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Title: We Give A Shit Author: Tom Nomad Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: g20, insurgency, summit hopping Notes: The following article was written by Tom Nomad and originally published as a zine entitled “We Give A Shit” in 2011 and later revised as a chapter of The Master’s Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility (Little Black Cart, 2013)
The primary critique of the summit-hopping era, (one that applies to me
as well) is that we never expanded outside of the activist context,
never moved beyond complaining loudly around summits, never moved from
complaint to active engagement. But there was something in the summit
era that did hold promise; in the concentration of numbers in space
there was always this possibility of breaking out of the confinement of
the downtown area, the confinement of the frontal conflict between
police and anarchists, the confinement of pre-planned confrontation, and
the limitations of the dates of the summit itself. There was this sense
that activism could be transcended, that conflict could be amplified on
the streets with the speed and magnitude, that conflict could multiply
territorially and break the logistical capacity of the police to contain
it. This is what many of us saw, if only briefly, during the Pittsburgh
G20, the finale of the summit era, and it was this that both generated
the current tactical impasse that we find ourselves in and that points
to the way out. The multiplication of the terrains of conflict during
the first day of action creates a problem; it became clear that this
form of action was insufficient to break the forms of containment that
typify the summit demonstration (even if we raised the stakes
dramatically). This left many of us feeling as if the terrain of
conflict in our own spaces, in our own towns, began to be everything,
and that seems to have left us at a loss. But it was specifically this
collapse of the attempts to contain the Pittsburgh demonstrations into
the traditional forms that typified the summit demonstrations that
points to a way out of a dead-end strategy based in complaint and
activist tourism. To understand why this was the case we must do more
than just look at the context of the actions, the recent tactical shifts
that had occurred between 2007 and that point, or even the actions
themselves. As with all actions we have to keep in mind that these
occurred in a time and in a space, and it is those, combined with the
actions taken within those dynamics, that shaped the trajectory of
conflict during those two days in September 2009.
To get a handle on what happened there we have to begin with the
political and historical terrain. The city of Pittsburgh, however, has a
long history of struggle. It was the Pittsburgh Congress of 1883 that is
widely credited with being a beginning of an organized anarchist
movement in America. This was the site of the Homestead strike in 1892,
a huge steel strike that involved shoot-outs between strikers and
Pinkerton guards and was the place where Alexander Berkman attempted to
assassinate Henry Clay Frick, who now has a park named after him. This
is one of those events that is now immortalized on plaques in warehouse
districts and “historic areas.” Pittsburgh is also where the United
Steelworkers began (and are still based), the AFL (American Federation
of Labor), the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), and was also
the site of their merger agreement.
This history of struggle has shaped the dynamics of the city and its
structure of enforcement. Beginning during the Homestead strike, when
the Pittsburgh police refused to break the strike, the bosses called in
Pinkerton guards and deputized them, beginning a practice in the
Rustbelt of deputization to deal with social ruptures, something that
has become a day-to-day part of life there. Homestead was also the
motivation for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to create the
Pennsylvania State Police, a large element of the enforcement structure
during the G-20.
Like all cities in the Rustbelt, Pittsburgh is a city that has been
completely fucked over by capitalist globalization. Starting in the
1970s and 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, privatization, and
globalization, production of steel—the basis of the city’s economy—began
to shift overseas. Today, despite being the home of the United Steel
Worker’s union and commonly referred to as “Steel City,” Pittsburgh is
left with no functioning steel mills, aside from some part-time,
scrap-melting mills. Massive unemployment and political marginalization
was coupled with the market abandonment of these areas, leaving many
with no hope in the ability of the market to provide for their daily
needs. In the recent past Pittsburgh has seen a rising anarchist scene,
with a series of long-running and well-known direct action groups and
campaigns occurring through the late 1990s and into the 2000s,
specifically the anti-war and counter-recruitment campaigns between 2002
and 2008. These often had actions turn into confrontations with the
police.
