A General Strike has been Called and here’s the Plan in NYC:

The overall plan for M1:
There are going to be three convergences throughout the day. There is more information about M1 events at: maydaynyc.org

1. 8am-4pm: Midtown action staging zone in Bryant Park. This will include food, a really, REALLY free market, skillshares, workshops, lectures, art, fun and more. There is no permit for this site, but it is expected to be family friendly. Attendance is likely to be thousands of people.  There will be a large number of groups and events in one static location.  This convergence will happen during daylight hours, and have a high attendance. It will likely have a crowded, festival atmosphere.

2. 4:00 march from Bryant Park to Union Square. If your intervention is best suited to a march, or to an audience that passes by, this may be the place to be. There will probably be some police presence, but, like in other marches, we expect they will mainly control traffic and we aren’t expecting arrests.

3. The Unity Rally, at 4pm-6pm, in Union Square.  This will be a much, much larger gathering than at Bryant Park. This site does have a permit. It will have the full participation of the may1st coalition, including undocumented immigrants and others, and is one of the main events of the day. It will be crowded and have a festive atmosphere.

4. The Unity March, ~6pm-7?8?pm.  From Union Square to the Financial district. Many of the people at the Unity Rally will head downtown. Conditions will be simmer to the 4:00 march.

5. The financial district staging area.  Post-march.  Everyone who marches will gather in an area that may be used as staging for other actions. This area will probably be more chaotic than the other two, and will be a better place for more Direct Actions or creative disruptions if your art works along those lines. Note this will occur after dark. There will be an effort to create a “green zone,” or safe zone here, though these spaces are not necessarily guaranteed by outside parties.

6. City streets, any time. You do not have to participate in any of the convergences. One of our goals is to have art happening everywhere in the city, all day long, so every New York inhabitant encounters some art on May first. If your art is suited to curious passersby, is best done in morning rush hour, or would benefit from quite® one on one interactions, you may want to consider staging your project outside of a convergence or near a convergence.

There is also a specific call to disrupt day-to-day life for the 1% in midtown all day. Your action may suit that call.

Finally, some people are providing side actions in the surrounding neighborhoods of the convergences that draw people to the main areas. For example, we have a choir piece where people will sing their way from Madison Square to Union Square in time for the convergence.

This is a lecture done by Jennifer Uleman, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College (SUNY) on 3/12/12. At the request of OccupyNCC we are posting the full notes of this lecture here on the blog. Download link below…

Occupy Reality: Hegel, Harry Frankfurt, and Ontology in Zuccotti Park
Jennifer Uleman
March 12, 2012
Nassau Community College

 All rights reserved; please cite using information above. Download the full document here…

My ultimate aim in this talk is to illustrate, and also to defend, an idea of Hegel’s.  I do this with the help of Harry Frankfurt, and by recalling scenes and reminding listeners of salient features of Occupy Wall Street.  I hope to convince you that Hegel’s idea – which I’ll mention shortly – is a useful one, and that Frankfurt’s analysis – which I’ll also describe shortly – is trenchant.  I also hope to suggest that Hegel and Frankfurt can help Occupy and those sympathetic to it stay out of trouble, at least the bad kinds of trouble, like losing track of what matters, posturing, and hallucinating.

To begin: two guiding quotations (Slide 2):

The first is from Hegel’s Preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”[1]

The second is Harry Frankfurt; it is the opening of his great 1986 essay, “On Bullshit.”  (Reveal second quotation.)  “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.  Everyone knows this.”[2]

So much for guiding fragments.

One of the most salient features of Zuccotti Park, from late September to early November, 2011,when OWS was at its height there, was that it felt real – it felt full of reality.  There might have been bullshit around the edges, and there was plenty of bullshit, at first especially, in the press, but milling around, on the signs and in the conversations, in the coverage that started emerging, and in the widespread public discourse that started to take hold, one felt that reality was pushing through against bullshit, making headway, making itself known.  This was absolutely thrilling, and a source of great relief.

