Precarious Workers Brigade: Fragments Toward an Understandingof a Week that Changed Everything

8/6/2019 Precarious Workers Brigade: Fragments Toward an Understandingof a Week that Changed Everything

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Precarious Workers Brigade

FragmentsToward an

Understandingof a Week thatChangedEverything…

The week of November 10, characterized now bythe dramatic occupation of Millbank anddescribed as “the event of the generation ofdebt, precarity, and unemployment,” brought50,000 people into the streets of London.1

Entering the halls of Britain’s Conservative Partyheadquarters, many of us found ourselvesoverwhelmed by a movement we did not knowexisted. Formerly tucked in the folds of student

unions, further education colleges, localcouncils, trade unions, and classrooms, amobilization that seemed almost unthinkableonly the week before materialized before oureyes. At once beautiful and perplexing for manyof us involved in the formerly benign feeling ofLondon’s cultural scene, was to see how quicklyso many of us – artists, lecturers, students offashion, design, music, and theatre – shed yearsof a neoliberal lockdown on the arts to re-conjugate ourselves as active political agents.!!!!!!!!!!What can only be described as an

ideological attack on the poor, on arts andhumanities – on critical thought and productionand on what little remains of the British welfarestate – threw Britain into a state of crisis. Inresponse, we demanded free education for all,for cultural assets to be managed throughdemocratic processes, for decisions about thefuture of culture and education to stay out of thehands of non-elected “advisors” (such as LordBrowne, former Chief Executive of BritishPetroleum and current Chair of Trustees of theTate Gallery). We also shouted that ourresistance to the current cuts is not a call for therestoration of New Labour’s public-privateconfusion, but something else: the articulationof a cultural and political commons. Finally, wedemanded an end to police violence and showedsolidarity with those who have been arrested,and against those who have suspended our rightto be in the streets.!!!!!!!!!!In the frenzied chronicling of this autumn ofdiscontent, and of a movement with no end insight, it is impossible to analyze from outside, tomake reviews or predictions about “them” – thestudents, artists, or activists. With the force of

life that has moved us from art school to artschool, from campus to campus, from meeting tomeeting, those regimes of spectatorship,observation, and aesthetic judgment (in all theircontemporary pseudo-critical wrappings) thatfelt so impenetrable before, suddenly seemanachronistic in the context here and now.!!!!!!!!!!We therefore write our recount infragments, moments, and movements from themultiplicity and power of these recent eventsthat we do not yet know how to name. Names willsurely come, but there is also tremendous

happiness in the semioclasm of the early daysand nights of a movement at its beginning.

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F r a g m e n t s T o w a r d a n U n d e r s t a n d i n g o f a W e e k t h a t C h a n g e d E v e r y t h i n g …

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November 10, 2010: National Day of Action, London UK. Photo: NC-SA.

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I. New Occupations…or Rehearsals for theRe-enchantment of Consequence

In the years preceding this moment, the commonfrustration of London’s critical art agents hadbeen directed towards the total inefficacy ofsophisticated so-called “radical” debates andprojects staged inside cultural and educationinstitutions. Always remaining confined within a

space of critique without consequence, we hadwatched and even participated in theinstrumentalization of our work. We hadobserved those capacities of art we hold dearbeing converted to models of culturaldissociation, imported and exported to and froman international art arena.!!!!!!!!!!Working in the context of such deeplyproblematic institutions, and being so deeplyinscribed within them, without a movement, ourstruggles were often isolated, disjointed, andunheard. Our individual (and often inaudible)

protests of non-participation, attempts atcritical occupancy, telephone rants, and negativereviews often seemed as alienated as thesubjects of our critiques.!!!!!!!!!!These divisions performed themselves inearly September when members of the politicalart collective Chto Delat? came to London as partof the ICA’s “Season of Dissent.” They invitedartists and activists to spend forty-eight hours inresidence, working on a learning play about thevery subject of how to intervene in the landscapeof instrumentalized political art. Some membersof London’s critical arts community refused toattend in protest against the ICA’s mass layoffs,mismanagement, and interpellation of criticalartists into seemingly disingenuous (anduncompensated) attempts at institutionalrebuilding in recent years.!!!!!!!!!!For those who did take part, the play andprocess asked us to perform this division, toplace ourselves on the side of “Art” or “Activism.”Though many felt this to be a reductive polarity,it was prescient in retrospect, as it demandedthat we choose which political subject weimagined ourselves to be, what we were willing to

