The Human Chain as a Non-Violent Weapon

One of the main weapons of non-violent uprisings are human chains. The latter's power is, as with all chains, its continuous physical form: a line of protesters interlocking arms and blocking the mobility of state agents. This is the breathing, striving material form of a collective body unified in its aim to wrest space from the control of the state. Paul Virilio wrote that “a place changes in quality according to the facility with which it can be crossed” (Bunker Archaeology, p.19). Human chains qualitatively transform and politicize space because they make it hard for state agents to move, cross that space, and control it. This striation explicitly made against the state may in most cases be purely local and temporary; but it can disrupt the fake smoothness of corporate space deeply enough to expand, as it happened at Davis, the spatial reach of insurrections.

The pepper-spraying of protesters sitting on the ground with their interlocked arms at the UC Davis campus made apparent the physical and affective power of this bodily weapon. This is a form in which bodies are no longer dispersed but become interconnected nodes within a physically continuous assemblage. Only a few days earlier, the police had tried to violently disarticulate the solidity of exactly the same type of assemblage at UC Berkeley, recurrently hitting it with batons. In both Davis and Berkeley, individual bodies on the chain were hurt and the chain was briefly shaken. But the spatial striation was not broken. Furthermore, the affective shock generated by the images of violence on bodies that were in no position to cause harm provided the insurrection with a formidable media weapon.

The images of the UC Davis police officer calmly pepper-spraying human bodies as if they were insects went viral because the most defining feature of the human chain is that it is defensive in nature (see this great piece by Rei Terada). By interlocking and immobilizing the main parts of the human body that can be used to cause physical harm, arms and hands, this is an assemblage that because of its form cannot be a source of violence. And human chains that sit on the ground make this defensiveness even more apparent, for even the legs of protesters are purposely immobilized.

Few images affect more than images of violence inflicted on people who are clearly unable and unwilling to inflict harm. And this power is enhanced when those people offer their bodies to be targets of the violence of the state without intention to strike back. The courage and discipline of the bodies making up the chain at UC Davis reveal the determination that guides the occupy movement. But that the pepper-spraying backfired does not mean that the chemical violence against the human chain was random or irrational. The police officer, following orders, attacked the chain because of its power to prevent the state from having full control of the local terrain. Those interlocked bodies partly diminished the state’s capacity to act and move. It is therefore not surprising that the UC Berkeley Chancellor argued, in a brilliant illustration of Orwellian double-speak, that the formation of a human chain at Berkeley was “not non-violent” and, therefore, that it was violent. Officials are often keen to redefine violence not as the production of bodily harm but as the interruption of the mobility of state agents and capital. For the state, anything that disrupts its spatial flow is framed as “violent” and therefore in need of eradication by state violence.

Human chains have a long historical genealogy. In being created by people firmly grabbing each other’s bodies, this form materializes the multitude as a physically interlocked entity made up of multiplicities. This collective chain was made famous in the United States by Martin Luther King claiming space from state repression. Human chains were also central to the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, where protesters created more solid, hard-to-break assemblages by protecting their inter-locked and chained arms with long tubes. The relative resilience of this form was key in its power to shut down key street intersections and access to the buildings hosting the WTO on the first day of the protests. And some of the images of police officers calmly pepper-spraying human chains sitting on the ground in Seattle anticipate the spatial and bodily composition we now see recreated, twelve years later, at Davis.

The physical fragility of the form of the human chain is certainly that of the human body. Its efficacy is therefore lower in authoritarian political contexts. Under conditions of state terror, the state can easily destroy human chains and turn them into lines of corpses. If the human chain at UC Davis had been formed in Cairo, it is likely that some of those students would be now dead or severely wounded. The over 30 deadly victims of state violence in Egypt in the last few days speak volumes of the uneven terrains in which the global insurrection unfolds. Yet both cases differ in degree, not in substance. The teargas and weapons used to hurt and kill protesters in Egypt are “made in USA.” And in both Egypt and the US the state is determined to suppress dissent by dispersing those collective bodily forms that prevent the state from controlling space. The shock and disbelief that many Americans have expressed at the surge of police violence against the occupy movement (“This can’t happen in America!”) also reveals that they have been affectively secluded from the fact that the US government has always been ready to unleash deadly violence to protect capitalist interests, at home and abroad. It is to be seen, given the growing unrest, whether state violence in the US streets remains non-deadly for too long. The Obama administration, it should not be forgotten, recently declared that it has the right, using its sole discretion, to kill citizens deemed enemies of the state in the name of the state of exception.

