Marginality and Universality: The Indigenous Working Group and the 17th General Assembly of #OccupyMelbourne. #OMEL #OWS

The 17th General Assembly of Occupy Melbourne occurred in Treasury Gardens on the 12th November, 2011. Treasury Gardens is the current site of the second occupation of the movement, one marked by a great sense of malaise after the eviction of the first occupation, which was the site of such bold experimentation, at City Square. The 17th Assembly revealed how the Occupation conceives of itself as a cohesive movement, and some of the limitations to this conception. In this article, I use the case of the Indigenous embassy, erected and defended at the 17th Assembly, to illutrate some of the problems in the concept of political unity and the democratic processes intended to express it. At the same time, a review of these events should point a way forward from the political deadlock developing within the movement, which manifests as an inability to imagine strategies beyond the single camp, with a single strategy, presenting a single target for state attacks.

The position of the Indigenous working group within Occupy Melbourne is roughly analagous to the position of Indigenous people within Australian society as a whole. In both cases, we encounter a “totality,” a sign which organises a real diversity into an idealised unity. In one case we encounter “Australia,” in the other “Occupy Melbourne,” totalities which, even when “diversity” is admitted as one of their qualities, possess a slightly homogenising, flattening quality. In both cases, “Indigenous” appears as an intrusive, excessive element, disturbing this homogeneity. In terms of Australia, our imaginary construction of a white, anglophone nation-state is disrupted and embarassed by the inclusion of this exception. The same goes for many depictions of our movement (mostly young, white, university-educated, etc). Obviously, these static and homogenous images are not the reality, either of Australia or Occupy Melbourne, but we must recognise the real power that these images have to structure reality. In the case of Australia, policy is always (supposedly) geared first and foremost to the needs of the “typical” Australian, and “marginal” interests can only be considered when these first interests are satisfied. This means that Indigenous claims for social goods must compete with a multitude of other marginalised interests: women, migrants, the disabled, and so forth, not to mention the competition internal to the Indigenous community between different social projects and programs. Within Occupy Melbourne, the marginal interest of a working group is always secondary to the assumed consensus.

Before going further, it is worth identifying various strategies which have historically been used to overcome this contradiction between the marginal/particular and the general/universal:

1. Suppression of the margin. This strategy actually has two levels: when possible, the existence of the margin is denied (“Yes, it’s sad that there aren’t any Aborigines left”); when it’s not possible to simply ignore the margin, usually because some marginal people have organised collective power and a collective voice, this strategy turns simply genocidal.
2. Inclusion-as-exception. This is what we have outlined above; it mostly appears as political correctness, or so-called identity politics.
3. Exile. In Indigenous affairs, this is often the strategy of Black Nationalists who start to question whether it’s even worthwhile for “Indigenous” to include itself within “Australia.” But the refusal of the media to recognise “refugee” as “Australian” shows that this status can be imposed, as well as chosen.

In Occupy Melbourne, there exists a consensus damning the first strategy. The third seems theoretically possible, were the Indigenous working group (or some fraction thereof) to finally grow fed up with the latent and actual racism within the movement and walk out. Ultimately, however, one suspects this would be an expression of political impotence (and we should remember, to this effect, that even Malcolm X began to renounce seperatism towards the end of his life). The predominant strategy, then, has been the inclusion-as-exception of Indigenous people: their working group brings their voice as one of several special interests within the mosaic that is Occupy Melbourne, subordinate to the group’s consensus, as are we all. But is this the absolute limit of political possibility?

The 17th General Assembly began in the standard way, with the reports of working groups. The delegate of the Indigenous working group came forth and announced that the erection of a tent embassy had been achieved. He requested (informally, it would later be said) the solidarity of the assembly, and was assured of it by a wave of raising arms and voices. The meeting continued. The logistics working group, during its report, pointed out that all existing structures (including the embassy, but also some set up by other political groups) lacked the mandate of the general assembly. It was during this report that several police moved on the embassy in an effort to remove it. Most of the Assembly responded immediately: the embassy was defended by a crowd, the police were surrounded, and to clapping and the cry of “Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land” they were forced back.[1] When the crisis passed, and as the Assembly began to reconvene, there were heated arguments over whether the words of the logistics working group, or the failure of the facilitators to “officially” adjourn the Assembly, constituted a (possibly racist) attack on the legitimacy of the embassy. Others put forward a more nuanced perspective, that the process itself was at fault, and suggested it be altered. I will return to these political dilemmas, but what is important to note is that as soon as the arguments were past the General Assembly entertained a motion for the defense of the embassy. This decision, which was basically to do “officially” in the future what we had all just done in actuality, took several confused minutes to debate and pass, largely, it seemed, due to sectarian tensions. When it finally passed, the meeting then spent the remainder of its duration discussing and approving the form of a new, more established, camp in Treasury Gardens.