risk, and what we desired. This made it a dressrehearsal for what was about to come: momentsin which we would have to choose between goingto work or going to the demonstration, betweengetting good grades or learning to collaborate,between supporting student demonstrators inthe face of police attack or succumbing tovilifying media campaigns and universityadministrators who threatened punitive actions.!!!!!!!!!!However, this rehearsal was small incomparison to the wave of art school and galleryoccupations that took place in the weeks that

followed, a few of which are outlined below indiary form.

January 29, 2011: teach-in at the British Museum, London UK. Photo:NC-SA.

November 24, 2010University College London, Occupation ofJeremy Bentham Room.

At the heart of many of the London occupations,the daily performances, outdoor life drawingclasses, and banners that draped the UCLcourtyard formed a meeting place in London forstudents, artists, and teachers. A timeline of themobilizations in the central hall charted the workthat had been done to date. In the main roomtables were assembled with the titles “media,”“food,” and “legal.” Here, skills in dealing withlegal issues, consensus decision-making, large-

scale organization, and media liaising could beacquired. At a microphone in the front of theroom, visitors from various social movementsand student organizations announcedthemselves, expressed solidarity, and plannedfuture actions.

December 2, 2010Slade Student Occupation

Inspired by the success of UCL (just across thestreet), students at the Slade occupied a centralroom in the art college. After having anticipated a

longer timeframe for participation, studentswere told that security on campus was to be

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March 26, 2011: March for the Alternative, London, UK. Photo: NC-SA.

March 26, 2011: March for the Alternative, London UK. Photo: NC-SA.

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increased, and quickly occupied a main buildingof the school.

December 6, 2010Occupation Camberwell College of Art andTeach In: Turner Prize, Tate Britain.

Students took the upper main room atCamberwell’s Wilson St. building, stayingthroughout the Christmas holidays. Arts groups

such as London’s Radical Education Forum andUltra-red presented workshops at Camberwell aspart of an open program. Food and support werebrought by local groups in solidarity.!!!!!!!!!!Over two-hundred students and lecturersfrom Goldsmiths, the Slade, St Martin’s,Camberwell, and other art and fashion collegesoccupied Tate Britain during the live, televisedpresentations of the Turner Prize in a sit-inorganized by the Arts Against Cuts Campaign.Corralled out of sight, away from official guests –the best and brightest of London’s art world – the

students and artists protested: “We are not justhere to fight fees! We are here to fightphilistinism!” The chanting could be heard on thelive television broadcast, drowning out thepresenters’ words. Support was expressed byTurner Prize winners and some guests, withothers treating the students’ protest as aperformance for their own edification, describingthe disruption as “naïve.”2

December 7, 2010Goldsmiths Occupation and Royal Collegeof Art Occupation

A coalition of students and lecturers occupiedthe university library at Goldsmiths in oppositionto the cuts and subsequent increase in universityfees. Opened as a center for organization,“available 24 hours a day to students and allthose on the receiving end of the government’sassault in the local South London Lewishamcommunity,” it was here that students madedemands to the management at Goldsmiths,such as making a statement to oppose fees andrefuse further cuts or staff redundancies at theuniversity, and demanding that management

defend all those from Goldsmiths arrested inprotests and retract their threat to charge theStudent Union £15,000 in response to theoccupation of Deptford Town Hall.3 Theoccupation flared many tensions between staffand student participants, between generationsand styles of activism, and between politicalagents from different movements, but it was alsoan important site for planning and for bringingstudents together in collective action.!!!!!!!!!!In the name of education for all, support forstudent demonstrators, and a statement

demanding an end to the cuts, students at TheRoyal College of Art occupied parts of the

College, including its gallery, along with thirty-seven other colleges and universities in thecountry. Their letter of demands also addressedthe teaching and learning conditions at thecollege. They requested access to the gallery,which rents for £4,500 per day, higher teacher-student ratios, and financial aid.

