oakland agonistes

My first feeling, after locking my bike to a handrail and stepping onto the straw-strewn southeast corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment, was excitement of the same breed as a child’s sudden lifting of spirit and emotion when stepping onto the midway at a county fair. There was music! Candles! The magical alchemy of tents and recklessly “irrational” dreams! I gravitated, as one does, toward the nearest long line of people, expecting to see that they were queuing for the food I’d heard had been donated by local businesses and people (like Lupe Fiasco!). But I stepped closer and saw that the line was for silkscreen prints that said “Hella Occupy Oakland,” “we are the 99%,” and “system sucks,” against a gorgeous skyline of bank buildings surveilled by a helicopter. It was protest merch. It was free, sure, but otherwise internally consistent with the commodity ethos of the broken system we were united in opposing, right? I wanted one, and could picture it on my wall beside my Flaming Lips poster, in some near-future all but identical to the present. The poster would be my souvenir to show off to out of town visitors, or to reference when I grow up and tell younger people about the glorious nonrevolution.

The Occupy movement, as I see it (with a gaze admittedly narrowed as I please), is an effort at iconoclasm. The kids and union workers and retired hippies and bereaved darkskinned mothers of unjustly incarcerated or routinely harassed nonwhite boys are all secular Miltonians, or Augustinians, or Calvinists. We are looking to expose and destroy the idols of global late capitalism, the false divinities of acquisition, profit, speculation, individualism… We want to smash the golden icons of Mammon. But, like all iconoclasts (Marxists included), we’ve run into the risk of knocking down other people’s idols in order to erect our own.

The career of John Milton, poet and iconoclast, offers a useful point of reference. He grew increasingly worried that his poetry would itself become an idol, and his fear of idolizing language motivated a gradual evacuation of lyrical beauty from his long poems. In terms of imagery and sensuousness of language, his late poems Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes seem authored by someone other than the poet of the Fall from Eden, the poet who wrote about “that one talent which is death to hide.” I exaggerate a bit, but compare the final words of Paradise Lost :

The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitarie way.

to those of Paradise Regained:

Thus they the Son of God, our Saviour meek,
Sung victor, and, from heavenly feast refreshed,
Brought on his way with joy. He, unobserved,
Home to his mother’s house private returned.

The same intelligence, and something of the same rhythm, is discernible behind both passages. But the music is entirely different. The earlier work is arguably more pleasant to read, and we close the poem with an image of Adam and Eve, hand in hand, yet solitary (emblem of the first marriage), embarking on separate lives of shared discovery. The later work closes not only with pared-down and non-musical aesthetics, but with the frank denial of imagery: Christ is himself unobserved, retreating from the public.

Milton’s two last poetic works are thematically centered around the issue of idolatry, but Milton knew that stirring rhetoric against Dagon, a favorite god of the Philistines, and lyrical opposition to the images of worldly splendor and knowledge and power with which Satan tempts Christ in the wilderness, might itself become the improper object of adoration rightly directed toward God. How can an iconoclast break one idol without, at the very least, feeling some pride in his hammer? The difficult irony of the iconoclast’s position is well illustrated at the end of Samson Agonistes, when Samson’s father proposes erecting a statue to honor the son who has just brought a stadium down upon the heads of thousands of Philistines in the midst of paying homage to Dagon, killing himself (heroically? terroristically?) in the process. That Samson’s father wants to erect a statue honoring the iconoclast is an ironic disappointment, to say the least, and a pointed comment if you remember your Scripture, according to which no actual political change follows Samson’s jihad. The Hebrews who will theoretically pay tribute to Samson’s valiant suicide will still be enslaved to the Philistines for some time.

Marxist scholars, iconoclasts of a different sort, have run into a closely related problem. The fetishization of the commodity gives way (for the few who engage in the critical dialogue) to a fetishizing of labor, perhaps, or “history,” the “historical process,” the “proletariat,” or revolution itself. Ideologies supplant ideologies, fetishes, fetishes. Perhaps the process is dialectic, and moving somewhere, but even this seems inadequately consoling when the intellectual dialectic is happening within confined walls, when it is merely the product of monastic exertions by academic Marxists.