Here is Francine Prose, one of the first to post at “Occupy Writers” (Slide 3):

As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom I’ve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) I’ve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes [ER-MÉZ] scarf. I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of “vagueness” one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity—clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it. In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we’re being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.[3]

Hegel’s troubled – that is, highly contested – claim that, “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational” (and yes, this is the idea I want to illustrate and defend), Hegel’s claim can help us make philosophical sense of this – of the openness, sympathy, organization, of the clarities of purpose, method, and understanding Prose observed, and of her relief from isolation and powerless dread.

Here are a few of the scenes from Zuccotti Park that led me to think about Hegel in these ways.

I.  ACTUALITY IN ZUCCOTTI PARK

First, at Zuccotti Park, there was a fierce attachment to democracy.  This is an attachment I think most of us actually have, but don’t always think about.  Here, that attachment was manifest, evident both in the social/political/economic critique the protesters were leveling and in the workings of the park itself.

The idea of democracy is the idea that each person’s interests, well-being, and ideological commitments (religious, political, etc.) count as much as anyone else’s, and that decisions about how we are to live together – about social, economic, and political arrangements – need to involve and take account of each of us.  We each get to vote in electing officials, we have a free and varied press, and we regulate campaign finance, among a million other things, to put this idea – that each of us counts – into practice.

The critique the protesters were leveling pointed out that all these things – a free and varied press, regulations on campaign finance, even the right to vote, among a million other things – are being eroded, that our democracy is becoming a plutocracy, or a system ruled not by the people, the demos, but by the wealthy, the ploutos, whose wealth is only growing.

The workings of the park itself were democratic, encouraging engagement in decision-making.  What emerged was maybe social-democratic: the decisions that were made provided many, in whatever temporary short-term way, with some basic social goods – food, health-care, housing.  Being in Zucotti Park was like having one’s attachment to democracy realized, its rationale actualized.  So first, there was that: at Zuccotti Park, democracy, the system many of us think reason demands, was real again, really engaged and, to the degree possible, really realized.  The rational was actual and the actual was rational.

Second, at Zuccotti Park, this happened spontaneously – rational collective human spirit (or what Hegel calls Geist) was at work, was acting.  A postage-stamp park, all peach/brown granite, young trees, and flower beds, Zuccotti was laid-out for lunching office workers and tourists, but was transformed, by the occupiers, into a small city.  (Image: OWSJ Map, Slide 4.)  Many, like Prose, remarked on how well-organized it was.  The organization seemed to have emerged organically; it made intuitive sense and felt responsive to shifting needs.  (Images: Press Area, Food Line, Kitchen (w/The Heart Wants sign) Slides 5, 6, and 7.)  There was planning, it’s true, but none of it very advance, and a lot of what happened was ad hoc, mapped and coordinated by the Town Planning Working Group that emerged, but not dictated by it. Things were set up the way they were set up because those set ups made sense to everyone who was there, and changes, one had a sense, would be made when changes made sense to whoever was there.  You can see, for instance, that the Assembly Area moved, and it moved to an area that was better suited to it (more amphitheater-like).  (Image: Liberty Plaza Map, Slide 8).  This was supra-personal self-organization, a la Hegel, at work.

Now, by calling this self-organization ‘supra-personal,’ the last thing I mean is that it was not human beings who did it.  It was us, or them, but anyway not anything from the beyond.  Geist is just us, collectively, with all our history, insofar as we make any kind of sense.  The spirit of Zuccotti Park was human spirit.  But what happened in Zuccotti Park was, like juridical law (that is, not laws of physical nature, but the laws ‘on the books’ that govern everything from traffic to taxes), not the work of a single mind.  It was an organization – an arrangement and a set of understandings about how to do things and where – that came into being through interactions, conversations, actions, observations, and mutual recognitions.  What does the kitchen need?  How should the food be laid out?  Should there be a line?  And today – should it be the same way today it was yesterday?  And hey, we really need to make a new map.  As Hegel puts it about juridical laws, such decisions and the physical realities that follow from them, “are something laid down, something derived from human beings” – just not by or from individuals acting alone.

