Issue #325: Student Encampments and U.S. Spectacle
Playoff basketball continues to be among the top three most important elements of my life right now. Despite two other high profile sport-ish events, Evo Japan (a fighting game tournament) and PT Thunder Junction (a Magic: the Gathering tournament), nothing can distract me from the beautiful spectacle of playoff ball. The first round is an embarrassment of riches. I don’t even know who won any of the Evo tournaments or the PT, so maybe I’ll go back and watch them.
The first round of the playoffs is just electric. So many teams, so many meaningful games. I’ve been watching just about every series, but my two favorites have been Timberwolves vs. Suns and Knicks vs. 76ers.
I got on board with the Timberwolves around All-Star break. I was an enthusiastic fan after this post-game interview with Gobert: Rudy Gobert’s on-court postgame interview: “that’s what movies is made of”
He’s calling back to a KAT post-game comment:
Then, of course, there is Anthony Edwards. No comment on the “DX celebration,” but you can look it up. There is no more electric player to watch right now. This dunk from last night is just outrageous:
Then, there’s the stats. Last night, Edwards scored 9 points in the first half barely keeping the Timberwolves in the game. In the second half, he scored 31 points. This is the definition of that guy. Edwards showed up when his team needed him to. In his post-game interview with Inside the NBA, he remarked on the ability of his team to hold things together until he was finally able to get into a groove and start scoring.
In a few days, the Timberwolves will likely be playing the Denver Nuggets. That’s going to be a series to watch. As for the 76ers vs. the Knicks, both teams have been tremendous, but Jalen Brunson has willed the Knicks into championship contention. I would be surprised to not see them in the Eastern conference finals. And if they are opposite the Celtics, I’m not looking forward to it.
There have also been some enduring jokes that have come up during the playoffs. When a team is eliminated from contention, twitter users and comedically inclined sports commentators like to say the team is relegated to Cancun. They’re going to the beach, going on vacation, etc.
Charles Barkley on Inside the NBA has come up with a new vacation for the less deserving NBA teams, however. Cancun is too scenic for the lackadaisical effort of the New Orleans Pelicans, for instance. Instead, Barkley will be lobbying for them to vacation in Galveston, Texas. Apparently, there is a beach there.
There is even a “Pelican Island,” so BI and McCollum should feel right at home.
That brings me to the Celtics. If you were surprised to not see the Celtics vs. Miami series represented among my favorites, I understand. But this series is not fun to watch at all. I would be having fun if the Celtics were 3-0. But they are (at time of writing) 2-1. From being 1-1. Come on.
Losing to the Heat without Jimmy Butler or Terry Rozier is just embarrassing. The conditions under which we lost were even worse. The Miami Heat set a franchise playoff-record for three point shots, with 23. Their performance on Wednesday, in fact, was the fourth largest number of made threes in a playoff game ever.
Instead of treating this like an inescapable statistical anomaly, the Celtics subject to force majeure, one must consider to what extent did the Celtics defense allow this to happen. Considering, the extent is a lot. NBA tracking data indicated the Heat scored twenty one three pointers that were either “open” (4-6 feet in front of the shooter) or “wide open” (more than 6 feet in front of the shooter). This is nearly as much of a concession by the Celtics as emptying your bench in garbage time. Block the perimeter.
Worse, still, is Celtics Head Coach Joe Mazzulla’s unwillingness to take responsibility. In his game 2 post-game interview, he called most of Miami’s three point shots “moderately to heavily contested.” If more than 4 feet in front of the shooter is “moderately contested,” sure. While we won game 3, Mazzulla says there were no defensive adjustments, just greater effort. This is not Moneyball (2011), Joe. Despite the statistical unlikelihood of a made three from some players on the Heat, contest shots from the perimeter if they are getting hot. By the time you read this, game 4 may be a wrap. If we are 3-1, the Celtics will be back in my good graces, although I can only imagine how good it would feel to have closed it out tonight. If we are 2-2, I’m going dark. And buying an Anthony Edwards jersey.
This week, a lengthy discussion of pro-Palestinian student encampments.
Unprecedented Human Rights Violations are Ongoing
I have already discussed in the past how I find writing about Palestine alongside basketball and anime and shit somewhat difficult. Maybe you can sympathize, but I think this is more of a me problem. The people who are upset when I address this topic would be upset no matter the context. Those that want me to, hopefully, can accept the topical incongruity.
