»The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency…«
Walter Benjamin »Theses on the Philosophy of History«

On April 27, the central campus of Sarah Lawrence College, 20 miles outside New York City, became the stage for Right2Fight (R2F), a unique pedagogical encounter organized by new media artist Trebor Scholz and urban historian Dominique Malaquais, bringing together a range of activists and cultural producers to address the ongoing crisis of police violence in the United States and beyond.

The event was scheduled to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the uprising sparked in South Central Los Angeles by the acquittal of the white police officers captured on video brutalizing black motorist Rodney King. An unsettling lesson about media and »human rights« emerged from the King verdict: no matter how seemingly incontrovertible and self-evident the video images, the mere availability of »information« was no guarantee in calling into being an adequate public response to the brutality or from preventing its recurrence, as the rest of the 1990's and the first two years of the new millennium have gone on to prove. This is partially because the numerous episodes of »excessive force« that have surfaced during this period have continued to be framed in official discourse as either 1) justified responses to the danger posed by the victim to the police, and by extension, to the public 2) isolated acts of aberrant individuals or 3) regrettable indications of maladjusted »police-community relations.« However, other voices are now emerging that throw into question the full spectrum of official interpretations, insisting instead that this »excess« is no accident, but is built into the very foundations of contemporary law enforcement, criminal justice and political economy.

In a context of public indifference, official impunity, and narrowly defined agendas of reform, what kinds of cultural interventions can activate a critical, effective response to abuses perpetrated by the very apparatus officially authorized to protect and serve? Acknowledging that the straightforward presentation of »facts« has proven inadequate, the activists and artists featured in R2F have elaborated new strategies and idioms for constructing an oppositional public sphere that might work to challenge the regular »state of emergency« that prevails, in the words of the organizers, from »Brooklyn to Johannesburg.«

Upon arrival at the central lawn of the Sarah Lawrence campus, visitors were confronted with a spatial disjuncture announcing their entry into an unconventional pedagogical arena: a line of blue wooden barriers across which would normally be inscribed the prohibition »POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS.« Yet substituted for this official spatial directive were a series of names and dates marking fatalities at the hands of the police: »Malcolm Ferguson, March 2, 2000,« »Amadou Diallo, February 4th, 1999,« »Gideon Busch, August 30, 1999.« This memorial installation by Adam De Croix evokes traces of the dead within the very architectonics of police authority. The boundary enabling the police to represent - and defend - public security is here recast as a shield erected against public accountability, functioning not only to efface past injustices, but to tacitly legitimize future ones as well.

Whose body is put at risk in the name of protecting »the public«? Who or what can protect from the violence of the protectors? This is the question posed by Dread Scott's [i]Sign of the Times[/i], which inhabits the generic format of a yellow street sign, conventionally assumed to alert a generic citizen to hazards which cannot be fully controlled or anticipated. Yet Scott's sign alerts its addressee to a risk which is far from accidental and which does not threaten all users of public space equally: against the yellow field are set the blocky silhouettes of a police officer opening fire on another figure whose raised arms indicate a surrender. It reads »DANGER: POLICE IN AREA.« This image, reproduced on buttons, T shirts and posters available at R2F, was originally mounted on actually existing street signs in black and Latino neighborhoods in New York City after the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999.

Police brutality must be understood as simultaneously a physical assault and a strategy of psychic and symbolic terror designed to isolate and silence its victims. In such a context, testifying, or the act of calling others to bear witness to »the specificity of a historical experience which annihilated any possibility of address« can be an emancipatory event in and of itself.¹ This testimonial imperative was operative across a range of practices brought together at R2F, including a forum at which relatives of victims of police brutality spoke of their losses and the ongoing violence of official impunity. Among the relatives to speak at the forum was Margarita Rosario, whose teenage son and nephew were shot, execution style, in 1996 when their apartment was subjected to a police raid as part of the »war on drugs« that has resulted in the steady militarization of inner-city neighborhoods across the United States.

Rosario is one of many relatives whose practices of mourning have become a form of militancy in the form of the October 22nd Coalition Against Police Brutality and the Criminalization of a Generation. This organization has sought for the past eight years to document and publicize instances of police brutality, which it regards as an »epidemic« with systemic roots and not a series of random or isolated occurrences. Among its strategies of public address, the Coalition has initiated the Stolen Lives Project, an ongoing archive of police killings across the country that has become available as a book. The Coalition has also declared October 22 »wear black day,« an annual ritual of collective mourning, and produced a number of television announcements for a »police brutality hotline« featuring hip-hop artists such as Wyclef Jean.

As the full name of the Coalition implies, its members contend that explicit physical violence is made possible and legitimized by a context of pervasive structural violence in which certain populations are evicted from labor markets and underserved by state institutions, save those concerned with surveillance and incarceration. These related developments have helped to produce a redundant black and Latino sub-proletariat understood as necessitating permanent carcereal management rather than individual rehabilitation or social reintegration, as earlier discourses of criminal justice might have had it.² In so far as these criminalized populations are taken to be permanent, inevitable features of society, from the perspective of capital they comprise a relatively stable source of potential profit.

