‘More Authentic Than You:’ Punks, Occupy, and Solidarity Rupture in US Radical Cultures

E. Colin RuggeroFor the Politics and Protest Workshop, CUNY

February 20, 2014(Do not disseminate or republish without permission)

IntroductionThe following vignettes are taken from fieldnotes recorded the night of Occupy Philadelphia’s eviction from their two-month encampment at the doorstep of City Hall:

At around 11pm on November 29th, 2011, I began to receive emails, texts, tweets and Facebook updates about rumors of an impending eviction of the Occupy Philadelphia encampment at City Hall. I was chatting online with a friend, checking out bands for a benefit show we were organizing together, when he shared word of police confirmation of the eviction, passed on to him by a friend who works for the local NBC affiliate. I suited up for the cold, wet night and hopped on my bike to alert a few friends before heading downtown.

I passed a local bar, where a Metal and Punk dance party was being held and shouted to Kathy, Jim and the other people smoking on the steps, most of whom I didn’t know. Though both Kathy and Jim had been working regularly with Occupy, neither seemed interested in leaving the music or the booze. The information moved quickly through the small crowd and, as I turned to leave, three people I didn’t know nodded at me as they hurriedly unlock their bike; as I rode away, I heard a boy in a leather studded jacket loudly shout, “Who the fuck cares about that shit, [feigning a ‘hippie’ voice] the 60s are over man!” as the Dead Kennedy’s opined about Reagan on the stereo inside.

I turned north and headed to Mika’s house, a typical West Philly large Victorian duplex, where six self-identified ‘Queers’ were living collectively. Inside, I found twelve people, meeting to discuss plans for a series of events aimed at fostering Queer solidarity. When I shared the eviction news, blank stares told me quickly that the events at City Hall mattered little to this group. A person to my left commented “Good, we never felt welcome there,” and a few others nodded. As I was leaving, a recent acquaintance, smoking on his porch across the street, waved me over; he helps out at a radical autonomous space in the area that has been around for decades. Though I knew he had not been involved with Occupy, I asked if he wanted to come along. “No,” he replied, “I haven’t been in the street since the RNC [in 2000] and I’m pretty much done with that…Besides,” he chuckled, “someone has to keep the space running when y’all are all in jail.”

When I arrived at City Hall, a close friend called me over and others made room in the locked-arm sit down the group was using to stall being moved by the police. She turned to me and said, “Of course, Tim, Mike, Sally and those kids aren’t here.” I knew who she was talking about, and I’d seen a few people from

Ruggero 1

that group of friends once or twice in Occupy’s first few days, but I asked what she meant by her snark. “They’re just worried about not looking cool and, you know, they’re into being ‘grown-ups,’ buying houses and starting businesses and [making a face] ‘serious’ politics…they go on and on about ‘community’ but I think it just means their community, vegan coffeeshops and all that. A few minutes ago, I saw Tim posted something on Facebook like ‘good luck kiddies’…what an ass.”

When the police finally moved us out of the street, we joined the much larger crowd that had formed on the sidewalk over the past hour. I was surprised to see a boy who had told me a week earlier that he was “done” with Occupy because of an interpersonal conflict he had had with a friend over organizing a march. I smiled and said, “I thought you were done.” “Yeah, but I can’t pass up a chance to fight with the cops!”

These notes are presented here because they help highlight phenomena that have inspired the development of the proposed project. Indeed, the rapid gathering (and for some, nonattendance) of individuals at City Hall that cold night is a helpful metaphor for understanding the aims of this project.

That bike ride, quite literally, weaved through a layered combination of physical/spatial and sociocultural networks – the ‘scene’ – linked via their radical-leftist political orientation and/or symbolic and cultural markers and practices that draw heavily from the DIY (Do-it-Yourself)-Punk subculture, referred to here as Philadelphia’s ‘radical-DIY scene.’

To most outside observers, these people and places would appear quite similar, and in many ways they are. They share a culture in the sense of shared ways of doing things, as patterns of speaking and acting that people practice in everyday situations; they share political convictions, styles of dress, tastes, social norms, signs and symbols, and specialized knowledge. In a deeper sense, these people and places are connected through a shared prefigurative political orientation, wherein personal behaviors and choices (lifestyles) are seen as fertile grounds for envisioning social change and experimenting with alternative ways of life that attempt to prefigure what radical social change could look like.

However, the vignettes also point to important differences, variations in what and how much is shared, particularly when it comes to opinions about Occupy Philly. Indeed, it seems that Occupy Philly’s interjection into the life of the scene helps to reveal differences in political orientations, expressed via the participation of some and the objection, disinterest, or even hostility of others.

In fact, the patterns of rejection or difference individuals expressed with regards to Occupy Philly hint at broader concerns about the tactical and strategic viability of lifestyle or prefigurative politics that have been raised in debates among activists and academics since the 1970s. Of particular concern here is the tendency for lifestyle practices to “become targets of self-righteous moralizing and other forms of social policing,” or what Laura Portwood-Stacer calls “politicking over lifestyle,” and that this politicking over lifestyle “can fracture bonds of solidarity among activists who make different lifestyle choices” (Poortwood-Stacer 2013:9). Further, the notion that one’s lifestyle is completely malleable via choice ignores (or at least downplays) the many issues of power and privilege at work in the formation of political identities and movements; indeed, as will be shown, this was made clear in the Philly scene’s

Ruggero 2

rocky (and at times hostile) encounter with the diversity of people and perspectives found within Occupy Philly and the many examples of politicking over lifestyle that occurred there and within the scene itself.

Thus, this project approaches the encounter of Occupy Philadelphia and Philadelphia's radical-DIY scene as a potentially fruitful site for deeper investigation of these issues, exploring the patterning of scene behavior in and around Occupy in the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the issues facing prefigurative scenes and what these suggest about the political viability of prefiguration, the relationship between scenes and movements, and what this may mean for social movements more generally.

