Following Up on the Double Negative

This is a different kind of post: a response to Jerry Z.’s response, which is broken into 4 comments on the previous post below, the resonances of which help to bring out the theoretical dimensions of the situation that Birgeneau’s language symptomizes. (The quotations all refer to Jerry's comments.)

(1) I’ve been interested in the “strange neither-positive-nor-negative realm” of the double negative for a long time. One of the earliest posts on WWD (written when I was very uncertain what I wanted posts to look like) deals with J.L. Austin’s idea that the real is signaled most persuasively by the double negative of the not unreal. The appelation “real” is redundant and defensive—itself negative—except when it distinguishes X from something being passed off as X. So, I don’t think that saying that something is not-not something else merely dissimulates alternatives that would otherwise be clear. Rather, it virtually admits that what counts as reality is always something that’s being decided socially, through representations. This realm is strange because such moments are like lucid dreaming, when what had seemed static and thinglike becomes dynamic and the fluidity of everything is illuminated. If we followed this line of thought it would eventually lead to a metaphysical argument about the inextricability and codependence of representation with the ability to think beyond it. On the local level, this is to say that Birgeneau backed himself out of the world of social fact (the “yes-or-no modality of violence and its absence, or whatever”) and into the zone of indetermination from which social facts arise and where they go to die.

(2) JZ recognizes as a recent phenomenon the “incapacity to think the changing conditions of politics as such” reflected in this kind of language: “the sense of simultaneously feeling like one cannot do anything but attempting at some kind of tentative action, is becoming more and more congruent with the terms of politics itself . . . . The conditions of this new formulation of political agency . . . is a figure of political agency as non-agency, not a kind of resistance but a kind of reaction.” As a figure (and I think we’re now talking about figures, not about metaphysics, and with no direct cause and effect between them, just a resonance), the realm of the not-un is associated with being between what you don’t want and is “already broken” and something you can’t and maybe don’t want to name and which you can’t exactly “do”: with (now I paraphrase/rephrase/double back) wanting the not-“already broken,” the not-false. I recognize this, too, as a good description of what a lot of people are experiencing and don’t want to be hurried out of. (A reference point here is Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which keeps this particular space open.) It’s encouraging that this kind of space, formerly experienced or typed as intolerable, seems to be getting experienced (if wearily) as tolerable and more than tolerable. It’s interesting to think of the incapacity of the police to feel they know what they’re doing—they’re officially “confused”—as a reflection of the indetermination that is the mode of occupation.

(3) Bringing in the inability not to act (where “act” is understood to be qualified, shot through with incapacity) suggests that, as the not-unreal is the powerful form of “real,” inability not to act is the powerful form of “act” (here the reference point is Kant’s Second Critique, as Jerry implies; for [1] above it is the First Critique). Revolutionary theory takes up this thought whenever it assumes that the people will act only when they literally can no longer not act. Jerry’s associations to the nonhuman and the natural, the automated or spontaneous reaction, inflect this thought. That “the police are allowed to be violent not because they are claiming a kind of sovereign right but because they have been provoked into it” shows that there is no particular political valance built into this figure; the logic in which the double negative is stronger appears in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary discourse, in revolution from below and from above. Birgeneau’s and police statements applied while denying it, asymmetrically, to protesters. In the memo, protesters “choose to defy the policy” of banned encampments; within that choice, some further “chose to obstruct the police by linking arms” while others “chose to be arrested peacefully.” Additionally, “tens of thousands . . . elected [!] not to participate.” The administration and police, on the other hand, were “required” by their own policy to “forcibly remove tents and arrest people,” while the policy itself was “born out of past experiences that grew beyond our control and ability.” These past experiences have made them realize that they “are not equipped.” We could reply by saying that if the protesters had choices, the administration also had choices, recently and in the past. And we could also say that the administration is refusing to credit the fact that, given their own policy, born out of their own “past experiences,” the people who “chose to obstruct the police” felt they had no choice but to link arms. “The protests and its violence/nonviolence/non-non-violence becomes a kind of swirling vortex of non-agency, where the conditions for action always originate in the actions of another . . . . it seems here that violent or not, violence, when it occurs must always be framed as a kind of ethical reaction to a situation that is always-already outside of one's grasp. that is, not even the state has a legitimate claim over a proactive violence anymore.” This is both a description of conditions and a critique of sovereignty (<--allusion to the seminar taught by my friend Dina al-Kassim).

