The Terms of Debate

In the past week I have engaged in my regular life of my PhD research, chatted with friends, read the news, marched on a student rally against the introduction of fees into higher education and visited occupy london a number of times.  One thing that seems to stand out above all is the ways in which things are understood, that is the frame, the context of all action.  In this blog I will reflect a little on a few of the ways in which the ‘terms of debate’ were key in these events.

Firstly within my own work, an EPSRC funded project which looks at the relationship between the physical and social environments in the suburbs the question of scale and representation is an important one.  At one extreme, and I’ll be crude here for the point of a short blog, we have the notion of embodied, relational, subjective human space and the other we have the decentred, ‘objective’ systemic abstract space.  The first is similar to Ingold’s -(see lines 2007) notion of habitation where place comes to be seen as a point of convergence of many paths, lifelines that create an energy around a node, the latter is equated with Ingold’s notion of Occupation whereby place is seen a static bounded place that people are in, making the paths between them utilitarian movements as opposed to place forming movements.  Much has been made of the relative merits of either angle but my point here is that both are ways of representing space that work in very different ways.  Abstract space is useful for maps of a large scale and larger analysis of areas, whereas human space is more useful for person centred analysis, local embodied knowledge.   My point here is that scale is not just choice of representation, it is a choice of knowledge and as such it is, in some sense political.  So the project tries to have both types of representation but in doing so it must recognise the political implication of the representation, what does each one do, how does it de-limit the terms of knowledge. 

In a very real way this goes beyond representation, it is in a sense directly influencing the ways in which people act.  On both a traditional OS street map and in a mental map of a street, the street is represented.  However the various capacities of that street are drawn upon in very different ways.  For example the street in abstract space is a traffic node, it is a point from A to B.  It is a route.  This was used to demark the route of the Student protest.  The route map will show, in the annals of history, the realisation of the democratic right to march.  However what it does not show is the ‘terms’ of the march, the bodily experience and the effectiveness of the movement through the streets, that is the human space.   

I was a little late for the march (shame on me) and decided to join it from the front by cycling down the route in the wrong direction.  As I did I was confronted with empty streets and with almost as many police officers that could fit into every side street gap, every overhead bridge, as possible.  It was quite frankly odd.  I was being watched from every angle and the route was very strictly barricaded.  A to B was the only option available by force.  This was directly Foucauldian, the way in which I used my body changed, I felt vulnerable and I felt disempowered, rightly or wrongly.  Further the march had been preceded by the sanctioning of the use of rubber bullets ‘if needed’ and the sending of letters to those who had been on marches before and had their names taken by police (not necessarily charged http://www.fitwatch.org.uk/2011/11/08/dont-be-intimidated-see-you-on-the-streets/).

Now I don’t want to get into my moral position but these events are of direct relevance to academic geographers and anthropologists.  Here we can see directly the managing of the bodies of both the florescent clad police officers, the students as well as the office workers (perhaps representative of the normative users of space?).  Bodies as vessels of force over the struggle to use space, the streets, to perform an action, to behave in a certain way which reflects the contestation – the disjuncture’s – of power, of body politics, of conceived notions of the ‘right to the city’.  It seemed as though the demonstrators posed a real threat to the normative use of space, that needed managing, the ‘terms of debate’ are directly spatial here. It is the street and its use.  Further is it the discourse around the street. 

A recent suggestion that public sector workers should only strike for 15 minutes to avoid disruption to the public was recently tabled (but only to the press) by Francis Maude a government minister.  It seems that the idea is that protests should not disrupt, they should be made and then listened too and this is democracy.  However in recent times I would suggest that this is the problem.  Such marches have in the last 30 years, with a weakening role of trade unions and the move towards a post-political age (where consensus based arrangements to technical problems such as climate change have replaced a politics of radical alterity) have been largely ignored or ineffective.  That is a politics of antagonism where a radically different arrangement of social relations is conceived of has been wiped away from the realm of possibility.  In this situation Zizek claims it is almost easier to imagine the appocaliptic end of the world than radical alterity.  Further activists such as Arundahati Roy have suugested that if non-violent protest is not listened too in an active way, if there seems to be no discourse then violent action is the recourse and, she states this is the position of the Maoist fighters in India.  This is a serious issue.

“If you’re an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.” Arundahati Roy

So at the end of a slow, crowded march that stopped frequently in cold weather behind thick lines of police the end point was reached, the police surrounded the marches and let them filter out slowly in different directions.  Most people did leave as memories at a 9 hour kettle on a windy Westminster bridge were still raw for many.  I was asked by a TV crew if I thought the march was a success.  My answer was it depends on how you judge success, it shows that people can get together and express a view, a point of concern, a united voice on a particular issue.  Will it change the issue, I don’t think so.  For me, the failure of the anti-war marches pre-iraq invasion have signed the end to the effectiveness of such things but I hold hope. 