Obama claimed to have chosen Pittsburgh due to its recent economic
“revival” through something called the Pittsburgh Model. This model of
development is based on using tax breaks and the restructuring and
colonization of poor neighborhoods to provide “favorable market
conditions,” (cheap or free land, cheap or free buildings, the lack of
unions, tax breaks, etc.) to attract investment. In Pittsburgh this has
primarily concentrated around “green building”, military engineering
research, the biomedical field, and the building of large universities,
as well as the demolition of a poor neighborhood to build a baseball
stadium on the north side of the city. Development is also a major force
in gentrifying parts of the city, particularly Oakland (the university
district), parts of Garfield, and East Liberty, among others. This has
created a situation in which a few research and university jobs are
created while the majority of the city is left working low wage and/or
temporary jobs. In contrast, 40 years ago this population had access to
high paying union jobs in the steel mills. The city looks like it is
reviving on the physical level, but under the facade the Rustbelt
reality is the rising of the poverty rate and the shrinking of the
population (by almost half since 1950).
Pittsburgh has begun to undergo a series of profound changes, with the
abandonment of large parts of the city used as an excuse to restructure
its entire fabric. In the attempt to draw outside investment the city
government has almost bankrupted itself pouring money into neighborhood
redevelopment projects, based on so-called green condo developments,
medical research facilities, university expansion, and massive expansion
of the policing and surveillance apparatuses, framed in a context of
community policing, also known as counter-insurgency. This has caused
the fragmentation of many neighborhoods, massive population
displacement, and the bulldozing of the city’s history in favor of
housing for yuppies. It is this environment which has generated a
profound sense of tension on the streets of certain areas of the city,
and it is this environment that played a large role in shaping the
preparation and trajectory of conflict during the summit itself.
Analyzing the tactics of police in Pittsburgh is difficult for a series
of reasons. Firstly, there were so many actions going on in so many
different places that the very possibility of being able to look at
their tactics as a single strategic body is impossible. Secondly, many
people have reported long gaps between police sightings, periods of time
with little to no police coverage of their movements. This attests to
our ability to challenge their control of the streets and create zones
where police had little to no physical control, but also makes analysis
difficult. However, from the Twitter feeds, from news reports, and from
personal experience we can begin to cobble together some understanding
of their thinking during the actions.
There are a few things to keep in mind here. Cops need to build cohesive
forces, to be able to generalize their needs for a certain situation,
and to build force to define a situation. This takes both time and
control, the time to build a cohesive force and the ability to use that
force to operate within a terrain, to contain actions with their planned
strategy. If the situation cannot be made to conform, then their force
ceases to be relevant and they have to improvise, or move to a posture
of response. This is what it means for the police to enforce definition.
The state sets the limits of allowable action and the police must
develop a way of enforcing those limits in a situation that is always
changing, even though their force is not. Their preparation time was
limited in the case of the G20, since they had only four months (as
opposed to the two years it took to prepare a comparable police force
for the RNC). In contrast, we can quickly do outreach, plan in out
affinity groups, and link up with other affinity groups, all in
non-linear structures that can adapt to changing circumstances. More
time to prepare can be a good thing, but it is not as important for us.
We do not need to create and enforce definitions, we are able to be
mobile.
Maybe to compensate for their lack of time to prepare, maybe as an
intentional tactic, the cops early on defined their approach to this
series of actions. Firstly they engaged in raids meant to accomplish the
two goals of disrupting organizing and intimidation. In other words,
they were meant to build the feeling that the cops were everywhere. They
kept catching the Seeds of Peace bus, as well as other cars, on the
street instead of at static spaces, trying to create the impression that
they could find us whenever they wanted to. They coupled this with very
public announcements whenever they seized equipment. This approach
backfired however, and led not just to lawsuits but also to
embarrassment. (Having very publically announced finding PVC pipe they
claimed was for “sleeping dragons,” they discovered later that the pipes
were being stored by a company for product testing.) This constant
presense also heightened the eerie feeling within the city of the coming
police state, to the dismay of many residents. This can partially
explain the intense public support that many reported while marching
through the streets. These disruptions, like the tactics used on
Thursday afternoon, were as much based on intimidating anarchists and
the general populace as they were on materially disrupting organizing
work.
This phsychological tactic was increased by their tactic of posturing,
especially through the media. In past mobilizations the press work by
the cops beforehand was aimed at the general populace and meant to
generate fear of anarchists coming to burn the city to the ground, and
so on. The G20 pre-action press preparation was different; it was aimed
at us. There were the obligatory warnings from the mayor against the
people coming to “cause destruction,” but on top of that there was
endless coverage of the police build-up, tours of the security
perimeter, tours of their command center (something even the press was
confused about), as well as constant police harrassment before the
actions. But without being able to carry out any raids of material
importance, this all came across as psturing and nothing more. They were
forced to backpedal from a lot of these statements in the days before
the action as lawsuits and complains started coming in from various
groups, and business owners started boarding up stores. The police were
trying to strike a balance between inflating fears of anarchist horde to
justify the massive police buildup, and reassuring business owners that
they were safe to remain open. They failed. Ordinary Pittsburgh
residents were angry at the government for turning their city into a
police state, leading many of them to side with the protesters, and most
downtown businesses shut down for the duration of the G20.