This paper aims to provide a snapshot of this work in progress, a distilled version of the findings and arguments the larger dissertation project puts forward. The discussion begins with an explanation and exploration of the ‘prefiguration’ and ‘scenes’ concepts. It then moves to tie these conceptual tools to the specific context of Philadelphia’s radical-DIY scene and offers a glimpse of some of the findings and insights the project has rendered. This section is organized around moments of alliance-breaking or solidarity rupture, focusing on the discursive work of ‘rejection and difference’ employed in these moments, and the theme of authenticity that arose in this discourse. The first example is taken from a General Assembly at Occupy Philly, held in early 2012; the second example revolves around a wide intra-scene gulf that emerged following the publication of a zine and the many ensuing discussions and arguments over its contents, its tone, and its authorship. The final section details the current lines of analysis and theoretical reflection the project is currently wrestling with.

Punks Prefiguring in PhiladelphiaThe ‘bike ride’ vignette provides a glimpse of the social world that forms this project’s

object of study, Philadelphia’s ‘radical-DIY scene.’ The use of ‘scene’ here draws on Leach and Haunss’ (2009) initial development, wherein scenes are meant to describe the social and spatial infrastructure that surrounds culturally-oriented movements or social and political struggles more generally. ‘Culturally-oriented’ is a key phrase here. The leftist German scene studied by Leach and Haunss and the Philadelphia radicalism that will be discussed here are both part of a much wider array of culturally-oriented social and political struggles that engage in prefigurative politics.

PrefigurationThe first uses of the prefiguration concept were in reference to the New Left’s rejection

of institutional and vanguardist politics (particularly communism, which dominated the left at the time) in favor of creating and sustaining relationships and political practices that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society (Breines 1989:6). Thus, prefiguration refers both to activists’ organizing forms and processes (e.g. consensus decision-making) as well as practices found in the everyday life of activists. For example, in his research on the Movement for a New Society (MNS), a national network of feminist, radical pacifist collectives that existed through most of the 1970s and 80s, Andrew Cornell (2011) notes that this organization was centrally responsible for popularizing a variety of prefigurative strategies and practices in the US – e.g., consensus decision making, spokescouncils, communal living, unlearning oppressive behavior, and creating cooperatively owned business. Indeed, Cornell argues that radicals and antiauthoritarians have so widely adopted practices that MNS promoted that they have become hegemonic within

Ruggero 3

movement culture, to the point that “they are frequently taken as transhistorical tenets of anarchist politics or radicalism more generally” (Cornell 2011:15).

In fact, the concept found renewed popularity and application in the wave of ‘alterglobalization movement’ scholarship that emerged following the dramatic WTO protests in Seattle 1999, providing the prevailing approaches to the concept used today. Jordan defines prefigurative politics as a form of politics that “attempts to preview what social change may bring…activists begin to act as if the world they want to live in has come into existence” (Jordan 2002:73). Sitrin describes prefigurative movements as “movements that are creating the future in their present social relationships…social change isn’t deferred to a later date by demanding reforms from the state, or by taking state power and eventually instituting these reforms” (Sitrin 2006:4). Finally, in his long-term study of the alterglobalization movement, Pleyers (2011) describes what it is to engage in prefigurative politics:

Activists consider the struggle as a process of creative experimentation in which the values of ‘another world’ are put into practice within organizations…or in daily life. They understand ‘building another world’ from the starting point of their concrete, alternative practices and experiences: alternative consumption, horizontal and participative organization of activists’ networks and communities…In this ‘prefigurative’ activism, the objective does not precede action, but is concomitant.

(Pleyers 2011:38) But what does prefiguration look like in practice, that is, in the reality of day-to-day life?

Glimpses of this realm, while not absent from academic social movements scholarship, are far more detailed and numerous within nonacademic, activist literatures. Here we find prefiguration discussed in terms of everyday spaces, everyday practices/behaviors, and everyday social relations: bicycle culture, vacant-lot gardening, pirate programmers and hackers, art spaces, collectively owned and run small businesses, local autonomous meetings spaces, food coops, performance spaces, free schools, skill building, gender play, collective living, bookstores, infoshops, zines, bands, food distribution schemes, broadcasting stations, art and performance collectives, internet databases, libraries, cafes, squats, video networks, public kitchens, clubs, online message boards, record labels, bars, and more (cf. Augman 2005; Bevington and Dixon 2005; Carlsson 2008; Cherry 2006; Day 2005; Dunn 2008; Gordon 2008; Halfacree 2004; Kellstadt 2001; Pleyers 2011; Ruggero 2009; Spencer 2008).

In fact, there appears to be some distance between the discussions of prefiguration found in the most widely read academic social movement literatures (which tend to focus more on horizontal-democratic decision making processes and organizational forms) and discussions of the sorts of everyday prefiguration mentioned above (which are more often found away from the academic literatures). Emerging research on the Occupy Movement helps illustrate this point further.

In a recent issue of Social Movement Studies devoted to the Occupy Movement (OM), John Krinsky and Jenny Pickerill summarize the themes found in the issue as ‘eight reasons why occupy matters’ “for understanding both the political importance of social movements and the theoretical limits of social movement approaches,” including “the politics of prefiguring a new society (and its contradictions)” (Pickerill and Krinsky 2012:1). Pickerill and Krinsky suggest:

Occupy throws the work of prefigurative politics into stark relief, and challenges us to evaluate critically the balance of effort between living and acting a prefigurative, autonomous politics of mutual aid in ‘camps’, and working within,

Ruggero 4

even on the edge of, ‘normal’ movement politics to win tangible reforms and alterations of behavior in various parts of the state.

