immer bereit

"immer bereit gegen die aggression der u.s.a. - sw crew"
(always ready against the aggression of the u.s.a. - sw crew)

u.s. activists 'discover' european squatting

I always had the impression that squatting space played a less dominant role in U.S. radical left politics than in Western Europe, but the Occupy Movement has recently opened up a widespread debate in the U.S. about the agora and reinvigorating public space for democratic citizenship. The discussion has extended to claiming not only public but private space as well, as a number of local Occupy movements have supported people squatting their own foreclosed homes. Occupying one's own former property is probably the most palatable form of squatting for Americans, who are notoriously overzealous about the sanctity of private property and home ownership. (Hmm, and what about the Swiss?) It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Amnesty International started its "Housing: it's a wonderful right" campaign around Christmastime last year, giving new gas to an idea that's relatively unpopular in the U.S. : that housing is a human right.

We might ask ourselves what the predominance of squatting in European radical scenes and its smaller significance in the U.S. has to do with differing geographies, and more specifically, histories of urban spaces -- race and place, above all in the States. So perhaps its not a surprise, but still sweetly nerdy that the Squatting Europe Collective met this past weekend as part of the Association of Amerian Geographers' annual convention.

Why has contact with European squatters come so late?

Firstly, I find the language of "freiräume" and German demands for space for alternative living difficult to translate into English. While "infoshops" and bike workshops are a mainstay of the small anarchist scenes in the States, community organizing has always focused on setting up shop in working-class, immigrant, or people of color neighborhoods. Insofar as some community organizers as well as anarchist activists struggle with their own race & class privileges and the difficulties of working in communities they themselves don't belong to, there is great sensitivity towards how demanding space for a particular political lilfestyle within such working class, people of color neighborhoods can reiterate colonialist tendencies. Occupy movements were heavily criticized by indigenous and anti-racist activists for not recognizing the oppressive connotations of the term "occupation" and called upon to "decolonize" themselves.

Secondly, the radicals and self-identified anarchists that I know in the States orient themselves mostly towards Latin America, drawing inspiration from Zapatistas and "21st century Socialism." There seemed to be little contact with European social movements, until the recent involvement of Spanish and Greek activists in the creation of Occupy Wall Street. Perhaps this is a fetish of the white, middle class youth who predominate in anarchist circles in the States, idealizing poor people of color as the "true avant garde". Maybe we could draw a parallel to the German anti-fascist's fetish of Greek street fighters in gas masks, or the general tendency of privileged activists to seek out solidarity first with the leftist movements in the countries their own country has fucked over for profit.

affectivity at art openings

I found myself recently in a passionate discussion at a Vernissage at the NGBK in Kreuzberg. The topic was Sharon Hayes’ “I March In The Parade Of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You, I’m Not Free”. If you know Hayes’ piece, it’s a hybrid love-letter demonstration-speech, which she performed through a megaphone on a New York City street corner to passersby. Her later work, like "Revolutionary Love: I am Your Worst Fear, I am Your Best Fantasy," fuses the two genres more fully, so that the “you” she addresses swims vaguely between a single and collective subject, lover / politician-nemesis / fellow protestor. The Institut für Queer Theory's put together the first show in their "Bossing Images" series very smartly as a collective discussion with the artists and curators.

An older philosopher among the audience commented on the distinctly affective nature of Hayes’ presentation of the political (her pleading voice reminding us "There is no prison in any world into which love cannot force an entrance”), which belongs to a long U.S. tradition. Affective politics, or politics built on strong emotional expression, are something suspicious in more academic corners of the German Left, because of course the Nazis were master manipulators of collective sentiment. This is perhaps why when I showed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech in my English class, a video which gives me goosebumps without fail even on the twentieth viewing, a student said that it reminded him of the Third Reich.

After the lecture, a friend and I were at Kreuzberger exploring affectivity and the Civil Rights Movement in more detail. She was part of a class organizing an exhibition in the Bethanien of responses to a famous short documentary film by Santiago Alvarez, a Cuban filmmaker who collaged together images of the Civil Rights Movement with Lena Horne’s “NOW” as the soundtrack. This sort of proto-music video, with heavy doses of police brutality, ends with the sound of a machine gun firing spelling “NOW!” on the screen in bullet holes. It is clearly a call to arms that makes its case on the emotional response to overwhelming images of human suffering. My friend said she herself felt agitated and near tears everytime she saw it. Conversation circled around the ethics of watching others suffer, political fetishes, and the intriguing and offensive idea from one student of removing all the African-American victims from the images of police brutality in Alvarez's film.

But what sticks is that damn song. Through the next weeks as she prepared the exhibition in a room next to mine with thin walls, the song and its tune based on the “Hava Nagila” crept deep into all of our subconsciousnesses. So deep that I found myself in the middle of the woods in Brandenburg whistling it out of the blue.

The Civil Rights Movement is perhaps the best example of this American tradition of affective politics. Singing gospel songs together was a huge part of big movement rallies and meetings. Photos from the era show SNCC members praying over burnt out churches and one organizer carrying a bag with the sticker "Forgiveness". That affectivity, as well as spirituality, was crucial to finding a language to talk about the wages of racism and the project of decolonizing the mind and spirit.

Many of my German friends who move in leftist circles are skeptical of emotion in organizing, or organizing around emotion. There’s anxiety about being perceived as “esoteric” or a hippie if you express emotion too much or, let's say, too vaguely. There’s an overemphasis on analysis, which often (but doesn’t have to) come in an academic language that is inaccessible to many people. In my Berlin, people don’t pick up instruments and sing songs together, which is a part of the anarchist folk tradition of Woody Guthrie and the Wobblies in the U.S. Public performances of affect are tinted with danger: the loss of self, orgiastic violence. The discourses on self and collective love and healing that I find inspiring in the women and queers of color movements in the U.S. seem totally absent here, apart from some echoes in the feminist/queer scene in Berlin.

Maybe its about religion: there's a longer history of progressive religious organizing in the U.S., within the churches of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (of which MLK was the head), the Catholic Worker, and progressive Jewish organizations. This made spirituality not as dirty a word as it might be in secular old Europe. (In exchange, "socialism" is the dirty word.)

Maybe there's something there about language within multicultural societies -- how emotional expression can supplement or facilitate communication in societies where people are speaking in different languages and different cultural codes.

And It's definitely about differing histories of populism, and the German experience of how Nazis manipulated populist affect with disastrous results. This history could be instructive, as the emotions of the Civil Rights movement have too been depoliticized as the movement's history has been rewritten. The low long resonances in the U.S. collective unconscious of what blazed through Selma, Greensboro, D.C. and beyond have been channeled towards a Hollywoodized catharsis, including the post-racial fantasies that came with Obama's entry into office.

And of course, this has to do with other knotted webs of differences around affectivity and race, culture, and privilege which don’t have the space to be fully explored in this post. Emotion has been inscribed by dominant Western culture onto "otherized" bodies -- women, people of color, queer people, and so on. So what happens when those marginalized groups take up emotion as a tool for their emancipation?

I personally long for this kind of affectivity or (dare I say it?) spiritual connection in my political organizing. I'm left wondering what it would feel like in my school if we sang before every Vollversammlung…

*You can still catch the exhibition afternoons at the Bethanien until March 4th.