Nonviolence Ain't What It Used To Be - Shon Meckfessel

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posed a simple question: “Do you support the Occupy Oakland movement?” The paper had spent the previous five months being consistently critical of Occupy Oakland, ranging from an initial bewilderment to later indignation and even outrage. Just two weeks before the poll, it headlined an article with a quote from Mayor Quan addressed to protesters, “Stop Using Oakland as Your Playground!” The paper tended to highlight the voices of local political, business, and nonprofit leaders dismissing Occupy Oakland as beyond the boundaries of legitimate dissent. One might have expected, then, for Tribune readers to harbor few warm feelings for the movement. The results of the poll, quietly published in a sidebar, were surprising: 94 percent voted “yes” to supporting the movement, and only 6 percent voted “no.”62 Evidently, the 10,829 respondents bore little relation to the audience constituted through the paper’s daily discursive prac­tices—a puzzling outcome indeed.

      The passivity or activity of mass-mediated publics has been a heated debate within cultural and media studies since the field’s inception. On the one hand, theorists of the Frankfurt School spoke of the “culture industry,” a depressing, fatalistic, and seamless model of social control, in which masses are passively molded by capitalist culture. On the other hand, there is John Fiske’s “semiotic democracy,” in which audiences, with joyful irreverence, freely go about creating their own meanings to sabotage unequal access to the means of representation. Arguably, however, neither of these models can account for the sort of public that appears in the Tribune’s poll—materially real, yet somehow invisible in all but this one sidebar. The more this material public begins to appear, the more the “average reader” addressed by the paper is revealed as an empty public; ghost-like, disappearing into the realm of the supernatural. How is it possible, one must wonder, that some previously invisible public believes precisely the opposite of the audience that the paper’s consistent editorial policy seeks to discursively constitute, and that they believe so to such an extreme degree? An independent survey cited by “Occupy Research” claims equally surprising results from the businesses surrounding the encampment as well:

      What these figures show is that Occupy Oakland’s claims and rhetorical appeals, which were negatively received (if at all) by mainstream media and leading figures among indirect-rule political institutions and nonprofits, do indeed reach certain immediate publics. Those publics seem to be created by some resonance of actions, invisible to the channels of mass mediation that usually serve as the exclusive measure of contemporary publics. The choices that virtually ensure antipathy from news editors and political representatives may simultaneously work to constitute publics through other channels—a fact that organizers seem well aware of and consider worth the risk.

      The approach of constitution publics immediately does not lay claim to any pretensions of a universal audience, without race, class, gender, or any positionality. Responding to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” or insisting that the movement has to moderate its acts to appeal to “normal people,” ignores the fact that the “All Lives” and “normal people” are themselves instances of the status quo. Organizing a collectivity or public—mainstream or marginal—is already and inherently political; it implies and determines the possibilities of consciousness and action available to that public. “All Lives” are not equally murdered by police, but people of various “races” gathered together on the basis of resisting police violence against Black lives might find themselves acting as a powerful body against racism. The same group of people thinks and acts very differently depending on how and under what logic they gather. Marginality isn’t incidental—the very means of coming together, of constituting a new public, is an attack on how the center is constituted. All are welcome, but not necessarily as they are: if everyone showed up as they are, then the new group would be indistinguishable from the status quo. Challenger publics must transform participants in the very act of coming together. This transformation is central to what contemporary disruptive social movements work to achieve.

      Hannah Arendt and the Direct Demos

      The notion that mass publics, brought together by mass media, are resources better left untapped is not entirely new. Emma Goldman, who in 1893 was arrested on inciting-to-riot charges for exhorting a large crowd of unemployed workers to take bread if they were not given work, could hardly be called an elitist; yet the hazards “the masses” present to real democracy is an ongoing theme in her work. Near the end of her essay “Minorities Versus Majorities,” she addresses this apparent contradiction in her concerns:

      Scholars of Goldman have often stumbled over her position, finding her affection for Nietzsche and his idealization of the solitary genius of the Übermensch in contradiction with her anticapitalist populism. But as she makes clear, she is not making an elitist assertion against the differentiated Many (what Paolo Virno calls the “Multitude”), but is warning against their unitary constitution—through representative media of politics, information, or sociological instruments—into an undifferentiated whole. Rather than being an embittered, secret aristocrat, Goldman reveals herself to have a very contemporary concern with how people are drawn into a collectivity, without assuming that their mode of collective being is given by their demographic. For many years, Goldman herself served as the English spokesperson of the Spanish CNT-FAI, consisting at times of some millions of members—certainly a “mass” of participants in some sense—but which was organized along decentralized, ­direct-democratic, rather than mass, lines.

      Arendt’s thought in her earlier The Human Condition focuses on the way that different types of political or personal activity determine the values and meaning of human life; thinking in terms of such meaning-producing activity can clarify the difference between “people” and “masses.” What we do determines who we are, not

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