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Not An Alternative Presentation: How Do Social Movements Communicate?
- 1. How do social movements communicate?
- 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5x1dI9iQt 0 The Revolution Within (Glenn Beck) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5x1dI9iQt0
- 4. Images of issue focused organizing
- 5. Map of the world with “Capitalism” written above On the map pin points marked by the word suffering
- 8. Image of Beck pointing at a map of world revolutions
- 9. [slideshow of images of Quetzalcoatl and the fall of Tenochtitlan]
- 10. [slideshow of images of Quetzalcoatl and the fall of Tenochtitlan]
- 11. [images of Banlieue riots]
- 12. [images of Banlieue riots]
- 13. [images of encampments in egypt, greece, spain] [include slow motion documentation of astronaut planting flag at beginning of 15m occupation]
- 15. [images of the movement of the squares and occupy that focus infrastructures in common]
- 16. [images of the movement of the squares and occupy that focus infrastructures in common]
- 17. [images of the movement of the squares and occupy that focus infrastructures in common]
- 18. [images of people with gags over their mouths]
- 19. Images of blisset and Anonymous
Notas del editor
- We are Not An Alternative, a collective based in BK. We’ve been around for about 9 years, running an activist space and working in the context of social movements, where our role has been organizing, producing actions, and developing design and visuals for street protests. We were involved with Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement more generally, and continue to be to some degree. For this panel titled “Media, Communication, Outreach” we ask: “What forms or structures best describe how social movements communicate? , and What forms of communication give social movements power?There are conflictual responses to this question. We will examine them, but first we’re going to start with a video:
- but first we’re going to start with a video …[Video: The Revolution Within (Glenn Beck)]…
- This voice you hear in this “V for Vendetta” detournement is that of Glenn Beck a well known right wing tv and radio personality in the U.S...In this Anonymous video intervention Beck describes a threat that is almost entirely exaggerated. He suggests it exists everywhere, is networked and highly organized, laying in wait, ready to strike from it’s position of hiding within the interstices of capitalism. The absurdity of his exaggeration is likely obvious to all of us here in this room. Common sense and experience tell us that while there is resistance there is no real organized, coordinated threat of the kind he describes.
- The truth is we live in an age of fragmentation. There is relatively little coordination between groups. Most Left energies are spent fighting against issues considered separate from one another. We fight foreclosures, we fight GMOs, we fight budget cuts, and so on….
- Since the global economic crisis there has been an explosion of resistance around the world, largely a reaction to a rapid decrease in standards of living. While the Left celebrates these expressions, it could be argued that these protests and riots are just an index of suffering. Isolated expressions of frustration in reaction to worsening conditions. Are we just celebrating the symptom of a problem, in other words, the worse things get, the better they get?Are these eruptions adding up to something, and strengthening the Left? This is important to ask, because with each challenge power responds with repression, and fortifies itself.So, do these uprisings build and fortify a real alternative counter-power?
- If the actual situation the Left faces is fragmentation, why does Glenn Beck try to make it look like there is a growing coordinated power? Is he secretly working for the Left as the video seems to suggest? No, he’s not.
- But it’s a funny suggestion. Especially considering that the popularity of the book The Coming Insurrection, at least in the U.S., was in large part a result of Glenn Beck’s fanatical insistence that everyone should read it because “it’s a book of revolution”, “a dangerous book”.
- The reason why he makes this claim is pretty obvious. With a megaphone that reaches millions, he aims to scare people and mobilize support for the fortification of the capitalist infrastructures organized around this threat.
- Beck’s amplification of a myth affects material reality. Now lets consider another, historical example of this: The myth of the fall of the Azteks(Grain of salt, it’s an unsubstantiated myth, but a popular one and for our purposes functions as a useful allegory)
- The Azteks anticipated that their god Quetzalcoatl would return. And when the conquistadors arrived with Cortez, the Azteks saw it as the fulfilling of a prophesy and laid down their arms, paving the way for invasion, the coming transformation.in both these examples, the threat to the current system (of each context) has a form, which is popularized and embedded in the cultural consciousness.this illustrates the power and potential in expectation. where the form of the threat is recognizable, and anticipated, inhabiting that form makes it much easier to incite the crowd. to actualize the threat.