The dismantling by the police of the node of resonance in Liberty Park in New York only seems to have accelerated the spread of the rebellion and its adoption of even more rhizomic, mobile, unstable, unpredictable lines of spatial expansion. This expansion is leading to the creation of myriad human chains to protect encampments, to prevent families whose homes are foreclosed by banks from being evicted by the police, and to shut down banks, corporate offices, and university buildings. The occupation of everywhere is no longer just a slogan but an actual physical struggle for the control of myriad nodes of the national and global space. And one of the main weapons the insurrection relies on to challenge the police in public space has been the human chains that striate the smoothness of state space. The other fundamental weapon have been the images of state agents trying to violently disrupt these collective spatial occupations. The police attack on the human chain at UC Davis has triggered a massive call to occupy the whole of the spatial fabric of the University of California system on November 28. And yesterday in New Hampshire, protesters were able to reach the body of the President for the first time: by interrupting his morally empty speech with a "mic check!" and by handing him a note telling him that his silence condones state violence on peaceful protesters. The occupation of spaces on the terrain continues unabated and has even reached the tightly secluded, scripted eyes and ears of the Head of State.

The most important moment of the pepper-spray incident was not the act of chemical violence now immortalized in popular culture; it was the reaction of the multitude that surrounded the human chain and was deeply affected by an attack that they could personally see, hear, smell, and touch (it is worth watching the video of the whole sequence in detail). For several minutes and without interruption, the whole of the space was saturated with screams, cries, and chants of “shame on you! shame on you!” aimed at the cops. The chants gained momentum and made an indignant yet composed multitude slowly move onto the space held by the police. At one point, the cops could not but slowly begin retreating. But they did not retreat orderly, in a straight line and facing ahead, following formal training procedures. They backed away gradually but in relative disarray, looking nervous, intimidated, confused. Many moved their heads left and right, as if waiting for an unexpected attack. A few raised their guns, as if they were fearful soldiers on an imperial patrol chased by savages, moving in a terrain made hostile by a sonic and bodily saturation they did not understand. But the protesters were only armed with myriad filming devices pointed at them, the resonance of their chants, and the physical form of their massive numbers occupying space. After the police had been slowly retreating for several minutes, the chants shifted to "Whose university? Our university!" The final chant was the coup de grace. And it was an order: "You can go! You can go! You can go!" The police officers promptly obeyed the loud command to abandon that space that emanated from the multitude. They turned around and went away, relieved it was over. The students cheered and chanted, "Whose quad? Our quad!" They had secured, with the help of the human chain, the occupation of UC Davis.

Occupy Wall Street and the State of Exception

On Friday, September 30, 2011 the United States announced it had legally murdered two US citizens without due legal process in Yemen. The following day, the police kettled and arrested 700 anti-corporate protesters who were marching peacefully on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Seemingly unrelated and spatially distant from each other, these events nonetheless reveal that the US citizens taking to the streets to challenge the capitalist looting of the commons are also confronting a state that has just declared that it can assassinate, without recourse to courts, citizens deemed hostile to the state.

The Bush administration's abandonment of due process to torture and assassinate non-citizens, allegedly because of the “exceptional” nature of the war on terror, is well documented. Obama has now extended this principle to US citizens by suspending the Fifth Amendment, the one that says “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Further, Obama seems to have ordered to put an end to the torture and rendition of suspects under Bush so that those suspects could be executed. This is an extraordinary turning point, for the murder of citizens without due process of law is now decreed legal. The same way that for George Orwell the clearest examples of authoritarian double-speak under Big Brother were the slogans “war is peace” and “slavery is freedom,” now the motto under the Bush-Obama paradigm is “ignoring your constitutional rights is legal.” As Giorgio Agamben has argued, this state of exception also defined the Nazi state, which in its twelve years of existence was under a constitution suspended by Hitler in the name of defending the German nation. The political regimes of North America and Europe seem to be moving in a similar direction, ruled by constitutions that are recurrently suspended because the state of the exception, as Walter Benjamin once argued, is no longer the exception but the rule.


“Imperial sovereignty means that no point of space or time and no element of the bio-political tissue is safe from intervention” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, p. 157). The bio-political tissue of US citizens was never safe from imperial intervention, yet this intervention was at least partly regulated. In the 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum, a secret CIA program is shut down, and its directors prosecuted, when Jason Bourne revealed that its hit-men had assassinated US citizens without due process. The movie, and its message of accountability for state terror, represents a paradigm of the past. The last obstacle that put limits to the reach of imperial death squads, US citizenship rights, has been declared void. Now the bio-political tissue of every single human being on the planet can be destroyed with impunity through an executive order based on classified evidence.

This de-facto dissolution of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens also means that the very nature of the global geographies under imperial sovereignty is shifting. In extending the reach of the state of exception, imperial formations are also creating globalized political subjects that are equally vulnerable to state terror irrespective of nationality. While imperial violence continues being racialized and directed largely at non-white bodies, we are moving toward a paradigm of sovereignty in which all human bodies on the planet are potential expressions of what Agamben calls “bare life,” bodies that can be killed without breaking the law.


