Reflections on After the Fall
As I read through After the Fall, a publication dated February 2010 reflecting on the wave of occupations in Autumn 2009 on California campuses, I was struck by the rampant sexualization of occupations.
I understand that the publication was not a unified theoretical piece, but rather a collection of texts from disparate and discrete groups writing from various campuses and describing different local experiences. However, I do think there is a certain fairly coherent ideological and theoretical argument that threads the texts together. This is broadly defined by a defense of demandlessness, a negation of a split between means and ends, and occupation as both a tactic and a strategy. I see these threads most clearly articulated by the first three articles in the text. I will try to locate my critiques primarily in the introduction and conclusion articles, which I understand were written by the collective, or group of friends, that put together the publication, and which should represent, to some extent, the ideas that motivated the compilation.
After the Fall‘s sexualization of occupations begins on the very first page of the text. ”They occupy buildings to find one another, to be together in the same place, to have a base from which to carry out raids, to drink and fuck, to talk philosophy.” There it is, one unbroken all-inclusive event: meet, touch, foreplay, climax, pillowtalk. Not only is the occupation represented as an exciting rendez-vous, the act of occupying is itself highly sexualized. “An occupation is a vortex, not a protest.” Both the Necrosocial and Communique from an Absent Future make clear their understanding of the dichotomy of Agamben’s political concepts of life and death. There is the whole of student life, (death) which is broken only by, “a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreak,” (life). Occupation is basically the act of life, incarnate.
As I read through After the Fall, I began playing the game one often plays with fortune cookies, where you add the words in bed to the end of every sentence. The practice forced me to try to think through what role the sexualization played in the theoretical formulations presented by the writers. I’ll pay token tribute to the feminist thinkers that enabled this criticism, and say yes, thinking about gender in After the Fall revealed all of the patriarchal, colonial, and imperialist implications of the verb to occupy and complicated the negation of any critical examination of privilege presented by the pieces. However, I think there are others who could present those arguments with more force and passion then I would, and I’d like to focus on what I think is a bit more of an immanent critique. I might distinguish myself by pointing out that I don’t see this sexualization as being a priori a patriarchal practice.
Their are a number of aspects of this sexualization I would like to examine, but I think the most important is that sex is one of the only actions I can think of that is self-evidently good. It is this nature that I think is the most important thing for the occupationist ideology to appropriate. In order to maintain that correct politics should have no separation between means and ends, their is no room for pedagogy, for theory as such, which might seek to explain and communicate rather than depict. After the Fall is in fact more pornographic than exegetical. This primarily voyereustic mode is made clear in the introductory note of the “group of friends” who published After the Fall. ”We thought it worthwhile to… provide some critical contextualization for those who were not fortunate enough to be there.” This seems like a very odd assertion. I find it hard to believe that there will be many who read After the Fall who did not participate in the actions it depicts to some extent. But regardless of the statement’s factual nature, it plays an important role in illustrating some of the dynamics of the theoretical formulations of After the Fall. Within the ideology presented by the We are the Crisis article, there is a monolothic “we” made up of “those who were there”, as opposed to those who weren’t there. The publication presents itself as the communication of the we to the other who was not there. This dichotomy invisibilizes anyone who “was there” but who had a different view then what was presented in the publication. This invisibilization is necessary for the maintenance of the idea that occupations are not merely a means but also the end. A means might need explanation to someone who was there, but if it is the means and the end, then there shouldn’t have been anyone who was there that didn’t want to occupy, it should only require illustration for the folks who couldn’t be there.
I’m going to try and posit a theory of consciousness through space and time, and my apologies if it’s not up to par to my readers. One’s consciousness is framed by the accumulation of experiences we’ve had through our lives. In common parlance, I’d argue that knowledge often refers to the spatial element of our experience. The quantity of knowledge we have is the product of the variety of different places and spaces we’ve been in. Wisdom often refers to the temporal aspect. What chances have we had to observe the behavior of phenomena through time, analyze and understand the ways the same things shift and change and the patterns in that. To tell someone about one’s weekend reflects a difference in space- I was there, you weren’t there, let me tell you about it. To explain our weekend reflects a difference in time- I have spent some time either in the past or since our weekend happened thinking through and examining the events of our weekend, let me try to fill you in on the product of that time spent. I know this appears thoroughly simplistic, but bear with me. Voyeurism is about a relationship through space, exegesis is about a relationship through time.
