Trans-Scripts 3 (2013)
Technologies of Direct Democracy
Nicholas Mirzoeff *
In November 2010, the last sentence I wrote in the manuscript of what became The
Right to Look (published a year later) was, “In short, the choice is between continuing
to move on and authorizing authority or claiming that there is something to see and
democratizing democracy.” Two months later the Arab Spring began in North
Africa, which I had concentrated on as the boundary between the global North and
global South, specifically in the Algerian revolution. I argued that this revolution was
not over but in suspension. Since January 2011, it has once again been active. When
the force of this transformation reached the US in September 2011, it was set up a
mile and a half from my house on a non-descript stretch of urban “park” called
Zuccotti Park. In the fifteen months since that time, we have intensified the
possibilities for what I called in my book countervisuality, the resistances to the ways in
which authority claims to visualize history as it happens and derive its legitimacy
from doing so. We are now able not only to say that another world is possible, which
was always logically true, but what it might look like and how we need to work to get
there. Our tools are technologies of direct democracy.
What is a technology of direct democracy? It is something that makes direct
democracy. We do not yet fully know what that is but it has to invent itself and its
technologies. It is not about machines but about how people are extended towards
one another and learn to recognize themselves in each other. In short, my
proposition is that if we combine militant research with the history of the
anonymous and direct action, we form a network of resistance. As these networks
have been active since 2011 in the US, we are learning what works and what does not
and how to move the movement.
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* Nicholas Mirzoeff is a Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication
at New York University. His works include The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality
(2011), An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999 first edition, 2009 second edition), Seinfeld: A
Critical Study of the Series (2007), Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture
(2005), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (2001), and The Visual Culture
Reader (1998 first edition, 2002 second edition).
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The History of the Anonymous
On a climate-changing rainy day in August 2011, I stood on a Spanish cliff top in the
city of Port Bou by the “Passages” memorial to Walter Benjamin, designed by Dani
Karavan. It is located just outside the cemetery where Benjamin was buried in 1940.
It was not far to Barcelona with its neighborhood assemblies that were about to
spawn a cousin on Wall Street. Half a day on the train to Madrid and the indignados.
You felt a sense of change. The piece is a metal hood over a flight of steps leading
down to the sea, enclosed by long sheets of steel. At the bottom is a sheet of glass.
The result is that the memorial projects your image as you stand there onto the sea
beneath the cliffs. For a long time, it was hard to see oneself against the imagined
background of European fascism, the imperative to never forget overwriting all
other presents and futures, turning the projection into a spectre, erased on the always
moving waters below.
Since the Arab Spring, we have become visible to ourselves through the glass, on
which is written Benjamin’s aphorism from On the Concept of History (1940):
It is more difficult to honor the memory of the anonymous than it is to honor the
memory of the famous, the celebrated, not excluding poets and thinkers. The
historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous.
Who are the anonymous? From the cliffs, you look out to sea, southwest, towards
Tunisia, where a fruit-seller named Mohammed Bou’azizi immolated himself into
history as the person in whose name the Tunisian revolution of 2011 was enacted.
Thus Foucault’s concept of history of the present in whose name so much academic
work has been carried out can be seen to require two steps. First, the construction of
a present in which the anonymous can be given a name. Since 2011 we have found
some new names for the anonymous such as the indignados or the 99%. To construct
the anonymous as a subject that has a name is to make a democracy. So the second
part is the elaboration of a history within which to say that name and for it to
resonate with pasts, presents and possible futures. Making that history is done by
direct action from the reclaiming of public space to the reclaiming of obscured
histories and the possibility of living differently.
Militant Research
Benjamin and Foucault wrote as activists in the aftermath of disasters. Benjamin was
part of the long disaster of European fascism, staying in Paris until it was too late to
escape. After the collapse of 1968, Foucault worked with the Groupe Information
Prison, visiting institutions and doing interviews with inmates that led directly to
Discipline and Punish. For forty years we worked in these shadows. When neo260
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liberalism eroded the space of democratic action, we came to concentrate, perhaps
too much, on representation and cultural politics. People calling themselves scholars
prefer disinterested contemplation to being an actor. The right to look is always
interested, always engaged, always inventing the other and being invented by her.
After 2008, we needed our own recovery in our own time, our own language to
recover from the financial disaster. The camp at Zuccotti Park was first a disaster
response: food, clothing, medical care and mutual aid were the first projects. It
embodied the Zapatista concept caminar preguntando: walking while asking questions.
The tactic became first: placing your body in space, while thinking. It has now
become: doing while thinking.
This is the arrival in the North of the militant research practices already
underway in the South for over a decade. For the Buenos Aires-based Colectivo
Situaciones, militant research “is the production of (an) encounter(s) without
subject(s), or, if you prefer, of an encounter that produces subjects. …[It] refers to
experimentation.” The feminist group Precarias a la Deriva say it is “a desire for
common ground when the common ground is shattered.” It is the sense that
everyday life is the subject to be produced when every day there is an emergency and
nothing about the conditions of such an existence seem simply quotidian or banal
any more. In these circumstances, argue Colectivo, “We think that the labor of
research militancy is linked to the construction of a new perception.” A
countervisuality. The right to look.
Direct Action
The protesting body that engages in this action makes democracy because it is not
known what democracy might be. All we have previously known is that it is the
autonomy of “the part that has no part,” to use Rancière’s formula. The movements
and encampments seek to prefigure a democracy that is not one of passive
representation. We make while moving, performing technologies of direct
democracy. Its primary technology is mutual aid. A movement that a year ago was all
about occupying public space as a shelter from disaster has become public in its
engagement with mutual aid in recovery from financial and climate disaster, which
are two sides of the same coin. These new actions have no center, no specific place
of occupation, but create a new geography of mutual aid, requiring its own network,
its own media and its own citizenship. The Invisible Committee, the French
collective that created The Coming Insurrection in 2009, suggest that “movements do
not spread by contamination,” but by “resonance” between radical moments, and
that is certainly what we have seen with the upsurge of popular resistance. Tahrir
resonated with Madrid, which resonated with Athens, which resonated with New
York. Countervisualities can be felt and explored once again. This moment of rupture
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may or may not last. It will not be extended from our studies and libraries, or our
humanities centers. If you want to see this change develop and extend, you have to
find a way to work with it.
Where can we do that now? Militant research is being published in the US by
Tidal: Occupy Theory Occupy Strategy. It is being practiced in communities across the
country and can be found in Strike Debt’s report: “Shouldering the Cost of Sandy,”
which describes how FEMA responds to disasters by offering loans. Direct
democracy has developed into a platform for the Indignados and their counterparts
across Europe: Debt cancellation. A living wage. Democracy by lot (the Athenian
model). New histories of the anonymous are being written all the time.
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Works Cited:
“Rolling Jubilee.” <RollingJubilee.org>.
“Strike Debt.” <StrikeDebt.org>.
Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. <Tidalmag.org>.
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