Snafu

By Marco Deseriis and Jodi Dean

Originally published by Possible Futures, a project of the Social Science Research Council.

The question of demands infused the initial weeks and months of Occupy Wall Street with the endless opening of desire. Nearly unbearable, the absence of demands concentrated interest, fear, expectation, and hope in the movement. What did they want? What could they want? Commentators have been nearly hysterical in their demand for demands: somebody has got to say what Occupy Wall Street wants! In part because of the excitement accumulating around the gap the movement opened up in the deadlocked US political scene—having done the impossible in creating a new political force it seemed as if the movement might even demand the impossible—many of those in and around Occupy Wall Street have also treated the absence of demands as a benefit, a strength. Commentators and protesters alike thus give the impression that the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and a shared political line is a conscious choice.

Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of the movement knows that this is not the case. Even if some occupations have released lists of demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York, where only independent organizations such as labor unions have released their own demands. In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections that are raised against demands during general assemblies, meetings, and conversations people have about the Occupy movement.

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On September 30, Eric Kleutenberg of Tactical Media Files will facilitate an international seminar at De Balie in Amsterdam on the recent outbursts of social protest and their media strategies. The seminar is titled “Media Squares: On the New Forms of Protest and their Media” and brings together media activists, critics, artists and political scientists from the Netherlands, Southern Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. Here is my response to the seminar announcement posted to the mailing list nettime:

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Another collection of scholarly essays on the intersection of art and activism, with a specific focus on social movements. Edited by Begum O. Firat and Aylin Kuryel as part of Rodopi’s Thamyris/Intersecting series, it features articles by Gavin Grindon, A. K. Thompson, L. M. Bogad, and myself (on the Luther Blissett Project) among others. From the synopsis:

“This volume addresses contemporary activist practices that aim to interrupt and reorient politics as well as culture. The specific tactics analyzed here are diverse, ranging from culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, street art, to hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. Though indebted to the artistic and political movements of the past, this form of activism brings a novel dimension to public protest with its insistence on humor, playfulness, and confusion. This book attempts to grasp both the old and new aspects of contemporary activist practices, as well as their common characteristics and internal varieties. It attempts to open up space for the acknowledgement of the ways in which contemporary capitalism affects all our lives, and for the reflection on possible modes of struggling with it. It focuses on the possibilities that different activist tactics enable, the ways in which those may be innovative or destructive, as well as on their complications and dilemmas.”

The PDF of my article is available here. Other articles can be downloaded from the Ingenta Connect database. The book is also available from Amazon.

The folks at NAi–an awesome publishing house based in Rotterdam– have just released a new book on art and activism. Edited by Lieven de Cauter, Rubben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck, the book contains 31 articles with contributions by Rosi Braidotti, Pippo Del Bono, Richard Schechner, Brian Holmes, BAVO, John Jordan, and myself, among others. Hopefully, reading it will be as captivating as the amazing front cover:

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

In a video that is going viral, 15-old British student Rodney Owen McCarthy argues that the “Facebook generation” is waking up and not accepting the rationale behind the British government’s plans of tripling the taxes for higher education in the UK. McCarthy, who spoke at the National Conference of the Coalition of Resistance in Camden on November 27, is referring here to the November 10 demonstration in London, in which students broke into the Conservative Party headquarters, prompting battles with the police:

An interesting article by Gabriella Coleman on the co-dividual use of images, videos, and other forms of aesthetic representation by the hacker network Anonymous.

Tah-dah! After months of being at large from this blog, I am very pleased to announce that I finally graduated!!

On December 3, 2010, I successfully defended my dissertation entitled “Improper Names: The Minor Politics of Collective Pseudonyms and Multiple-Use Names.” The dissertation committee was composed of Alexander Galloway (NYU), Allen Feldman (NYU), and McKenzie Wark (New School), whereas the outside readers were Gabriella Coleman (NYU) and Jodi Dean (William & Hobart Colleges).

The dissertation investigates the historic conditions of possibility for the emergence of the “improper name”—i.e., the adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and scattered individuals. Bridging gaps between the history of the labor movement, the twentieth-century avant-gardes, and contemporary theories of immaterial labor, the research focuses on collective pseudonyms and “multiple-use names” which make their appearance in Europe and North America at three critical historic junctures: the Industrial Revolution, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, and the contemporary emergence of the network society.
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I have recently published an article on Repubblica.it (in Italian) on the work of Aaron Koblin, a young, brilliant Californian artist who has been crowdsourcing his art projects through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

By collecting the contributions of thousands of MTurk’s providers Koblin realized a version of Daisy Bell sung by two thousand voices, a $100 bill drawn by 10,000 contributors (paid 1 cent each), and a very large flock of sheep all facing left.

In this video interview Koblin explains what inspired him to ask 10,000+ MTurkers to draw a sheep for 2 cents a piece:

After watching the video I emailed him a couple of questions. In particular I asked him whether aside from assigning the Mturks an unusual and aesthetic task such as drawing a sheep he had tried to involve them on a different level, for instance whether he tried to involve them in a discussion on possible future developments of the project. His first answer was:

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