I’d argue that one of the main theoretical postulations put forward by Communique from and Absent Future, one that serves as a thread through much of After the Fall is the collapse of time between now and then, “the is and the ought are one.” Temporal collapse is also required for a negation of means and ends. Ends and means are relationships through time, to speak of ends and means is to think about the effect of one action on a later situation. Communique argues that ends and means are useless because the future is already here, all that remains is to make it visible, which one can do in certain spaces. Now it’s probably clear why I did my cute little wisdom/knowledge distinction.
There is a very coherent relationship between the form of After the Fall (voyeuristic rather than exegetical) and the content it presents, (the negation of time).
I think to fetishize space and negate time is characteristic of the ideology presented by After the Fall, an ideology which I’ll call in the specific form occupationism, but might more generally be called communizationism. This dynamic presents an interesting lens to examine occupations with. After the Fall argues that, ”They saw the point of occupation as the creation of a momentary opening in capitalist time and space, a rearrangement that sketched the contours of a new society.” I’d argue that this is patently untrue. I think occupations represented a very important break in the space of capitalism, but really almost no break in the time of capitalism. Occupations have forced clear rearrangements in where capitalists perform their work, what spaces are under control by the proletariat and the capitalist, and other spatial arrangements. But occupations rarely force temporal shifts. To change capitalist time is to change the temporal relationship of capital and production. Occupations have often opened up the space of unused factories to proletarian control, but rarely have occupations in recent years closed off used factories from the hegemony of capitalist time. Here on the university, occupations forced administrators and students and workers to go about their business in some other space than usual, but the rearrangement of the time required for the production the University does was, at the macro-level, negligible.
So we come full circle. I too want to, “find one another, to be together in the same place, to have a base from which to carry out raids, to drink and fuck, to talk philosophy.” But I don’t want to do it for two hours, or two days, or two weeks, or even just two years. I don’t want to occupy everything, (all spaces) I just want all of my time to be occupied by the really good things in life. To do that, we’re going to need to have some analysis of time, of what we want and how to get it, and the fact that we don’t have the power to just take it now. But we can build that power, and I hate to break it to you, it might take something more than dancing.
I’d like to briefly reiterate my disclaimer at the beginning about the nature of this publication, and to say that even though I have presented a monolithic version of After the Fall, I am really only talking about a very specific ideology that I see emanating from communizationism. I think that the Reflections from Kerr Hall piece represents a definite exception to many of the dynamics above detailed. It is not particularly voyeuristic, it is up front about the problems and the hard times and the disagreements, and it seeks to explain the writer’s(‘?) perspective on what happened rather than merely one view of what happened. We could use more like that.
P.S. You’ll have to excuse one last bit of immaturity. In the context of my opening metaphor, Cinthia definitely seems like a major cockblock.
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I think the notion that occupations interrupt capitalist time has to do with the idea that they interrupt the daily rhythms of the capitalist life-world — sleep, study, go to work, etc. . .In other words, they interrupt the (temporal) circulation of bodies through capitalist space. That’s all.
The kind of reflective time — we might call it duration — isn’t really the time under discussion After the Fall, I’d say. But if you think of capital as value-in-motion, value that circulates through society, then certain occupation do interrupt such temporalities. Just because they don’t last very long doesn’t mean they’re not temporal — they’re just temporal on a small-scale.
Hmm. You’ll have to be a little clearer as to how occupations interrupt the temporalities of capital. Recently, a friend suggested organizing a bunch of people to wait until the last possible day to pay fees at the UC, and then occupying the business office. That would be a rearrangement of the time of capitalism, of the speed and the direction and the temporality of capital circulation at the UC. So far, I have yet to see anything of this sort occur.
You say the daily rhythms of the capitalist world were interrupted. I definitely saw sleep and study interrupted by occupations, but until the march 4th ucsc strike, I saw no work interrupted. The occupations I saw merely forced workers to go to another building and work, which is why I say the space of capitalism was interrupted, but not the time. If you stop the work from ocurring in the time required for production, you interrupt the time of capitalism. I did not see this happening until march 4th.
Furthermore, the point was not whether or not the occupations were or were not temporal. Of course all of human existence has some temporal aspect to it. The point is that the ideology being advanced by some fronts negates the power of temporal relationships, and this is illustrated in the form and content of After the Fall.
I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on the matter.