(Pickerill and Krinsky 2012:4)It is certainly true prefiguration undergirds the procedural politics manifest in the OM,

including its affinity for direct, participatory democracy and non-hierarchical organization. Further, as suggested above, these are the most popular aspects of prefiguration covered by early Occupy research (Sitrin 2012; Juris 2012; Razsa and Kurnik 2012; Smith and Glidden 2012; Kreiss and Tufekci 2012). However, the everyday forms of prefiguration listed above should push us to consider both prefiguration as enacted in organizing structures and practices as well as in those personal and cultural arenas that fall outside of these traditionally understood ‘movement contexts.’ In light of the aims of this project discussed, perhaps we can reframe the tension in Pickerill and Krinsky’s comments as being between “living and acting a prefigurative, autonomous politics of mutual aid” in everyday life, and the mobilization politics of Occupy and other movements, including the more ‘normal’ movement politics aimed at winning “tangible reforms and alterations of behavior in various parts of the state” (Pickerill and Krinsky 2012:4).

Further, expanding our understanding of prefiguration in this way allows us to begin to ask questions about the relationship between these shared ways of life and the more specific issues and needs found in movement/mobilization/organizing contexts. After all, it is the daily lives (and the myriad networks, institutions, practices, and forms of knowledge they intersect) of prefigurative political subjects that work to feed (or starve) movements like Occupy. For example, while there was a lot of consensus decision-making used during Occupy Philly’s eviction from City Hall, elsewhere in the city, there were many other expressions of prefigurative ideology and practice going on, as hinted at in my encounters with collective living, long-lasting radical autonomous spaces, and competing political understandings of ‘community.’

The project makes use of the ‘scenes’ concept in order to locate and explore this realm of everyday prefiguration, making it possible to not only ask questions about its relationship with movement/mobilization contexts, but also how the many everyday expressions of prefiguration relate to one another. As Laura Portwood-Stacer observes about prefigurative lifestyle politics, “shared ways of life bring together diffuse collections of political subjects, and symbolically represent them as a unified movement seeking changes in existing political conditions;” however, scenes let us access and interrogate the relatively subtle variations and differences within this seemingly ‘unified’ collection of political subjects (Portwood-Stacer 2013:3).

ScenesGenerally, scenes are meant to describe a social and spatial infrastructure that surrounds

culturally oriented movements. However, as opposed to similar concepts like ‘free spaces’ (Polletta 1999, Johnston 2005), ‘submerged networks’ (Melucci 1989; Mueller 1994), or ‘oppositional cultures’ (Johnston 1991), scenes allow for greater conceptual flexibility for expanding our view of the range of prefigurative perspectives and practices that surround it. Indeed, scenes differ from concepts like ‘free spaces’ in that the latter are usually defined functionally (and tautologically) as ‘generative,’ ‘communicative,’ or ‘nurturing’ settings that are necessarily political and tied to movement mobilization. Scenes, on the other hand, (1) are not necessarily political, (2) are not necessarily attached to movements, and when they are, a scene is not reducible to the movement itself or to the organizations within it; and (3) where scenes are connected to a movement, the relationship between the two is not always beneficial for the movement (Leach and Haunss 2009:259).

Ruggero 5

Following the concept’s creators, this project conceives of ‘scenes’ representing both networks of people who share “a common identity and a common set of subcultural or countercultural beliefs, values, norms, and convictions” as well as the networks of physical spaces where members of that group “are known to congregate” (Leach and Haunss 2009: 259).

In fact, this notion of spaces where group members ‘are known to congregate,’ is what first drew me to the scenes concept during pervious research on Philadelphia’s Punk and radical activist networks (Ruggero 2009). In that work, I was focusing on the central institutional nexus of Punk life in Philadelphia, ‘Punk houses,’ particularly in West Philadelphia. These large Victorian-style homes, built in the early 20th century, house six or more people at a time and, often, the large basements serve as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) venues for ‘basement shows,’ a key cultural institution of DIY/Punk culture in Philadelphia and across the world. At the time, I counted over thirty such houses in West Philadelphia alone, with names like ‘Trinity House,’ ‘The Twenty-Sided House,’ ‘Danger Danger,’ and ‘The Farm,’ each with their own household cultures, reflecting subtle variations in Punk microcultures.

Much like the strategic and tactical strategies pioneered by the MNS that, as Cornell noted, are now so ingrained within movement culture that they appear to ‘have always been,’ when I inquired about the origins of Philadelphia’s Punk house culture, respondents usually attributed it to Punk culture in general.

However, the historical legacy of the ‘Punk house’ institution in Philadelphia actually intersects with the MNS. Recall that a key part of MNS’s prefigurative political praxis involved living collectively in order to save money to support further activism, promote solidarity, and develop and practice alternative forms of social relations. In his historical analysis, Cornell notes, “in January 1976…a ten-block area of West Philadelphia was home to nineteen collective households composed of four to eleven people each, with names such as ‘The Gathering,’ ‘Kool Rock Amazons,’ and ‘Sunflower’ (Cornell 2011:30).

In some cases, these are the same houses that today’s Punks and activists now occupy, houses that have been continually occupied by leftist radicals or Punks since the 1970s; further, these houses are only one element in a wider set of prefigurative patterns of everyday life that the contemporary residents share with the MNS. But these shared patterns of everyday life not only link the MNS to today; they also weave together the lives of today’s Punks and radical activists, which is significant because these are two highly politically diverse communities, potentially ranging from a sort of apolitical nihilism found in Punk on one hand, to strands of deeply individualistic, judgmental moralizing found among activists.

We can, at least in part, attribute the convergence of these diverse political communities around prefigurative lifestyles to the ‘DIY (Do-it-Yourself) ethic’ of self-reliance and thoughtful action that was developed within the Punk community during its post-70s evolution and reemergence in the late 1980s (cf. Dunn 2008; Spencer 2008; Ruggero 2009).

In early 1980s, even as it was being declared ‘dead,’ the US Punk culture began to reevaluate itself. There was a push to return to Punk’s creative and self-reliant roots, particularly through the development of music industry counter-institutions. Bands and fans once again created their own record labels, performance spaces and network ties through homemade fanzines. This was the rebirth of the DIY ethic (Do-it-Yourself) of self-reliance and thoughtful action that had gotten lost in Punk’s commercial success.

