask thatthey also provide us with blueprints of afuture order is to demand from themsomething they are not. The traces of

these mediators subsist in the aftermathof the insurgent moment. This lingeringis not an accident in the otherwisenormal functioning of mediators. Like

failure, it is part of their structure ofpossibilities. This is why mediators dont

stand in a relationship of pure andsimple exteriority with the outcome they

facilitate. They contribute to shape thescene they help to bring about and are

therefore operators of constituent power.

The provisional status of unplanned

insurgencies

The point, I hope, is sufficiently clear:rebellions might turn out to be lostcauses but we cant peg their failure to

the absence of a script. Failure will be acontingent outcome of their actions andinaction in the strategic relationship intowhich they enter with their variousothers regardless of whether they have aplan or not. So even if progressive criticsassume the role of a Cartesian evil genie

trying to fault rebels for the absence of a


11/19

9


sociopolitical programme, they wonttrick them into believing they are nothingas long as they think they are something.

At this point someone might object bysaying that even if this were true, by nothaving a blueprint of the future theevents that supercharged 2011 might

turn out to be episodic and fade awaywith the return of the repetitive rituals ofpolitics as usual. The quick and honestanswer to this objection is to say, sowhat? All insurgencies are episodic.Emancipatory politics is not a perpetual

present of revolt but somethingextraordinary literally: out of theordinary. Rancire himself describespolitics or the practice of equality hecalls emancipation as a rare occurrence.Politics for him is the tracing of a

vanishing difference that occurs as analways provisional accident within thehistory of forms of domination (Rancire2010: 35). The keywords here are

vanishing, provisional and accident;they underline the distance separatingrebels from institutional politics. WalterBenjamin understood this well. For him,people who revolt try to stir things up topierce the continuum of history. Theyaim to disrupt the time of domination,which is why he was so taken by theimage of French revolutionaries shootingat clocks in different places of Paris: the

rebels wanted to mark the interruptionof the continuity of history, of the historyof the victors. Michael Lwy (2005: 92)updates this Benjaminian trope byreminding us of something thathappened in 1992, when many countrieswere preparing to celebrate 500 years ofColumbus arrival to America on 12October 1492. Brazils largest televisionand communications conglomerate, OGlobo, sponsored a clock that kept track

of the time leading to 12 October. Theindigenous population had nothing tocelebrate and shot arrows at the clock toprevent it from further registering the

history of their domination.

The insurgent moment is therefore of thenature of an event: a lot of dreams andorganizational efforts go into it but inessence it is something unplanned anddifficult to capture within a system ofrules because rules are precisely whatare being put into question. This is thecommon trait of recent experiences of

rebellion from Egypt to Spain to thevarious Occupy Wall Street initiatives.They are the tracing of a vanishingdifference. But we shouldnt conclude

from this that the evanescent nature ofinsurgencies make them irrelevant. Theyare not. The occupation of public spacegives visibility to a cause that definesitself on the go and functions both as acatalyst for public opinion and an

energizer of sympathetic voices. Theoccupations I mentioned above havebeen pivotal for the inclusion ofinequality, economic injustice,corruption, impunity, and the deficit ofparticipation and accountability in thepublic conversation. Keep in mind theanalogy with McLuhan. For him contentis not irrelevant but it is not all thatimportant either: the medium is the

message because it sets out toreconfigure the lived environment.Similarly, the insurgencies rather than

their proposals are the plan becausethey aim to modify the boundaries of thegiven and the narratives through whichwe make sense of it. Occupations and

the general assemblies they trigger arethe iconic, visible trait of rebellions thatwill eventually fizzle or morph into othermodes of collective action.


12/19

10


Does this mean that the goal ofinsurgencies is to become mainstreampolitics? This would be a mistake. It is

true that governing or becoming

government may be the outcome of theiractions because all rebellions exhibit adiversity of tendencies, including those

that call for plans and blueprints of thefuture. But becoming government cannotbe their destination. If it were, we wouldbe forced to speak of a continuumbetween emancipatory revolts and theadministration of a new status quo. Thisin turn would authorize critics to faultrevolts for having no policies at hand. So,whether we take our cue from Rancireor from Jameson reloaded, insurgenciesare the tracing of a vanishing difference,

the vanishing mediators that put thepresent state of affairs into contact withother possible worlds. Theirs is astructural evanescence, not an accident

that may or may not occur.