So I made my way to St Pauls to re-energise, and there I was given more hope.  I was tired, this is essentially an embodied experience, the police had made it hard, the march was not carnivalesque, family orientated or an engaging with the police as they have been in the past, this does not encourage wider participation at all.  It de-limits the effectiveness of ‘your right’ I needed energy.  Fortunately I was given some by Rage Against the Machine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZul_mSFczs) guitarist Tom Morello who played some songs for a lucky crowd. 

This made me think about the occupy movements static-ness.  It does not move, it’s a place of flow in that I am there sometimes and not there at others but the camp stays as an ‘occupied’ part of the city.  A space of persistent demonstration where people come and talk, re-energise and form links (via livestream, through face to face meetings or through association) with others, the so called 99%.  What this shows for me is the way in which ‘the right to the city’ is constantly contested and the fights over it take many forms, they are embodied, they are spatial and in flux with the various configurations of relations between bodies, power and space. 

Lots of people I have been talking to have different ideas of the camp, some state that it needs particular demands, some say it is not ‘particularly constructive’, others sympathise.  For me this blog sums up the various positions that can be taken on the situation and as such I shall not repeat them here other than to surmise that the blog suggest three positions, greater regulation of current system, a true free market or no capitalism at all.  Whilst we all have opinions on the future there seems to be wide recognition of crisis. 

From the talks at the camp a number of ideas where put forward and here I want to relate them to geography and anthropology so we can see how our disiplines effect the ‘terms of debate’.  Professor Danny Miller, of UCL Anthropology, rejected the ideas that our society had become ‘to much’ of something or other and rather that it had become the wrong sort of thing.  Specifically he rejected the notions of ‘over commodification’ and that we had in some way become to materialistic and asserted that in many ways societies are materialistic.  That is they work through materials, he cited the love and affection in looking for a Christmas gift was part of the exchange, in this way we work through materials.  He positioned the problem rather with financial systems that work with money that is the property of the workers in the form of pensions and such.  These notions are best explained such writers as Gordon Clark, and Michel Lewis but Miller asked what is speculative capital based on and who controls this?  For Miller the focus on the materiality of the situation and the power involved should reside in these questions and less so in the link to some idea of a ‘commodity free society’ as his research suggests that commodities are far from the symbols of de-humanising greed but often the conduits of human relations such as love and care.  Miller also stated the need for material, concrete, real examples of best practice citing Norway as an example of a string economy with a string welfare state at the scale of level and companies such as John Lewis and Waitrose as worker inclusive capitalism and a smaller level.  For Miller these concrete examples show a material realisation of best practice and demands can take the form of regulation to encourage such forms of social relation. 

On the Saturday [12/11/2011] David Harvey gave talk to a sizable crowd.  His talk noted the success of the appropriation of the public space as being one that is truly public space, one that is political and rejects its privatised legal status.  This he said was the fundamentals of the matter.  The terms of debate here rest on questions that generally end in ‘for whom?’.  This is Private land ‘for whom?’, This is a Crisis ‘for whom?’, austerity ‘for whom?’.  Harvey drew links between the inequality of wealth with the inequality of political power quoting Mark Twain who said of the US “we have the best congress money can buy’.  He stated that we need to stay and demand, link ourselves globally to movements in the rest of the world citing Chile, amongst others as strong campaigns.  He linked the shadow of Pinochet, Regan and Thatcher as casting us into a neo-liberal economic trajectory that needs to be reversed as the globe reaches a saturation point of growth.  He suggested a radical imagining of a 0 growth economy and that the camp should reflect the fact that it values humanity, love and ‘the festival of life’ as its terms of debate not the %growth rate fixation. 

In conclusion the events of the last week has shown how society always has ‘terms for the debates’ about the system of social relations it conceives of as just, positive and legitimate and those that are not.  These terms range from the forms of representation of space and phenomena used in de-limiting debate to the performance of bodies and power, legal and social status of place and the configuration of space itself, amongst others.  So the fact that I marched down a street on a map does not show the bodily emotional experience of this on the day, the energy I felt and the politics of this.  This energy was taken by the slow, stop start, cattle like march but returned in full by Tom Morello.  The legal status of St Pauls land does not represent the value inactions it is involved with in wider society and so on. 

Danny Miller’s talk explained how the talk of growth and the finance sector set the terms of debate when really if we ask where are these things, how does it work through the materiality of the world situation and what is the politics for this, perhaps then we can start to understand what to take nad what to leave from capitalism. 