By the early 1990s, the creative energy that initially fueled the reinvention of the Punk music scene had expanded into other genres of music and, importantly, into practices and institutions outside the world of music. In moving beyond a strict focus on music, Punk

Ruggero 6

encountered a rising left-radicalism in the US and Western Europe, whose own prefigurative political perspectives and practices resonated with Punk’s DIY ethic. This convergence saw the two become intertwined, encouraging the development of a diverse set of social, political and cultural institutions including bookstores, infoshops, zines, bands, food distribution schemes, broadcasting stations, art and performance collectives, internet databases, libraries, cafes, squats – i.e., the very same sorts of prefigurative practices and projects discussed previously. However, while prefiguration and the tenets of DIY are deeply resonant, it is important to recognize that this connection is strongest around the idea that individuals and individual choices can effect change in society. For Punks, this meant creating cultural outlets and objects beyond the dictates of the marketplace, while for radical activists this meant making conscious choices that reflect a vision of social change and of an ideal society. While this characterization perhaps overstates the average positions of radical and Punks, it does speak to the deep political divisions and variations that can be found within the Philadelphia scene, as suggested in the opening vignettes.

Importantly, contrary to free-space type concepts mentioned above, scenes enable us to capture all of this variation and difference because scenes look to shared ways of life for its empirical work rather than focusing on only those elements with an explicitly ‘political’ character. Again, this is significant given the variation highlighted in the opening vignettes and the expanded notion of the ‘political’ needed here to move beyond traditionally understood movement contexts.

That said, the Philadelphia scene, as a subject, does require an important modification to Leach and Haunss’ initial development of the scenes concept. Leach and Haunss suggest that, much like earlier ‘free spaces’ concepts, scenes have an assumed autonomy, that is, they are places “where group members are able to interact beyond the reach of oppressor groups” (Leach and Haunss 2009:258). This project does not accept this assumed autonomy, if only because ‘oppressor groups’ as conceived of by Leach and Haunss seems to refer to somewhat obvious groups like the police, but offers no further clarification on what these ‘groups’ are. For example, while Philly’s radical-DIY scene may be beyond the reach of or be closed to ‘oppressor groups’ like the police, this is not the same as being beyond the reach of the very socially or culturally rooted systems of oppression these radicals understand themselves to be struggling against, for example the ‘intrusion’ of internalized racism or the replication of hierarchical (particularly gendered) social relations. Indeed, if this project is to remain open to examining how scenes may not always be beneficial for movements, this assumed or ideally conceived autonomy must be open for critical investigation.

It is also worth mentioning that this project’s application of ‘scenes’ to the Philadelphia case differs slightly from Leach and Haunss’ application to their case – the German autonomous movement. The authors approach the scene associated with this movement as having developed around the movement, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the scene and the movement. The case at hand is quite different. First, Philly’s radical-DIY scene existed prior to the OP emergence, and though it was of course altered by the OP ‘moment,’ the scene’s preexistence sets up the potential for a very different perspective on scene-movement relationship than that seen in the German case. Second, and relatedly, while there was certainly a strong strain of the radical-DIY scene’s prefigurative political orientation in OP, and in the OM more generally, what is perhaps most interesting about the Occupy case is that this radical political orientation encountered many other political orientations in OP contexts.

Thus, in the interest of answering Leach and Haunss’ call for more insight into ‘negative effects scenes may have on movements,’ it is hoped that these OP encounters will offer insight

Ruggero 7

into issues the German case makes it difficult to see, for example: when and how does a scene (or subscene) develop a political agenda, or, put differently, how and when does a political agenda develop within a scene; how and when does this agenda produce the sort of politics that lead to the initiation of or participation in collective organizing and mobilizing activity; how does this agenda compare and interact with others in the context of a broad-based movement like OP; and, what are the conditions and dynamics of movement ingress and egress for scene members. Thus, the ‘encounter with outsiders’ dimension in scene members’ OP involvement is expected to allow for a more through consideration of scenes’ ‘negative effects’ on movements than the German case offers.

More Authentic Than You: Prefigurative Scenes, Mobilization, and IdentityIn the final sections of Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism, Portwood-Stacer argues

that questions about the effectiveness of prefigurative lifestyle politics (or any political action) can only be asked in relation to specific historical and spatial contexts. She is echoing Robin Kelley’s (1996) observation that “certain forms of resistance create their own limits,” and that these are “limits that can be understood only in specific historical and spatial contexts. It is hoped that this historical and spatial specificity can be achieved here through the application of scenes to the concrete reality of everyday life for today’s Punks and radicals in Philadelphia.

As noted in the introduction, this project aims to explore a number of interrelated issues within this specified context. It asks after issues of power and privilege at work in the formation of prefigurative political identities and how this relates to the tendency for lifestyle practices to “become targets of self-righteous moralizing and other forms of social policing,” or what Laura Portwood-Stacer calls “politicking over lifestyle” (Portwood-Stacer 2013:9). Further, it questions how, in this case, such politicking can “fracture bonds of solidarity among activists who make different lifestyle choices,” with dual interest in fracturing within the scene itself and in relation to OP, thus taking up Leach and Haunss’ call for research into the “negative effects scenes may have on movements ” (Leach and Haunss 2009:21).

Therefore, the project takes issues of solidarity and rupture as a means to approaching its empirical work, with the understanding that rupture or ‘distancing’ can occur in a variety of ways. Indeed, because identities “are constructed through, not outside, difference” and can “function as points of identification and attachment only because of their capacity to exclude, to leave out, to render ‘outside,’ abjected,” the project is interested not only in individuals’ conscious rejection or dismissal of other groups or people, but also the rejection and difference embedded in the very formation of prefigurative political identities (Hall 2000:18).

In the interest of making the best use of space in this paper, certain methodological details will have to be left out, though a few points are worth sharing here. For the past two and a half years, I have been exploring the Philadelphia radical-DIY scene, of which I am a part. I have explored subject positions both very distant from my own and those which are very close to me, tracing these patterns of everyday life; further, because of my personal embeddedness in the scene, it is hard to identify points in this research period where I actually ‘left the field.’ Therefore, because in some ways I am a participant observer in my own life, the project draws on a wide range of empirical sources: interviews, observations, personal diaries (my own and others’), various online networks and discourses, numerous forms of material artifacts, and more.