I think it is incorrect to ascribe the reluctance of some to endorse the embassy, or its defense, to racism or malicious intent. Rather, it resulted from the same fetishism of democratic process and consensus which causes many to endorse “individual” structures, while at the same time agonising over what an “Occupy Melbourne” structure is. In this respect, those who went on to fight for motions to retroactively validate the defense were equally guilty. Both factions attempted to relegate the actions of the Indigenous working group to an included exception, an element at the margin of our unity which must be subordinated the the will of the whole. Of course, the divide was ostensibly between strategic conservatism and principled militancy. But the fact that we spent so much time debating whether we would collectively endorse the actions that we had already taken so decisively indicates to me how superficial the difference between those positions actually was.

What the events of the day showed is that there is in fact a fourth way of resolving the particular/universal contradiction. Whatever their merits or detriments, all of the previously named solutions have in common the preservation of the marginal as marginal, as a contained excess. What occurred on Saturday was something entirely different: the marginal element directly became the universal. Through their actions, the Indigenous working group implicitly posed several demands:

1. Treasury Gardens should have structures, both in order to defy the council and to increase the effectiveness of the occupation.
2. Those who are fighting systemic injustice need wait on no authority to legitimise their efforts to fight.
3. Solidarity is not the outcome of mediating procedure, but of direct bonds of political love between singularities.

These proposals gained the effective consensus (of bodies, minds, and voices raised in indignation) because they were not limited to the circumstances of the Indigenous working group. The marginal status of Indigenous people (even within an “inclusive” movement) and the working group’s frustration with the strategic timidity of the movement forced them to create these demands. This outburst revealed a subterranean politics which had been hidden beneath the supposed consensus of the group. Subsequently, the assembly attempted to corral that instinctive, “spontaneous” outburst of collective refusal back into the space of procedural consensus, the only space which so far enjoys recognised legitimacy within the movement. While the General Assembly is certainly a more democratic space than the shambling, zombified parliaments of the world’s governments, we still see here a failure of its political imagination.

Normally, I hate the verbal rituals of solidarity that the Australian left expresses with Indigenous people. How radical can the acknowledgement of country really be if Julia Gillard can utter its words without bursting into flame? And what is the real impact of these words when the actions they ought to imply are always deferred to another day, another place? But when we surrounded the Indigenous embassy, the chant which had always seemed like ritualistic politeness to me in the past exploded from my lips: I felt my solidarity with the dispossesed throughout my mind and in my body, a unity called “praxis” in Marxist jargon. It seemed that we were living a politics that had reached back in time from some revolutionary future, and which pulled us inexorably forward. For a moment, the ontological order of the movement was completely inverted. Instead of the Indigenous working group trying to accommodate itself within the alienating consensus of the General Assembly (alienating and alienated to us all), the movement was suddenly subsumed within the marginal position of the Indigenous working group. That position was our strength and our righteous anger. And in that moment, it ceased to be the position of the Indigenous working group at all: it became the universal truth of our movement, the embodiment of our collective desire to be free. The political effect of this event was obvious over the next few days. It is doubtful whether the Assembly would have even dared to call for structures without the event; it seems more likely that a collapse back into impotent legalism would have occurred. And while we failed to really generalise the demands of the event, continuing to remove structures when the council issued their notices to comply, the refusal to negotiate over the presence of the Indigenous embassy demonstrates a fidelity to the event, an internalisation of truth that it took one hundred of the police on the following Wednesday morning to erase.