The press coverage was combined with the use of weapons of intimidation
and staged force during the actual actions. They had announced
beforehand that they “would not be the spark.” It became obvious that
they were anticipating the possibility of disruption and that they
assumed it would happen downtown, or at least on the way to downtown.
Twin Cities Indymedia, as well as a lot of people traveling to Arsenal
Park on Thursday, reported seeing large columns of police behind the
initial skirmish line at 34th and Liberty, between the residential parts
of the East End of Pittsburgh and Downtown in an area known as the Strip
District.These police were there in case the initial lines broke down.
They used weapons that couldn’t be carefully or accurately targetted, so
they could not pick and shoose targets until they began to bring out
bean-bag rounds and rubber bullets on Thursday afternoon. The
indiscriminate weapons were used to keep people away from areas. But
dispersing a crowd into smaller groups makes the situation harder to
define, so this tactic of dispersal combined with the air of total
presense, was supposed to make us want to disperse ourselves. In other
words, like all the pre-action preparation, these weapons are meant to
have a psychological effect; they are used to demoralize crowds, to take
the fight out of us by making us feel that resistance is futile. But
these weapons backfired. Because a lot of people have seem them before,
the weapons didn’t have the intimidating effect the police planned on.
Even the helicopters and gas (which became constants at a certain point)
did little to deter people who have been in situations like this, and at
this point that is a lot of us. When gassed we noticed a lot of people
calmly putting on goggles and helping others to do the same, then calmly
and quickly moving into more open space. Police also relied heavily on
the LRAD, which had such minimal effect that it became a joke on the
Daily Show, not to mention in our internal circles. (Note: many of us
have switched our ringtone to the sound of the LRAD.) Police approaches
generally are based in staging force, using increasing physical force
instead of psychological as the situation escapes their control, and
this is what they ended up doing. They brought out armored personnel
carries on Thursday, but didn’t really use them except to block roads,
and changed to indiscriminate use of force on Friday night.
To begin to attempt an analysis of the People’s Uprising march is
difficult. There was such widely dispersed action after the first half
hour or so that we need to look at the dynamics of the action instead of
the actions themselves. In other words, the actions built a dynamic
environment, and this is what to focus on. What we know now is that
outside the large police presence at Arsenal Park there was a much
larger and more concentrated presence of police between the initial
point of contact (34th and Liberty St) and the perimeter downtown,
staggered in increased concentrations the closer we got to the David L.
Lawrence Convention Center.
The initial police contingent seemed willing to give the street to the
march. This is not surprising within a new, modified police tactic of
containment/dispersal, or containment as dispersal, a tactic that we
have encountered in Washington, DC. If the police think the march will
be able to take the street, or is determined to do so, they will set up
a zone of control, an area of the street that they will give to the
march to avoid confrontation, while they try to contain everything
outside this space. So they may give the street but surround the march
on all sides, they may give a lane, etc. As this march moved out, some
noticed this and redirected the march through the park to another exit
point, which immediately frustrated the police attempt to contain the
march. This was evident as we were passing small contingents of riot
cops, spaced out on the corners of intersections, especially when we
encountered two riot cops in a car as we turned onto Liberty (i.e. we
were seeing the backside of their tactic). At this point the march
split, some trying to head away from the massive police contingent in
downtown and go to any number of recently gentrifying commercial
districts. On reaching the corner of 34th and Liberty we saw a line of
riot police, an armored personnel carrier (APC) equipped with an LRAD,
and a series of other vehicles. Unknown to many at this point was that
this was only an intial line, there was a much higher concentration of
cops further on. The cops gave a dispersal warning and then sounded the
LRAD for the first time.