Due to space limitations here, the following section focuses on two examples to provide a glimpse of some of the findings and insights the project has rendered. It is organized around moments of alliance breaking or solidarity rupture, focusing on the discursive work of ‘rejection

Ruggero 8

and difference’ employed in these moments, and the theme of authenticity that arose in this discourse. The first example below is taken from a General Assembly at Occupy Philly, held in early 2012; the second example revolves around a wide intra-scene gulf that developed following the publication of a zine and the many discussions and arguments over its contents that followed.

Rejection and Difference I: ‘Centrists’ and ‘Children’My first encounters with the rejection and difference work done by scene members in and

around Occupy Philly (OP) were difficult to ignore. In fact, the high tension and strong emotions expressed in these moments were what inspired the focus on rejection and difference work in the first place. While it was easy to see the obvious points of contention between radical leftists and, say, the Ron Paul supporters who maintained a significant presence at OP, the divisions and distancing that occurred between prefigurers and more moderate leftists was surprising and, at times, entirely unexpected.

One example stands out in particular; the following passage is from my fieldnotes taken at a GA held in January of 2012,:

Two middle-aged men brought a proposal to a sparsely attended GA asking if OP would support voter registration drives in Philadelphia, particularly in the poorer sections of the city where voter registration and turn-out is incredibly low. They were not asking for material support or even door-to-door help; he asked to use the OP logo on the voter registration materials. They ended their presentation by asking, “Is the GA going to vote in line with the interests of disenfranchisement?” It is important note that Pennsylvania is at the center of a nationwide push to make voting more difficult through ID requirements other hurdles.

Scene members seem to outnumber other groups at the GA (plus they are all sitting together, on a bench in the back of a huge mostly empty room). Their response was overwhelmingly negative. They began ganging up on the presenters and accusing them of, among other things, ‘trying to trap people in a broken system,’ ‘using guilt and shame to make us [the GA] do things,’ and ‘being Democratic Party operatives.’ This finger-pointing quickly escalated as one or two older, white Quakers commented that ‘people died to get the right to vote’ and were immediately met with middle-fingers and accusations of ‘classism,’ ‘racism,’ and ‘privilege’ by the bench full of scene members. The scene members, at this point, were standing on the bench, getting in people’s faces, and some were crying. I’ve written ‘everyone is being awful’ four times in a row in my scribbled notes.

I followed the two men who brought the proposal into the hallway as they left and encountered them telling the lead facilitator, “We don’t care so much about the ‘no’ vote, but the disrespect we felt was ridiculous. We are two black men trying to raise political consciousness in poor black neighborhoods in this city and we were shouted down and accused of all kinds of things by a bunch of radical kids…I mean, they were acting like children.”

It was clear in this moment that the focus of the scene member’s ire was the act of voting as an element of formal, institutionalized politics. This was a message repeated across the Occupy movement; further, the movement’s resistance to engaging in formal politics (by supporting candidates or shaping clear demands into a platform) was a frequent point of criticism of

Ruggero 9

Occupy, as suggested by Pickerill and Kinsky’s observations. In later interviews and online discussions, many scene members (both those involved in OP and not) made it clear that they thought voting didn’t encourage people to ‘think for themselves,’ and only helped to ‘support’ and ‘justify’ a ‘corrupt’ and ‘evil’ political system.

However, when asked for examples of work OP was doing that did encourage people to ‘think for themselves,’ people found it difficult to specify anything beyond the basic existence of OP as a visible form of resistance. To be sure, the spectacle of OP certainly spoke to and encouraged some people to ‘think for themselves.’ But as reflection in the years following OP have revealed, it seems that for many Philadelphians, this message-via-presence wasn’t so clear for everyone.

While this position vis-à-vis formal politics is somewhat predictable and manifested itself in interactions throughout OP (e.g. resistance to dialogue with city government, tensions with unions engaging with OP), what is most interesting for this project is the manner in which this political orientation was commonly expressed. This example highlights the deeply personal way in which prefigurative perspectives tended to be set against those of more mainstream leftists. One person’s suggestion that registering to vote might ‘help people start thinking critically about politics in ways that you [scene members] already do’ was met by shouting, jeering, and what can only be described as scene members ganging up and forcing this person into silence and, eventually, early exit from the GA.

Indeed, it is not hard to hear scene members’ statements about voting as something akin to: ‘I don’t vote because I’m smarter than that.’ In fact, in many situations, the ways in which individuals’ critical opinions about formal politics were presented in interactions with others were deeply imbued with condescension. Crucially, this condescension is intimately tied with notions of authenticity, the idea being that authentic radicals don’t vote. A deeper look into the scene helps us tease out these authenticity struggles from what looks like simple condescension.

Rejection and Difference II: ‘Bros’ and ‘Highschool Brats’While authenticity continues to be a theme in prefigurative scene members’ difference-

making, the basis for this rejection becomes more subtle and complex as we move fully into the scene and focus on interactions between scene members. The individuals discussed here share a greater number of prefigurative patterns of everyday life (i.e. deeper within the scene), though this does not mean they share political orientations. While they may hang out at similar places, eat and shop at the same places, and know many of the same people, this apparent ‘closeness’ obscures deep divisions in their understanding of what prefigurative politics are supposed to ‘do.’

For example, in the opening vignette, the Punk outside the bar who reminded me that ‘the 60s were over’ hints at one of these divisions in the scene, a particularly hostile one, between the scene groups seen in the first example and what might be called ‘Drunk Punks’ or, to use a recently created invective developed in a widely read local zine, ‘Bros.’