Ah, but now, some iconoclastic spirit has infected the streets and squares of cities around the world! Israelis have been camping in Habima Square in Tel Aviv since July, in protest to rising housing costs and declining social services. The indignados in Spain continue to vent their indignation and visions for radical, transparent democracy, five months after the first day of protests coordinated in cities across their country. And Liberty Plaza/Zuccatti Park has captured imaginations around the world….

The capturing, or enslavement, of imagination is, in fact, one of the primary charges that any iconoclast makes against the idols. Plato, on poetry: “The greater the poetical charm of [poems], the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.” Augustine, on spiritual idols: “There is a miserable servitude of the spirit in this habit of taking signs for things,” and “he is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies.” The threat posed by idols, or ideologies, is that we enslave ourselves to the picture or sign of something that we either do not understand, or that does not in actuality exist. Our believing and adoration gives the thing existence – an idol is itself nothing, but it attains captivating power and may as well exist to those who mistake the idols for the real thing. This is the link between the iconoclasm of the theologians and the iconoclasm of 19^th and 20^th century Marxist (and Nietzschian and Freudian) demystifiers: all equally aim to liberate the minds of humans serving (or neurotically repressing and replacing) imaginary, false deities. Marx, on the effect of the “fetishism of commodities”: “To [the producers], their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”

It was perhaps inevitable that today’s Occupy iconoclasm would assume a spectacular form that makes it resemble the idols that earlier iconoclasts smashed. We are the Society of the Spectacle, to a degree that far surpasses that of the pagans, gentiles, and Catholics whose icons were gleefully destroyed in prior centuries. Spectacle has been hugely useful to the revolutionary currents of the last ten months, in the West and in the Middle East. YouTube videos of police brutality contributed to the ends of regimes, and in our modest American proto-revolution, such videos have spurred an upwelling of international moral support for the encampment in Oakland and the movement in general. Facebook, ever spectacular, is an organizing tool. Walking around Occupy Oakland, or perusing its website and Facebook group page, you understand that the protesters embrace the spectacular power of branding, although they/we are discovering that branding only gets a person so far when she doesn’t have a product. If, as certain detractors maintain, we don’t know what we stand for, are we slaves to the signs we brandish? What does “we are the 99%” signify, tangibly, beyond the realm of semiotics and in the real world of what Marxists call “praxis,” the world of men, women, and children who work, get sick, educate themselves, go grocery shopping, fall in and out of love, and so on?

The product is ourselves, we say, and the movement. We are building a world, we are experimenting with real democracy, a truer democracy than has ever existed, because it incorporates the voices of women and people of color and homeless, landless human beings. We have General Assemblies and Working Groups, speak-outs and teach-ins, gift economies. We are the product, but not the product as conceived in a capitalist exchange economy, and people who don’t understand or who harp about how we don’t have a coherent “message” are simply listening at the wrong frequency. We could demand that tax loopeholes close, and that capital gains be taxed, and that subsidies to certain industries (oil, coal, corn) end, and be replaced by investment in innovations in green energy, transportation infrastructure, diversified organic farming (for example…). But we want a deeper, structural revolution. We want an ideological purging, a shakeup of the way Americans view ourselves, our values, our labor and bodies, the way we view the world’s resources and the populations of other countries. We want to retain the wonderful gifts of capitalism, sure, but not at the price of the enslavement of factory workers in distant countries and farm workers in our own country; not at the price of rampant home foreclosures and stifling student loan debt; not at the price of devastated ecosystems, unprecedented mass extinctions, and clusters of trash floating across hundreds of miles of the Pacific.

Above all, perhaps, we want to recover the agency and intimacy of a less abstract and rationalized world.

We fear, and sense the risk of, falling into immanence. We fear, and sense the risk of, our movement petrifying as yet another idol. We know we’re dangerously close to fetishizing the act of protest itself – we feel the telltale tingling in our bellies as we walk past bongo drummers and candlelight memorials, and as we listen to stories of rage and pain that move us to almost-cathartic tears. But we reject catharsis. We must reject accepting the Occupy Movement as an opportunity for SWAG and photo-ops for a posterity systemically identical to the present.

We need the courage and the intelligence to imagine something truly new, and to plot the route by which to gain this new horizon. It might require compromise. It will certainly require work. But great courage, intelligence, wisdom and effort are necessary in order to ensure that, if we manage to bring down the Temple, we do not die in the rubble, and posterity does more than remember us with a statue.

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