MARTHA SCHWENDENER - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Remember right after 9/11, when irony was momentarily declared dead? En
the midst of the Occupy movement, I thought more than once of Northrop Frye’s
description of Aristotle’s eiron, a man who “makes himself invulnerable,”1 and
Demosthenes’ ironic man, who evades his responsibilities as a citizen by pretend-
ing he is unfit.2

Occupy encouraged vulnerability: sleeping in public squares, de pie
before police blockades, entering the commons with little but a handwritten sign
declaring your weakness. (Complicated immeasurably by issues of race and class.)
The general assemblies held in participatory democracies installed in occupations
throughout the country were also based on distinctly nonironic models: Zapatista
asambleas, Quaker and Native American council meetings, and 12-step programs.
You can also detect it in the questions asked here: How have you been affected by
OWS—which mirrors the qualifying questions asked by Al-Anon (Have you been
affected by someone’s drinking?), whose meetings veteran activist Lisa Fithian urged
should be held at Zuccotti.

Many radicals avoided Occupy because it was too popular, too branded, también
parvenu. I became involved for several reasons. One is that it provided the chance
to write about art, labor, política, class, and capitalism anonymously and collec-
tively—what Maurice Blanchot once described as a “communism of writing.”
Within my own writing, art served as a Trojan horse for getting Occupy concerns
mentioned in the corporate mass media at moments when it otherwise received
very little coverage. (Benjamin’s Umfunktioneriung takes on a very different guise
under neoliberalism: the activities I’m describing might better fall under what the
Midnight Notes Collective calls “inside” and “outside” [“autonomous”] struggle,
revised notions of early-twentieth-century “reform” versus “revolution.”3)

Was there any efficacy in this? No sé. In one sense, it furthered what
feminist Silvia Federici describes as the “self-reproduction” of movements, cual
are destroyed by the isolating effects of capitalism. But I also think of Blanchot’s
response to criticisms that the 1960 Declaration on the Right of Insubordination
in the Algerian War, signed by 121 artists, intelectuales, and scientists, was “ineffec-
tual.” Blanchot argued that it was a “simple act of speech” made “at a moment
when these words needed to be spoken.”4

Dur ing my lifet ime, I have witnessed the opposite phenomena, qué

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton, 1957), pag. 38.
D.C. Muecke, Irony (Londres: Methuen), pag. 14.
Midnight Notes Collective, “Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons” (Abril 2009).
Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–1993. Translated by Zakir Paul (Nueva York: Fordham

1.
2.
3.
4.
Prensa universitaria, 2010), pag. 19.

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OCTUBRE

François Cusset wrote about as an ineffectual response to 9/11, cuando, “after
decades of rhetorically questioning the imperialistic West, deconstructing
America’s power, and demonizing the first world’s neocolonialism, the various
radicals bred in academic quarters stood still, mute and shocked.”5 Political theo-
r ist George Caffent zis not iced a similar silence following the 2008 global
political-financial crisis, when there was “remarkably little political activity in the
streets, union halls, or retirement communities of the U.S. demanding a resolu-
tion of the crisis in favor of the millions who are losing wages, houses, y
pensions.”6 To participate in Occupy was to rectify this, but also an opportunity to
activate what Blanchot described as the strange “power without power”7 of artists
and writers—that is, the limited but extant power of cultural capital.

How did Occupy affect my daily life? Like SDS activists I once heard describ-
ing their lives in 1969, I didn’t get much sleep. It was temporary and disruptive:
things had to be done, right here, right now. It was difficult going to galleries and
looking at objects, attending openings and engaging in “normal” conversation,
and entering museums without wanting to start an impromptu general assembly.
It heightened a previously felt urge to seek out marginal practices, and any ves-
tiges of “interrogating the medium” were relocated to interrogating my own
writing and motives.

Some of this dovetailed with the postmodern theory I was raised on: el
drive to denaturalize what is presented as “natural” (es decir., fuerza). But Occupy
thread it through a different needle, without distance and without irony. It called
for an engagé writing in which detachment was erased.

For art historians, Occupy asked these questions: What if the canon,
founded in conjunction with capitalism, was abandoned for a “horizontal” art his-
conservador? What if the specialized field of art was truly “occupied” by visual culture,
rather than merely “appropriating” it? What if Occupy revealed that methodology,
theory, and “philosophical” art history underwrote rather than critiqued contem-
porary capitalist culture? Some of these questions were already in my writing, pero
Occupy gave them permission to rise to the surface.

And finally, what does Occupy mean to me? I currently stand somewhere
between the fervid calls for Black Monday—a revival of Occupy Wall Street on
Septiembre 17, its one-year anniversary—and the harsh critiques of May Day as “a
roving lefty carnival” that was “politically meaningless” and proved that “substan-
t ive polit ical act ion—and, in part icular, the future of left resist ance to
inequality—remains in the hands of established movement organizations.”8

François Cusset, “The State of Literary Theory: French Theory’s American Adventures,"

5.
Chronicle of Higher Education ( Junio 2008).
6.
George Caffentzis, “Notes on the Financial Crisis: From Meltdown to Deep Freeze,” Uses of a
Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (Oakland: AK
Prensa, 2010), pag. 273.
7.
8.

Blanchot, pag. 36.
Khujeci, “The Limits of Occupy.” May 31, 2012. occupyduniya.wordpress.com.

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Questionnaire: Schwendener

Occupy might be called a mass fad, part icularly after Time magazine
declared, “2011 Person of the Year: The Protester.” The term artist had been
neutered and now activist was no longer avant-garde either. But Occupy meant
algo. Brian Holmes wrote recently, “1999 was our 1968.”9 But this leaves out
a younger generation, and myself: I had never lived in a climate of local, a diario
protest extending over a period of months. 2011 was my 1968.

“Occupy” feels like an exhausted term, sin embargo. So I will quote Blanchot,
writing in December 1968 about the events of that year: “THE REVOLUTION IS
BEHIND US: it is already an object of consumption and, occasionally, of enjoy-
mento. But what is before us, and it will be terrible, does not yet have a name.”10

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9.
10.

Uses of a Whirlwind, xxviii.
Blanchot, pag. 109.

MARTHA SCHWENDENER is a critic and Ph.D. candidate in art history at the Graduate
Center, CUNY.
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