- It is not a question of “what is to be done?” but of “what is already being done?” There are already fires burning. The question is not how to start a revolution but how to pour fuel on a fire that’s already there, fan the flames and make that fire grow.
- For instance, to get literal with the fire analogy, lets take the example of the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris. If it is your goal to incite crowds to burn cars, you’ll be much more likely get people to join you if you do it while others are partaking in this practice, as the youth were in the Banlieue. The tactic is live in the culture, and it registers as contagious. it is more likely to spread. (i’ll note, this is independent of claiming a stake on the meaning of this contagion, i just mean to say that the form which is already out there is an easier one to recruit around than an entirely new form. the struggle over defining the meaning of the phenomenon is the next thing, and it often happens retroactively, but we’ll come back to that.)
- It’s our sense that it was the power of “expectation” that organizers tapped into in the Fall of 2011. It wasn’t an accident that the occupation of Wall St took the form that it did, and subsequently caught fire. The idea of Occupy was already out there before it ever happened. It existed like a myth that so many were anticipating.
- In order to actualize the idea, organizers adopted the form of the revolution that was happening in squares around the world and staged it on U.S. soil. A myth made real.
- There were common recognizable elements that were repeated in the squares from Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, to Greece to NY. They repeated, and sometimes mutated from one country to the next. The Occupy movement took hold because it registered for people as a link in a sequence of iterations. each manifestation was legible as having a relationship to what came before it.
- We claim that this is the structure that gives social movements their power. Movements are not simply reactionary. They are not just expressions of frustration dependent on things getting worse. Where they are successful they have a positively constituted form, one that can be built on, recognizable as a real counter-power.
- Social movements have a kind of language shared in common that grows as infrastructure is organized around it. As new infrastructures are introduced they become a part of a productive process that propels this language in common. A conversation across cities, across time is taking place.
- Thinking of social movements in this way runs counter to the way they are typically theorized, in that we’re suggesting they’re not organized around democratic decision making processes (or an attempt to find a common voice, agreement, or consensus). inherently various movement actors will and do disagree. And so defining the movement as democratic discourse and decision-making inevitably results in frustration when disagreements erupt, and process breaks down. infighting occurs and people jump ship. so much energy is invested in creating something that's recognizable as a threat to capitalism, yet we abandon the current form and start over from scratch. We argue that movements are not organized around democratic processes but rather are are organized around a fidelity to the (collaboratively produced) language in common, and the struggle that is inherent in the effort to give a movement meaning and shape. As the movement of squares spread to different cities, there was no petition process to a centralized body requesting the right to establish a camp, or use the name “occupy”. New manifestations occurred where autonomous individuals and groups decided to implement a recognizable form. To be clear, there were so many competing understandings of what Occupy “was” and what it “meant”. The movement’s force was never derived from agreement, but from a commitment to call one’s action Occupy in spite of disagreement. Making the decision to “join” was not a matter of signing on to something agreed upon, but of committing to fighting over the meaning of the language shared in common.
- We would suggest that Occupy was structured like Anonymous. There is no centralized or even democratic decision making structure.
- Instead the idea is determined by individuals who contribute their various skills and participate in the production of the myth.
- Thinking about the movement in this way makes it possible to discern what makes a movement more powerful. As recognizable iterations take up the language and expand on the existing form, the result is a positive assertion that there exists something around which new infrastructure can be built.
- If a group produces an action and then someone copies, for the group who produced the initial action there is a positive affirmation that they have been heard. A conversation has taken place without people meeting in person.
- Retroactive determination is a term that Zizek uses to describe the process of looking back on something (lets say a movement), and in the act of looking back, one makes conclusions about that movement, retroactively determining meaning. Essentially we’re talking about the stories that we tell about the movement. We consider it a useful concept, in relation to this idea of fortifying an idea, in that describes the act of pushing something to have connections even when those connections are in fact tenuous. What we’re suggesting is to perform something very much along the lines of what Glenn Beck does in the video. There is a specter haunting the wrold. In order to see it one needs to call it into being. This is not a plaintive cry for what should be done, but a look at what is already being done. Pour fuel on the fire, and maintain a fidelity to what’s been started to fan the flames and keep it growing, even when the wind blows the ash in our face, we hold true to that flame.