A Terrible Reading of John Cage
There has been no shortage of commentary on the student encampments popping up across the U.S. and across the globe. One such comment comes from Columbia lecturer John McWhorter, who lamented the loss of serene Columbia campus soundscapes.
I will restrain my utter disdain for this commentary only to point out that (as I commented elsewhere) McWhorter’s exceptionally facile reading of “4’33’” makes it equivalent to “City Park Sounds for Relaxation.”
One need not defer to the fantasmatic authority of the artist to dismiss McWhorter’s concerns. If the peaceful sounds of campus are really all that’s at stake here, the student encampments should probably escalate their efforts. But “4’33”” makes no such demands on its listener regarding the where and when of its playing. Unlike Depeche Mode’s injunction to “Enjoy the Silence,” “4’33”” assumes precisely that there will be no such silence to enjoy. If the sounds one spends their four minutes and thirty three seconds listening to are those of protest chants, so be it.
Lampooning McWhorter is fun because his spurious concern makes the stakes of the student encampments very low. For better and worse, the opposite is true. Students have put themselves in profound danger for an urgent cause and displayed immense courage. The disruption they present to ongoing campus life is as clear as administrations’ effort to quash the demonstrations. The way these encampments have seized the national and global imagination is a testament to, if not their effectiveness, at least their meaning.
Students and Suppression Raids
Across Massachusetts, students have been brutalized, criminalized, and repressed. At Emerson College, 118 protestors were arrested in an overnight raid on April 25th1. Remarkably, following the raid, Emerson cancelled classes for the day. As a former Emerson employee, I’ve known the institution to go to frankly absurd lengths to ensure class convenes. Of course, when a viral video of cleaning crews power washing blood from pavement that may have belonged to students emerged, a cancellation is in order.
Emerson President Jay Bernhardt made an overdue statement on the campus arrests. Taking him at his word, the statement is at least minimally reasonable. He writes:
Because we are committed to our students’ right to protest, Emerson made every possible effort to avoid confrontation between the police and the protesters at the encampment. Prior to the law enforcement action, the College advocated with the City and Boston Police Department for several days to delay the removal of the encampment. When it became clear the City intended to clear the tents from the alley, we actively encouraged the protestors to remove them to prevent arrest. We also strongly and directly advocated for the police to peacefully remove tents without making arrests.
And:
The College will not bring any campus disciplinary charges against the protestors and will encourage the district attorney not to pursue charges related to encampment violations.
This statement came Sunday (April 28) morning, after an Emerson Student Government Association meeting calling for Bernhardt’s resignation on the 25th. It seems to me that the content of Bernhardt’s statement comes after the immense pressure exerted by the Emerson student body and the bumbling response of Northeastern University to its own student arrests in April 27th — which I’ll get to. Before I talk about Northeastern, I have to change my tone from solemn to irreverent. For now, the saga for the Emerson student activists is far from over. I’m following The Berkeley Beacon’s coverage of Emerson here.
The Billion Dollar Notes App Screenshots
Let me turn my attention, then, to Northeastern whose handling of their encampment has been as bad and dystopian as one could possibly imagine. Northeastern also deployed the Boston Police Department on students, taking responsibility for their shameful endangering of student wellbeing in a post that looks like it was made with the “create” function of Instagram stories. I’m not kidding, look at this shit:
Why is this not a professional press release delivered as written text with a signature from the University President? Clearly, Emerson took notes from this PR nightmare. Northeastern shared a series of these text-images to get their point across:
Embarrassing, disgraceful, and dishonest barely begin to scratch the surface of the combination of what Northeastern is asserting here and how they asserted it. Does an amateur instagram influencer run Northeastern University PR? Who involved in releasing this nonsense had media training? It is fucking astonishing to me that the visual language of the notes screenshot has been adopted by an educational institution with a $1.54 billion endowment. Even more astonishing that this was the method they chose to tell the world about how many students they had the BPD manhandle and handcuff. In 2023, The Face attributed the origin of the notes app apology to Ariana Grande, but this moment calls for a deeper study of the how-and-why the text-image screenshot, notes, instagram, whatever the fuck, has become such a widely used method for “taking accountability.”
Universities should not deploy a municipal police force on their students en masse. They should not have people carrying guns, riot shields, or other SWAT paraphernalia breaking up peaceful protest.
