Occupying London

Post-Crash Resistance and the Limits of Possibility

Samuel Burgum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351966610
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Just because there has been a crisis does not necessarily mean there is going to be a change. And yet why, exactly, did nothing change in the face of global resistances and movements which followed the financial meltdown of 2007/8? Based on ethnographic research with the Occupy movement in London – as a case study of one post-crash attempt to bring alternatives about – this book argues that change was ultimately foreclosed by widespread 'common sense' limitations of what was considered possible after the crash.

Offering a critically constructive analysis of the Occupy movement in London and incorporating both activist praise and self-criticism of their movement, Occupying London discusses both the political potential suggested by the occupation of space and the slogan 'we are the 99%', as well as the problematic extension of post-crash normativity into the movement through issues of organisation, repetitions of wider norms, and an inadvertent acceptance of wider distributions of possibility. Such positives and negatives are shown to have played out in a wide-range of arenas: from the occupation of space itself, through attempts to organise collective appearance and voice, as well as 'authentic' constructions of resistance and 'cynical' framings of power.

The author's intention is to provoke thought on behalf of any 'half-fascinated, half-devastated witnesses' of the financial crash and the political disappointments which followed. It is argued that such movements possess the potential to bring about progressive change, but only if they intervene into wider distributions of 'common sense' by embracing collective symbolic efficiency and avoiding binary framings of 'authentic' resistance vs. 'hidden' power.

1 What is our one demand?

By way of a literature review, this chapter will establish a baseline and theoretical background for the discussions which follow, building a position on the complexities of contemporary power and resistance by focusing on a number of key theorists who do not always fit comfortably alongside one another. However, while they may approach the problem from different angles – using different traditions and presuppositions – I intend to play them off against one another in order to establish themes and concepts which will be developed throughout the book: authority, collective organisation, and aesthetics. Moreover, while Foucault, Butler, Brown, Žižek, Badiou, Dean, and Rancière may differ in their philosophical pedigrees, they nevertheless share a common and overlapping interest in understanding the counterintuitive mechanisms of power and resistance in the context of (post-)modern capitalism. It is this common focus which has led me to mix their contributions despite the in-fighting that exists between their followers; for instance, we might highlight the rifts between post-structuralists and Marxists, which in the case of these specific theorists have usually taken the form of mistaken accusations of Foucault himself being a neoliberal (e.g. Zamora 2014) and post-structuralists (among many others) unfairly dismissing Žižek as a charlatan or a facetious clown (Chomsky 2016; see also Burgum 2014).

We will begin with Foucault, outlining his observations of the way in which power began to operate differently under modernity, changing into something decentralised, non-concentrated, and rarely wholly ‘possessed’ by a group or sovereign individual. If power ever did seem to be centralised (e.g. in the nation state), he argues, this is in fact an outcome of wider distributions and relations of power, rather than the starting point from which all coercion emanates. For Foucault, modern power plays out via societal norms which can be simultaneously a matter of knowledge and a mode of coercion (a ‘norm’ being both ‘a statistical derivation and a standard to which people are subjected’ (Elden 2017: 28). Understandings of the ‘normal’ are shared and asserted in common, making this a capillary power which is affirmed by historical discourses and hierarchies of expertise. Thus, power is not something that simply oppresses from above and maintains that oppression through hiding its truth or perpetuating false consciousness; instead, it is something that becomes internalised and perpetuated by the individuals and populations subjected to it. Rather than theorising power as radiating from a central position, therefore, Foucault implores us to ‘cut off the head of the king’ in political thought and analysis (1998: 88–9) in order to break with understandings of power as something acting upon us and towards seeing it as something which can be exercised and extended by those subjected to it. This has important implications for the way in which we frame resistance. Rather than seeing protest as something which needs to be autonomous and ‘outside of power’ in order to be authentic – or that takes aim at an all-powerful central point which is, by definition, untouchable – I will argue that movements like Occupy need to assert their own authority in order to make their voices heard and appearances seen.

