Within modern society, there are two things that cannot be acknowledged. Dirt and death. These represent the abject, that which we refuse to see, except when it slips into view, and then we experience revulsion and disgust.
As Anne McClintock says in Imperial Leather, “nothing is inherently dirty... dirt is what’s left over after exchange value has been extracted.” In other words, dirt is the visual evidence of manual labor- slave labor, domestic labor, sweatshop labor, etc.-and because modern economies were founded on the myth that non-manual labor- like banking- is worth the big bucks, dirt must be erased. Death represents a different sort of disruption. As Mary Shelly made so beautifully clear in Frankenstein, death brings the progress narrative of modern science to a monstrous halt.
So Burlington, Vermont, where I live, may be the place where the Occupy movement ends as death and dirt were used to shut down the encampment last week. As was reported in both the national and the local press, last Thursday a 35-year-old man by the name of Josh Pfeffer shot himself in the head after supposedly pointing the gun at another person. Pfeffer was in a tent at the Occupy Burlington encampment in City Hall Park.
Police immediately shut down the encampment and cited Pfeffer’s death as clear evidence that the Occupy encampment was a public safety hazard and would no longer be allowed to take place. According to the Burlington police, they can no longer allow an encampment because:
tents were unsafe because of what may happen out of sight, including possesion of weapons and illicit drug and alcohol use. The city said it must take care of public health hazards before it will be completely reopened. These hazards include but are not limited to blood, used condoms, broken glass, and other sharp objects. ... The Parks Department needs to fully clean and perform maintenance on the south side of the park before it can be re-opened to full public traffic.
Similar reasons have been used to shut down encampments in Oakland, where a man was killed on the edges of the protest. Occupy Oakland was shut down, tents removed, and the whole place cleaned up after someone was fatally shot near the encampment. And last night hundreds of police in New York City did the same thing, taking tents, arresting 70 protesters, and then power washing Zuccotti Park to clean away the dirt.
The problem with the abject, with dirt and death and power washing the evidence of them away, is that there is no away that they can actually go to. They just return—the homeless, the criminal, the mentally ill, the chronically unemployed, the recently unemployed, the students with crushing debt, the elderly who cannot retire—haunting us with the evidence that the exchange value has already been extracted from these bodies.
In Oakland, protesters are gathering to join with student protesters at Berkeley. In New York,
the National Lawyers Guild obtained a court order allowing the protesters to return with their tents to the park, where they have camped for two months. The guild said the injunction prevents the city from enforcing park rules on the protesters who are now looking for squatters rights, despite park rules banning camping overnight.
Death happens. Whether there are encampments are not, people kill themselves and kill others. In Burlington, Oakland, and everywhere else. No one shuts down my block when someone dies on private property. Dirt happens. People use condoms, inject drugs, and generally create ways for infections to spread. In Burlington, if you’re over the age of five, you know that drugs and sex can be found for sale in City Hall Park. Regardless of the presence or absence of tents. That the very modern sense of “private” and “property” mark the encampments as filled with dirt and death in order to clean them up is completely within the logic of our times. But death, dirt and the Occupy movement will continue to haunt us, a specter of the limits of modern economies and modern forms of knowledge.