December 9, 2010

Teach-in at the National GalleryOn the day of the parliamentary vote to increasestudent fees, many student protesters foundthemselves kettled for hours. Meanwhile, artsstudents and lecturers staged a teach-in atRoom 43 of London’s National Gallery. Their aimwas to produce a manifesto for their portion ofthe education movement (read as a “nomadichive”) that promoted tactics of swarming,avoiding kettles, and coming together forstrategic actions. Staying beyond the closinghour, and holding the space until the task was

completed, over two hundred artists and culturalworkers contributed to the manifesto. Inpreparation, teachers using names from thehistory of art, such as Frida Kahlo, gaveperformative lectures about works of art ondisplay nearby, including Manet’s Execution of

Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1868). While themanifesto was largely poetic, the task of comingtogether taught the group to make decisions, tobetter understand the potential of artists and thearts in a broader movement, and how to be in aninstitution on our own terms.

January 29, 2011: teach-in at the British Museum, London UK. Photo:NC-SA.

II. Reflection and Action: Long WeekendsCatalyzed by the excitement and organizing buzzof art departments and college occupations, two

long weekends were arranged as opportunitiesfor reflection, making, and planning. The first,

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December 5 and 6, 2010, was initiated bystudents at the Slade and hosted by the newly-formed Arts Against Cuts at Goldsmiths College.Its stated aim was to be “a furnace of creativity, aplace to re-imagine resistance against the cuts[to] reclaim the public, critical space thatuniversities and art schools should be.” Thisweekend also sought to

transform the buildings into a livinglaboratory, an art school for the future,which brings together art students, artists,cultural workers, and those fighting thecuts from across the UK to share indefiance against the relentlessmarketization of our education and ourlives …. It’s not important what art is butwhat it does, and right now it has thepotential to turn the crisis of cuts into anopportunity for change.4

The two weekends, the December Long Weekendat Goldsmiths and, more recently, the DirectWeekend at Camberwell College of Art, were firstand foremost forums that made use of spaces inuniversities and art colleges. They built upon anddeveloped the proliferation of groups,discussions, and affinities generated acrossdepartments, in museums and galleries, alongall levels in the school system. Actions such asthe Book Block and the gallery occupations camedirectly out of the discussions during the firstLong Weekend. Importantly, so did thebeginnings of a shared analytic framework.Primary topics of discussion included questionsof composition – class, education, skill – and theconstant challenge of keeping a movement openand connected to different struggles. Thelanguage of movement – how to expressopposition to the cuts without producing anostalgic glorification of what existed before –was an ongoing debate. How could studentssupport teachers in their protest for betterwages while supporting each other in challengingthe ways schools are run? We debated unions,how to defend a public sector from the multiple

positions of cultural practitioners and educators,artists and freelancers, students and teachers –all of whom are precarious, part-time, anddisaffiliated from institutions of public cultureand education.!!!!!!!!!!Beyond the slightly declamatory language ofart manifestos, what emerged was a search for acollective time-space in which the critique ofexisting cultural and educational institutionscould be articulated, but could also form thebasis for learning and organizing towardsconcrete alternatives. Stemming from a shared

sensitivity to practices of collective productionand thought, experiments settled into the

discomfort of finding forms that do not replicatethe art world with its authorial and spectatorialregimes: the lecturers lecturing and the studentsstudying; the artists making art while the rest ofthe world observes; the poster and theperformance quickly crystallizing into anauthored commodity.!!!!!!!!!!The recognition of these often unspokenissues and tensions within critical cultural

production around authority prompted a rapidprocess of self-education. Together students,teachers, and artists learned strategies ofhorizontal decision-making and facilitation –bearing the fruits of years of experiments anddiscussions around anti-authorial andautonomous forms of artistic action in the artworld – we patiently nibbled away at habitualpolarizations between art and politics.!!!!!!!!!!Tensions and new skills were developedbetween different forms of organization –consensus versus voting, lectures versus group

work – but also between the voices of teachersand students, between those with a lot oforganizing experience and those with none at all.Teachers and students together found ways tomove away from authoritative forms to act withhundreds of people, made plenaries, openedspaces, and learned to move from idea to action.These lessons were perhaps the most formative.Different from the spaces of the main studentassemblies, these were zones of micropoliticallearning.