The business (quite literally) of managing these criminalized populations is taken up in Ashley Hunt's video [i]Corrections[/i] (2000). Hunt uses as a point of entry the explosion of the private prison industry over the past fifteen years, tracing the origins of this phenomenon, (pioneered by the Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut), to the emergence of »law and order« politics in the wake of the urban social movements of the 1960's and the neo-liberal revolution launched under Reagan in the 1980's. Eschewing a unified narrative voice, Hunt weaves together archival and contemporary footage and interview material with historians, activists, prison officials and corporate spokespeople in order to produce a cognitive map of the Prison Industrial Complex and the multitude of local initiatives that have emerged to combat it.

While the primary focus is on cultural and political responses to the disproportionate impact of police violence on the urban poor in the United States, the R2F initiative also raised intriguing questions about the possibilities and limitations of linking these responses to other situations of criminalization and brutalization both domestically and worldwide.

Several pieces included in R2F dealt with the militarization of urban space in Northern cities that have hosted the institutions of global economic governance over the past three years. The massive deployment of heavily armored police in these situations has been intended to signify the protection of a universal public united by »free trade« against the irrationality and potential violence embodied by demonstrators. However, the official semiotics and bodily enforcement of »public order« have proved vulnerable to reversal, with the police and, by extension, global capitalist legality, coming to appear as the enemies, rather than the defenders, of the public. Rick Rowe's [i]Seattle/Genoa[/i] and Oliver Ressler's [i]This is What Democracy Looks Like[/i] demonstrate the centrality of hand-held video technology in both the documentation and the taking-place of events that are all too often narrated from the perspective of capital. However, these videos focus almost exclusively on the spatial tactics of demonstrators as they wrangle with police, producing a kind of phenomenology of direct action and bodily risk. These micro-spatial struggles - occupying physical and mediatic space simultaneously - are clearly a crucial moment in the overall process of constructing corporate globalization as a site of antagonism. Yet there is always the risk of fetishizing the process of »reclaiming the street« as an end in itself, overshadowing the urgency of a deeper analysis of the relationship between global neo-liberalism and the dismantling of social and economic rights for poor people in the United States and elsewhere in the North. The analysis of what might be called »structural adjustment at home« begun by Ashley Hunt's Corrections thus provides a stronger basis for linking anti-corporate and anti-brutality work than the superficially common experience of white, middle class demonstrators assaulted with teargas and the everyday exposure to law enforcement undergone by the urban poor of the sort detailed in October 22nd Coaltion's testimonial video [i]Youth[/i]. As Andrew Hsiao writes, »…direct-action tactics have a different meaning in communities where many are undocumented or already have a perilous relationship with the police.«³

This tension is particularly important to consider when it comes to the anarchist anti-statism of many Northern demonstrators, a position which finds its philosophical justification in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's much celebrated [i]Empire[/i]. There, the authors conjure the figure of the multitude, whose »constituent power« strives to break free from the stifling limits of the nation-state in order to realize an open-ended and dynamic »cosmopolitical« community. Yet opposing »The State« as a generic gesture of resistance is a luxury not afforded to either people of color in the U.S. or the popular movements of the Global South; indeed as Pheng Cheah⁴ has argued in his critique of Marxist and post colonialist cosmopolitanisms alike, the nation-state remains the only institutional form currently available for insulating the poor from raw exposure to the coercive laws of global competition and for realizing a modicum of social redistribution (through measures such as the protection of national food systems, the regulation of finance capital, the maintenance of budget deficits for public spending, etc.). This position does not lead Cheah to uncritically embrace official nationalisms or to dispense with the project of »acting and feeling beyond the nation,« but it does demand that the radical left formulate a more nuanced account of the nation-state in both its repressive as well as (potentially) protective aspects, maintaining it as one terrain of struggle among many others in the pursuit of global justice.

Yet even as we take heed of Cheah's conjunctural defense of the politico-economic sovereignty in the Global South, it is clear that in the North Atlantic countries, the discourse of sovereignty is linked fundamentally to the right to police national borders and to control and/or expel selected populations of immigrants and refugees.

On display at R2F were promotional materials from the Deportation Class campaign mounted by No One is Illegal, a network of tactical media activists devoted to combating the criminalization of migrants and the »Fortress Europe« mentality that informs the discourse of neo-fascist and neo-liberal politicians alike. Deportation Class was designed in response to a series of deaths that occurred on commercial flights as asylum seekers were physically restrained during their deportation from various western European countries. Intervening at various points of the marketing apparatus of Lufthansa airlines, the campaign's pseudo-corporate announcement of a »new« class of travelers brought wide attention to the way private corporations profit from the involuntary mobility of bodies marked as useless or threatening to the »health« of western polities. No One Is Illegal thus enacted its own form of cosmopolitical address, demanding that consumers and citizens withdraw their tacit sanction from a concept of society in which nation and nativity are the ultimate arbiters of belonging and the arrival of strangers is treated as a plague.

