Assemblism

As Maria Hlavajova notes in her introduction to the appropriately titled book Former West: “The country that routinely calls itself the leader of the free world has just blatantly shown that bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, climate change denial, etc., are at the core of how it wants to be governed. All this to loud jubilation of right-wing ideologues in the west and across the globe, saluting the birth of a new world order, once again.” Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, eds. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 15.

In the work of Brian Michael Goss, for example, the Us/Them dichotomy is discussed as the dominant ideological doctrine of the War on Terror. Reviving the trope of orientalism, Goss argues, allowed Saddam Hussein and his regime to become constructed as “exotic, traditional, sensuous, mysterious” while simultaneously being framed as “brutal, untouched by the rigors of reason, subjected to the primitive social organization of the leader and the led.” Against this, George W. Bush could be contrasted as the enlightened crusader of Western democracy. Goss goes on to comment that “the paired exaltation and denigration of Our and Their leaders perhaps mutually summon each other into being.” Brian Michael Goss, Rebooting the Herman & Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013), 98, 104.

This political use of the term “tsunami”—equating migration and fleeing refugees with the devastation caused by natural disaster (or rather, climate change)—was first coined by Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, when he described the “tsunami of Islamization” as the greatest threat to the Netherlands and the West at large. See Sanne ten Hoove and Raoul du Pré, “Wilders bang van ‘tsunami van islamisering,’” Volkskrant, October 6, 2006 →.

Sven Lütticken rightfully points out that this division entails far more than income inequality, as was demonstrated by the Brexit vote, in which well-off citizens who owned houses tended to vote “leave,” while people in more precarious conditions and those with mortgages tended to vote “remain.” The Us/Them divide is as much political and cultural as it is economic. See Sven Lütticken, “Who Makes the Nazis?,” e-flux journal 76 (October 2016) →.

Not all these examples are examined in Butler’s book, partly because Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock had not yet emerged when she was writing it. But a different category of assemly that seems missing from the book is heavily politicized online assemblies that aim at collective action, for example in the form of transnationally organized “DDoS” attacks (Distributed Denial of Service)—essentially a tactic to overwhelm websites by accelerating their data usage. Although DDoS attacks are also used by governments in cyber offensives and are certainly not exclusive to progressive groups, historic cases such as Operation Payback (2010), which took down the websites of Visa and Mastercard in retaliation for their refusal to accept donations to WikiLeaks, are examples of forms of transnational assembly with a potential to construct diverse collectivities. See Esther Addley and Josh Halliday, “WikiLeaks supporters disrupt Visa and Mastercard Sites in ‘Operation Payback,’” The Guardian, December 9, 2010 →.

Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 58.

Ibid., 27.

See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).

Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 65.

In a collaborative book project with Athena Athanasiou, Butler writes in a crucial passage that “the performative emerges precisely as the specific power of the precarious—unauthorized by existing legal regimes, abandoned by the law itself—to demand the end of precarity.” Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 121.

Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 218.

Butler’s own speech at the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, New York on October 23, 2011 can be considered a marking point for her theory on performativity and the enactment of new social forms. She said: “As bodies we suffer, we require shelter and food, and as bodies we require one another and desire one another. So this is a politics of the public body, the requirements of the body, its movement and voice. We would not be here if elected officials were representing the popular will. We stand apart from the electoral process and its complicities with exploitation. We sit and stand and move and speak, as we can, as the popular will, the one that electoral democracy has forgotten and abandoned. But we are here, and remain here, enacting the phrase, ‘we the people.’” See →.

For accounts from different members of Artists in Occupy Amsterdam, see Actors, Agents and Attendants: Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice, eds. Fulya Erdemci and Andrea Phillips (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).

The University of Colour emerged as a critique of and alternative to what its initiators considered the underlying colonial and white bias of the demands and knowledges propagated by the New University. The University of Colour, in contrast, sought to “decolonize the university.” See →.

On the role of art in instituting the New University, see Jonas Staal, “New Art for the New University,” June 15, 2015 →.

Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 84.

Ibid., 127.

Not An Alternative argues for a form of “institutional liberation,” meaning that through social movements, occupations, boycotts, etc., existing institutions can become repurposed within the imaginary of an alternative institutionality brought forward by the precariat: “Institutional liberation isn’t about making institutions better, more inclusive, more participatory. It’s about establishing politicized base camps from which ever more coordinated, elaborate, and effective campaigns against the capitalist state in all its racist, exploitative, extractivist, and colonizing dimensions can be carried out. This takeover will not happen overnight. But it is happening now at an international scale, accumulating force and momentum with every repetition of a common name and image, every iteration of associated acts: red lines, red squares, arrayed tents, money drops, blockades, occupations.” Not An Alternative, “Institutional Liberation,” e-flux journal 77 (November 2016) →.