This zine, titled Bros Fall Back, was written in May of 2013 and quickly spread throughout Philly’s radical-DIY scene; it is difficult to overstate the impact this zine had on conversations and interactions across the scene. It appears as part of a rising critical voice within the scene aimed at pointing out how supposedly Punk and radical spaces and scenes actually harbor racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and classist ideals, particularly when people come to the defense of someone accused of one of these demonstrating one of these behaviors (i.e. ‘he’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk’). From the zine:

Ruggero 10

A bro is someone who assumes that any space they enter is meant to cater to augmenting their personal experience. they “don’t give a fuck,” even at the expense of everyone around them. regardless of the presence of oppressive and problematic behavior, a bro will tirelessly try to appear aloof….interesting things, to a bro, are shocking, ironic, edgy, but vapid activities…a bro is too cowardly to express anything sincere.

…Booking [Punk] shows isn’t a righteous, revolutionary pursuit. I just don’t want to have to tolerate the racist, patriarchical, queerphobic bullshit that I have to tolerate in most other spaces. I’m about alienating my enemies, not embracing them. If you’re thoughtlessly policing someone’s behavior or making fucked up jokes you’re acting like my enemy…claiming you didn’t have ill intent won’t save you and is not a thoughtful, thorough apology…

When we have punk shows we are expressing a sentiment of ownership and belonging to the neighborhood, an entitlement to impose our culture on a specific geography. When we have punk shows we are paving the way for artists, hipsters, university students, and yuppies to feel safe and welcomed…We are the warning signs of gentrification…When we have punk shows we are inviting a historically white population [i.e. Punks] to take up space and make lots of noise in neighborhoods that are currently experiencing or already have experienced a certain degree of gentrification…

…There should be more space to self-criticize ourselves, our friends, our scenes without a defeatist attitude. Instead we can utilize our politics for more than catchy song lyrics and patches, and try to employ them for uses that lend themselves to more valuable conversation.The perceived problems with ‘bros’ are laid out with relative clarity here. In many ways,

the zine is representative of a broader effort to reclaim or stake out a new understanding about what Philly’s Punk spaces should be. However, despite the very real and very important issues raised in the zine, the ensuing debates and discussions (many occurring online, where linked personal networks create a sort of ‘punk public’) were far messier and far more personal than the zine appears to have envisioned.

On one side, ‘zine supporters’ made repeated efforts to highlight how Punk spaces can not only be exclusionary but even hostile to those who do not fit the ‘traditional’ Punk archetype (i.e. white, nihilistic males). This is an issue that has been widely discussed in the literature on Punk, a long-term problem that has garnered intense debate over the past three decades. In interaction, however, these points were often made in a tone that suggested that ‘you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.’

Thus, while the zine does highlight significant problems facing this community, the tone of the writing and, more importantly, the tone taken by many of its supporters in online and real-life discussions ended up becoming the focus of debate and contention. In fact, the phrase ‘high school bullshit’ was an extremely common comment made by those who were made to feel alienated in these arguments. As one person put it to me after a show that featured physical altercations over this zine, they felt those rallying in support of the zine and it’s content were

…like snotty teenagers who think they know everything, like they’re the first to write about this, and that if you don’t know them personally, like hang out with them, then you’re automatically a racist patriarch who is ruining everything. And when you try to talk to any of them about it, they act like you’re too stupid to

Ruggero 11

possibly get it, you haven’t read the right stuff, you never will, and you’re just not cool, or a punk, or radical enough or something. It’s fucking high school shit! Online trolling, physical altercations, refusal to interact or discuss in scene spaces, and a

great deal of gossiping appeared to infect this important discussion about the manifestation of racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc. within the radical-DIY scene, leading many people to remove themselves entirely from any discussion on these issues. This is clearly not an ideal outcome for the zine’s authors who, at least nominally, were seeking ‘valuable self-critical conversation.’ However, it is inline with what a supporter (and possibly one of the zine’s multiple, but anonymous authors) told me the ‘real goal’ was: to be an explicitly trolling text, meant to incite anger and discontent. This again pushes us to reconsider what prefigurative, identity-based lifestyle politics are suppose to do in these situations. Was the prefigurative thrust in the zine’s development aimed at modeling the values of a new world, or, was it aimed at the selective, particular and even opportunistic deployment of identity in pursuit of starting arguments and ‘getting in their faces and kicking them out for the new crew,’ as one supporter claimed it was?

In fact, this confrontational tone quickly mutated into an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic that pushed even small, tangential discussions into heated and contentious arguments. The very definition of a ‘bro’ became a key point of contention as interactions across this scene gulf became more hostile; some were clearly interested in determining whether others considered them a ‘bro,’ while others wanted to point out perceived hypocrisies in the positions of those defending the zine’s arguments.

The latter, often took the form of simple rejection of the authors and their approach to these issues as being ‘self-involved,’ ‘written by graduate students,’ ‘too PC,’ ‘written by people who haven’t been involved in the scene for decades like I have,’ or ‘classist in its very use of big words and theory.’ Another major problem for many of those who felt alienated or targeted by the zine was the refusal of the authors or their supporters to further explain their positions or the issues raised, with the consistent refrain: ‘It is not the job of the oppressed to explain their oppression to their oppressors.’ It was this response that usually led to explosive confrontation, with one bro/DrunkPunk commenting to me as she walked away from an argument at a show,

“Who the fuck do these people think they are? Of course there are problems. I’m a goddamn woman who plays goddamn punk, you think I don’t know about these problems, you act like I DON’T KNOW [shouting back toward argument]. But I don’t get all bratty about it, I actually work against it where it lives. But to just sit there and complain and say people are being awful to you and then refuse to explain yourself further and only say ‘figure it out yourself’…I don’t know, its just so fucking self-righteous. I mean, I honestly don’t know much about this stuff and I don’t know where I’m supposed to start…I never went to college, I don’t know how to dig into this theory or whatever.”In fact, the direct responses of ‘bros’ to these sorts of accusations are equally interesting

given our interest in authenticity. Perhaps the most telling example comes from the many, many discussions and exchanges that revolved around issues of privilege. Over and over again, when white male DrunkPunk/bros were accused of not recognizing their white privilege, their responses could be consistently summarized as ‘I don’t have privilege, I grew up poor.’ Here, the recourse to class (‘I grew up poor’) is a return to the working-class aesthetics and ideals that form a fundamental part of Punk’s overall mythos. In fact, many of the symbolic cultural markers of bros/DrunkPunks appear explicitly aimed at down classing – dirty clothes, dumpster diving, squatting, cheap alcohol, etc.