This absolutization of the nation-state-territory nexus (or what Jacques Derrida has called »ontopology«⁵) bears a constitutive relationship to the no-man's land of the refugee camp, which Giorgio Agamben has suggested is the exemplary space of the twentieth century.⁶ Positioned by the organizers of R2F in the center of the Sarah Lawrence campus, Emily Jacir's [i]Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948[/i] (2001) consists of a startling architectural presence - a full-scale canvas refugee tent, circa 1948 - that enjoins us to bear witness to an originary violence and the ongoing force of what Nietzsche would call »active forgetting.« This counter-monument to nation-building is the residual afterlife of a performative encounter staged by Jacir in New York City, in which she invited diasporic Palestinians, Israelis, and others to gather in her studio over the course of several months to embroider the names of the 418 displaced villages into the canvas of the tent, with not a few of these left deliberately incomplete as faint graphite outlines. Jacir's project utilizes an ostensibly temporary, exceptional structure that at once facilitates the bare survival of evicted, stateless populations, while all too often functioning to cause acceptance of this condition of exposure as a permanent technical »problem« to be managed rather than politically resolved. The camp is a sinister instance of »post-national« existence, of belonging solely to »humanity« (and humanitarian expertise) without recourse to an apparatus of citizenship, national or otherwise. Jacir's memorial demonstrates a simultaneous embrace of cross-border belonging and exchange (as enacted in its creation and exhibition) and a refusal to relinquish the project of postcolonial national self-determination in the name of purely »human« rights.

The relationship between law enforcement, state power, and rights has taken on a new dimension in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the deployment of an open-ended »war on terror« by the United States, domestically and abroad. While the R2F event did not explicitly address the transformation of the politico-ideological field set in motion by the attacks, the hybridization of military and police operations that we have witnessed over the past year formally parallel and practically intersect with the specific issues taken up by Scholz and Malaquais' event. As Agamben has written, »The rationales of 'public order' and 'security' on which the police have to decide on a case-by-case basis define an area of indistinction between violence and right that is exactly symmetrical to that of sovereignty.«⁷ In other words, both operate with reference to what Agamben calls a »state of exception« which requires periodically legitimizing the »suspension of the validity of the law.« In the limitless, global purview of the Bush administration, it is the security of civilization itself (a perverse cosmopolitics of its own) that is at stake in the undertaking of »exceptional« measures such as the planning of an unprovoked attack on Iraq, the [i]de facto[/i] suspension of the Geneva conventions in Guantanamo Bay, the unconstitutional surveillance and detention of »suspicious« Arab and South Asian men in the United States and the continued unilateral support for Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Although the assault on immigrants under the rubric of the War on Terror and the systemic profiling, harassment and brutalization of black and Latino youth in the War on Crime should not be collapsed into a single, deliberate project of oppression, the construction of linkages between these issues is both possible and urgent. As both situations demonstrate, access to the domain of the human and the rights ostensibly guaranteed therein remains heavily circumscribed, producing at its abjected margins contemporary versions of the ancient Roman figure [i]homo sacer[/i], the one whose life does not register as such in the legal calculus and who can therefore be killed with impunity. Considering the relative ease with which these practices of dehumanization have proceeded, whether in ghettoes, refugee camps or immigrant detention centers, the notion of a »Right to Fight« takes on its full radicality. For it does not take as its end the possession of a preexisting object, as might be suggested by the injunction to engage in a fight [i]for[/i] rights that have been lost or gone missing. Instead, it stages the declaration of a kind of ur-right, that of contesting the parameters of the political itself, of exercising a citizenship that disrupts the given distribution of subject positions (including, crucially the »non place« of homo [i]sacer[/i] itself.)

At our present conjuncture, the political is organized around an authoritarian principle of security and an attribution of violence to a menacing, asocial exterior. This exteriorization of violence rests on a disavowal of the violent foundations of the very entity being (violently) protected. When society is represented as a unified body in opposition to an absolutely criminalized enemy, it is effectively depoliticized and ceases to be an arena of democratic contestation. Only when it is acknowledged that antagonism is immanent to the normal operations of the »civilized« world can substantial transformations (rather than never-ending measures of security) be set in motion.

Yet might there be alternative futures for the concept of »security«? In a statement on the role of the Prison Industrial Complex in post 9-11 America, the Critical Resistance conference quoted Angela Davis to the effect that »prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear people.« The statement continued, »We challenge the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness.«⁸

Beyond the day-long, transitory encounter at Sarah Lawrence, R2F maintains its existence as a continuing web project (http://www.molodiez.org/right2fight/). The site is at once an exhibition and documentation venue for artists, a practical organizational and publicity resource for activists, and above all a laboratory for experimenting with diverse democratic vocabularies and alliances, within and across national borders. However, it is important to remember that new forms of cosmopolitical citizenship do not spontaneously occur out of any deep, multitudinous »ontological desire«, but require a careful, (and conflictual) labor of articulation such as that undertaken by the organizers and participants in Right2Fight.⁹

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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