The spectral remainder of

insurgencies: a material afterlife

Let us return now to the aftermath ofthese movements. I have mentionedrepeatedly that the fact of theiroccurrence is already significant. Many of

the revolts of 2011 will fail if we measure

success in terms of regime change(assuming we agree on the critical massor quantum of change required for us tospeak of meaningful change). But even if

they fail, or vanish as misfires, they willhave had a spectral remainder.Immanuel Wallerstein describes the OWSmovement as the most importantpolitical happening in the United Statessince the uprisings in 1968, whose direct

descendant or continuation it is. For himthe impact it has is clear: it will have

succeeded and left a legacy even if itpeters out due to exhaustion orrepression (2011).

Sometimes the remainder is theexemplary role of insurgencies thatcapture the imagination of people indistant lands. They becomecosmopolitan variants of Kants index ofour moral progress. For him revolutionsare the sign of such progress due to theenthusiasm they generate amongonlookers, people who are touched by

the drama unfolding in the streets and

express sympathy for one side or theother. Today this enthusiasm bursts

through the cage of territoriality; takingsides manifests itself through solidaritywith the struggles of the oppressedoutside ones country as well as in thereplication of their insurgent spirit by

those who witness it from afar. The ArabSpring is one of the exemplars of 2011.Tahrir, or freedom in Arabic, functions as

a signifier of change that has energizeddissenters all over the planet. Theepicentre of OWS in New York renamedZuccotti Park Freedom Square, and inIsrael one could see hand-writtenbanners with the inscription Tahrir Tel

Aviv.

The afterlife of emancipatory strugglesalso appears in the displacement of the

cognitive maps through which we makesense of our being in community. Thisdisplacement is as material as thechange of rulers, the rewriting ofconstitutional texts or the crafting of newinstitutions. I will illustrate this with twoexamples.


13/19

11


1. The Arab Spring: debunking the myth

of the omnipotence of power

The first one takes us to the North of

Africa and its surroundings. An entiregeneration of Egyptians, Tunisians,Libyans, Syrians and Yemenis grew upunder the shadow of a single strongmanand his cronies. The continual assault toundermine their will to act reinforcedwhat psychologists call learnedhelplessness. Its mechanisms are

familiar. Theres the relentless cult ofpersonality presenting the leader as the

First Worker, First Sportsman, and FirstWhatever of the nation. Then there are

the many forms of corruption to securethe allegiance or at least the passivecompliance of business, commercial,

trade union and other organized interestgroups. And one cannot forget the terrorgenerated by everyday harassment,arbitrary detention and torture. Terrorseeks to instil the paranoia-inducing

distrust of others and the belief thatresistance is futile because the ever-present eyes and ears of the police and

their network of informants willeventually find out what you are up to.Like Etienne de la Boeties voluntaryservitude, learned helplessness preventspeople from seeing alternatives. They areas bewildered as the anguishedcharacters in Luis Buuels film TheExterminating Angel, who arrive at adinner party and eventually find

themselves inexplicably unable to leavethe house of their host even though thedoors are wide open and nobody isstopping them. Tyrants seek to replicate

this predicament by fostering theparalyzing myth of an impotentpopulation confronting an omnipotent,omnipresent and irreplaceable regimeand leader.

Insurgencies show that the spell ofpower can be undone because theemperor has no clothes. They changepeoples frames of reference by offering

windows of possibility, the rabbit holes Idescribed as passageways to other (this-worldly) worlds. The encounters amongstrangers in the otherwise unremarkableswath of urban space of Tahrir Squaremeant more than a mere convergence ofbodies in the manner of an arithmeticsum. People felt the exhilaration ofmaking a difference by the mere fact ofbeing together. This is precisely MauriceBlanchots point about May 1968: themain thing of the soixante-huitards wasnot to seize power but to let a possibilitymanifest itself, the possibility beyondany utilitarian gain of being-together(Blanchot 1988: 30). The circulation ofimages of the experience of occupying

Tahrir and resisting attacks ofgovernment forces precipitated anenhanced connectivity that reverberatedmuch further than the space of Tahrir.

The physicality of occupation wassupplemented by a virtual being-togetherof those who wanted to change theirworld. People in the square andelsewhere in Egypt felt that they could

touch the sky with their hands in thefleeting moment of their being-together.