III. Docile Bodies and Police Violence: thePedagogy of the Kettle

We continued learning the organizational formsof a movement, albeit much more rapidly in thedays of the protests and demonstrations. Beyondthe ambiguous messages of thespectacularization of occupations and streetdemos – “making good TV” – the Millbank eventmarked for many of us the beginning of anembodied crash course in contemporarybiopolitics. If critical cultural workers and artstudents had bathed for more than a decade inFoucauldian analysis and terminologies, now

was the moment to wear the theory in practice,to feel it on the collective body of the movement,and on the individual bodies of its participants.The first kettle was unexpected for most, exceptfor the few of us who had experienced the G8demonstrations around the world in the early2000s. Critical teachers had brought theirstudents, freelance practitioners had invitedfriends and collaborators, and all foundthemselves immersed in a joyful swarm offifteen- and sixteen-year-olds walking out inrage against the fee increases. At one point in

the day, we were suddenly blocked, surrounded,and violently held for ten hours in freezing

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March 26, 2011: March for the Alternative, London, UK: Trafalgar Square during the late night kettling. Photo: NC-SA.

temperatures, with no explanation given, nodialogue possible, no water, no food, and notoilets. Agamben’s state of exception suddenlytranslated from some seminar room debate tothe here and now, in the shadow of the so-calleddemocratic Houses of Parliament in centralLondon.!!!!!!!!!!The body in these moments became themeeting place for abstract notions of state

violence, for various knowledges of performanceart, agitprop, and situationism: gesture and voicesurfaced and combined to bring about new levelsof awareness and understanding that was farmore than skin-deep. “There is knowledge,” asone demonstrator said, “and there is knowledge.”We came to know differently in the kettle thatthe police exist to protect private property, andno matter how harmless and docile we are, theywill contain us and shout at us, shove us around,and hold us still in uncomfortable positions. Ourinitial bewilderment and liberal rationalizations

– “they’ll let us free once they realize there’sbeen a mistake” – became passive resignationand quickly grew into a pensive anger, whoseembers are kept alive in recounting the stories toour bewildered and unsympathetic friends alike.!!!!!!!!!!In all its painful and futile violence, theevent of the kettle became, out of necessity, aspace of political self-education for those amongus who had inhabited a more detached version of

cultural politics, of gentle dissent and civilizeddebate. These experiences contradicted theinculcated belief – certainly the by-product ofthe education we are so proud of – that stateinstruments of repression are only used againstthose who misbehave. Those of us who thoughtwe had a “right” to peaceful protest werespectacularly reminded that this right had beenbestowed upon us by a high authority that can

withdraw it at will and with the least credibleexcuses, if any excuses were even to be botheredwith at all. At the same time, we also relearnedthe performative dimensions of these rights andremembered that the making of a space ofdissent is a composition of gestures, not aprocedurally granted abstraction.!!!!!!!!!!In being there, being kettled and breakingout of it, our bodies understood the dynamicrelationship between power over and power to,the latter found in our actions together insidethis space, in our collective memory of physical

oppression, the sharing of stories andreflections. In affinity groups, we rediscoveredthe importance of our critical and artisticeducation in giving us the tools to deconstructand de-legitimize supposedly “legitimate” use of“reasonable force”: to realize, narrate, andunderstand collectively that violence isstructural and had always been there, and thatviolence has now simply revealed itself to a

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larger swathe of society who found themselvessuddenly and quite unexpectedly on the frontlineof a conflict for a right as basic as publiceducation. Avoiding and breaking out of thekettle, we learned the value of free movement –that space is created through action, and thatswarming the city in small groups of joyfulspontaneous running is one with shouting“Whose streets? Our streets!” Situationism was

no longer an art historical movement or a feebleattempt at re-enactment but a necessarypractice.