I totally agree with the implication (?) that there is some kind of slight of hand or slippage between the consciousness of the not-already broken, the not-false, which occupies (literally) the strange realm of decomposing social fact, on one hand, and the automaticity, returned spontaneity, and immanent if not sovereign action that would infuse the inability-not-to-act, on the other. On my reading, this slippage is not there in Kant, and thus perhaps doesn't need to be there if we're careful. Kant doesn’t say that you are ever unable-not-to-act; he says that you are unable not to know how you want to be acting, which is, in his view, how you ought to be acting. On my reading, getting a sense of what you are incapable of wanting (which will always be multiple) does not in and of itself close the interval to make an outcome inevitable (a logic that tends to make whatever is currently happening seem inevitable), but only moves it explicitly into the realm of indetermination so that the next act can be “free.”



[*The scare quotes mean that I don’t mean this in an absolute sense; rather, this is what counts as “free” to me and I think it deserves the word.]

"Not Non-Violent Civil Disobedience"

UCB Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s statement rationalizing police beatings of unarmed and unthreatening protesters relies on a contentious contrast between those who “chose to be arrested peacefully” and are to be “honor[ed]” because they “were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” and others who “chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents” of their would-be encampment. The latter tactic, he writes, is “not non-violent civil disobedience.” Overnight the discussion of Birgeneau’s letter has focused on its willingness to defend beating in the name of non-violence and its fetishization of non-violence as such. In agreement with those points, I'm also interested in Birgeneau's falsification of the history he references and, positively, in the tensions it suggests when we don’t accept such a cheap edition of it.

Birgeneau’s double negative locution, “not non-violent,” acknowledges that the Berkeley protesters were, well, lacking in violence, if also lacking in non-violence. It frames an ambiguous realm between violence and non-violence, further partitioning a field already divided by the term “non-violent” in the first place. A program, or “tradition,” of “non-violence” is not automatically a program of peace. That’s why Birgeneau has to add “peaceful” and “peacefully” to his description; it is not redundant. “Traditionally,” non-violence is the realm of the march and the sit-in, which challenge opponents to commit or resist aggression on their own side. In the history of U.S. civil rights struggle by African-Americans, arguments like Birgeneau’s have often functioned to justify racist force by a white community on the grounds that the actions of African-Americans were provocative, if not violent. That is, the violence or not of protesters’ actions was part of the debate; acts were perceived as violent enough to warrant indubitably violent repression because of their contextual, subjectively perceived aggression. Protesters invited, or provoked, police violence through ambiguous “non-violence” in order to question the cultural norms beneath white perceptions of what felt violent (enough) to them. We miss part of the significance if we view the segregationist charges of provocation as completely disingenuous. The debate, and the genuine confusion, about violence and non-violence recurs in Birgeneau’s distinction between non-violence and that which is “not non-violent.”

Birgeneau has seen Eyes on the Prize and knows he cannot come out against non-violent civil disobedience. Yet he also seems to demur from UC Police Captain Margo Bennett's less subtle statement: "The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence." Pragmatically, he’s talking about the legal difference between being arrested and also resisting arrest. Traditional civil rights protesters, Birgeneau suggests, do not resist arrest. But this claim doesn’t bear scrutiny. It must be said that guides to civil disobedience often advise not resisting arrest on practical grounds: it’s an additional and gratuitous charge if you’re being arrested anyway, and conviction on resisting arrest disallows a civil rights complaint against police. It’s also difficult to say how often “traditional” civil rights protesters resisted because resisting arrest was so often charged to promote conviction in the absence of other persuasive offenses. What constitutes physical resistance is itself in the realm of perceptual ambiguity, to the interest of which this kind of protest calls attention. Even so, the docket records of civil rights struggle show too much resistance for it to be plausible to assert that it was no part of the tradition Birgeneau wants to honor. Chicago v. Gregory (1966), Pennsylvania v. 100 Defs. (1963), New York City v. 7 Defs. (1963), New York v. 17 Demonstrators (1966), and New York v. Gray, Vaughan (1966), to name a few, look like good places to explore further resistance to arrest within the civil disobedience "tradition." In New York v. 17 Demonstrators, for example, “50 demonstrators, mostly mothers on welfare, blocked doors of Dept of Welfare, seeking increased clothes allowances for school children,” and were arrested for “disorderly conduct, trespass, resisting arrest.”