The march diverted down an alley next to the Church Brew Works, where
the first dumpsters were came out and barricades were built. This area
of Pittsburgh, in a neighborhood called Lawrenceville, is characterized
by narrow winding streets, often dead ending into one another, which
only requires a single dumpster to completely block. As we rounded the
corner again, to get back to Butler St at 37th (and thus began to move
through the Strip District towards downtown), we were met with another
line. That is when the cops first used high concentrations of gas. After
they failed to contain the march at the park, they switched to a
blocking tactic, one that is only meant to prevent access to certain
areas. They used a show of force and shifting blockades to prevent
access to downtown while also trying to convince us to disperse. This is
speculation, but it seems as if they made some mistakes in their
projections of our actions. Firstly, they seemed to assume our goal was
to head into downtown, and they allocated force to prevent that
movement. This became clear as the march formed into smaller groups;
those who headed away from downtown saw almost no cops for a long period
of time. Secondly, police made a big deal before the actions about
training to defeat lockdowns, maybe expecting a repeat of the Republican
National Convention activist tactics, which centered around blockading
access to certain areas of downtown. For G20, few if any groups planned
on locking down, opting to remain more flexible instead of using a
tactic that immobilizes at the point of deployment.
As the march "dispersed" into smaller groups, the situation became
really fluid and dynamic. The constant changes in the scenario kept cops
from accounting for numerous groups in the streets. We can separate
these trajectories of movement into two general movements. One group
engaged with the cops in their own territory by trying to head downtown.
This was a rather large section of the march; they got stopped in the
Strip district. It seems like many cops were diverted to stop this
group. Another set of groups started to head the opposite way towards
the gentrified shopping areas of the East End through Lawrenceville and
Bloomfield. These groups began to notice a series of things. The most
astonishing was that people from the neighborhoods, and these were
largely working class neighborhoods, began to come out onto the streets
to engage with the events, both in cheering anarchists on and in certain
instances helping to barricade off streets. These groups set up
barricades to create space. A PNC Bank got its ATMs smashed, pulling
more police into simple response actions, and away from the operation of
a coherent strategy.
There are two fundamental aspects to these sets of movements. Firstly,
in multiplying the terrain of conflict, in the organized and intentional
dispersal across space, we were able to break the zone of containment
that the police attempted to set up, and to eventually break outside of
their ability to contain the terrain of conflict at all. This forced
police to respond to a series of points of conflict, often too slowly to
actually catch anyone or to even engage, which constancy of movement
stretched their capacity to maintain logistical coherence of strategic
initiative. Secondly, the use of barricades and property destruction
occurred in a way that had not really been seen in American summit
demonstrations. Barricades proliferated on side streets as groups began
to move off main roads and into the twisted tangles that characterizes
this part of Pittsburgh. Barricades limited police movement to major
roads. When combined with the loss of tactical initiative, which forced
them to respond to points of engagement in small groups, usually on city
buses, police lost the ability to project through space. As the terrain
became more resistant, as the movement of motorized units was
constrained, and as the terrain of conflict widened, the police were
forced to move through whatever space they could, as fast as possible in
as many groups as possible, to as many points as possible, and lost
their ability to occupy, to move, or to maintain logistical coherence.
A call went out over Twitter to meet in Friendship Park, on the border
of the Bloomfield, Friendship, and Garfield neighborhoods. A trickle of
people ballooned to hundreds. The park became a space to rest, get
treated for injuries, and plan next moves. Cops began showing up in
droves, hoping to surround the park, but again the crowd was too large
for them to box it. That march began, and headed down Liberty Ave, away
from downtown, in the direction of the Oakland neighborhood, or the
university district. At the intersection of Liberty and Baum Ave the
march turned right and began to speed up, with many groups breaking off.
The police began to fire rubber bullets into the crowd, causing some
affinity groups to spread out, resulting in a trail of broken windows
all up Baum, including hits on Boston Market and various other chain
restaurants. During these confrontations police attempted to target
certain individuals (including the now famous footage of police in camo
fatigues jumping out of a car, grabbing someone and driving off with
them); these stopped after groups began to double back and pelt the
police with chunks of concrete. As people filtered into Oakland the
police presense increased dramatically, beginning the trajectory of
conflict that would result in large scale rioting a couple of hours
later.
This concentration of police was bolstered by contingents of cops tasked
with protecting a State Dinner at Philips Conservatory (a building in
Schenley Park), which borders the University of Pittsburgh in the heart
of Oakland. Students began to be harassed by police who, in response to
events earlier in the day, were attempting to clear the campus of any
students not in their dorm rooms. This caused a conflict between
students at Pitt and the police on their campus; a conflict that would
set the stage for what was about to occur.
