Towards a Nomadology of Class Struggle: Rhythms, Spaces and Occupy London Stock Exchange

Abstract

On the evening of 9 December 2010, while a large student protest against the trebling of tuition fees and the overall cuts in the education budget was under way in London’s Parliament Square, at the other end of Whitehall a group of arts students (Arts Against Cuts) entered the National Gallery and staged a protest of their own: they squatted on the space in front of édouard Manet’s painting The Execution of Maximilian (1867–68) and collectively created their ‘Nomadic Hive Manifesto’ (see Mason 2012d: 53–4). As the arts and humanities are most notably affected by the cuts in higher education and the arts sector suffers from decreasing state funding, the staging of such a performance in a highly subsidised museum challenged at once the economic order that makes debt slaves as well as the institutions complicit with its logic. Moreover, the choice of Manet’s depiction of a poignant moment of the revolution against the Mexican Empire (a political project championed by European imperialist powers and the Mexican aristocracy of wealth) has its own significance too: Manet’s painting was re-appropriated by the students (after being initially appropriated by the logic of the museum); it was no longer a masterpiece by a great master, but a representation of a revolutionary act. While their fellow students were being contained (or ‘kettled’) by the police half a mile down the road and attracted most of the attention, they performed a ‘minor’ act of resistance that, nevertheless, set the tone for a wave of protests that followed.

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of debt slaves refusing to pay. All the powers within Europe have entered into a holy alliance to regenerate a failing economy, to realise a lethal dream of returning to business as usual, and to […] transform the educational and cultural sectors into a consumer society success story. (Arts Against Cuts 2010)