David Harvey showed how the ‘terms of debate’ must be set in a way that shows clearly and relevantly what you consider important.  With this it is clear that why Mr Cameron considers the occupy movement ‘not particularly constructive’ it is perhaps because it is not trying to construct the same thing he is trying to construct.  Further the terms of debate are spatial, they link people globally through the effects of economic policy and locally through the fight for the ‘right to the city’.

So for geographers and anthropologists, (I consider myself a bit of both) there are many ways the things we consider is related to the very real politics of the above events.  Events that are fundamentally about the ways in which we structure and understand social relations.  We have a role here in opening up the ways of thinking about, and being in space and the association of the politics of social relations that work through it.  In doing so we can also move beyond debates of which type form of representation should be used, and recognise abstract and human space, occupation and habitation as forms of understanding that draw upon particular political capacities of space for particular ends.  In doing so we can reflexively select our tools to build a truly ‘human space’.  

Value, Abstraction and Material.

Last night [26.10.2011] I made my way to St Pauls.  I felt it was important to show my support and be one of the numbers when I can.  I wish that I could spend more time there but like most of the 99% I have other commitments and lend my thankfulness to those who make the numbers in the occupation on our behalf.

I went specifically on this night to hear Doreen Massey talk, Massey a seminal professor of geography has written extensively on the idea of space, how space is used, experienced, contested and thereby, and relevantly in this setting political.  In her talk Massey outlines the ways in which the financial sector has grown in dominance over the last thirty years.  This, she explained really took off with the de-regulation of the stock market and increased privatisation of resources that occurred largely under a Thatcher government.  Since this time there has been both Labour and Conservative government yet both have overseen a political policy direction of this nature.  The road of privatisation and the influence of the financial sector now dominates all of the political life not only the UK but Europe, USA and most of the globe.

“The end of the socialist alternative, then, did not signify any renewal of democratic debate. Instead, it signified the reduction of democratic life to the management of local consequences of global economic necessity. The latter, in fact, was posited as a common condition which imposed the same solutions on both left and right. Consensus around these solutions became the supreme democratic value” (Rancière, 2004: 3–4).*

London is in many ways the centre of the migration of neoliberal ideology and policy into all walks of our life.  How is it that we have money for banks yet not schools, it is because the idea that one simply cannot fail now has become normal in the everyday policy making of those that call themselves politicians.  Massey states that politicians are scared of the financial sector; I’d say they are the financial sector or at least the representatives of an imagination that sees solutions and problems with which they occupy themselves as firmly located in the realm of managing neoliberal financial systems.  However I want not to rant on about the ‘inequality of it all’ but look to how we can start to move forward in all this and I think some of the clues came from what I saw at St Pauls last night.

Firstly Massey’s talk eloquently outlined the ways in which the material practices of everyday human existence have become abstract from the forces that condition such actions.  What do I mean, well simply put the speculation of financial markets on the trading of such things as the future price of coco that hasn’t even been grown yet seems very abstract to the point of ridiculousness.  It is almost impossible to actually trace such a financial trade to a material happening of some coco growing and a famer harvesting it (Although some try, see; followthethings.com).  However the effects of that trade are felt in very real ways through another abstraction that of value.

Value has many forms, economic, social, moral, cultural, emotional and so on.  What occurs through an economic transaction is in the economic sense the difference in value between the farmers work and price paid for the coco is the surplus and this is abstracted, extracted and traded ,this is financial profit.  However such an analysis alone largely ignores the other forms of value involved.  There is a moral value involved in the nature of the production, further there is an emotional cultural and social value to such things as attachments to land, job security, and small locally owned businesses.  These forms of value have been abstracted away from the material conditions of production so that the economic form is left.   This process of abstraction happens at such a scale that a London based bank worker, the shopper, the company manger, the cook have no way of understanding the complexity of the ways in which material processes flow from one form of abstraction to another.  How does labour translate to the commodity price, how does this feed into speculative trading and so on.

Ok so you’ve heard this before right?  The arguments are familiar to many now and I wish not to repeat them here but to suggest that perhaps this process of abstraction might suggest a way in which to move forward through a process of re-configuring the ways in which we conceive of the balance of the values involved.