As the cops were tear gassing the first groups of protesting students in
Schenley Park, the Bash Back! march began to gather at the corner of
Desoto and Fifth Ave, three blocks south-west of the Plaza. The march
rolled out around 10, only a half hour after the disturbances began on
Pitt's campus. The march began down Meyran Ave to Forbes and along the
way picked up six dumpsters. The first police vehicle arrived and was
stopped by four of the dumpsters being turned over in the intersection.
Corporate shops were attacked, with windows busted out of Subway,
McDonald's, and American Apparel, among others. While the cops were
still stopped at the first barricade, two more dumpsters were
overturned, one on fire, at the intersection of Forbes and Desoto, which
created even more space away from the cops. Students and bystanders
crowded the sidewalks as the police substation got its windows busted
out. The march then saw its first police line, a line of vehicles, about
a block ahead. Instead of engaging, the crowd began to move through
university property across the street from Schenley Plaza. The crowd
took a right and headed up past a university vivisection lab, which got
its windows smashed out, then a left, a right, ending up on a street
with three banks and a Quiznos, all of which got windows broken.
At this point, you could begin to see the police cordon setting up at
the intersections: a couple of cops per intersection, a car, and usually
some form of wooden barricade with reinforcements of riot police down
the streets. We did not know at the time that there was a much larger
disturbance back at Pitt. In the wake of the crowd, students had swarmed
the streets, chanting "cops off campus," "Go Pitt, Fuck the Police" and
"we love Pittsburgh, fuck the G20." Contrary to media reports, students
were not just swept up in the events but were actively participating.
The cops were split once again, trying to deal with dynamic situations
moving in two different directions. Vehicles had caught up with the
crowd again and were attempting to run it off the streets. Many small
groups started to disperse down alleys and work their way back toward
Schenley Plaza where cops had begun gassing students again. Around
midnight, around when they called "All units to Oakland" over the police
scanner, they decided to cordon off the area. They set up skirmish lines
on Forbes and Fifth and pushed students away from the commercial
district and back onto campus. They began by pushing people down the
sidewalk but that quickly escalated into firing tear gas down the street
and even gassing students trying to enter their dorms. This escalated
the situation and brought more students out into the street. It took
till 2:30 for them to finally quell the unrest in Oakland. What few of
us knew whas that when the march began, they were trying to get Obama
out of Schenley Park, the entrance to which is Schenley Plaza, ground
zero for the rioting, and at this point many units ran out of their gas
requisition, freezing them in place for a period of time. This even
further escalated the situation until they began to completely clear
streets, driving vehicles down residential streets in Oakland, repeating
the dispersal warning from loudspeakers.
The point when they ran out of gas is an important moment, the point
where their security plan broke down completely. In a single day we had
exceeded their projection of the worst possible scenario for the entire
weekend. When creating a summit security plan, police will requisition
supplies based on what they consider to be the worst possible scenario
for the entire time of potential conflict (in this case, a weekend). The
fact that they ran out of gas makes it clear that in a single day we
exceeded the worst possible scenario projection for the entire weekend.
This wasn't because of the volume of property destroyed or the magnitude
of any individual action; it wwas a result of the speed of movement
through terrain, the ability to limit police projection, and the
multiplication of terrains of conflict that ruptured the coherence of
police logistics and eviscerated any concept of tactical initiative on
their part. As is often discussed in relation to asymmetric conflict,
when conflict spreads throughout a terrain, gaps in police coverage open
up, and these gaps are where conflict can proliferate; but in the
creation of these gaps conflict becomes a potential in all space and
police movement through space becomes uncertain and difficult. It was in
specifically breaking the containment of the summit demonstration,
breaking the planned demonstration zones, the containment strategy of
police strategy, and the containment of political identity, that these
actions pushed police logistics to the breaking point. The only tragedy
of that day was that we did not push this further, through the night and
into the following days, and in failing to pursue, to continue to
amplify conflict. We allowed the police time to regroup, resupply, and
call in reinforcements.
The next morning the permitted march began to gather. At the gathering
point itself there were relatively few police, but just blocks away were
hundreds of riot cops, spaced out in groups of 30-50, surrounding
vehicles so that they could be mobile, and accompanied by K-9 units.
These mobile units were to deal with anyone who diverged from the
agreed-upon plan for the day. As the march moved downtown we noticed
more and more cops, in higher concentrations, 'til we got downtown and
then they lined the streets, standing in front of barriers that held
back crowds of people who had gathered along the march route. When the
march stopped in front of the City County Building, the cops began to
show a little of what they had in store for later that night. The crowd
stood in a downtown street while 50-100 riot cops began to move off a
side street, one (backed up by one of the LRADs) even moving into the
crowd. The bloc assembled and moved towards the cops to form a buffer
between the cops and the rest of the crowd.
