Some thoughts about non-violence, naivety, democracy, and privilege:
Part of the earnestness of the Occupy Movement comes from the exaggerated performance of a democracy that should be there, even as everyone involved is aware that democracy is not as it should be. People complain about the idealism of the movement - the wide-eyed surprise as police use powers that they can and do use against marginalised peoples every day.
This is said to be a sign of privilege, and I’m not saying that it’s not, but it’s also more complicated than that. That’s why there is an anecdate from one outer-West occupier about the fact that the use of signs like “Since when is there a time limit on peaceful assembly?” is not effective plastered on Blacktown station. The reaction from the locals is usually something like “er, since always”. But I would say that that’s actually fine. The “er, since always” moment is actually a perfect instance of dissensus - the moment at which you realise/remember/know that your experience of the world violently dislocates the concept of democracy.
So a lot of this wide-eyed surprise is rhetorical, affective performance of a loss of faith. Because the occupation is enacting an extreme in-good-faith understanding of the principles of democracy. e.g. That we are allowed, as democratic subjects, to assemble and have conversations. So the wide-eyed surprise is also a performance.
We are not naive; our performance of naivety is part of our protest. We are using the principles of democracy, under which we supposedly live, as a rhetorical tool to point out that things are not as they are supposed to be.
No one believes in democracy. Just as in many communist regimes no one believed in communism. That’s why in communist times the earnest enactment of communist principles was so effective as a dissident act against the communist regimes as they stood. Because it was hard for so-called communists (those with power) to criticise and act against “naive” communist actions without undoing the lie of their legitimacy. Because it undoes the folded lie of communism, and demonstrates that institutional power in communist regimes was never about communist principles but about the accumulation of money and power. Likewise, democratic principles in contemporary democratic regimes.
What we are doing is performing, in good faith, the democracy that should exist. This is the basis of non-violent protest, where young girls insert flowers in the barrel of guns. This is why, as a woman has a tent wrapper knifed from her body against her will, we don’t intervene. We only ask politely, in good faith, that the officers act within the law. When they don’t, we earnestly and naively ask “What the fuck?” even though we expect nothing less than the abuse of power on display in that horrible moment when she is left on the grass in her underwear. Because it makes no sense against the good-faith performance of democracy. Because democracy in its imaginings does not exist.
Because the use of institutional power against the wearing of tents as clothes is so absurd. The laughing carnival of the tent monsters is a good faith enactment of democratic action. The violent removal of same is proof of the illegitimacy of power.
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