Closer to home, Mario Savio was among a group of protesters who repeatedly picketed and sat in at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco to protest its racially discriminatory hiring policies in 1964. They did so in violation of a court injunction that limited the time they could protest, and on March 7, 1964, were arrested “lying down with arms linked . . . blocking the exits of the hotel” (from Savio’s applications to the Mississippi Summer Project, King Center Library, Atlanta; quoted in Jo Freeman, “How the 1963-64 Bay Area Civil Rights Demonstrations Paved the Way to Campus Protest,” Organization of American Historians, San Francisco, April 19, 1997; my italics). Freeman, who participated in the Sheraton Palace protests, remembers how their efforts were almost universally reviled.

In thinking about the reception of African-American civil rights protest and examples like Mario Savio’s together, we re-encounter in its most powerful form Birgeneau’s hoped-for distinction between heroic non-violent activists and undesirable, not non-violent students. It's the convenience of this that is at stake in the question of the incidence of resisting arrest in “classic” African-American civil rights protest. In a recent book on the photography of the civil rights era, Martin Berger and David Garrow ponder the anonymous photograph above, showing a woman in the Birmingham protest fiercely contesting her arrest. Berger and Garrow point out that the mainstream history of the era tends not to reproduce such photographs, and we can see the legacy of that pattern in the cliché version of the “tradition” mobilized by Birgeneau. “White publications in the North shunned such complicating photographs,” they note, and left it to segregationist journals to publish them. The “inactive-active opposition,” they argue, “structured the emotional and intellectual response of whites to photographs of dogs and fire hoses” ( Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, p. 119]) and so regulated both their empathy and their understanding of protest. It is this very opposition that Birgeneau complacently repeats, at once narrowing the possibilities for activism and obscuring the complexity of the history he thinks he honors.

Outside the Free Speech Cage

Marx remarks that the “principle of public safety” can be a legitimate moral force, even though “measures of public safety” are usually “dictatorial measures.” But as he writes this, he is making the point that the Prussian ministry “never hesitated to apply measures of public safety . . . against the democrats,” even as it has “taken good care not to intervene against the counter-revolution on grounds of public safety” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 14 September 1848, in The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Vol. 1 [New York: Verso, 2010], 162). All moral legitimacy is lost in this asymmetry, which winds up subordinating the supposedly hallowed principle of public safety to political conformity and revealing the narrowness of the ministry’s idea of the public.

In the University of California the discourse of “safety” was densest amid the racist incidents of 2009-10, such as the discovery of a noose on the UCSD campus. During and after that time, President Mark C. Yudof and several UC Chancellors declared their desire that students be able to feel safe. “Campus climate is about a sense of belonging,” said Yudof. “It is about a sense that you are welcome, that you are supported and that you are safe. That is your right as students, to a safe, respectful and welcoming campus climate” (newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=2326). In various statements and speeches, the representatives of UC administration paired “safe’” with “civil” and even with “comfortable”: “safe, inclusive, and civil”; (chancellor.ucsb.edu/memos/details.cfm?V=B60719BD750CAB2B”; “"I understand that students don't feel safe, they don't feel comfortable" (www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/22934). The problem is not only the administration’s slide from literal safety to nebulous civility, which equates hate speech with political speech on the ground that both might make someone uncomfortable. The problem is that, as the protests have continued, the administration has failed to show the kind of concern for public safety and public civility that would require it to include protesters within their caring. In order for such a concern to exist, high-ranking UC administrators would need to acknowledge that it is possible for student protesters to be the victims of violence and incivility by others. But this they cannot do, because it would show the speech and acts of protesters to be responses to a political situation rather than simple aggressions; it would show that the administrators themselves are invested actors who have already taken sides in a political situation.

