by Ian Alan Paul of the Friendly Fire Collective
The dust of the storm that was the Republican National Convention has slowly settled on to the streets of St. Paul. The busses which once carried delegates now return to their normal routes. The corporate news vans retract their antennae and reporters return to their studios. The National Guard disassembles their security perimeters and packs concrete barricades on to military trucks. City employees nonchalantly sweep up the broken glass which is the only remaining sign of the riot that danced through the downtown a few days before. Anti-capitalists return to their homes across North America and recover from the trauma of the week’s events. Now, we reflect.
Dancing in the Streets of St. Paul
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
—Raoul Vaneigem
The theater awaited its performers. The fences across the downtown had been carefully erected and the defenders of law and order stood by patiently looking for their cue. After 2 long years of waiting behind the curtains, the actors from across North America began assembling. They had been rehearsing, gathering props and now it was finally time to act. Although some of them had played their parts countless times before and others among them were about to experience it all for the first time, the butterflies in their stomachs weren’t exclusive to either group. Then, without notice, it all begins. Dancers in black weave through the streets and alleys of downtown and redecorate the storefront facades. Others provide the musical score and rhythmically occupy the stage of St. Paul.
When we think of resistance in the North American context, it’s hard to not recognize the spectacular nature of both the protests and the target of the resistance. While the aesthetic of insurgency and armed groups has proliferated itself into the radical wings of the American left, our strategies, perhaps unconsciously, remain centered on performance.
With the insistence of resisting using ‘direct action’, that is, action which confronts problems directly rather than seeking intermediaries, the radical left has presented itself as moving beyond symbolic action. When using ‘direct action’ to disrupt the spectacle of conventions, we confront contradictions in how we relate to power and hierarchy in society. How do we claim to be ‘directly’ intervening in society when we decide to confront spectacle itself? The critical questions we must ask ourselves when deciding to confront power at these sites of struggle are: what are we hoping to interrupt with our tactics and what will the outcome of the interruption be? If the measure of success is a measure of how ‘direct’ the effects of the action are, then by all measures we’ve failed. If the measure of our success instead lies in the exposure of proliferation of the anarchist spectacle and in the epistemic damage done to the spectacle of law and order, then we need to reconsider our relationship to direct action.
In a sense, a lot of what radical protest in the United States has become is an expression of our desires, albeit a policed one. The destruction of property, occupation of streets and attacks on police all represent our repressed desires being sublimated into street actions. While the imagination of the radical Left continues to flourish and blossom, the constraints put onto individuals by authoritarian institutions through the deployment of police and the intensification of surveillance into the personal lives of the participants constrains the possible realization of those dreams. The results are brief and intense outpourings of frustration and desire, love and rage, which are not bent on creating the world’s we want to see but instead are ‘performances’ of our own imaginations. As we quickly find when we mine and investigate these desires, the schisms between what we are fighting for and how we fight are deeper than are assumed.
Defending the Barricades of the Imagination
It is often said that anarchists live in a world of dreams to come and do not see the things which happen today. We see them only too well and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forests of prejudices that beset us.
—Peter Kropotkin
Are these street protests prefigurations of a future society waiting for the chance to emerge? If that is the case, this is a society still in contest with itself and its own values. While the spread of black bloc militant tactics onto larger parts of the recent manifestations is being hailed as a success by large parts of the antiauthoritarian movement, there has been a silence on the problems inherent with the spread of such tactics. As outlined in the article Of Stones and Flowers by John Holloway and Vittorio Sergi, the militant black bloc both represents our most passionate desires and deep insecurities as a movement. The fact that the black bloc is mostly male, white and young contradicts the ideals professed in the ideas of the movement, and as John Holloway points out the black bloc exhibits a stark symmetry to the police they are fighting in both aesthetic and demographic terms. How are we to make sense of this? Has American violent mass-entertainment and the spectacle of militant resistance abroad colonized the movement? If anything, the summits of the past decade seem to be adaptations of the WTO summit protests in 1999, using the same scripts and roles with only different actors.
I think that if we look closely, the seeds of desire for new tactics, new forms of manifestations and a different model for confronting power were there in St. Paul. The organizing done by Bash Back in different cities across the country (mostly in the Midwest) before the demonstrations in St. Paul provided a glimpse of a model which not only confronted power and hierarchy in the streets in a militant and confrontational way, but also did so in a participatory manner. Also important to note was that Bash Back was able to contest power relationships not only in the streets and with people outside of our movement, but within the spokescouncils as well. Speaking prefiguratively, these are ideas and features which more closely resemble the future societies we are fighting for. While our analysis of power has been well developed and deployed against capitalist structures, a critical eye is lacking when thinking about the realities and performances of our movement. If we are demonstrating, what is it we hope to demonstrate? And if we are, as Europeans have called it, ‘manifesting’, what are we hoping to manifest? When there are contradictions between our ideas and our actions, especially considering the hierarchies we are hoping to topple (patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, etc), how do we hope to resolve them? Will the imaginations and desires that have carried us to this juncture carry us to new landscapes of resistance or lead us blindly through old ones?
Manifesting the Desires of the New Society
“After N30, many people will never see a shop window or a hammer the same way again. The potential uses of an entire cityscape have increased a thousand-fold. The number of broken windows pales in comparison to the number broken spells—spells cast by a corporate hegemony to lull us into forgetfulness of all the violence committed in the name of private property rights and of all the potential of a society without them. Broken windows can be boarded up (with yet more waste of our forests) and eventually replaced, but the shattering of assumptions will hopefully persist for some time to come.”
-N30 Black Bloc Communique, the ACME Collective
I do not profess to have the solutions that would bridge the schism between our imagination and desires and our performances in the streets, and I think if we are to move forward and produce our dreams in the material it will be the result of collective imagining, not individual desire. Perhaps the intensification of repression over the past decade has in a sense forced us to sublimate our desires in the aforementioned ways. While I’ve described the division between our ideas and actions, I know that part of this is caused by the knowledge of what the consequences would be if we did act in the ways we wanted to. While there is a natural utilitarianism in the use of the black bloc as a tactic, we must come to terms with what it means to have a separation of means and ends in our movement.
What happened in St. Paul and in the summits before it has had an impact on the antiauthoritarian movement in the United States, and it is inspiring to see people in the streets risking a lot to resist the machinery of colonization and capitalism. However, as a movement, rather than blindly running forward with stale tactics and internal contradictions, perhaps it’s time to reflect on our past(s) and experiment with new models for action which allow us to resolve these tensions. The questions of how we relate to spectacle and performance, as well as how we can be more participatory in our actions are essential if we want to be effective in the future. I wrote this article knowing that it could not be truly resolved in writing, that like the movement, the ideas are contested and fragmented – I only hope that the questions posed throughout provide sparks with which to start new fires against capitalism and against authority.
Ian Alan Paul is an artist and writer currently living in San Francisco and is a member of the Friendly Fire Collective.