Ruggero 12

In the examples given above, the theme of authenticity rises, in two forms. First, the responses of bros/DrunkPunks consistently rejected the notion of privilege by emphasizing their ‘authentic’ Punk self as being ‘in the scene for over a decade,’ ‘the kind of person who actually does the work of punk like setting up shows,’ nihilistic, and (at least symbolically) living a working-class life. Further, the more personal criticisms and invectives lobbed at the zine’s authors and supporters generally either tried to frame them as inauthentic Punks (‘new kids in the city who just want attention,’ ‘graduate students,’ ‘just want to destroy the community’), or, as hypocrites and, thus, inauthentic in their own self-presentation.

Second, it also possible to see issues of authenticity at work the behavior and discourse of zine supporters, particularly in sense of in/out-group dynamics. By using the complex radical politics presented in the zine to do the work of rejection and difference, these individuals were also constructing their own identities as more authentic radicals than the Punks who were not “welcome in the cool club” as a zine supporter phrased it in a screaming match outside a Punk show.

Analyzing the Scene: Authenticity, Identity, Rejection and DifferenceIn each of these examples of rupture, distancing, or the breaking of alliances, there

emerged a theme of ‘authenticity’ in the discursive work done to both construct the identities of those involved via difference (Hall 2000) and to “make their everyday activities count as meaningful expressions of political resistance.” (Portwood-Stacer 2013:158). In this sense, there appears to be some support for Portwood-Stacer’s suggestion that the “conditions that give lifestyle politics its political potential are also those which limit it” in the sense that ‘politicking over lifestyle’ can lead to division and exclusion (Portwood-Stacer 2013).

However, it is not enough to simply suggest that there is nothing going on here but fights over authenticity. How can we interpret and analyze this quest for authenticity in a productive way such that we can go beyond a simple dismissal of lifestyle politics and toward a more detailed and productive critical analysis of what is ‘being done.’

In A Hard Rain Fell, David Barber (2008) explores similar issues of authenticity in relation to the white New Left’s response to the organizing critiques and demands of the ‘black movement.’ He agrees with Doug Rossinow’s (1998) emphasis on authenticity in trying to understand the New Left’s rise and fall, but goes further than Rossinow by asking why white students quested after authenticity. Barber argues that “white students failed to see themselves as authentic agents of social change because of their whiteness…The struggle for authenticity, at its root, was simply the struggle to comprehend and purge themselves of the lie of whiteness,” with the ‘lie’ referring to the students’ unconscious (or repressed) knowledge of the false foundation of their privileged lives (Barber 2008:8).

This argument offers some important insights for the work presented here, particularly if we reframe his comments in terms of class rather than explicitly in terms of race. Of course, this is not to downplay issues of race at work within the scene or prefigurative lifestyle politics more generally. However, because race and class are deeply interwoven in the scene context and because the overwhelming majority of scene members are white, the pivot to class allows greater theoretical flexibility.

Connecting scene member’s quests for authenticity to issues of class may seem problematic in the sense that many of the identities present in the scene (and much of the post-60s Left) are defined across class boundaries (queer, Punk, radical, etc.) and because prefigurative lifestyle politics to not revolve around ‘class’ as a political actor. However, this

Ruggero 13

does not necessarily mean that class dynamics or issues of class aren’t ‘at work’ here. Indeed, as Valocchi argues in his study of the class-inflected nature of activist identities, identity talk “may be an opportunity to express, allay, or deflect social mobility or social class anxieties” (Valocchi 2013:174).

Perhaps we can read the theme of authenticity above in terms of this wrestling with class anxieties. Individuals’ sensitivity to the charge of privilege, for example, could then be seen as reactions to a discomfort with their own class backgrounds and issues of class at work in their everyday life. Indeed, a lot of the rejection and difference work that manifests within the scene revolves around issues of class, as suggested by many of the most commonly used insults and invectives in the scene – e.g. labels for others like ‘gentrifiers,’ ‘bourgeois yuppies,’ ‘secret rich kids,’ ‘just like your upper-middle class parents,’ ‘privileged kids with no self-critique,’ and the particularly local slur ‘just like Penn students.’

Could it be that a lot of what is going on in the complex realm of rejection and difference in prefigurative lifestyle politics is a wrestling with class-consciousness, in the sense of individuals’ attempts to make sense of how class works in American society and how this manifests in their own lives? If so, what does this mean for questions of solidarity, alliance and collective action more generally?

ConclusionThe project is currently wrestling with these final points. However, it should be made

clear that rather than naked finger-pointing, the project is attempting to approach these questions in such a way that actually offers the potential for productive insight for the prefigurative subjects themselves. Rather than focus on individual or group-level faults, the project returns to some of the well-known critiques of prefigurative lifestyle politics that find a particular resonance in the context of this case and attempts to rework them towards these productive ends.

In the foreword to Massimo Modonesi’s recent Constructing the Political Subject, John Holloway echoes many critics of lifestyle politics when he notes that,

There is always a danger in drawing lines too clearly, in transforming the different faces of our experience into rigid identities…To transform these experiential tones into differences of identity (you are a reformist, I am a revolutionary) is to promote the deepest penetration of capital into anticapitalist thought: to promote identitarian thinking, in other words. In fact, the sentence ‘I am a revolutionary’ is blatantly self-contradictory: at the same time as it would negate capital, it reproduces capital in its most insidious form, as identification.