The purpose of this article is not to claim that Indigenous politics are now universal politics, or that the Indigenous working group should now claim leadership of the movement (I think they’re smart enough not to want it anyway). Nor are Indigenous politics always the most radical politics: there are Indigenous politicians and business owners, and Indigenous voices which encourage accommodation with the present order. Rather, I argue that in a given social-historical situation it is possible for a marginal position, due to its very desperate need, to give rise to a demand that suddenly reveals the universal truth of the entire situation. This was precisely Marx’s point on the proletariat: if the proletariat could really express its desires for a project of liberation from its repressed and excluded position, that project would in fact be one of universal liberation. If one accepts a Marxist methodology (while setting aside a 19th century sociology), then it should come as no suprise that Indigenous political action should be capable of revealing the universal will of Occupy Melbourne. It is vital that the movement learn this lesson well: Occupy Melbourne is not some tool which the 99% must wield in order to restore its well-deserved democratic representation. The 99% is a demographic phantasm in which every human voice is drowned out. Rather, Occupy Melbourne must be the process by those who are politically, economically, and legally 0% can suddenly become 100%. This revolutionary inversion happens in a moment, but if one recognises the moment one can act in fidelity with it, generalise its meaning, and exploit its potential to the full.

Notes
[1] I would like to point out that the tactic here was one which I choose to call anti-violence. The police were forced back not because we were threatening violence; only the state has used or threatened violence in this campaign. Rather, the police fell back when they realised our physical presence robbed them of the option of inciting violence. I conceive of anti-violence of this sort of being a proactive, aggressive strategic orientation: like nonviolence it refuses to use violent means; but unlike nonviolence it actively seeks to deny such means to the enemy as well. I intend to develop a theory of this strategy in a future article.

Congratulations if you’ve made it this far. Hope it was worth the trip. I didn’t have time to do any quotations, but if you’re curious about my methodology I recommend Alain Badiou’s 2nd Manifesto for Philosophy, which I’m quite enamoured with. It’s a light, but dense, tome.

A review of this weekend of #OccupyMelbourne

Hey all,

Been getting some requests for an update on O.M. from a couple of people, so I figure I’ll just run down what I’ve seen, and offer a few conclusions on the matter.

Saturday was a pretty big day for us. With news that the injunction against the council’s orders to comply did NOT make it through the courts, we had to decide whether we were going to wait on the legal process or take matters into our own hands. As it happened, indigenous people took the leadership by erecting a tent embassy in Treasury Gardens on Saturday afternoon. While the general assembly was debating how to deal with the situation (including some really ignorant comments that indigenous people need OUR authority to erect tents on THEIR land) the police forced the issue by moving in a force of about a dozen to try and disassemble the embassy. Most of the 150 participants in the G.A. then encircled the embassy (and the police) chanting “Always was, always will be, aboriginal land.” Now, that’s a chant that usually bores me (like most chants) but in this instance it was utterly appropriate. And guess what: the cops backed down.

Sorry, maybe you missed that. We beat the cops.

Admittedly, we just persuaded a small group that they couldn’t force us to obey. This was no riot squad. It’s possible that a lot of Melbourne’s police force is currently tied up trying to bust the picket line in Laverton, but it also seems that the political will to crush the camp is faltering. I’ve heard a lot of rumours: cops questioning orders, councillors calling for inquiries. The ruling class is breaking ranks. On a good day, the government is like the brain of a narcissist sociopath: self-centred, with no compassion. At the moment it’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Robert Doyle is probably starting to feel his support slipping. I bet even his secretary is starting to be rude to him. Expect the state to be a little less decisive for a while… but possibly still dangerous.

As a consequence of yesterday’s victory, the camp is now growing in numbers and permanent structures. While we haven’t yet reached the established presence that we had in city square, with several social and working areas established and generous support services in operation, it looks for the first time in a while that the occupation is actually growing.

Today we had a workshop on nonviolent resistance down in the space. It was pretty well-attended, and ran quite smoothly. Out of that, a few more links and relationships seem to be forming, so I feel myself more a part of a cohesive movement. I’d like to run, and see run, a lot more things like this.