What Northeastern did, however, is even worse than how they told us. This is a little less complicated. Universities should not deploy a municipal police force on their students en masse. They should not have people carrying guns, riot shields, or other SWAT paraphernalia breaking up peaceful protest. They also shouldn’t be subjecting students to college disciplinary charges. It is totally obscene. Their justification for taking these actions, “the use of virulent antisemitic slurs,” refers to the actions of Zionists counterprotestors with no evidence any such language was used by those in the encampment. At least Emerson has the decency to claim they tried to stop the BPD from raiding the encampment and promise not to pursue campus disciplinary action against the students. It really is the least they can do.
I don’t envy my colleagues teaching at these or other institutions where encampments have emerged. If McWhorter is the type of instructor who can’t teach while protests are ongoing, I’m the type who can’t teach while protests are being suppressed. For others who are still working as adjuncts, I can only imagine the immense pressures being exerted by student expectation, administrative instruction, and financial precarity. If you happen to be an adjunct and would like to discuss your experience on campus during these demonstrations, anonymously or otherwise, I would be happy to hear from you.
The Role of the “Outside Agitator”
Along with Northeastern and Emerson, there are encampments on Tufts, MIT, and Harvard campus. The demonstrations have spread from Columbia to as far as Tokyo and Paris. A common justification for the quashing of these protests has been the “outside agitator” narrative, the idea that the encampments are primarily made up of and controlled by non-students with malicious intentions.
Charisse Burden-Stelly examines the history of this cultural figure in Black Scare / Red Scare (2023), suggesting the “Outside Agitator … was a genre of Radical Blackness that illuminated a deep contradiction in US Capitalist Racist Society” (66). Namely, the idea that education — valued by the aforementioned social order — should in theory inundate Black Americans from foreign political influence but, in practice, “the more educated Blacks became, the more amenable—as opposed to susceptible—they ostensibly were to ‘foreign’ propaganda” (66). While the culturally specific context to which Burden-Stelly refers considers Black Americans as avatars of supposedly “foreign” political interests, as opposed to emergent community interests related to self-determination, the essence of this idea endures in the discussions of the encampments today. Those “outside agitators” implicitly are opposed to elements of the students’ organizational platform and will, according to university administrators, subvert the goal of the protest rather than support it. They either do so clandestinely, or even accidentally, harming the optics of the protest through their indecorous conduct, or explicitly, taking over the protest and altering its aims. The irony is, in the case of Northeastern, actual outside agitators in the form of explicitly Zionist counter-demonstrators are the reason the encampment was suppressed. However, it was Northeastern’s own inability to discern the obvious distinction between the demonstrations — or their need for an excuse — that resulted in their decision to sic the BPD on students.
What the educational dynamic Burden-Stelly discusses and the statements about “outside agitators” from campus authority figures and politicians reveal is that student encampments are part of a global struggle. The international solidarity should be self-evident. These are, after all, demonstrations for Gaza happening in the U.S., France, Japan, and elsewhere. But such a struggle necessarily extends beyond the borders of the campus and involves people everywhere. Many encampments have, through various channels, issued demands to their home campuses for divestment and disengagement from Israel and the military industrial complex. These demands may be directed to the university, but they are not about the university. Day to day life on the campus changes little whether or not the demands are met. This is internationalism, par excellence.
Anarchism and Community Alliances
Anarchist publication Ill Will has also done its share of commenting, theorizing, and idea sharing in the course of these demonstrations. On April 24th, they shared a “communique” with “principles of unity.”
Though the author(s) is (are) ambiguous, intentionally, the “we” pronoun suggests the voice of “the masses,” including and especially those participating in the encampment protests. The principles respond to common critiques. To the narrative that would reduce these protests to a youthful indiscretion, the principles posit, “We will use the encampments and building occupations to continuously develop our collective intelligence and expand our capacity for action.” In response to the “outside agitator” narrative, “The distinction between student and non-student only enforces the gates between university and its surrounding communities.” The principles also seem to address the leadership structure of Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and the “negotiations” between the group and Columbia administration, “We speak with our actions. No one person or organization can represent any encampment or negotiate on its behalf.” From the perspective of this set of principles, any action taken by a university to divest or disassociate from Israel would fall short of sufficient for the encampment to disband, “We will stop at nothing less than an end to genocide in Gaza.”
I admire the Ill Will publication. The principles here follow clearly from the capacious, optimistic anarchist perspective from which they operate. I defer, however, to the information that comes directly from encampment organizers and participants — with attribution. But Ill Will’s contributions to global struggle cannot be understated. In the course of this disruption to normal life, they have highlighted a number of thinkers through social media posts and published essays.
