Reflection & Data:
When previously analyzing makeshift urbanism (Vasudevan 2015), I primarily focused upon how different municipal policies of regulation produce distinct possibilities for squatting. Even in the context of Detroit, I principally emphasized the manners by which law enforcement practices of non-intervention and thus acceptance of spatial appropriation ultimately facilitate a style of occupation amicable to neoliberal property rights. Accordingly, I felt that I lacked a sufficient conceptual framework for examining those squatting projects that external agencies might not detect, such as the democratic committees and practices of ‘campzenship’ present in Seattle’s tent cities. Therefore, this past week, I decided to review political scientist James C. Scott’s theory of infrapolitics (1990).
In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Scott proposes that subordinate groups employ strategies of resistance – “infrapolitics” – that go unnoticed by their superordinates (183). Acknowledging the “limitations of open confrontation,” subaltern groups employ such tactics to “probe for weaknesses and exploit small advantages” in surveillance and law enforcement beneath elites (184), thus functioning as makeshift urbanism. Scott further suggests that domination represents a “process of subordination” firmly anchored in material and symbolic “appropriation.” Given that the “realities of power” preclude “frontal assaults,” “low-profile stratagems” represent “practical struggles to thwart or mitigate exploitation…[and thus] minimize appropriation” (187-88, 192).
Scott (1990) usefully notes that critics of alternatives to direct conflict would claim that infrapolitics simply reinforce hegemonic structures by “play[ing] at rebellion within specified rules and times” prescribed “from above” (191). However, the author maintains that the “discursive [and material] practices offstage” – the “hidden transcript[s]” – ultimately both sustain resistance and precipitate “public transcripts” or visible confrontations between privileged and marginalized groups (192). All forms of subaltern resistance, he affirms, center upon the “creation of autonomous social space for assertion of dignity,” as well as rituals of defiance. Such rebellious performances operate through a “logic of disguise” embodied in a “realm of informal leadership…of conversation and oral discourse, and of surreptitious resistance” (200). Offering an example, Scott asserts that squatting illustrates the infrapolitical equivalent of an open land invasion, both aimed at resisting appropriation of land by elites, yet operating through distinct mechanisms depending on available opportunities (199). Nevertheless, the aggregation of “thousands upon thousands” of such hidden acts can produce “dramatic economic and political effects,” such as “restructur[ing] the control of property” in the case of squatting (Scott 1990:192).
I hope to apply this notion of infrapolitics when assessing the unique practices of citizenship and governance that arise amongst squatting communities, especially in New York and Seattle. However, I also plan to expand upon Scott’s theory by challenging the bifurcation between hidden and public transcripts, especially in contexts of streets and parks, where both subtle and blatant acts of resistance coexist in plain visibility, differing only in the media attention they garner. I imagine that such complexities appear within the 2011 Occupy Movement, specifically in temporary encampments, where protesters actively reimagined notions of ‘home.’ While I will not yet delve into such analysis, hereafter I briefly summarize Occupy’s squatting practices.
On September 17, 2011, hundreds of protesters occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City’s Wall Street financial district to protest the economic inequality exacerbated by the Great Recession. In addition to a space of political manifestation, the Park also represented a temporary home for many occupants who inhabited the space for months, forming a micro-community that publicly contested the significance of both home and private ownership. Rana Jaleel (2013) proposes that the quotidian life of the encampment operated through an ethics of care, nurturing a “queer politics of home” by “commoning” the movement’s “material means of reproduction.” Opposing “narratives of both State and Private Property,” the creation of such ‘commons’ encouraged a solidarity premised on rendering the traditionally private “labor of care” intimately public, extending its benefits to those who “dwell beyond home,” such as the chronically unsheltered. Jaleel affirms that the encampments also achieved “a nascent, if difficult, fluency” in organizing a functioning democratic community, providing its constituents food, shelter, medical attention, and other material resources, as well as direct political engagement, in a manner remarkably similar to Seattle’s tent cities.
However, on November 15, 2011, the New York Police Department routed Occupy Wall Street activists from Zuccotti Park, detaining over 200 protesters. Yet, after the eviction, Occupy did not simply dissolve, but rather assumed new forms and objectives. Beneath the Great Recession, more than 20 million US households suffered foreclosure as a result of subprime loans, which had generated trillions for the banking industry while systematically dispossessing families of color (Arnold 2012). As economic conditions failed to improve and financial institutions – many of which used federal bailouts to directly bankroll foreclosures – refused to aid homeowners, thousands of Occupy protesters across the US decided in December, 2011 to squat foreclosed homes in what organizers described as the “new frontier” of the movement (Gabbet & Devereux 2011). From Oakland to New York, affiliated movements joined with local activist groups to reclaim empty buildings, often renovating and thereafter handing over the spaces to housing insecure and homeless families (Burns 2012). During the following years, protesting financial entities, disrupting foreclosure auctions, and occupying abandoned properties grew increasingly common, often supported by nonprofit organizations, labor unions, policy advocates, and legal experts (Arnold 2012; Jaleel 2013).
Next, I plan to continue examining these squatting initiatives, hoping to learn how a ‘queer politics of home’ transcended Zuccotti Park and informed these latter projects. Unfortunately, I cannot find any academic scholarship, specifically ethnographies, on this subject, a significant challenge for detailing forms of governance and citizenship in such spaces. Regardless, I very much look forward to intertwining my case studies throughout these upcoming weeks and establishing an overarching thread of analysis.
Bibliography:
Arnold, Eric K. 2012. “Foreclosure Crisis Meets Occupy Effect.” Race, Poverty & the Environment 19(1):67-70. Retrieved March 1, 2019 (https://urbanhabitat.org/files/19-1.arnold.pdf).
Burns, Rebecca. 2012. “No Vacancies: Squatters Move In.” In These Times, April 19. Retrieved March 1, 2019 (http://inthesetimes.com/article/13037/no_vacancies_squatters_move_in).
Gabbet, Adam & Ryan Devereux. 2011. “Wall Street protestors to occupy foreclosed homes.” The Guardian, December 6. Retrieved March 1, 2019. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/06/occupy-wall-street-occupy-foreclosed-homes).
Jaleel, Rana. 2013. “A Queer Home in the Midst of a Movement? Occupy Homes, Occupy Homemaking.” In Periscope: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, Eds. Bauer, AJ., Cristina Beltran, Rana Jaleel & Andrew Ross. Retrieved March 1, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.7916/D8FJ2SXZ).
Scott, James C. 1990. “The Infrapolitics of Subordinate Groups.” In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, pp. 183-201. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lopez’s Comments:
Brandon you continue to make excellent progress on your final paper! You do a great job with your use of Scott’s infrapolitics, and I agree with you, his bifurcated approach does not completely capture the subtle and overt forms of resistance alive within squatter settlements.