The impression the administration promulgates, instead, is the same--coincidentally, uncannily the same--as the one that the Orange County District Attorney relied on in its press release yesterday explaining why it is filing criminal charges against 19 students and workers who held a sit-in at UC Irvine on February 24, 2010 or protested outside. The D.A. points out that the campus offers “designated areas to practice free speech in a safe and effective manner without disrupting the normal operations of the University.” (Why the campus code is at all relevant to the decision to prosecute under California law is a mystery.) The D.A., citing UCI, divides “safe” from unsafe free speech by the ability of the former to comport with “normal operations,” which are thus implicitly defined as not already including free speech. “Normal operations” does not mean that freedom of speech normally describes or suffuses the activities of the university. They are that which free speech has to navigate around, and it is this process of navigation, a “manner,” that accrues the responsibility for maintaining safety: free speech can of itself be unsafe. The contradictions of campus speech codes and applications of the First Amendment generally have been subject to many scholarly analyses since the introduction of free speech “zones.” I am pointing to something different, albeit complementary: the failure of the University to vouch for safety outside the straitened terms of these self-created zones: the crushing disinterest of the University in actively defending safety for dissidents.

As far as I know, no UC Chancellor has unilaterally declared his or her concern for the treatment of protesters. No police scandal should be necessary for such a declaration. After the botched police breakup of the Wheeler Hall occupation on November 20, 2009, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau of UC Berkeley “truly regret[ted] the incidents that brought physical and emotional injury to members of our community” and initiated a review of police actions. He did not characterize the kinds of incidents and agents that brought on this injury, however, nor say who was injured. He leaves open the possibility that protesters themselves were on both sides of the injury line, while leaving the dynamic of the events undescribed. Of course it’s often the intention of protesters to provoke somebody. But the provocation of protesters is referenced by UC officials again and again while their interlocutors, and the history of their exchanges, at best remain tactfully faceless and at worst are erased from existence. As we know, the concentric circles created by the campus/community wall and repeated by the designation of special zones within the campus work against protesters and never for them (paralleling in this way the Student Code of Conduct). Complementarily, each constructed circle relieves the University of more of its responsibility even as it places additional restrictions on protesters. It protects “normal operations” from free speech that counts as unsafe without defending free speakers from police harassment outside the “normal” sphere but inside the campus wall--or from attack in the community, where they are subject to violent racist threats. While the University worries about the safety of policemen, it seems to lose no sleep on violence against its students. It relieves itself of the responsibility to criticize what happens off-campus—even if it happens next door, like the so-called “Compton Cookout”--or with private money, like the Sarah Palin banquet at Cal State Stanislaus or the racist UCSD “humor” magazine The Koala. It implies that policemen are entitled to break students’ fingers with batons and point loaded guns at them when students are not within the “place, time, and manner” restrictions. These restrictions are restrictions on civility, but in one direction only. And they are so egregious that they must damage our confidence, not only in democracy, but in any public safety that would merit the term "public."

So, on the one hand the Orange County D.A. charges 19 students and workers variously with trespassing, disorderly conduct, failure to disperse, “false imprisonment” (which I take to mean that someone blocked an exit), "obstruction of a public place," and “being a public nuisance.” The fascinating language of the D.A.’s press release phrases legal and routine actions in a vocabulary of emergency and denunciation. The defendants are “accused” of disorderly conduct; they are also “accused” of “trespassing onto the UCI campus, entering the fifth floor of Aldrich Hall, and gathering outside the Office of the Chancellor.” (Why not “accuse” them of using the stairs instead of the elevator, or of wearing T-shirts? There’s no difference.) “400 UCI employees,” according to the D.A., were “evacuated” because of the 17 students within, although they never threatened anyone, orally or otherwise. On the other, after an account of this sit-in appeared in the Orange County Register, Orange County community members distinguished themselves with an avalanche of vicious comments. They were bothered primarily by the dark skin color of many of the students, and secondarily by the criticism of “heteronormativity” that appeared in their literature. People called for background checks on the citizenship of the students, commented that “it looks like some of them are illegal,” asked if any “American-born” students were left at the University, blamed “diversity,” and recommended deportation: “Expel, deport or incarcerate as appropriate UCI.” Along the way they opined that “hetero- behavior IS the norm of society.” In comments that were deleted because I myself objected to them (which I afterward regretted—it was an impulse), people commented directly on the physical appearance of students, used racial slurs, and suggested attacking them with dogs. Would it not have been appropriate for someone, for example the Dean of Students, to write in under his own name to say “Please do not advocate attacking our students with dogs. I do not appreciate it”? Yet 400 UCI employees were “evacuated” lest they be harmed by students, which, as someone who was on the fifth floor for the whole thing, I can say was certainly the only thing that disrupted these employees’ ability to work.