Likewise, the “public safety” threat of non-student protestors certainly can’t be greater than the threat of municipal police. To this point, only one of those groups have left students’ blood on the pavement.
The communal alliances that would bring non-students to the “student demonstrations” seem to me the most important thing to demystify. Understanding the historical “outside agitator” boogieman is one element. Another is reflecting on the university’s perceived impermeability by outsiders. The impact a university has on its surrounding community should be to enrich it and share resources rather than isolate and oppose itself to non-students. Likewise, the “public safety” threat of non-student protestors certainly can’t be greater than the threat of municipal police. To this point, only one of those groups have left students’ blood on the pavement.
Global Struggle, Historical Struggle
Student activism and the struggle for Palestinian self-determination have a long, rich history. Ill Will published an anonymously authored piece, “First We Take Columbia: Lessons from the April 1968 Occupations Movement” that connects Palestine Solidarity Encampments with an April 1968 occupation where protestors “demanded that Columbia stop a construction project that would contribute to the gentrification of Harlem, an end to a secret research project funded by the CIA, and amnesty for student protesters.”
Crimethinc also took the opportunity to draw out connections between 2008-2010 university occupations, also beginning in New York, and the encampments today. The broad genealogy of student activism is tremendously important to understanding — and strategizing — today. However, I also want to emphasize the truly global and enduring character of the Palestinian struggle. In the July 17th, 1970 issue of Palante, the Young Lords Party demands freedom for the beleaguered nation, identifying connections between the conditions of Palestine and Puerto Rico and contextualizing Palestinian struggle within a global anti-capitalist and anti-racist program.
How can such a widespread struggle, in any of its permutations, narrowly restrict its participants?
Unsung Student Movements
These international encampments remind me of the history of activism at a place unlikely to be immortalized by well-respected and enduring anarchist publications: Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. FAMU is my alma mater, and had the highest volume of demonstrations I can recall in 2011. In February of that year, the FAMU debate team featuring my good friends and mentors Lucas Melton and the late Jamaal Rose staged a public debate with the FSU College Republicans over an “affirmative action bake sale” the College Republicans hosted earlier in January. I was also on the debate team and a researcher for this confrontation. A lot of this comes down to my imperfect recollection, but we sent challenges to the College Republicans repeatedly. Even after they accepted post-bake sale, they dodged us, hemming and hawing about the time and place.
The interest of the FAMU student body in this debate was so tremendous, FAMU administration tried to shut down the event, prohibiting it from occurring on FAMU campus and threatening debaters and attendees with disciplinary action for attending the debate — which was eventually scheduled on FSU campus. Widespread on-campus demonstration and interest from the County Commission finally forced FAMU to relent and allow students to participate in and attend the debate. It was a barn burner. I remember being in the lecture hall packed way past capacity feeling like I was in a well-attended DIY show in a shed somewhere. I think we got the better of FSU in the debate, but we certainly were the most well represented group. Even the area outside the lecture hall was crowded with FAMU students. Back then, I remember there being news cameras and some local coverage, but I can’t find the videos now.
A less protracted but equally impressive student mobilization emerged in the wake of Rick Scott’s calls for University President James Ammons to resign in December 2011. We marched from campus to demonstrate in front of the Governor’s Mansion to insulting response. These mobilizations, more than others, taught me the wide ranges of affects that can be part of protests. Reflecting on them now, FAMU’s penchant for student demonstration is a learned response to the constant meddling and ill-treatment of one of our country’s preeminent HBCUs. Organizations like the Dream Defenders, with a large number of FAMU students among them, also reflects the collective consciousness of the FAMU student body. The vicissitudes of HBCU life fit within the scope of settler-colonial and hegemonic projects, from the platforms and policies of Thomas Macaulay to Booker T. Washington to Ron DeSantis. Unfortunately, however, no Palestinian solidarity encampments have emerged on FAMU campus as of yet.