We will then move onto problematising contemporary resistance further by thinking about what such opposition requires in practice (something which, as Brown (2015) points out, Foucault never outlines explicitly). Using Žižek’s ideas about the counterintuitive operations of identity and culture in postmodern capitalism – which, following Jameson (1992), he also refers to as ‘cultural capitalism’ or ‘late capitalism’ – I will outline what he has called a ‘decline in symbolic efficiency’ in contemporary society. This decline, encouraged by the flexibility and injunction to enjoy under consumer capitalism, as well as the notion of ‘freedom’ being individualised under (neo)liberalism, has had the effect of undermining the authority and desire for collective organisation. For Žižek, this problem is often overlooked in left-wing theory, praxis, and strategy, which has tended to champion values such as individual liberty, pluralism, and libertarianism at the expense of collective organisation and symbolic efficiency, and Occupy (in) London (as I will demonstrate) often attempted to dismiss and avoid any attempt at collective discipline for fear that it would prove oppressive and exclusive. Yet, as pointed out by many within the movement itself, this approach problematically extended wider norms of individualism and fluidity while undermining the movement’s appearance and resistance. I will therefore use Dean (2012) and Badiou (2012) in particular to extend these ideas and make an argument for the importance of collective organisation and symbolic efficiency within the context of postmodern capitalism.

Finally, Rancière will push us further by asserting that this interplay between power and resistance is ultimately expressed materially and aesthetically, and this takes on especial importance when we are dealing with Occupy-type urban movements. On the one hand, appearing to agree with Foucault, Rancière perceives resistance as policed and limited by a normative (common-sense) distribution of what should (or should not) be heard or seen as legitimate. However, on the other hand, his turn towards aesthetics also makes Žižek’s plea for symbolic efficiency and Badiou’s argument for disciplined organisation even more crucial. Because it is the tendency of (what he calls) ‘the police order’ to materially and structurally dismiss and deny the appearance of resistance, this dismissal and denial becomes easier if that which is being labelled as ‘disorganised non-sense’ actually resembles this label. Rancière builds on this idea by providing a persuasive outline for what a resistive politics should involve, provocatively aligning this with ‘democracy’ and thinking what it means to make ‘non-sense’ appear against its designation as such.

In sum, Foucault first gives us an unrivalled account of power and resistance under modernity as two sides of the same normative distribution. Brown, Žižek, Dean, and Badiou then allow us to probe further the consequences of Foucault’s insight further in order to think about the counterintuitive nature of this relationship under postmodern capitalism, as well as what this means for collective organisation. Finally, Rancière then enables us to consider the aesthetic and material practice of democratic resistance under such conditions of normative and decentralised power, pushing us to think about resisting with authority those policing forces that seek to dismiss and deny the appearance of alternatives, as well as not getting too carried away and insisting that we recognise where foreclosures are taking place too. This chapter will take a path between these thinkers, overlooking many contradictions between their thinking in order to allow their interaction to create a framework that incorporates slightly different elements of post-crash power and resistance. This approach therefore implies a synergy between Foucault’s structures of normative power, Žižek’s ideological symbolic order, and Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, treating these concepts as interchangeable in a move that readers from these camps might find distasteful (at best) or illogical (at worst). However, I maintain that all three capture something about the nature of power after the financial crash, helping us to ask the right questions about how and why political alternatives were foreclosed, as well as to identify the strengths and limitations of movements like Occupy (in) London.

Foucault, power and resistance

Having been inspired by the student protests and civil resistance against the Habib Bourguiba dictatorship in March 1968, as well as changes which had occurred in France after the protests of May 1968 (which took place while he was in Tunisia), Foucault returned to Paris in 1969 and adjusted his research focus ‘from the political stakes of knowledge to the workings of power’ (Elden 2017: 1). His aim was to deconstruct and decentralise the way in which we had become accustomed to understanding power by genealogically tracing and unsettling its development through modern history. It was Foucault’s contention that, contrary to popular opinion and political theory which tended to understand power solely as sovereign – i.e. a top-down, centralised, and negative force that acted through decrees and threats of punishment – modernity had seen the development of types of power which acted through a normative ‘art of distribution’ and that could either discipline via ‘the distribution of individuals in space’ (1991: 141) or control populations through distributions of knowledge and security. In other words, these new forms of power were acting through common sense, what is considered to be ‘normal’. This can operate either at the individual or collective level, because ‘the norm is something that can be applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularise’ (ibid. 2003: 253).

