[I recently attended a panel discussion on policing gay spaces, gentrification and the politics of violence as part of Pervers/cite. I did not exactly have all the words to respond during Q&A, but I have spent some time reflecting on this playlist, as well as other documents posted on the event page, and I wanted to respond with a little bit about what I am thinking, and why we need to abandon politics of non-violence (and instead learn to navigate violence). This video sums up my argument in less than a minute, if you don't have the patience to read it. Google anything unknown or in "quotes" (or inbox me) if you want further explanation.]
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# Awesome event! #
I wanted to say first of all, I was really excited to see the old footage & foundational documents regarding the 1990 crises. I wasn't even born then, so having a number of different videos and testimonials (and then the panel discussion) is really great for providing context. I read the questions and problems posted above while reviewing the materials and a few things kind of struck me (pun intended) in a way that I haven't quite been able to express until now. They have been sitting (roiling) in my belly for a couple of days now, and I felt compelled to share here. I want to be clear that I am not trying to speak over anybody, and I can only speak from my lived street experience from doing outreach and intervention; I hope my ideas can hover somewhere without disrupting any others in the process. I thought it would be in bad faith to post this before the panel and discussion, but these thoughts still linger.
# Erasure is Violence #
The biggest gut-punch of the questions is of course "who gets left behind?", and it seems really central to this year's dialogues around pervers/cite. The answer to that question is an impossibly unjust response if it relies on naming alone; there is no scroll long enough to bear the names. We must also be prepared to confront erasure as it relates to forgetting, at the foundation of arkhē, at the exact wound in history where an archive is created (understanding an archive broadly; from scars to stories to HD video to 'a village'). Derrida reminds us that “the archivization produces as much as it records the event”. We have a responsibility (and a drive) to create private/public records.
# Public Hupomnemata #
Hungry to satisfy our queer telos (and drive for understanding in action) we create archives of our struggles so as to have originary, collective points to return to; to rally, to teach, to re-energize, to re-plant our feet. There is "archive fever". To be sick with “mal d’archive" means "to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement". The so-called 'Village' can be understood both in terms of its role as archive and an originary point of queer struggle and simultaneously as a site of forgetting, an archiviolithic apparatus that actively (that is to say, violently) erases as it archives.
# Violence of the Archive #
Different kinds of forgetting inflict different sorts of violences. Getting bodied to Aaliyah's "One in a Million" with a cutie on a UNITY dancefloor is ahistorical violence; it is a temporary forgetting that 'scarcity' is a notion of capitalist ideology that seeks to moderate (and arguably toxify) our relationships with other people. That's not exactly what I want to talk about here, but I hope it speaks to the same distinction of 'active forgetting' with regard to the village as a whole. Forgetting is connected to survival. "To find a real love, you gotta get bodied".
In addition to the archive footage posted earlier (honestly, so awesome to have that), there are various memorials scattered about the village that commemorate historic and often violent moments in the collective history. We must remember that all monuments are monuments to forgetting, perhaps none make this more obvious than Berlin's football sized field of forgetting that is the Memorial for Murdered European Jews (Whom? Where? When? The silence is violence!). A memorial's violence lies in priviliging what it names, as well as in the active forgetting of what is unmentioned, trimmed, and left behind. We must resist the totalizing charm of archives and understand that they can never stand in fully for the moment it records. An archive is impossibly deficient at reproducing the event because it is always produced at a distance.
# Limp Bodies #
I wanted to set that up to explain, I guess more plainly, what has been eating at me. While looking at the archive materials, I could not help but rage a little at the fact that I didn't "see myself" there. If the purpose of the activist archive is to bring us back to spark a shared sense of struggle, then we must be critical about why there are no reflections of ourselves. I saw a lot of limp bodies being dragged away by police (I'm willing to accept that making yourself really really heavy is on the spectrum of resistance tactics).
But where is the footage of the bodies in revolt? Where are the disablised/racialized bodies engaged in active dissent (and not portrayed as hapless targets for police)? How does that reportage legitimize only certain kinds of resistance when it is ensconced as 'archive-of-resistance'? The press-release manifesto document written by the group shortly after the event self-identifies the activists as 'defenseless lesbians and gays'. Who are these revisionists?