(Holloway 2014:xvi)Approaching the conflicts and struggles presented here as a ‘penetration’ might help us understand these struggles with authenticity as active sites of struggle with the penetrating force of domination. Gramsci’s development of subalternality is particularly helpful here. While the concept has suffered somewhat from overuse and theoretical dilution, Gramsci’s original construction remains productive for our purposes: “Gramsci conceptualized subalternality as an experience of subordination, expressed by the tension between acceptance/incorporation and the rejection/autonomization of the relations of domination” (Modonesi 2014:35).

If we view the different positions within the scene as representing different combinations of the acceptance/incorporation and rejection/autonomization of the relations of domination, perhaps we can understand the various groupings of subject positions within the scene

Ruggero 14

(DrunkPunks, etc.) as representing collections of individuals with similar combinations of acceptance and rejection, that is, similar experiences of subordination. Further, if the prefigurative identities of scene members could be articulated using this language of different experiences of subordination, it may be possible to use this reformulation to address the issues of rupture and alliance breaking for which lifestyle politics are consistently criticized.

Put differently, an alternative must be sought to allowing class anxieties to fuel a drive for authenticity via the creation of identity-in-difference, which mutates into a zero-sum competition over ownership of the experience of subordination, or, over the ownership of the rejection of domination (i.e. ‘more authentic than you’).

Perhaps the development of mechanisms that allow for the recognition and acceptance of different experiences of subordination would allow space for the collective recognition that, under the hegemonic domination of capital, subordination is ultimately experienced by all, though in different ways. Such mechanisms may serve to lay ground work for developing tools to struggle against hegemony in the many ways in which it is experienced rather than as it is experienced by those seen as ‘most dominated’ or as it is identified by those who have ‘most rejected’ domination. One way to contextualize this suggestion in this case would be to not dismiss DrunkPunks because of the privilege they do enjoy, but instead find ways to build solidarity via recognition of their own experiences of domination/subordination despite this privilege.

As noted above, these final points are what the project is currently wrestling with. I hope this paper has offered an interesting glimpse of the current state of the project and has provided enough detail and context to inspire some critical assessments of the arguments it is currently developing.

Ruggero 15

Works Cited

Augman, R. 2005. "Reflex, Reaction, Action’ My Views Change Over Time #4" in K. Bravo. ed. Making Stuff and Doing Things. Portland, OR: Microchasm Publishing: 236-237.

Barber, D. 2008. A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Bevington, D., and C. Dixon. 2005. "Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism." Social Movement Studies 4(3): 185- 208.

Breines, W. 1989. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Carlsson, Chris. 2008. Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! First Edition. Oakland: AK Press.

Cherry, E. 2006. "Veganism as a Cultural Movement: A Relational Approach." Social Movement Studies 5(2):155-170.

Cornell, A. 2011. Oppose and Propose. Oakland, CA: AK Press

Dunn, Kevin C. 2008. “Never Mind the Bollocks: the Punk Rock Politics of Global Communication.” Review of International Studies 34: 193–210.

Gordon, U. 2008. Anarchy Alive!: Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Halfacree, K. 2004. "I Could Only Do Wrong': Academic Research and DiY Culture" in D. Fuller and R. Kitchin. eds. Radical Theory/Critical Praxis: Making a Difference Beyond the Academy? Kelowna, British Columbia: Praxis (e)Press

Hall, S. 2000. “Who needs ‘identity’?” in P. du Gay, J. Evans, P. Redman (eds.) Identity: A Reader. New York: Sage Publications: Pp. 15-30.

Holloway, J. 2014. “Preface” in M. Modonesi Constructing the Political Subject. London: Pluto Press: Pp. xiii-xvi.

Jordan, T. 2002. Activism!: Direct Action, Hacktivism And The Future Of Society. London: Reaktion Books Ltd.

Juris, J. S. 2008. Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

—. 2012. “Reflection on #Occupy Everywhere” American Ethnologist, 39(2): 259-279.

Ruggero 16

Katsiaficas, George. 1997. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Kellstadt, J. 2001. "The necessity and impossibility of ‘anti-activism.’" March 2001. http://www.infoshop.org/rants/antiactivism.html (accessed 10 March 2007).

Kreiss, D. and Z. Tufekci. 2012 “Occupying the Political: Occupy Wall Street, Collective Action, and the Rediscovery of Pragmatic Politics” Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, 13(3) (forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2147711

Leach, D. and S. Haunss. 2009. “Scenes and Social Movements” in Hank Johnston (Ed.) Culture, Social Movements, and Protest. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Melucci, R. 1989. Nomads Of The Present: Social Movements And Individual Needs In Contemporary Society. London etc.: Hutchinson

—. 1985. “The symbolic challenge of contemporary movements.” Social Research 52: 789 - 816

Modonesi, M. 2014. Constructing the Political Subject. London: Pluto Press.

Pickerill, Jenny, and John Krinsky. 2012. “Why Does Occupy Matter?.” Social Movement Studies 11 (3-4) (August): 279–287.

Pleyers, G. 2011. Alter-Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Polletta, F. 1999. "'Free Spaces' in Collective Action." Theory and Society 28:1-38.

Portwood-Stacer, L. 2013. Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism. New York: Bloomsbury.

Razsa, M. and A. Kurnik. 2012. “The Occupy Movement in Zizek’s Hometown” American Ethnologist, 39(2): 238-258.

Ruggero, E C. 2009. “Radical Green Populism| Environmental Values in DIY/Punk Communities.” Dissertations and Thesis. ProQuest UMI.

Scott, Alan. 1990. Ideology and the New Social Movements. London: Unwin Hyman.

Sitrin, M. 2006. Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina Oakland, CA: AK Press.

—. 2012. “Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements.” Dissent 59(2): 74–75.

Smith, J. and B. Glidden. 2012. “Occupy Pittsburgh and the Challenges of Participatory Democracy.” Social Movement Studies 11 (3-4): 288-294.

Ruggero 17

Spencer, Amy. 2008. DIY: the Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. 2nd ed. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.

Valocchi, S. 2013. “Activism as a Career, Calling, and Way of Life.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 42: 169-200.

Ruggero 18