In contrast to the sovereign power of a monarch, Foucault was therefore identifying ‘new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalisation, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus’ (1991: 89; emphasis added). As he then went on to demonstrate throughout his work in the 1970s – such as Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, as well as the recently published College de France lectures – this was a power that operated in ways that could not be reduced to trans-historical economic class war (as in Marx and Engels 2002) nor simply to a sovereign authority supported by charisma, tradition, bureaucracy, and a ‘monopoly on the legitimate means of violence’ (as in Weber (2003). Instead, modern power was operating as an art of distribution, through norms that were being developed and perpetuated via historical discourses and the institutions which embodied them.

First, at the individual level, Foucault argues that this new power disciplines subjects through a ‘specification of place’ (1991: 141). He saw such disciplinary power being adopted by those institutions which were necessary for the development of modern capitalism – law, medicine, science, knowledge, reason – before becoming dispersed beyond those institutions and into wider society as organising norms. By coercing subjects through both surveillance (a general gaze which is internalised by those subjected to it) and normalising sanctions, this power created a ‘perpetual penalty that traverses all points and controls every instant in the disciplinary institutions … [it] compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes … in a word, it normalises’ (Elden 2017: 150). In any given context, then, an individual could now be thought of as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ – included or excluded, in place or out of place – and coerced accordingly. Such a disciplinary distribution is then supported by the creation of hierarchy and value:

Organising ‘cells’, ‘places’ and ‘ranks’, the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical … it is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation: they carve out individual segments and establish operational links; they mark places and indicate values; they guarantee the obedience of individuals, but also a better economy of time and gesture … they are mixed spaces: real because they govern the disposition of buildings, rooms, furniture, but also ideal, because they are projected over this arrangement of characterisation, assessment, hierarchies.

(Foucault 1991: 148; emphasis added)

The emphasis on space here – as well as the idea that design and architecture can ‘govern the dispositions’ of spaces – will be picked up in the section on Rancière below (as well as in the next chapter). But, for now, suffice to point out that this type of disciplinary power was seen by Foucault as following the example of the botanical sciences which were being developed under modernity, fixing and categorising positions, marking places and indicating values, developing hierarchies and operational links. In other words, the individual is being controlled here, because they are on the receiving end of wider understandings of a ‘normative order’ in which they ‘carve out their place’. This is an order, therefore, that is internalised by those subjected to it, and that ‘exists, is reproduced, only insofar as subjects recognise themselves in it and, via repeated performative gestures, again and again assume their places in it’ (Žižek 2008a: 312).

Second, at the collective level, Foucault argues that this new normative power not only disciplines, but regularises and controls populations, on the grounds that it is necessary to protect life (even if this means killing or letting people die in the name of that protection). Thus, norms of security are maintained through institutions that survey, prescribe, assess, judge, decide, and divide between the normal and abnormal, internal and external (think about the algorithms now deployed at borders in order to ‘sort out’ potential threats to life within the nation; see Amoore 2013). Where collective control ends and individual discipline starts is unclear, but Foucault is explicit that one type of power does not simply replace another, but compliments it (2003: 240), creating an art of distribution which is internalised by those individuals and populations subjected to it. Modern normative power is therefore positive (i.e. constitutive) in character, and is repeated through everyday actions, identities, voices and appearances, as well as every appeal to something as being normal, truthful or sensible. The point is that power is not simply a nefarious, negative, oppressive force from above, because it can discipline, coerce, regularise and control through distributions being held in common. More than censoring, excluding, or repressing, Foucault’s ‘shift is away from a power that binds, dazzles and subjugates’ (Venn 2007: 113) and towards a power that operates through the very ‘processes of subject formation that constitute (or enable the self-constitution of) autonomous subjects’ (Blencowe 2010: 123). Or in Foucault’s words:

Power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression … if on the contrary power is strong, this is because, as we are beginning to realise, it produces affects at the level of desire – and also at the level of knowledge. Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it.