# Survival & The Impossibility of Justice #
I don't know about you, but I know a lot of resilient queers. To throw your hands up powerlessly and declare to be 'Against Violence' (while at the same time participate in occupying unceded indigenous land) is to fundamentally misunderstand it. You cannot renounce something without doing violence. We cannot build anything in 'The Village' without complicitly (with police and the corporation of Montreal) erasing the originary one. Our responsibility as archivists, historians, activists, is to move toward justice by navigating (and mitigating) violence. Our generation has an incredible historical burden: to bear the weight of the entirety of history that has come before us, to take apart all the structures that brought us here but also to do the work laying foundations for a just future that is to come. There is no way to provide recompense to all the broken bodies that have come before us; we have a responsibility to an impossibly huge debt. I hope to find a way to explain that justice (proper) is possible only when acting ahistorically opens up a path.
# Security Cultures #
My only experience dealing with MTL Police in an antagonistic setting has been from living through the "student" protests. When reviewing the youtube clips from 1990, I noticed a stark difference in their "riot gear" and loadout from what I am used to witnessing. I even thought to myself "I would never let somebody hit me like that. I could disarm that cop so easily, why is nobody resisting?". The panel discussion would later reveal that there were snipers on the roof (!!!), so I can appreciate the tone of 'surrender' more, perhaps, but I am still interested in thinking about how cultures of resistance develop out of these kinds of archived crises. I don't have a continuum of personal historical experience dealing with protests, but I am (we are) informed by techniques and security cultures that have developed out of collective struggle. It's not possible to archive all the protests, worldwide, since 1990 that have contributed to cultures of resistance, but collectively we craft something pretty darn resilient. We borrow, we learn, we forget, we remember (the casseroles, for example, were an exported tactic of resistance). We've had a lot of time since then to "up our protest-as-archive game", and the increasing militarization of the police necessitates learning new tactics of navigating violence. (Q: Where is the committee of "gays and lesbians against sound cannons"? A: Drinking mimosas unapologetically on a village terrace).
# Community Responsibility #
So if violence is inescapable, and justice is approaching impossibility, where does that leave us. How then are we to act responsibly? We must find a way to dance along the knife-edge of the "antagonistic involvement of memory and forgetfullness". Arendt speaks of community responsibility in terms of 'promise', a kind of promise that arises "directly out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking. If without action and speech, without the articulation of natality, we would be doomed to swing forever in the ever-recurring cycle of becoming, then without the faculty to undo what we have done and to control at least partially the processes they have let loose, we would be the victims of an automatic necessity bearing all the marks of inexorable laws...". This promise is linked to memory (of the archive) and therefore to every structure that has borne us to our current historical position; it anchors us to our past through what we record and how we remain 'witnesses' to history.
Our humanity makes implicit and automatic another, secondary, promise. This is the promise of forgetfullness (that includes both decay and forgiveness as its sources). Forgetfullness asserts itself at the exact moment history becomes memory, and swells to fill all the spaces left blank. Compared against the first promise (memory, which is a looking back), forgetfullness plants itself firmly in the present, opening up like a wound (or a LIGHT) toward the future. It is only from these ahistorical ruptures that the possibility for justice can exist. Firmly rooted in the past, our politics and institutions are poised to exert control over our futures up to the exact point where their continuity is ruptured; it's only as sovereign individuals, acting freely and testing the foundation of every historical pillar with a sledgehammer, that we can dismantle the structures that bind us and prevent us from non-violent relations to the other (in the future).
How then, to act ahistorically and with intentionality? How do we build pillars of promise that open toward the future without trampling over others? How do we build resilient communities and support networks? We must find a way to act/fight/love/resist DIFFERENTLY THAN EVER BEFORE if we are committed to the possibility of a just future.
# "Teen Fags Rule This Hood" #
I was happy that Christina brought up some examples of community based responses to neighbourhood security (like the Lavender Panthers!?), because I am quite interested in those sorts of projects, and I feel like last night's question of "how do we push back?" wasn't fully addressed. Sadly the Panthers' project (as well as the others briefly listed) were hopelessly doomed; a racist (or exclusionary) anti-oppressive project is an automatic failure (sorry "take back the night", the night is not given willingly).
