The autonomous life?

Paradoxes of hierarchy and authority in the squatters movement in Amsterdam

Nazima Kadir

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784998004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Anarchism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Autonomous Life? is an ethnography of the squatters' movement in Amsterdam written by an anthropologist who lived and worked in a squatters' community for over three years. During that time she resided as a squatter in four different houses, worked on two successful anti-gentrification campaigns, was evicted from two houses and jailed once. With this unique perspective, Kadir systematically examines the contradiction between what people say and what they practice in a highly ideological radicalleftcommunity. The squatters' movement defines itself primarily as anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, and yet is perpetually plagued by the contradiction between this public disavowal and the maintenance of hierarchy and authority within the movement. This study analyses how this contradiction is then reproduced in different micro-social interactions, examining the methods by which people negotiate minute details of their daily lives as squatter activists in the face of a fun house mirror of ideological expectations reflecting values from within the squatter community, that, in turn, often refract mainstream, middle-class norms.Using a unique critical perspective informed by gender and subaltern studies, this study contributes to social movements literature through a meticulous analysis of the production of power and hierarchy in a social movement subculture.

1

Squatter capital

Excerpt from interviews:

Frederick: In the beginning it’s restricting [not being Dutch]. It’s hard to say where it comes from but in general, new people have to prove themselves in the activist community, I mean, you don’t get a place like this, you know, it’s not for free. When you want to come into a certain group, you need to do stuff for this group that the rest appreciate. It depends on which collective you are working with. Just being there also for a long time and showing that you are constantly interested and that you are willing to do the shittiest jobs in the beginning and then starting to do more pro-active organizing projects by yourself, or whatever. You need to come in and that takes time and it is certainly restricting if you are a foreigner, not knowing a lot of things, not knowing a lot of codes. Not understanding how people communicate culturally cause it’s sure, another culture, but there is a big difference between activist culture where I’m from and the activist culture here, which is not the same as the normal culture or the hegemonic culture or whatever you want to call it.

Dirk: The second time I ran away [at age sixteen], I went to Den Haag where there was a guy from my village who had been squatting there since he was fourteen. I thought, I am young, can I live here? Which is not how it works, of course. It’s not how it works. Of course people give you shelter for a while but that’s not the same as just joining living groups. It’s not that easy. So they advised me to go to Amsterdam to get my act together.

Despite their differences in class, education, and their structural locations in the world, both of these squatters agree that one must prove oneself to be accepted in an activist community and that activist culture has its own set of standards that are difficult to understand and fulfill at first glance. Frederick, employed as a strategic planner in an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), came to Holland from Denmark in his early twenties to study intellectual history, bringing with him a background in radical left activism in Copenhagen. Dirk, who works for an organic produce distribution company, grew up in a deeply religious, conservative, Catholic family in a village in the south of the Netherlands, and ran away from home as a teenager to find himself squatting in Amsterdam. While Frederick clearly articulates what he perceives as the hidden codes and expectations of activist culture, Dirk refers to the same set of hidden codes by emphasizing, “it’s not how it works … it’s not that easy,” and that he had to get his “act together” before he could be accepted as a member of a squatters’ community.

What does it mean to prove oneself as a “real” or authentic squatter? What are the practices, conventions, and actions that constitute this fragile authenticity? Authenticity is complicated and fraught because it is a double process of inhabiting a location, whether that is a claimed and performed identity or a seemingly natural “habitus,” while simultaneously being recognized by others as authentic. Thus, the process of being named as authentic is constantly in flux because it depends on the actors involved: those who are or consider themselves authentic and those who then recognize (or do not) that authenticity. I argue that the act of living in a squat is not enough to be recognized as an authentic squatter. Authenticity is, rather, a status that one achieves through a lengthy process of practices, actions, and lifestyle performances that must then be evaluated by the squatters movement as authentic.

Achieving the status of authentic squatter requires, first, the ability to demonstrate a complicated mix of functional skills and activist performances with a sense of naturalness and ease – which I term squatter capital.

The second characteristic of authenticity is how a squatter defines themselves in hostile opposition, to a series of imagined Others: from the most external, such as the police, to internal squatter communities within the movement. Activist squatters share animosity towards various groups of imagined Others who are part of “the Mainstream” and perform a stance of hostility, which alters in intensity depending on whom this aggression is waged against. However, activist squatters feel restricted and are unable to display hostility during interactions with particular groups classified as “neighbors,” immigrants, and undocumented people. When interacting with these groups, squatters tend to feel uncomfortable because they are excessively authentic. As a result, squatters feel challenged in their oppositional identities by becoming aware of their privileges. This sense of restriction and paralysis results in moments of rupture. I will further explain this dynamic in the last part of the chapter.