Indeed it is for this very reason – that laws, or kitchen set-up in Zuccotti Park, are laid down by, or derived from, human beings, but not from individuals like me alone – that I can come into a certain kind of conflict with them.  We see the lines along which people have organized things, and “our inner voice may either come into collision with them or concur with them.”[4]  Hegel continues (Image: Slide 9):

The human being does not stop short at the existent, but claims to have within himself the measure of what is right; he may be subjected to the necessity and power of external authority [police, professors], but never in the same way as to natural necessity [that is, to laws of nature], for his inner self always tells him how things ought to be, and he finds within himself the confirmation or repudiation of what is accepted as valid.  […]  [Or, in other words] …in laws of right [or ways of organizing the kitchen] the thing is not valid because it exists; on the contrary, everyone demands that it should match his own criterion.  Thus a conflict may arise between what is and what ought to be…[5]

This points to something really important.  Talk to people who were staying there, or working with working groups, and you’d hear kvetching about the chaos, the disorganization, the things that didn’t happen when they were supposed to, the rude surprises.  (Image: Working Group Schedule, Slide 10.)  There was conflict.  Any individual actor, confronting Zucotti Park, might experience a chaotic jumble of obstacles (and also opportunities), vis-à-vis her particular projects and interests.  But from a point of view just a bit more wide-angle, the whole was organized, and breath-takingly so, and by collective intelligence, or rationality.  Here, the supra-personal rational was actual and the actual was rational, however occasionally infuriating things were to particular individals (Image: Info Desk with Group List, Slide 11)

Another example:  On Thursday, Oct. 13, amidst reports that the city was going to clear the park to do a ‘power wash’ the next day, people started cleaning.  I first noticed people cleaning flowerbeds – removing trash, turning soil, neatening plants.  No one had to be told – as soon as you saw that cleaning was going on, you knew why, and you knew it was a good idea, and if you could, you pitched in.  Here was group consciousness and group action, based in a collective clarity of purpose and intention of the kind Prose mentions.  Here, again, was rationality in action, actuality as rational.  Cleaning was the true thing to do, an embrace and assertion of reality, of what was called for, and a push-back against bullshit (about which more in a minute).

But what about cases where what is, or what happens, is not rational, not even in a wide-angle view?  There certainly are such cases, and lots of them, in this world.  Don’t these cases fatally challenge Hegel’s claim?  If the actual is not always rational or vice versa then, well, the actual is not rational and vice versa.

Here we need Hegel’s distinctions between the actual and the existent.  For Hegel, not everything that exists is actual, or real.  Bear with me.  Some things that happen are just accidents, are contingent, are particulars of no particular import for the whole.  These things are not real in a strong, normative sense.  This is not so unfamiliar as it might seem.  When someone says, “now that is a real apple pie!” or “that was a real party!” she does not just mean that something baked with crust and apple filling sits in front of her, or that she attended a gathering – she means that the pie lives up to standards, that the party was what a party is supposed to be, that it wasn’t, to jump again to Frankfurt, bullshit.  So a normative idea of ‘real’ is not so unusual.  And we frequently connect it ourselves with rationality.  When what happens does not make sense we say, at least some of the time, that it wasn’t real – that wasn’t a real class, we say, or a real meeting, or a real conversation, or a real thought, etc.  You can probably think of further examples.

If we are in tune with, and hang onto, relevant standards of rationality and actuality or realness, we can even deny existence where existence should be denied.