I understand that me posting here is a kind of wound in security culture itself, but I wanted to shyly raise my hand and say "there are other ways." Contemporary, peer-based examples include the NYI, a group of friends and survivors who were responding to increased violence in NY's village, but whose origin arose out of the lack of police response to the numerous murders of sex workers (by the so-called craigslist killer). The initiative is doing something quite different now, but it's still a good, semi-local, semi-recent example of peer-based community responses.
Montreal has a small, unaffiliated team of costumed activists as well, but we are much more low profile. The rhetoric of being a 'superhero' is ultra problematic (you can declare yourself a hero as readily as you declare yourself an ally), but it provides a framework of understanding regarding these kinds of projects (aka why I would put on kevlar and go looking for trouble while sane folks are sleeping soundly in their beds). There is a kind of hungry voice that keeps me up at night that keeps whispering "there's more that you can be doing". I know I'm not alone. We need it all. We need all the tactics. We need the kiss-ins, the re-blogs, the petitions, the bake-sales, but we also need direct actions, we need harm reductive strategies, we need to remember all the different ways to resist.
# Health Privilege & Skill Sharing #
I believe that as folks who ID as activists, it is our responsibility to act in the interests of community to the edge of our own personal limits. We need front-line folks, but we also need HTML experts. At the risk of 'burning out', we need to find ways to support each other with whatever vectors of privilege we happen to wield. If we agree there, then it would follow that we have an active responsibility to share, develop and LEARN new methods of survival.
When you see a crisis on the streets, what are the barriers for you to intervene personally? Do you know self defense? De-Escalation? Could you teach it? Do you want to learn? What about first aid? Do you know how to administer Naloxone? If a street youth asked you where the closest shelter was, could you tell them? I firmly believe we can strengthen the community by becoming more resilient ourselves.
# Surveillance vs. Sousveillance #
Surveillance was barely touched on during the discussion, but I wanted to bring up a counter-point to the top-down, arms-length approaches to 'monitoring community safety', which is of course the inverse concept of 'sousveillance'. One of the ways that I try to be present and accountable to the city is by patrolling with my very own, hands-free, High Definition archiviolithic device (my GOPRO). I have so much recorded footage of street life that others will probably never see. Having the camera with me allows me to be 'present' to crises as a more resilient witness. Street life is dangerous, and we know that the montreal police have a bloody history of violence against marginal folks (https://cobp.resist.ca/). Being present to record ("without interfering") an altercation between police and folks who would have otherwise been stripped of their agency can literally be a game changer in how the scenario plays out. I am sad-happy to report that I have zero footage of police playing 'bad cop' (but plenty of personal witnessing). I think there's a correlation.
Beyond recording the city, I think that's it really possible to actively increase the chance of being in the right place at the right time to intervene in crises, by making yourself more available to the city. I know this is a hard sell, but there is a spectrum of action available to you, from leaving 'Le Stud' one drink early to scout the village for any drunk or lost folks in need of assistance to putting on a kevlar vest and putting your own body in between sex workers and assaulters. Maybe you have an OPUS card and a free Friday night: get together with some peers and spend the night hanging out while riding the metro. I guarantee that you will find a way to intervene in a crisis that does not require turning to the SPVM. Maybe it starts there. If you are hungry too, then join me on the streets.
Love and Light
Forget Gandhi, remember Bhagat Singh
xx #lookaftereachother
PS. I decided to share a short clip from a needle cleanup and patrol with a friend. You can see the exact moment where this private, ahistorical moment becomes archive (where I look at the camera to see if it just recorded what happened). I trimmed away our initial conversation (and what took place after), and thereby commit violence. In the name of love. I hope you can see what I mean about navigating violence and being present to the community in radical ways with this 1 minute clip. (And no, I don't actually identify with Batman; rich old dude so disconnected from his community that he needs a signal in the sky to tell him where he's needed, pfft).
PPS. Shout-out to the cutie in one of the front rows reading 'UPRISING'. If there's a fire in your belly you gotta let it out.
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
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