To help analyze how squatters negotiate authenticity, I will use the work of three scholars, Pierre Bourdieu, Sarah Thornton, and Howard Becker. According to Bourdieu (1984), class is not merely an economic phenomenon, but one that is exhibited culturally and socially through taste and “habitus.”

Habitus is a set of subtle micro-behaviors that derive from a common historically produced set of dispositions of a particular social or ethnic group. It is the result of one’s family, class position, status, education, race/ethnicity, gender, and ideology (Behler, n.d). Habitus includes how one stands, moves, dresses, eats, and smiles – micro-behaviors that communicate one’s history and status. Hence, class and social position are reproduced through subtle, unconscious recognitions of affinity that are demonstrated through habitus and taste.

This understanding of habitus is essential to how Bourdieu distinguishes between various forms of “capital,” looking beyond monetary wealth to larger cultural and social articulations of class and social position. He classifies economic capital as one’s amount of financial wealth. Cultural capital refers to the amount of cultural and educational knowledge demonstrated through habitus and taste that is often associated with wealth without requiring actual finances. Finally, social capital is the strength of one’s social networks.

In the book of essays, The Field of Cultural Production (1993), Bourdieu builds upon these formulations of capital to discuss spaces in social life that have alternative definitions of capital that may superficially reject those valued in the Mainstream but actually refract them. Using the art world as an example to elucidate this process of refraction, in the essay, “The Production of Belief,” Bourdieu discusses how the financial success of an artistic product, which has value in capitalist social worlds, is inverted in the art world whereby commercial success actually has a lower status than more subtle, exclusive means of valorization among those in certain elite sections of the art world. For those within these alternative milieus, the values within the subculture dominate and those values considered external are rejected. Thus, there is a subtle process of mastery and rejection in which one understands the values of the Mainstream, masters them, and then rejects them to both conform to and reify the values of the alternative milieu (Bourdieu and Johnson 1993).

To complement Bourdieu’s more theoretical work, Howard Becker’s study of jazz musicians (1963) and Sarah Thornton’s study of ravers in the UK (1996) use ethnography to describe the social worlds of subcultures, their particular values, the process of hierarchical stratification within subcultures, and how subcultural participants define themselves oppositionally in relation to others within their social worlds. Heavily influenced by Bourdieu, Thornton appropriates the term “capital” and modifies it to apply to social worlds within subcultures:

Subcultural capital would seem to be a currency which correlates with and legitimizes unequal statuses … Subcultural capital is the linchpin of an alternative hierarchy in which the axes of age, gender, sexuality, and race are all employed in order to keep the determinations of class, income and occupation at bay. (Thornton, 1996: 104–5)

Thornton critiques how the literature of subcultural studies often focuses on how people in subcultures identify themselves in relation to an overwhelming Other that they call “the Mainstream.” First, she states that researchers mirror subcultural participants’ characterization of themselves and their worlds uncritically. Second, researchers often reveal a bias through their representations. That is, researchers often reify subcultural participants as resistant and avant garde versus an imagined Mainstream that both researchers and subcultural informants regard as banal and conformist.

She further charges that such classifications have a hidden classed and gendered disdain, since many of the subjects of subcultural research tend to be articulate middle-class men, hiding behind a classless subcultural guise. In Thornton’s research of ravers in the UK in the 1990s, clubbers, who considered themselves heterogeneous and difficult to stereotype, uniformly classified and disdained the “Tracys and Stacys dancing around the handbag;” that is, an imagined Mainstream female Other who attended dance clubs that were not considered as hip and exclusive as the carefully marketed rave parties that ravers proudly attended.

In this instance, the Mainstream Other is a denigrated working-class female. The handbag signifies a mature woman – “the symbol of the social and financial shackles of the housewife” who exemplifies, therefore the anti-youth who “do not enjoy the classless autonomy of “hip youth”” (Thornton, 1996: 101).

Thornton analyzes the codes behind the term “Tracy and Stacy dancing around their handbag,” to exemplify what she refers to as the “social logic of subcultural capital,” which reveals more about subcultural participants by who they define themselves against than how they define themselves.

Becker’s study of jazz musicians reveals similar insights. Jazz musicians seemed preoccupied by the decision to either play as a jazz musician or a commercial musician. Working as a commercial musician meant that one could earn a living but also signified losing the respect of one’s peers for “selling out.” Meanwhile, to work as a jazz musician demonstrated a musical conviction that exceeded material concerns. Yet, this option resulted in a hand-to-mouth living. Beyond the distinction between jazz and commercial musicians, musicians viewed the audience as the third Other. They tended to feel contemptuous of their audiences who, in their eyes, lacked sufficient and knowledgeable appreciation for their music.

Furthermore, the musicians tended to feel disempowered by the audiences because of their request for music that the musicians considered commercial and vapid. Hence, the jazz musicians divided their social world twice: first, between musicians and the external world of the “squares” – all those who lacked musical knowledge; and second, the distinction continued within the intimate world between commercial and jazz musicians.