Everyone knows about the human mic, and how it works.  It wasn’t, of course, used only during General Assemblies or when someone addressed a crowd, but also for quick announcements – that there would be a direct action training at the red cube at 3pm, for instance.  One afternoon, a young, rangy, charismatic man tested the mic near where I happened to be.  He had an announcement – something about sanitation, maybe, I can’t remember – which he made, with the help of everyone nearby.  He ended by saying “and now I need,” and the crowd repeated, “AND NOW I NEED,” and finished the sentence, “to go see about a young lady in Queens,” which the crowd spontaneously and decisively failed to repeat – maybe a murmur or guffaw, but the mic ‘malfunctioned’ quite beautifully, refusing to broadcast a message that, given the context and the terms according to which people were lending their voices and ears, was beside the point.  The end of his announcement, as announcement, wasn’t an actual or real announcement.  It did not merit existence, and existence it was denied.  Our collective rationality prevailed.  The right thing happened, without anyone having to confer with anyone else, without there being a stated rule, without us knowing each other.  It happened because we all responded to keep his particularity and contingency where, in this case, it belonged.

What the things I’ve mentioned point to, I think, are multiple ways that good, powerful aspects of Occupy, aspects that many have found profoundly moving – a lived commitment to democracy, a collective sense of purpose, the ways in which OWS has made profound sense – can be used to illustrate and defend Hegel’s idea that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.  So much of what happened at Zuccotti Park was actual and rational.  Occupy has been a site of practices, actions, understandings, conversations, and more that were not, to turn at last to the other possibility, bullshit.

II. BULLSHIT

One of my favorite signs at Zuccotti Park was the one that said, “Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit”  (Slide 12).  As social/economic/political critique, it seemed to me exactly correct, if a little general.  It put me in mind of Harry Frankfurt’s brilliant analysis of bullshit.

The “essence of bullshit,” writes Frankfurt, is an “indifference to how things really are.”[6]  (Image: Slide 13)  What a bullshitter says is, “unconnected to a concern with the truth.  Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality.  Her description…is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up.  She concocts it out of whole cloth; or, if she got it from someone else, she is repeating it quite mindlessly and without any regard for how things really are.”[7]

Examples?  Do you really need them?  “The realms of advertising and public relations,” Frankfurt writes, “and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept” (Frankfurt, 122).  I’m just going to let that stand.

Now again, the essence of bullshit is an indifference to how things really are.

But this is not the whole story: the condition of the possibility of bullshit is an arena in which how things really are matters.  Frankfurt mentions the “bull session,” an arena in which bullshit is allowed, and so, in an important way, is not really bullshit.  (Image: Slide 14)

What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say.  […]  The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adverturesome approach to the subjects under discussion.  Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it.  (Frankfurt, 126)

We experience the bullshitter, in contrast, “as engaged in an activity to which the distinction between what is true and what is false is crucial, and yet as taking no interest in whether what she says is true or false” (Frankfurt, 125; my emphasis).

Bullshit makes us feel crazy.  People who encounter it say things like this: it is “enough to make a casual observer’s head explode,”[8] or “is it just me, or is there something seriously wrong with this picture?”[9]  When we are surrounded by it, we have the feelings Prose describes:  dread, a vertiginous sense of falling off a cliff, isolation, powerlessness.

One of the most powerful signs that something other than bullshit was happening at Zuccotti Park were the signs themselves.  (Images: Slides 15 (Make Less?), 16 (Privatized Everything), 17 (We Are Citizens United)).

The fact that signs weren’t mass produced (Image: Array of Signs, Slide 18), that they were intelligent, to the point, and that people ate them up (Image: People in London, Slide 19), was evidence of the great hunger for speech that is not bullshit, that pushes back against bullshit, and that is real.

One could point to many more examples, but I hope you’re getting the idea, and I hope, thus far, that I’ve indicated some ways that powerful, valuable, salient features of Occupy can help illustrate and defend Hegel’s idea (and give us an excuse to read Frankfurt again).

Whether I have or no, it’s time to move to how Hegel and Frankfurt can help us moving forward.

III.  HOW TO HEW TO REALITY

I said up front that Hegel and Frankfurt can help us stay out of trouble, at least some bad kinds of trouble, like losing track of what you are saying, posturing, and hallucinating.