Big priorities for the movement (from where I’m sitting):
1. Now that we’ve definitely established the decision to increase our presence in defiance of the council, we need to ratchet up the political pressure. Robert Doyle is, as we know, a fucking cunt. He’s opposing calls for an inquiry into the decision for the city square eviction, and basically showing that he wipes his ass with our civil rights. Demonstrations directed at this excuse for a human being are probably in order.
2. We have the space. We need to politicise it! We need workshops, talks, discussion circles, reading groups, skill shares, movie screenings, etc etc etc… We need to show that we have a right to take over our public space by using it well. I don’t really care what your politics or experience are: just get down there and use the space for something. If that just means you have a picnic and chat to participants, that’s fine. If you do a puppet show, that would be pretty cool. If you can share some useful knowledge which will make everyone a bit more able, that’s awesome.
3. We need to encourage a diversity of actions and discourses against the current state of affairs. We always say that O.M. encourages diversity, but have we really seen it? I would like to see that place overflowing with literature, and daily planning meetings for actions which throw a badly-needed wrench in the works.

Solidarity, all.

Incendies: I don’t want another bloody review

I’ve just seen the film Incendies. It was extremely interesting. While I don’t claim to have done extensive trawling (a few minutes in a pay-up-front internet cafe… okay, I’ve done two google searches) but I’m already sick of the reviews I’m finding. They all say more or less the same thing. The acting is splendid, the pacing is good, the visual impact is near overwhelming. And, they generally decide, the film’s structure, an allegorically weighty Greek tragedy, strains credulity. In other words, it is a failing that the director has offered something other than what audiences expect. While I will admit that the film DOES strain credulity, I feel the director has deliberately chosen to break the spell, to show us the allegory, in the vain hope that audiences won’t miss the point. The themes dealt with in the film, love, hate, religion, war, and reconciliation, are heavy and pertinent. The questions raised by the film’s treatment are intelligent ones. It is hard to think how these questions could have been clearly stated without the treatment they received. It’s a new film, and the clock is ticking, so I shan’t try and unravel it here and now. Hopefully I’ll find some more time shortly.

Marking time

I woke up today before noon, intent on getting Many Important Things done. So I took our biggest water container, and ignoring strange looks from the parishoners, picked us up around a dozen litres, enough to do some dish washing this afternoon and drink all the tea I could want.

I’m supposed to having dinner with a friend tonight. I’m very excited about it, as you might expect, and with my OCD that manifests as the feeling that there’s tons and tons to do. The trouble is, this friend is so easy-going, and the evening we have planned is so straight-forward, that there really isn’t that much to do. Perhaps an hour or so of work before they show up? That gives me all afternoon for…

Well, I could work on my thesis, I suppose. But I’m cross with it right now. I could read more Capital. But I’m not sure I’m in a reading mood. Or I could just cruise the internet for an hour and listen to Woody Guthrie. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Writing to my Uncle about Mary Douglas

For Christmas, my Uncle gave me Purity and Danger and Natural Symbols by Mary Douglas. I’ve found them useful. I wrote him a letter today with some of my thoughts, and then reckoned “Hey, that’s interesting.” I hope you agree.

I must thank you again for my Christmas presents. Especially of late, Mary has been of great use to me in thinking about dirt, especially bodily impurity, which tends to occupy your mind more when you lack running water. I have, naturally, had to develop a private system of classifications to convince myself I haven’t gone totally feral, even if I couldn’t convince the grid. The walls of the squat, among other drawings, contain several drawings of The Diagram, which I have lectured various flatmates about. They’re quite pleased to hear we’re categorised with gipsies and vagrants.

While I have tried to weasel her into my thesis, it seems doubtful she’ll make an explicit appearence. Still, she’s shaped my thinking a bit about the insurrectionary current, and millenarian communism in general. While I agree with her that the fringe, by definition, cannot be the basis of society, I don’t lose faith in it for this reason. I suppose she writes about it in the chapter on the grid reconstituted (or something to that effect), but I see this desire for unmediated communication, for immediate contact with the transcendant, as a useful tool. The desire to sweep clean the slate serves as a preliminary to a reconstitutive process. The key is to commit oneself to the full process, and not merely the ecstatic moment of undoing (though the fact that our work is just one stage of a longer process doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy it).