Things were, if possible, even worse when 11 Muslim students protested the on-campus appearance of Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., and Israel's head of P.R. during its 2008-09 offensive against Gaza, Michael Oren. As you know, video shows a boisterous and increasingly excited crowd of mostly elderly community members whose exhortations to the students are rather less polite than the students’ addresses to Oren. My point is not to urge “civility” on them but to note that this dynamic was not invented in February, 2010. The Muslim Students Union is located in Orange County, amid a vociferous right-wing community whose views can be read on blogs like jewtudes and Jewlicious. These writings are not exactly pinnacles of public culture. If you have the heart to read the comments attached to the Orange County Register’s article about the Oren protest, it will take you over an hour to make your way through dozens and dozens of xenophobic and racist insults. They go beyond calling for the deportation of U.S. citizen students, although they do that frequently. “Name one muslim that has done anything good for mankind.” “These students, like their culture of origin, have never created the substantial wealth that a university like this requires. They are interlopers in this country that will be squashed like the bugs they are.” “Islam is a social cancer and these 'students' are a perfect example of what a tumor looks like.” “America is a tolerant country. However, we have free speech in the United States. Respect that while you are here as a guest and respect ALL OF OUR GUESTS! If you don’t like it, you can take your diaperhead bassackward culture and go suck sand in the dessert with the the rest of the caveman culture in the middle east.” Shortly after this the moderator censors someone for “capitaliz[ing] entire words and sentences,” then seems to give up entirely. The comments go on and on. Multiple people call for nuclear genocide. No administrator from UCI, then or since, has come forward to defend the safety of our so-provocative students in this climate, even as the larger public discourse degenerates to the point at which public figures call for the execution of dissidents and a U.S. congressman opines that he’d like to revive McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities. In this environment the literal safety of dissident students is no joke. In the absence of any moral word in defense of unfettered protest from any UC official, Mark Yudof’s attempts to emote on behalf of students who don’t feel “comfortable” are the dregs of plausibility. Even now, after a UC Irvine campus policeman pulled his gun on protesters at UCSF, the Berkeley campus police are taking down posters about police violence because they are worried about his safety. There is nothing public-spirited in such an act.

Some of the Orange County right wing community are currently pressuring UC Irvine to dissociate itself from the Olive Tree Initiative, a mainstream Israeli/Palestianian-issues dialogue project funded by the Ford Foundation in specific response to the supposedly bad relations of Muslim and Jewish groups at UCI. The Olive Tree Initiative is all about civil inquiry in tightly controlled spaces (and only there). But it isn’t the Worker-Student Alliance, the Radical Students Union, or Students for Justice in Palestine that’s calling for its discontinuation. Colleagues who work in Middle East studies tell me casually and ruefully that “of course” the right-wing community is the reason there is no Middle East Studies program at Irvine, despite plentiful faculty and graduate students working in the area and a developed proposal that has been on the table for years. Such pressure is the legal, socially sanctioned way of shutting down others’ speech—the way that operates upon the campus while standing safely outside its wall, while students who would protest it have to stay within their free speech cages. And the administrators continue to wonder aloud why the MSU couldn’t have done things differently, and the police keep citing the students for writing on the “free speech zone” in chalk.

Image: photo by Fabio Chee of "Chalk is Free Speech," November 22, 2010, UC Irvine

Two Hundred Years of University "Reform" and How to Dream It

Click on title. Please also see Issue 3 of Reclamations in its entirety.




photo: UC Irvine, March 4, 2010 (photo by Eyal Amiran)