The rhythm and direction of change can

be subsequently co-opted and colonizedby the likes of the Muslim Brotherhoodand other variants of orthodoxy, by theregrouping forces of the governing partyor by myriad other politicalentrepreneurs. But even when thishappens, if it does happen, all parties willhave realized that Egyptians (like

Tunisians, Libyans, Syrians, etc.) have lostmuch of their awe of power and thepowerful and that it wont be so easy to


14/19

12


reinstate an autocracy with a differentdressing. One commentator wrote,Activists across the Arab world speak ofbreaking through the barrier of fear so

that even the harshest repression nolonger deters (Black 2011). This is anaccurate depiction of the Arab Spring,particularly the Syrian uprising, wherepeople have shown admirable courage in

the face of the governments unrelentingbrutality. Of course, one should notunderestimate the role of fear as adisincentive for action. The point,however, is that many protesters take to

the streets despite their fear and notbecause they are fearless. What mattersis that the powerful lose their sacralaura. The spectacle of confused tyrantsput on trial, gone into hiding or fleetingabroad with the public monies lootedduring their time in government is awonderful educational experience. It islike the guillotining of Louis XVI: it taught

the French that the body could go onliving without its head and that rulerswere not demigods. This is the existentialpedagogy of emancipatory politics and itis foolish to dismiss it as subjectivegibberish. Its lessons are likely to lingerlong after the effervescence in thestreets subsides.

2. The student revolt in Chile

The second example takes us to Chile, acountry with the highest cost ofeducation among OECD countries after

the United States and a President whohas openly stated that education is aconsumer good. High school anduniversity students mounted a challenge

to the funding policies for schools and

privatized higher education. Chileanswere generally supportive of their cause,

if only because graduates start theirworking life with a huge debt and theirparents will have to foot the bill if theydont find jobs. Polls indicate that their

approval rating was far higher than thatof the right wing president, his politicalcoalition and even the left of centeropposition. At the high point of theprotests in July and August 2011, 77% of

the people surveyed had a positive viewof the student leaders and nearly 82%expressed support for the movementsdemands. In contrast, the approval ratingof the president was 26% and hisMinister of Education mustered only 19%

The left of center coalition Concertacinpor la Democracia did not fare better:only 17% approved its performance (seeLa Tercera2011a and 2011b; Centro deEstudios Pblicos 2011). Studentsseemed immune to protest fatigue(nearly 210 in an eight-month period,according to Koschutzke 2012: 19),mounted extensive mobilizations indemand of free public education(400,000 plus people in demonstrationsacross the country) and occupiedschools (over 600) and universities (17 of

them) knowing that this could forcethem to graduate a year later. They werealso well versed in guerrilla theatre: kiss-a-thons for free education, a flash mobof zombies (the living dead of a

dysfunctional educational system)dancing to the music of MichaelJacksons Thriller across from thePresidential palace, and an 1800 hoururban marathon one hour for eachmillion US dollars required to fund theeducation of 300,000 students per year.

At the time of writing this article thestudent insurgency had not succeededin modifying the educational policies of

the government. Neither had they


15/19

13


managed to secure its commitment tochange an educational model in which

the affluence of the borough andtherefore the strength of its tax base

determines the quality of publicly fundedschools. Their activism, however, hasdisturbed the given in various ways. Itopened a discussion about the limits ofprivatized higher education and madepeople aware of the life-longconsequences of policies that enshrineinequality in the allocation of funds forschools. Most importantly, students haverubbished the idea that education is aconsumer good.

Their mobilizations also put into questionthe countrys political table manners,which in the post-Pinochet era construesradical political demands as memoriesof a long gone past, celebratesconsensus and privileges the technicaldiscourse of people with limited goals,professional agendas, and little passion.

This is partly due to the way in whichinstitutional discourse processed (or

failed to process) the aftermath of thetraumatic overthrow of PresidentSalvador Allende in the other 9/11, theone of 1973. The political class tends torefrain from describing Pinochets rule asbarbarian, at least in public. Coup anddifficult times suffice, just like The

Troubles was the euphemism of choice

to describe the war in Northern Irelandin the 1970s. In 2011 the Ministry ofEducation went as far as to modifyprimary school textbooks by droppingdictatorship as the qualifier ofPinochets 17-year rule. It believed thatmilitary regime was more tactful (Acua2012).

But the repressed manages to return.