Les Non-Dupes Errent
Students are lucky. In the United States, higher education represents an opportunity and positions higher ed students as beneficiaries of a range of privileges, mostly economic in nature. It is an opportunity easier to access for some than others, but signifies the potential for greater possibility beyond. Students are lucky, then, if all they are subject to in the course of defending that privilege is a groan inducing reading of John Cage. Today’s encampments, however, expose students to a greater threat than annoyance — and not simply because they are working to protect aspects of their education or community. These are solidarity encampments, using the privilege of higher education to make oneself known in a place they have the unique opportunity to be. These institutions are looked upon as the home of the best and brightest of U.S. and global society. Their voice, then, attempts to instrumentalize the cachet of the elite university to the end of Palestinian self-determination. Like the “outside agitator” as Burden-Stelly describes it, though, the student encounters the contradiction of their institutional affiliation designating their intelligence and their youth diminishing the weight of their political assertions. They are supposedly young enough and smart enough to be deceived and controlled by “‘foreign’ propaganda.”
Indeed, the global consciousness of these student activists does not emerge without an encounter with accounts of global struggle and theories of historical struggle. Does knowledge diminish agency, as the ideology underlying the “outside agitator” and critiques of the students themselves would indicate? In Lacan’s Seminar XXI (1973), he discusses the formulation of “les non-dupes errent,” for which he names the seminar. Slavoj Žižek translates this phrase as “those who are not duped err most.” Lacan writes:
If the non-dupes are those that refuse to be captured by the space of the speaking being, if they are those who keep their hands free of it, as I might say, there is something that we must know how to imagine, which is the absolute necessity that results from it, not wandering but error. (13)
If this seems more complex than normal Lacanese due to the non-professional translation, let us read Lacan’s discourse closely. To be a “non-dupe,” is to “refuse to be captured by the space of the speaking being.” The possibility of such a refusal for the subject is an open question for Lacan. In earlier work, the constitution of the subject as we know it, the human being, requires the relinquishing of jouissance — not that one has any choice in the matter, and is in fact compelled to be the one that has no choice. In Seminar XXI, the additional burden on the one to be constituted in the first place is to be duped. The possibility to speak, to be a speaking being, means being duped.
In this case, it is those that condemn campus protests on the basis that the students are being misled, tricked, or controlled that constitute the “non-duped.”
Their position of intellectual superiority, however, is not secure. And is, indeed, guaranteed to lead to error. This brand of critic would be hard pressed to present compelling evidence to support their claim that the genocide to which Israel is subjecting Palestine has a justification. Their self-assuredness flies in the face of decades of analysis.
Just as Burden-Stelly sets up an opposition between being “susceptible” versus being “amenable,” the question of the non-dupes is whether one sees themself enmeshed in discourse or not. Many student protestors, and advocates for Palestine in general, see themselves as the latest permutation of an enduring global struggle. They are not alien to a discursive tradition, but a product of it, and certainly influenced by it. This does not compromise their agency. In fact, it makes their agency informed. By contrast, critics of the protest and of pro-Palestine sentiment position themselves as supported only by the most facile and misunderstood moral principles rather than being a part of an intellectual tradition. Their lack of reading renders them superior, because their positions spring from what they believe is their intuition, with no awareness of the extent to which they are also a part, and a culmination, of a tradition — a tradition of repression.
No End in Sight
Student demonstrations will not relent. People of conscience expressing solidarity with Palestine will find every possible avenue to exert pressure on U.S. institutions, including the federal government, to disengage with Israel, cease explicit or implicit support of the occupation of Palestine, and condemn the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Even as universities inevitably assent to student demands where they can, some universities are prevented by law from divesting. There is also a large gulf between university divestment and Israel ending a decades long occupation — though hopefully not as large as I think.
Sometimes a demonstration is not about a clear path to the stated goal. Sometimes it’s about sending a message. And the message of the students has been heard, loud and clear.
You can donate to campus bail funds supporting protestors here and on the ground fundraises for Gaza here. End the occupation.
Weekly Reading List
https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/ — The Intercept reveals how the NYT style guidelines attempt to obscure the facts of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
https://iai.tv/articles/wittgenstein-and-how-to-debate-your-enemy-drew-douglas-johnson-auid-2829 — Drew Douglas Johnson writes about Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969). Take Johnson’s prescriptions regarding rational debate for what they’re worth, but Wittgenstein’s underlying point is more radical than the conclusion Johnson draws from it. Wittgenstein writes, ““The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.” Such a claim, it seems to me prefigures Lacan’s les non-dupes errent.
Tofubeats did it again. No comment on the cover art for the new record, Nobody (2024).
https://www.billboard.com/pro/tupac-shakur-estate-drake-diss-track-ai-generated-voice/ — Now this is an AI lawsuit I can get behind.
Until next time.
The reported number of protestors arrested was initially 108, but was actually 118 according to the Berkeley Beacon.