This has led me to some interesting breaks with the dominant queer and feminist theories which currently circulate in Melbourne (I’ve drifted a little away from the reds and towards the pinks of late; not necessarily a more precise ideology, but fewer power trippers). There seems to be an agreement that the proper object of a revolutionary gender politic should be gender’s abolition. I think this is ridiculous. Even if we aren’t interested in appeasing the Bog Irish, our symbolic forms are too valuable to throw out without a fight. I’ve floated a different theory in these circles (and amazingly no one has called me a chauvinist yet). As a social-symbolic system, gender has the power to liberate or oppress. I compared it to language. You can use language to exert power, or to subvert it. We might suppose (or not) that the power function came first, but the subversive function is implicit in every form of power. So I compared queers to poets: recombining the elements of the symbolic system in new ways to bring out ambiguity and reveal previously concealed possibilities. I asked the millenarian queers: would you take the words from the poet? It seems that the most succesful (i.e. challenging, revolutionary, liberating) queers I’ve met have done it not by rejecting gender, but by a process of juxtaposition and collage. Once at St Andrews, the anthropology society organised a talk on gay rights (I can’t remember the exact topic). The head of the Christian Union was at one side of the table. My friend Harry was at the other side in make-up and a dress. What power would that statement have had if he had been gender-less? Not a whole lot, I suspect.

And, of course, sometimes we don’t wipe the slate as clean as we tell ourselves. It’s interesting to see, particularly in the ecstatic states that characterise our secular religion, how the social code can re-emerge even when we are supposedly at our most liberated. The first time I realised that this was going on, that even when we rolled on the floor laughing and whooped and yelled, that we were following quite strict rules in doing so, and that the group was able to react quite harshly when someone broke those rules (didn’t disobey the rules in the right way), I was amazed.

I re-read The Telling recently. I realised that Le Guin’s books are all about anthropologists, or at least about outsiders and observers. I think I’ve felt like that my entire life. An Australian amongst Americans, a colonial Britain, an American in Australia, a communist among anarchists, an anarchist among socialists, a traditionalist among the millenarians, a millenarian among the orthodox, a proletarian among the bourgeois, and a bourgeois among the proletarians. It’s extremely lonely sometimes, and I’ve been told off and rejected for my difference (sometimes with justification, to be fair). But there’s a power to it. Just as the marginal group in society suggests creative power and possibilities, I feel as though my constant marginality gives me some sort of power as well. It’s very confusing what to do with it though.

Mood swings

It’s exhausting, I tell ya. One day you’re on top of the world, the next day reality feels like it could explode in disaster at any moment. The same hopes which elevate my mood serve to create its instability. Today has been very strange. I’ve barely spoken to another person all day, except for a single short phone call, since when I awoke my flatmates had already set out. So there’s nothing really to do except plug a bit at my thesis, and wait for a change of circumstances. It’s weird. Yesterday I was so surrounded by lovely people that, by the end, I was quite overwhelmed, and happy to curl up alone with a book. Today this solitude, which should spur me to work, fills me with feelings of impotence. But the idea of actively seeking out company right now seems as distasteful as returning to the work I picked up with such a lack of zeal. And I told myself I would be so productive from today. Hmm. Maybe I’ll feel better after I watch a doco. Not like I have to accomplish a terribly huge amount this avo. I just want to read through my thesis draft and start thinking of how to make it less lousy.

I realise this may be one of my less interesting posts, but the movement of my fingers keeps me from a total shut-down of the brain, so you’ll have to suffer it.

I is smelly people

I’m trying to remember my last shower. It’s been some time now. At least a week. Maybe two. Maybe three. It’s interesting how my perception of bodily dirt has changed living in a squat. I’m more aware of sweat, but sweat, of course, evapourates. Normal grime passes beneath my radar, so I’m always shocked upon bathing how pale-skinned I am (really, I thought I was tan until it washed off). I think I shall bathe today, because the last few days I’ve been especially sweaty. The problem is that I sleep in a sleeping bag, with a duvet during the coldest hours of the night. Naturally, by morning, I’m drenched. My clothes are clean (well, they were; I’ve just run through my laundry today in fact) so I think that ten minutes under a stream of hot water and a bit of soap could make me feel lovely indeed.

And on that note: yes it’s going to be a long shower. Screw this four-minute shower business. Even when I was a daily bather that didn’t really move me (compare Australia’s water consumption for showers with its water consumption for coal mining etc…) and now that showers are a luxury for me, I uncompromisingly reject any move towards bathers’ austerity.

Much as the guides predict, my hair has suffered somewhat. It’s perpetually greasy, combined with dust, soot, and who knows what more. The advantage to this is that it stays out of my eyes quite well (it has “hold,” a stylist would say). The biggest disadvantage is that I might turn into a white guy with dreadlocks purely by accident. I’m not sure I’m ready for that.