The adversarial politics spearheaded bystudents has nudged the country out of

the prolonged state of exception inwhich it had been living for nearly fourdecades. One can see this in theacrimonious controversies between

students and government officials playedout live in the media and in their refusal

to back down from confrontations withthe political elite. Their relentlesscriticism of the educational policies of

the right wing government did not sparethe opposition Concertacin por laDemocracia either. The Concertacinimplemented well-meaning reformsduring its four consecutiveadministrations yet generally stuck to theneoliberal educational model inherited

from the Pinochet era. Students refusedto whitewash their policies by saying thatthe Concertacin had had two decadesto come up with an alternative. Criticizingboth the government and theConcertacin was refreshing. It madeconsensus less of an obsession in thepublic mind and, at least during themany months of protests of 2011, moved

the vector of politics from Congressionalcommittees to the streets. Their neither-nor position allowed them to bypass theusual wrangling between governmentand opposition. Change will probablycome about through the encounter of

these different political performances.

The student revolt also undermined the

success story that Chileans have beentelling themselves for the past threedecades: that the country is different more rational, less unstable and betteroff than others because there themarket works and macroeconomicindicators are sound. Business-speakcuts across the Chilean politicalspectrum and is prevalent among allclasses, ages and occupations. Itsubiquity is only comparable to that of the


16/19

14


managerial language permeating theaudit culture of UK universities, wheresomething that is not subject toassessment is in principle suspicious,

firings are called restructurings andHeads of Department line managers.Student protests in Chile highlighted theclass divisions embedded in theeducational system and its lifelongconsequences on social mobility. Theirstubborn refusal to back down in theircriticism of privilege, exclusion and theperception of education as a consumergood contributed to strip the neoliberaleconomic model from the immunitarianprivilege it had enjoyed. They are one bigreason that the mainstream itself haswarmed up to the idea that questioning

the market as the primary mechanismfor allocating resources and rewards isnot off the table.

To cut to the chase, the spectralremainder of the student revolt is that it

managed to disturb the given byundermining consensus, addressing thespectres of the past and questioning the

triumphalism of neoliberal discourse. Ithas renewed overly ritualized politicalexchanges and opened up politicaldiscourse to ways to deal with the

trauma of the coup that overthrewAllende and gave us Pinochet. In the finalline of Philip Roths novel, PortnoysComplaint, the psychoanalyst utters theonly line of dialogue after nearly 300pages of Portnoys soliloquy. He says:Now vee may perhaps to begin, yes?

Analogies must be taken with caution,but perhaps Chileans can now lighten up

the weight of their ghosts and mayperhaps to begin, yes? to pick up theirhistory from where they left it in 1973.

***

Whether we look at events associatedwith the Arab Spring or the mobilizationsof students in South America and thosespearheaded by #Occupy movements,

they all have great dreams about whatwill come but no real blueprint of what

the future will look like. They are episodicand at some point will be overtaken byold and new politicians embarked in theeveryday practice of running themachinery of government. Butinsurgencies will have a spectral afterlife

that is anything but ethereal because itimpregnates practices and institutions asmuch as ways of seeing and doing.

The materiality of this afterlife manifestsitself in the cognitive shifts insurgenciesgenerate, the learning experience of lifein the streets and of participating ingeneral assemblies to chart their nextsteps, in the memories of theseexperiences, in the leaders that couldemerge in the process of occupation, in

the subsequent campaigns andpartnerships they foster and in the policychanges they bring about. Inventivenessis another face of this materiality. Tech-savvy activists came up with the humanmicrophone, an anachronistically low-

tech solution devised to circumvent theNew York Police Department prohibitionof amplifiers and hand-held bullhorns. At

first sight one could have confused it

with a scene from Monty Pythons Life ofBrian, when Brian tells a crowd gatheredunder his window You are all individualsand they repeat in chorus Yes, we are allindividuals! But it wasnt similar at all.

The familiar Mic check! could be heardas a speaker took to the podium withouta microphone in her hand or lapel. Itprepared the general assembly for anunusual way of amplifying sound: peoplewould repeat in chorus what a speaker


17/19

15


said so that those further away couldhear too.

As always, concurrent and unborn

insurgencies benefit from thisinventiveness. Tactics and practicesdevised by activists become part of acollective political know-how, a political

jurisprudence that functions as a toolboxavailable for anyone to use. It is notalways easy to establish the paternity of

these tactics and procedures becauseonce they enter into circulation theybecome recombinant as people retouch

and adapt them to their needs. OWSassemblies adapted a hand-based signlanguage to express agreement,disagreement, a point of order or theblockage of proposals. In Syria, where

the government ordered its forces toshoot at protesters, activists came upwith tayar, an equivalent of flash mobs:

they gathered for 10 minutes and thendispersed before the army or policearrived.