Each in his own way tells us to hew to reality, and to dig in, to risk attaching ourselves to substance.  Hegel warns (I won’t read the quotations, but I have them here) against refusing to make truth claims in favor of leaning always only on what he calls “a mush of ‘heart, friendship, and enthusiasm’” (Hegel, PR, p. 16).  He would become impatient with a perpetual (though not a short-term tactical) refusal to issue demands, and also with a refusal to see anything good or worthwhile in existing social, economic, and political structures and institutions (family, markets, religious institutions, courts and police, welfare provisions, as well as the institutions of legislation and government).  The 99% are not behind total revolution, but a system that better approximates already commonly held ideals (e.g., about democracy).  (Here I might mention Charles Mills recent work, Occupy Liberalism.)  If Occupy is to continue to be relevant it needs to continue to give voice to real, widely shared concerns – it needs to keep track of what it is saying.

What else?  Avoid posturing and those who posture.  It is tempting, particularly in political movements, but is an enemy of reality.  Frankfurt (Slide 20):

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more extensive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to the topic.  This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.  The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.  (Frankfurt, 132-33)

It is important to be honest about what you know.

It is also important to try to know more things, to find out about things.  I’ll end on a Hegelian version of this thought, using another passage from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right.

Hegel makes reference in it to Aesop’s fable of the braggart.  The braggart comes back to town, boasting about feats, including a particularly spectacular jump, performed in Rhodes.  If anyone from Rhodes comes to town, the braggart says, he’ll tell you what a great jump I made.  Someone, calling his bluff, says to the braggart, “Here is Rhodes.”

Here is what Hegel does (Slide 21).

Hic Rhodus, hic saltus.  [Here is Rhodes, jump here.]  (PR, p. 21)

[…]

If his theory does indeed transcend his own time, if it builds itself a world as it ought to be, then it certainly has an existence, but only within his opinions – a pliant medium in which the imagination can construct anything it pleases.

With little alteration, the saying just quoted would read:

Here is the rose, dance here.

[…]

To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to delight in the present – this rational insight is the reconciliation with actuality which philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular and contingent situation, but in what has being in and for itself.  (PR, p. 22)

The first part warns against transcending the present for mere fantasies – dreams of jumps you wish you’d performed, theories of society that transcend everything we know about people and how people manage to live together, about what is good for us, about what works.  Think and imagine, by all means, but do not, if you want to improve this world, build whole worlds in imagination without connection to things as they are.

The next part offers some consolation, as this call to realism can feel like a wet blanket.

Dig in to this world, to reality, and you will find not just dross but also things that make sense – maybe not simple sense, not Spielberg-movie sense, but grown-up sense.  Some random examples.  It is important to know that Rosa Parks was not just a brave lady who refused to give up her seat, but part of a sophisticated team of civil rights strategists; that the military, much hated by the idealistic, is frequently more progressive than society at large; that most people who live ‘close to nature’ do so because they are impoverished and their culture has been decimated, not because they are noble and wise.  The present, with all its injustices and idiocies and horrors may be a cross, but knowing how it (with its good parts too) has come about is the rose in that cross, the saving grace.  Figuring out how people are and how people make worlds with each other is the same as finding reason in the world.  Don’t give up hope for critique, or for the new – insist on your freedom – but also do not squander it on fantasies of more virtuous people or institutions or arrangements than have ever yet been seen.  Stand with your subjective freedom in what has being in and for itself, not in your own wishes and hallucinations.

The moral, to which Hegel and Frankfurt and Occupy can lead us?  We should, with all our might, and intelligence, and passion, with our lives and minds and hearts, be sure that whatever else we occupy, we occupy reality.

Thank you.

Jennifer Uleman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College (SUNY).  She is author of An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 2010) and of various articles and reviews on Kant’s practical philosophy.  Her “Dispatch from Occupy Wall Street” appeared in The Feminist Wire.  She organized “Thinking Occupation: Philosophers Respond to Occupy Wall Street,” a panel at the Dec. 2011 American Philosophical Association Meeting.  A report on the panel, with links to panelist comments, can be found at Possible Futures.