(1980: 59)

Normative power is not a matter of violence or ignorance (as in sovereign power), but is an art of distribution that operates via ‘a grid of intelligibility of the social order’ (Foucault 1998: 93). It disciplines, regularises and controls, coercing through shared norms, meanings, attitudes, values, desires, knowledges, truths, designations, and possibilities in everyday life, internalised through notions of ‘common sense’.

But if power is so widespread and integrated into everyday actions, knowledge, and meaning, then what about resistance? Foucault concludes that, if power is a normative art of distribution, then there can be ‘no outside’ (1991: 301) to its influence, elaborating in a well-worn passage from The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, that ‘where there is power there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power’ (1998: 95). This is in sharp contrast to common understandings of power and resistance as an oppositional binary, with power seen as only acting negatively to prevent resistance. While many participants in Occupy (in) London, for instance, were very critical about the way in which the movement framed their resistance, there was certainly a general tendency to treat power in this way: as emanating from a single, central, top-down position (be that the state, international organisations, ‘the 1%’, or global conspiracy networks; see Chapter 6). The consequence of this was that resistance was seen to be something that needed to find an autonomous space from which to operate, somewhere authentic which was immune from the influence of power’s corrupting influence, so that the movement could ‘take the power back’ from ‘the powers that be’. Positioning themselves as aligned with ‘the 99%’ – who they saw as the powerless, rising up to fight for democratic freedom and socio-economic justice – power became defined as something they did not possess, something out of reach and untouchable. Power became something that was acting upon and against the movement, that ‘we’ (the weak and marginal) were now attempting to take from ‘them’ (the powerful).

And yet the obvious problem with Foucault’s mingling of power and resistance is that this appears to leave little opportunity or possibility for resistance. If power is ‘manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated’ (Foucault 1991: 141), then what chance is there to overcome and change this domination? Many theorists, including Žižek, have criticized Foucault on precisely this point. While at first agreeing that ‘power and resistance are effectively caught in a deadly mutual embrace … resistance to power are generated by the very matrix they seem to oppose’ (Žižek 2008a: 298), Žižek nevertheless dismisses Foucault for ‘remaining uncomfortably trapped within this cycle’ and ignoring ‘the dialectical path which would allow him to break out of the vicious cycle of power and resistance as an effect which can outgrow its cause and overturn it’ (Armstrong 2008: 20).

I would argue, however, that this is a misreading of Foucault’s position, which has most likely come about because of his failure to give an explicit and elaborated view on what effective resistance might look like under this new form of power (as his friend and colleague Giles Deleuze suggested, this lack of an outline may be down to Foucault’s main inquiry being one of problematising power through historical research, rather than elaborating on the consequences for present resistance, which he was more inclined to offer in interviews and lectures (see Elden 2017: 6). Elaborating in a later interview, and no doubt in answer to such criticism, Foucault explained that ‘to say one can never be “outside” power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what’ (1980: 142) and that he was ‘simply saying: as soon as there is power relation, there is a possibility of resistance … we are never trapped by power, we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy’ (ibid. 1989: 153). In other words, Foucault’s response to decentralised power is decentralised resistance:

Points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances … it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible.

(1998: 96)

Judith Butler can help us to understand this position further. On the one hand, she argues, normative power can be ‘oppressive when it requires the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that opposition – that is, take for granted the speaking subject’s own impossibility of unintelligibility’ (2006: 157). Because power operates through normative positions and distributions of what counts as meaningful speech, voice, and identity, this means that opportunities for discipline, control, and foreclosure are multiplied, as we rely on this distribution to make ourselves visible, audible, and identifiable. Thus, problems begin to arise when ‘we think we have found a point of opposition to domination [but] then realise that we have unwittingly enforced the power of domination through our participation in its opposition’ (ibid. 2000: 28). And yet, on the other hand, we might also consider methods of resistance that begin from within this distribution – ‘reverse discourses’ (Foucault 1998: 101) or instances of détournem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude
• Preface
• Introduction: Now is the winter of our discount tents!
• 1. What is our one demand?
• 2. Whose streets? Our streets!
• 3. We are the 99%
• 4. This is what democracy looks like
• 5. They owe us
• Conclusion: This is not a protest, it‘s a process
• Interviewee demographics
• Bibliography
• Index