What follows is an essay of interpretation. It is about direct action in North America, about the mass mobilizations organized by the so called "anti-globalization movement", and especially, about the war of images that has surrounded it. It begins with a simple observation. I think it's fair to say that if the average American knows just two things about these mobilizations, they are, first of all, that there are often people dressed in black who break windows; second, that they involve colorful giant puppets.
I want to start by asking why these images in particular appear to have so struck the popular imagination. I also want to ask why it is that of the two, American police seem to hate the puppets more. As many activists have observed, the forces of order in the United States seem to have a profound aversion to giant puppets. Often police strategies aim to destroy or capture them before they can even appear on the streets.
As a result, a major concern for those planning actions soon became how to hide the puppets so they will not be destroyed in pre-emptive attacks. What's more, for many individual officers at least, the objection to puppets appeared to be not merely strategic, but personal, even visceral. Cops hate puppets. Activists are puzzled as to why.
To some degree this essay emerges from that puzzlement. It is written very much from the perspective of a participant. I have been involved in the global justice movement1 for six years now, having helped to organize and taken part in actions small and large, and I have spent a good time wondering about such questions myself. If this were simply an essay on police psychology, of course, my involvement would put me at a significant disadvantage, since it makes it difficult to carry out detailed interviews with police.
Granted, being active in the movement does afford frequent occasions for casual chats with cops. But such chats aren't always the most enlightening. The only extended conversation I ever had with police officers on the subject of puppets, on the other hand, was carried out while I was handcuffed--which if nothing else makes it very difficult to take notes.
At any rate, this essay is not so much about the particulars of police, or activist, psychology as what the Annales school historians liked to call a "structure of the conjuncture": the peculiar--and endlessly shifting--symbolic interactions of state, capital, mass media, and oppositional movements that the globalization movement has sparked.
Since any strategic planning must start from an understanding of such matters, those engaged in planning such actions end up endlessly discussing the current state of this conjuncture. I see this essay, therefore, as a contribution to an ongoing conversation--one that is necessarily aesthetic, critical, ethical, and political all at the same time. I also see it as ultimately pursuing the movements' aims and aspirations in another form.
To ask these questions--Why puppets? Why windows? Why do these images seem to have such mythic power? Why do representatives of the state react the way they do? What is the public's perception? What is the "public", anyway? How would it be possible to transform "the public" into something else?--is to begin to try to piece together the tacit rules of game of symbolic warfare, from its elementary assumptions to the details of how the terms of engagement are negotiated in any given action, ultimately, to understand the stakes in new forms of revolutionary politics. I am myself personally convinced that such understandings are themselves revolutionary in their implications.
Hence the unusual structure of this essay, in which an analysis of the symbolism of puppets leads to a discussion of police media strategies to reflections on the very nature of violence and the state of international politics. It is an attempt to understand an historical moment from the perspective on someone situated inside it.
From the David Graeber entry on Wikipedia: David Rolfe Graeber (born 12 February 1961) is an American anthropologist and anarchist. On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he currently holds the title of Reader in Social Anthropology. He was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007. Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World.
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