Using these ethnographic examples, Thornton and Becker demonstrate that the participants’ way of classifying their particular Others reveals more about themselves than about the people who they imagine. The contempt that Becker’s jazz musicians have for the “squares” reveals the squares’ power over the musicians. The musicians desire recognition for their talent and their hard work, yet despise the audiences precisely for acknowledging these qualities. The anguish with which Becker’s musicians contemplate going commercial versus continuing with playing jazz provides a similar model for how squatters negotiate internal identities within the movement, as I shall argue. Equally, Thornton emphasizes that clubbers identify themselves in a negative relationship to the Mainstream; “Interestingly, the social logic of subcultural capital reveals itself most clearly by what it dislikes and by what it emphatically isn’t” (Thornton, 1996: 105). In Art Worlds, Howard Becker similarly notes that the best way to find out information about conventions and practices that are considered normal is through the complaints of informants:

Fieldworkers know that complaints are especially good data about organizational activity. Why? Because organizations consist of … regularized ways of interacting, ways known to everyone taking part as the way things are done. Participants take these ways for granted … and are upset when others do not behave as expected. And they complain, their complaints making clear what had been taken for granted as “the way things are done here,” which is, after all, what a sociologist wants to know. (Becker, 2008: xv)

In the squatters movement, I found that squatters rarely articulately illustrated who and what the authentic and ideal squatter was. Instead, by labeling someone as “not a real squatter,” they easily articulated what they disliked and disrespected about others in their community. By participating in countless conversations and listening to gossip in which squatters mainly talked negatively about each other, I acquired a sense of what kind of actions activist squatters valued and what types of skills they respected. In addition to listening, long-term participant observation that documented the discrepancy between how squatters represented themselves versus how they practiced their lives forms the basis of the composition of the ideal of the authentic squatter. This chapter relates what informants actually do, not what they claim to do, and describes how their practices reveal the values of the movement in contrast to how the movement represents these values.

I appropriate Thornton’s term, “subcultural capital,” and alter it to “squatter capital.” In Thornton’s definition, subcultural capital refers to ephemeral qualities such as hipness, which is carefully manufactured through a strategically marketed exclusivity in the dance worlds she describes. I do not deny the hugely subcultural stylistic elements of squatter capital. Many squatters dress alike, listen to similar music, and hold an ideal of “anti-consumption” while consuming identically to other squatters. However, I prefer to emphasize the non-leisure aspects of squatter capital when describing its building blocks.

Squatter capital comprises a combination of complicated practical skills that are discursively naturalized as “easy” but are not discussed openly, as well as performances of conviction through confrontations in political actions. These skills are valued in the squatters movement as different indicators of prestige and competence. After presenting a composite of the ideal squatter and the skills which are valued in this community, I explore authenticity among squatters as an ideal, negotiated in relation to external and internal Others. I further argue that inhabiting the ideal of the authentic squatter is defined more by what one is not rather than what one is. I locate the community of activist squatters where I conducted my fieldwork in relation to their internal and external imagined Others and to how they perform their identity primarily through hostility. In the last section of this chapter, I consider moments when this fragile authenticity is ruptured during interactions with “neighbors,” immigrants, and undocumented people both within and outside the squatters movement.

Squatter capital

Squatting a house

The ideal of a good squatter is someone who is well organized, responsible, trustworthy, committed, critical, outspoken, articulate. They should confront state authorities and demonstrate a willingness to fight violently if necessary against the state, property owners, and those considered political adversaries such as fascists. The first action that reveals if someone is a “good squatter” is if they have successfully squatted a house. Such an act comprises a number of complicated and challenging tasks.

A squatter should have research, communication, and observation skills. First, the squatter has to thoroughly research an empty space, its history, and status bureaucratically, compiling information from the space’s neighbors, as well as watching the house to check signs of habitability. In addition to searching for information on the internet, a squatter should call various municipal agencies about the site. In terms of communication skills, the squatter should feel comfortable approaching strangers and asking them deceptively about their neighbors’ house without revealing clues that they intend to squat it. With regards to observation, a squatter should diligently keep track of a certain location and consistently check if it’s inhabited over a long period of time.

Once the kraakspreekuur ¹ that the squatter has consulted with has determined if the house has been empty for a year or longer, then the squatter has to show organizational skills. They should assemble a number of elements. First, a “squatting kit” of a table, a chair, and a bed to establish occupancy – by searching throughout the city’s bulk trash nights for the items. Second, barricading material, by collecting items from squats, warehouses, and construction sites. Third, an attorney for the action – by obtaining recommendations from other squatters for which attorney to use and then assertively communicating with this attorney to retain their services....