As the march moved the police presense thinned out. They moved squads of
riot cops into the positions that we had occupied minutes before and
drove Hummers with fences attached to their fronts to block off the
bridges to everything but foot traffic. As the gathering in the park
wore on, and as the time for the permit to expire approached, we noticed
lines of riot police beginning to surround the park and a large
contingent getting off a school bus and gearing up in the southwest
corner of the park. These shows of force were further foreshadowing of
the actions later that night.
That night a large group of Pitt students, along with assorted
anarchists and activists, gathered in Schenley Plaza to demonstrate
against the police brutality from the previous night. Hours before the
gathering, we could see large groups of riot cops gearing up in the
Oakland neighborhood and hiding down side streets, particularly around
Forbes between Meyran and Desoto. As people began to gather, the park
became immediately surrounded. After 45 minutes the dispersal warnng was
sounded and the LRAD blared, but there was nowher for anyone to go. The
cops began to move in but not as a unit. They sent small tactical teams
into the crowd to secure an area, while cops behind them gassed that
area, and pepper sprayed or attacked anyone in range. Those they caught
were cuffed and arrested. Larger lines would move in behind them to
secure the area and process the arrestees. Groups managed to break
through and head both out of the area and further into Pitt's campus.
Those groups that ended up on campus were chased down by riot cops and
beaten if caught. The cops beat and gassed people indiscriminately,
including at least one instance of launching tear gas canisters into
open dorm windows.
The gathering in itself was relatively innocuous, being largely people
playing drums and giving speeches, but that is not the point. The police
response was meant to send a message not only against causing
distubances that night, but the make anyone present think twice about
stepping out of line again. The response was meant to psychologically
damage and generate fear, not just to stabilize a situation. And this is
a good lesson to learn. If we are going to be successful we have to be
ready for and expect this type of response in subsequent gatherings.
While difficult to deal with, it is inevitable. The police are trying to
stabilize a situation, and for them that means preserving control. That
means constructing us as subjects to be organized, to be positioned to
preserve the flows of the city, and if we can't be organized, to be
forced back into stability. The police actions on Friday night
accomplished their goal. There were few popular actions Friday night and
the energy of the actions dissipated quickly, but we doubt the resonance
of those actions will fade as easily.
There is little doubt that these were some of the most successful
actions that we have undertaken in recent memory. Not because anarchists
barricaded streets and created space, or because we fought back against
the cops and actually held our ground. Not because we forced the cops
into a stalemate by the middle of Thursday or the scale of the property
destruction. Rather it is that we were able to glimpse a form of action.
Unlike past summit demonstrations, isolated in downtown areas like the
summits themselves, these actions were both visible and invisible
simultaneously. They engaged on a plane of daily life that our actions
rarely touch (outside of our own lives). The actions were dispersed and
mobile, escaping the ability of the state to impose order on them.
During the Greek uprising a government minister complained most about
the inability to have an object of group to negotiate with, no demands
to mediate. Those actions existed on a different plane than the state.
Against the state's imposition of sameness, people in the streets
created divergence and multiplicity. The streets became indefinable as
actions proliferated, changing the environment with the participants
themselves. It became a terrain impossible to define, impossible to
limit as the very structures of control had broke down. The inability of
the state to mediate these actions was precisely due to the existence of
the actions of a plane that could not be mediated. It was not for
anything specific but for the possibility of possibility, the very
energy that destroys limits. This is a strategy of disappearance unable
to be defined, unable to be categorized, and therefore unable to be
policed. It was a fight over the possibility of control.
Not that the G20 was anywhere close to the intensity of Greece, but that
type of situation can only exist to the degree that it is invisible to
the state, that there are too many dynamics, too many actions to
stabilize. But this disappearance from the plane of the state, from the
state's gaze, is also an appearance on the level of daily life, a level
where life and action link up in ways that can only create dynamic
situations. Resistance struck a chord, it resonated, and that resonance
built itself into an energy that shook the city. It escaped the bounds
of the removed specialists of political action and broke out, it became
social war, or at least a glimpse of what that resonance may feel like.
It opened a window into something else. What that is, is up to us to
decide.