The material afterlife of insurgencies alsoappears in the cultural artifacts theyleave behind songs, graffiti, manifestos,pamphlets, photos, films, blogs, websitesand an assortment of testimonies in thesocial media. Then there is the

foreseeable torrent of conferences,workshops, publications (including thisone), interviews, media analyses,assessments by activists and everyday

conversations trying to make sense ofthe experience of these insurgencieslong after they pass.

So even in failure, if we measure failureby the absence of a plan for a futuresociety, the insurgencies of 2011 willhave had a measure of success.

References

Acua, E.. (2012), En Chile s hubo dictadura, El Ciudadano, 8 January,http://www.elciudadano.cl/2012/01/08/46777/en-chile-si-hubo-dictadura/. [AccessedJanuary 2012]

Beasley Murray, J. (2010), Post-Hegemony: Political Theory and Latin America, Minnesota:University of Minnesota Press.

Black, I. (2011), A year of uprisings and revolutions: uncertainty reigns in the Arab world, The

Guardian, 13 December, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/dec/13/arab-world-uprisings-2011-future. [Accessed December 2012]

Blanchot, M. (1988), The Unavowable Community, New York: Station Hill.

Centro de Estudios Pblicos, CEP (2011), Estudio Nacional de Opinin Pblica, Junio-Julio 2011,http://www.cepchile.cl/dms/lang_1/doc_4844.html. [Accessed November 2011]

Graber, D. (2011), On Playing By The Rules The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet, NakedCapitalist, 19 October, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/10/david-graeber-on-playing-by-the-rules-%E2%80%93-the-strange-success-of-occupy-wall-street.html.

[Accessed October 2011]


18/19

16


Jameson, F. (1973), The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber, New GermanCritique1, 52-82.

Koschutzke, A. (2012), Chile frente a s mismo. Los lmites del fundamentalismo de mercado y lasprotestas estudiantiles, Nueva Sociedad237, January-February, 17-31.

Krugman, P. (2011), Confronting the Malefactors, New York Times, 6 October,http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opinion/krugman-confronting-the-malefactors.html?src=tp&smid=fb-share. [Accessed October 2011]

La Tercera (2011a), 81.9% de los chilenos simpatizan con demandas de estudianteshttp://latercera.com/noticia/educacion/2011/07/657-377552-9-819-de-chilenos-simpatiza-con-demandas-de-estudiantes-segun-encuesta.shtml. [Accessed October 2011]

La Tercera (2011b), Movilizacin mantiene alto apoyo,

http://papeldigital.info/ltrep/2011/08/13/01/paginas/013.pdf. [Accessed November 2011]

Lwy, M. (2005), Fire Alarm. Reading Walter Benjamins On the Concept of History, London: Verso.

McLuhan, M. (1994 [1964]), Understanding Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

ODonnell, G., and P Schmitter (1986), Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusionsabout Uncertain Democracies, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rancire, J. (2010 [2001]), Ten Theses on Politics, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, editedand translated by Steve Corcoran, London and New York, 27-44.

Rancire, J. (2011), The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics, in P. Bowman and R.Stamp (eds.), Reading Rancire, London and New York: Continuum, 1-17.

Wallerstein, I. (2011), The Fantastic Success of Occupy Wall Street,http://www.iwallerstein.com/fantastic-success-occupy-wall-street/. [Accessed October2011]

iek, S. (2002), A Plea for Leninist Intolerance, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2): 54266.

iek, S. (2011), Shoplifters of the World Unite, London Review of Books, 19 August,http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite. [AccessedAugust 2011]


19/19

This article was first published in JOMEC Journal

JOMEC Journalis an online, open-access and peer reviewed journal dedicated to publishing the

highest quality innovative academic work in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. It is run by an

editorial collective based in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff

University, committed both to open-access publication and to maintaining the highest standards

of rigour and academic integrity. JOMEC Journal is peer reviewed with an international, multi-

disciplinary Editorial Board and Advisory Panel. It welcomes work that is located in any one ofthese disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary work that approaches Journalism, Media and Cultural

Studies as overlapping and interlocking fields. It is particularly interested in work that addresses

the political and ethical dimensions, stakes, problematics and possibilities of Journalism, Media

and Cultural Studies.

To submit a paper or to discuss publication, please contact:

Dr Paul Bowman: [email protected]

www.cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal

Twitter: @JOMECjournal

ISSN: ISSN 2049-2340

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

License. Based on a work at www.cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal.

.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

benjamin arditi, "insurgencies don't have a plan: the are the plan"

Documents