Jodi Dean’s work on the concept of the “crowd” overlaps in some respects with the assemblies of the precariat discussed by Butler. However, Dean takes a more militant approach in arguing that the egalitarian potential of the crowd must be translated through a new international Communist Party. Through the Community Party, she writes, the crowd can emerge as the People. See Dean’s lecture “If You’re Not Against Us, You’re With Us,” Former West Public Editorial Meeting, Hungary, May 13, 2015 →. See also Dean, Crowds and Party (Brooklyn: Verso, 2016).

Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 116.

Ibid., 68, 85, 87. Regarding art and morphology, see also Jonas Staal, “Ideology = Form,” e-flux journal 69 (January 2016) →. The notion of “assemblage” here resonates with Yates McKee’s history of art within the Occupy Movement and its aftermath: “Like the camp itself that would be set up in the following month, the founding assembly might be understood as a kind of embodied collage, transposing an alien political form into both the ossified landscape of the New York Left and the symbolic heart of global capital itself.” Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Brooklyn: Verso, 2016), 93. Hito Steyerl, in the context of the alterglobalization movement, speaks similarly of its “montage.” Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 78.

Herman and Chomsky, who articulated their famous “propaganda model” in the late Eighties, identified five “filters” through which monopolies of power come to perform normative reality: ownership, advertising, information dependency, flak (distortion), and anticommunism. They also proposed a form of counter-propaganda (what I will call “emancipatory propaganda”) realized through the “organization and self-education of groups in the community and workplace, and their networking and activism.” Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 307.

Masco speaks of the expanded concept of biosecurity in the War on Terror, which “promises a world without terror via the constant production of terror,” and as such ends up creating “a potentially endless recursive loop of threat production and response.” Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 156.

The idea that propaganda should be understood in the plural is taken from the philosopher Jacques Ellul, whose “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes” (1962) is a rather curious translation of the original plural French title: “Propagandas.”

The notion of emerging power resonates with what Gerald Raunig, following Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Antonio Negri, describes as “constituent power”: a “collective subjectivation, instituation, and formation beyond constituted power.” Raunig writes that constituent power is the driving force of “micropolitical” practices through which an alternative, non-statist history of art can be articulated. Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 54, 60. In the case of assemblism, we will speak of “emerging power,” since the cases examined by Butler are so radically differentiated.

In her essay “Some Propaganda for Propaganda” (1984), Lucy Lippard spoke of emancipatory propaganda as an “inherently feminist … more intimate” form of propaganda. See Lucy Lippard, To the Third Power: Feminism, Art, and Class Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1984), 117.

“Parliament of Bodies” is the title of the Athens edition of documenta 14. It attempts to broaden Bruno Latour’s concepts of the “Parliament of Things.” See Iliana Fokianaki, “Missing Bodies,” Frieze, October 24, 2016 →.

This has been discussed by the founders of Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, who note that “throughout the histories of decolonization, the possibility of reusing existing structures in the very same ways they were used under colonial regimes has proven too tempting to resist.” However, they simultaneously emphasize that “colonial remnants and ruins are not only the dead matter of past power, but could be thought of as material for re-appropriations and strategic activation within the politics of the present.” The latter certainly applies to the autonomous Rojava region. See Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, Architecture After Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 20, 21.

Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (1970) makes a similar point. In the context of the Women’s Movement, she observed that “the members of a friendship group will relate more to each other than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; they repeat each other’s points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore or grapple with the ‘outs,’ whose approval is not necessary for making a decision. But it is necessary for the ‘outs’ to stay on good terms with the ‘ins.’” See →.

Although I agree with Claire Bishop that the “binary of active/passive” tends to be reductive, the practice of assemblism certainly does aim to shift agency amongst participants, although this is admittedly more complex than switching from a politics of representation to one of “presence.” From a Butlerian perspective we could very well argue that our bodily presence is also a form of mediation and representation. In the context of assemblism, the term “actor” is closer to what Augusto Boal termed “spect-actor.” See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (London: Verso, 2012), 38.

See Jonas Staal, “Transdemocracy,” e-flux journal 76 (October 2016) →.

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency points to Palestine’s history of a parliament-in-exile—born out of devastating colonial violence—as a model of extraterritorial “Common Assembly,” which survives state violence through time “precisely because their gatherings have no fixed seats.” Petti, Hilal, and Weizman, Architecture After Revolution, 169.