March 26, 2011: March for the Alternative, London, UK: TrafalgarSquare before the late night kettling. Photo: NC-SA.

!!!!!!!!!!As students and educators we also used thekettle to reflect on questions of politics andresponsibility. And after the kettle we learnedagain. We learned about the images within andthe images outside: the way the helicopter lightshined down on us in the dark without reallyilluminating anything, the absurdity of policechoreography, the hours of waiting in line to getout, of warming our hands by the fires fueledwith burning placards – all of which werereduced to one image in the mainstream press.This reminded us of the power of spectacle, apractical training in media literacy that we willnot forget.

IV. Some Questions to Take ForwardAt the end of these intense weeks, we are left

with affects and questions, with a fundamentalintensification of collective ties, and a deepinterrogation of our existing, conflictualpositions within and beyond the institutions weinhabit. We assess now how far we are willing togo.!!!!!!!!!!Our sense of belonging is shifting andgrowing at the same time as our institutions arebecoming increasingly hard to work within. Howcan collectivity be strengthened in the comingweeks and months? How can it not be overcomeby legal and administrative controls in the

reduced versions of the places where we workand go to school?

!!!!!!!!!!How can these recent events inform themicro-practices of groups, as a more sustainablemode of struggle that goes beyond the state ofemergency status of these weeks? With theseexperiences in hand, how do we begin to set upthe world we want to be in?!!!!!!!!!!How do we maintain the momentum ofevent-togetherness-excitement in all of ourpractices? How do we make this the reality in

which we live in at a more elongated pace?!!!!!!!!!!How do we engage with the media? Whatare the other ways of increasing our numbersand moving public opinion into direct forms ofaction?!!!!!!!!!!Regardless of how these questions are to beresolved, we are noticing how nice our bodiesfeel after these weeks, having been away fromour routines and the computer, from the mutesites of our work. It becomes even clearer thatthis “work” – whether that of the teacher,student, or artist – is not all there is to fight for.

The world we create will make that alienatingrhetoric of “work” void, it will stop work fromdividing us. Instead, our self-organization showswhat pleasures lie in messing with the divisionsof labor and life in the context of struggle.Occupations and demonstrations have beenlaboratories of such un-division, of joyfulcollaboration, of a conviviality that hassomething more in mind than a career, the next

job, a house, and a car. Up and down stairs, off tomeetings in unfamiliar places, carrying cookiesand teabags, exploring our vocal range, gazing atstrangers, designing last-minute placards,turning lecture halls into spaces where life andlearning finally overlap again, learning to performin protest. A collective becoming is never basedon a fixed identity, on a set plan, or on a fewsteps – it happens because our potentialsresonate with our givens, because we enjoy andgrow. We work to keep this resonant, growing,spreading, building, fun; that’s the “work” welike. We’ll stay with it: moving, sensing, fighting,dancing.!!!!!!!!!!!This is the original English version of a text commissioned for

a special issue of Paletten, guest-edited by Maria Lind.This text is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0Licence. See http:creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

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Precarious Workers Brigade is a growing group ofprecarious workers in culture and education inLondon. Formed in response to the recent cuts, theBrigade links artists, cultural workers, art students,and lecturers working closely with campaigns such asArts Against Cuts, Making A Living, Paid Not Played,and the Carrotworkers Collective (with whomPrecarious Workers Brigade is affiliated). The groupworks in solidarity with all those struggling to make aliving in the current climate of instability and enforcedausterity, coming together not to defend what was, but

to demand, create, and reclaim. Seehttp://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com. Join usto learn, create, and struggle together!

!!!!!!1See http://www.edu-factory.org/w p/the-british-university-as- a-millbank-riot/.

!!!!!!2Seehttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/12/turner-prize-art-young-future .

!!!!!!3Seehttp://goldsmithsinoccupatio

n.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/goldsmiths-occupied/.

!!!!!!4Seehttp://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/arts-against-cuts-the-long-weekend/.

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Precarious Workers Brigade: Fragments Toward an Understandingof a Week that Changed Everything