At the St Pauls meeting I was approached by a member of the church who suggested that I (he meant the occupy movement) had made its point and that we should move on and further that I was inherently distrusting and disrespectful of the Dean of St Pauls.  There were a number of things going on here.  Firstly he had wrongly assumed I was the movement, that the movement was coherent and that I would somehow disseminate his opinion to the masses who thought like me.  However I was just one of many who just happened to walking past him at that time.  One of many people with an opinion on what to do about this or that specific situation (in this case about being outside St Pauls).  He was guilty of a moral and social abstraction here, he generalised, he sought a negative value, that of blocking a church and therefore limiting its capacity to develop economic value for the continuation of its aesthetic and moral value, and then defined me by it, (my opinions on the matter where never sought and are of little relevance to my point here).  This is key.  Just as he did here, we can take the abstraction of financial value and show that in its material reality such abstraction delimits the possibility of alternative action.  The farmer is at the mercy of economic value, such a privileging of tis form of value attaches no significance to other forms of value, such as quality of life.  This can be bought with the coins, which in the sense I understanding it here is a material transformation of the coco through a negation of value of that coco.  However these values and exchanges don’t line up, there is a disjuncture here, just as there is a disjuncture inherent in the idea that the progress of a booming financial sector will result in a more equal society evidence shows that we have been living in a increasingly divided country of rich and poor.  This has been felt specially, the north has felt the effects of a London centric financial based economy for years.  Graduates, whilst being educated nationally are most commonly employed in the South East.  Further recent policies have suggested that those unable to find work or afford local living conditions should move to a space they can afford.   However through material traces and reconfigurations it may be possible to highlight these disjuncture’s and further demand an opening of an imagination that seeks solutions outside of fixing a perceived minor malfunction of the neoliberal economic system, this is what governance is for.

However we have, as Massey states had an ‘invasion of the imagination’ in how to deal with such issues, the media and the politicians are now seeing only one way and that is the continuation of a neoliberal system, to tweak the machine, to fix the broken part (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw).  Yet such thinking abstracts the problem and fixes it away from the cause.  If such neoliberal systems abstract value in harmful and aggressive ways, we need to build a structure of social relations that means that the aggressive abstraction of any form of value (such as economic, or moral as in the case of my conversation/rant) does not impose and delimit the live of other forms of value.

Ok so what about the occupation.  Massey stated that “…the negotiation of space is an on-going social thing” and indeed St Pauls and the space around it has been radically transformed in the last two weeks.  The battle over it is more than legal or practical and any view of ‘legal right’ positions the law as a stable category, when it itself is an abstraction and fixing of morals that work for certain people in certain ways at certain times.  As Massey states “…we constitute space through our social relations…”.  The question is then not what sort of space do we want, but what form of social relations do we want and how does such spaces engender or delimit social relations.  The occupation has pulled on a different value that was always living in the realm of unmade potential in and around the city, the value of something else, of a different form of social relation, one that puts a value on the human experience of our economic systems on the ground.  This is very much an Occupation, it is taking a space and radically transforming what it is, what is done there and asserting a value that has long been ignored by the privileging of neoliberal systems of finance.

This is the material situation, the fight over this space is symbolic, and the noise of this space in its changes is heard all around the world.  The Occupation now tries to defend itself from abstractions of its image (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/25/occupy-london-tents-night), a undermining of its values and in doing so attempts to legitimatise its own value assertions.   The fight over space is in many ways the fighting of ideologies that manifest in material forms at all scales from the coco farm in South America to steeps St Pauls Cathedral via the stock exchange. The fight over this particular physical space outside St Pauls can be debated legally, economically morally not only taking opinions on how the space should be used but also creating the very space in itself.  As such we “create the space through our social relations”.  Further the sorts of spaces we have create us.

It is through the highlighting of the abstractions that we can start to re-open this invaded imagination, to carve spaces for new ways of doing things.  So how does this work on the ground.  Well the 99% all have different solutions; however most want a library, a school, a hospital.  Stating that we can’t have this without the banks is simply a privileging of one way of doing things over another.  This way is one that for social, ecological moral reasons cannot continue in its current form.  The occupy cause can seek out the material conditions of the privileging of the finance sector, the prominent ‘neoliberalism first’ ideas, at the local level manifest in the closed youth centre, the rise in student fees and so on.  Action can be taken, we needent wait for polotics to fall back into our way of thinking.  Write to your MP if you are unhappy, pester the newspaper, or if these things strike as petty drops in the ocean and in some way part of ‘the system’ then simply be radical.  Make alternative less radical, be demanding, force open the imagination and take what it is we need.  No longer can we see politics, finance, society, morals as separate things, they all work through the everyday materiality of all of us and as such we can re-configure the movement of value and the ways, in which we privilege one action over another to create a more equal future, equality upon which democracy depends.

The Labour Party’s crowning achievement is the death of politics. There’s nothing left to vote for (Noel Gallagher, Oasis rock star, The Independent 11 November 2006: 37).*

*Quotations taken from Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(3), 601-620.