This is a somber reminder that the protesters on Wall Street are challenging not only corporate America but also a state that has fully embraced the regular use of death squads in the name of national security. As we know all too well, in the imperial order of things the difference between non-violent activists and terrorists is often a question of language and labels, as was apparent when Joe Biden argued that Julian Assange is a “high-tech terrorist.” But the official announcement this past Friday that the state of exception has entered a new political phase also confirms what the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been saying all along: that ordinary US citizens have been reduced to a disempowered underclass whose democratic rights are recurrently overrun, and made meaningless, by the hijacking of the political system by corporate power. And that they have been inspired by similar protests in Egypt and Spain reveal that they see themselves as part of a global multitude striving for universal forms of justice. The same way that the state of exception tends to equalize all humans as potential targets irrespective of their citizenship, the protesters on Wall Street are responding in kind and embracing a more universal political subjectivity, embodied in their slogan "We are the 99%."

The Revolution Is Not Being Televised

During the Egyptian insurrection, the Mubarak regime tried to counter the multitudes on Tahrir Square by avoiding mentioning them on the state-run TV. The so-called liberal media in the United States highlighted that this authoritarian media blackout brought to light the freedom of expression we enjoy in “the West.” This is why the US media silencing of over a week of protests on Wall Street reminds us that New York City and Cairo, despite the different scale and tone of the unrest, are not that different from each other after all. Further, the power of the media in the United States to silence political events that may disrupt the status quo is comparatively vaster and probably more widespread and effective. And in the nation that defines itself as the land of the free, media blackouts are created not by the state but by that peculiar branch of corporate America that, with the full support of the state, profits from the creation of what qualifies as news.

For the past eight days, a remarkable grassroots movement against the capitalist looting of the commons inspired by similar protests in Spain, Greece, and Egypt has disrupted Wall Street, the spatial core of the global financial system. A crowd has camped out in public spaces, staging protests, and organizing assemblies to debate the social devastation created by the bankers based in the surrounding buildings. From day one, the blackout of the protests in the US media was eerie. Whereas a handful of wacky Tea Party activists always receives widespread coverage, “occupy Wall Street” was treated by all major corporate media outlets as a non-event (with a few exceptions that highlighted the media blackout, like Keith Olbermann). On Friday, September 23, as the protests entered their first week, The New York Times confirmed where its priorities are in the production of what is (and what is not) newsworthy by running on its front page an article about the worrisome rise in the theft of pigs in rural Illinois.


On Saturday, September 24, The New York Times was finally forced to partly lift its Pravda-esque silence. But this only happened because protesters became dangerously mobile and began marching uptown spreading their noisy anti-capitalist message and were arrested by the dozens for no other reason than protesting. The article trivializes the protest as a quasi-hippie gathering led by “noble” but confused and misinformed youths who “say” that the financial system “favors the rich and powerful over ordinary citizens.” The abrupt and unambiguously hostile coverage reflects the shift from what Michel-Ralph Trouillot called a formula of erasure to a formula of banalization, which are both operations of silencing. The silencing is the mandate by corporate America to treat potentially threatening political movements as non-events.

In other entries, I analyzed how the spatial spread of the insurrections of North Africa and the Middle followed a process of resonance expansion, through which thousands of people coming together on the streets created politically affective messages that resonated with countless other bodies elsewhere, often through alternative media that evaded state censorship. This is why counter-revolutionary efforts in those countries sought to contain the expansion of those insurgent resonances by all possible means, including violence, censorship, and the transformation of the official media into a machinery set out to prevent the spatial expansion of those resonances. In the United States today, more so than in any other country on the planet, the political machineries that work tirelessly to prevent anti-corporate resonances from expanding are owned by the same corporate forces that profit from the devastation that is wreaking North America and Europe. As Michael Parenti forcefully put in the film The Panama Deception, “The media is not associated with or allied with corporate America. The media is corporate America."


As in Egypt or Tunisia, the protests in New York are spreading and growing through alternative media and the internet. But this expansion has so far been largely contained by the media blackout. Maybe it is time for the protesters in NY to follow the lead of protesters elsewhere in the world and challenge the blackout not only by calling and emailing news stations (as many are doing) but also by protesting at the gates of those stations’ buildings. In Egypt, the multitudes in Cairo eroded the censorship of the state-run TV by simply surrounding its main building and demanding to be heard. Hours before Mubarak fell, these multitudes forced those inside the TV station to turn their cameras onto the streets and change the tone of the coverage. The same happened in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2002, when millions of people took to the streets to oppose the US-sponsored coup against Hugo Chávez. As protests raged all over Venezuela, the private TV stations that were involved in the coup and controlled all airwaves played movies and soap operas. This Orwellian erasure of the insurrection by the corporate media only came to an end when thousands of protestors surrounded the stations demanding that their opposition to the coup be shown on TV. Indeed, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, as Gill Scott-Heron wrote in the 1970s. Except that we should probably change the tense of the verb in this now famous phrase, for this is not a silencing that will happen sometime in a distant and abstract future but is happening right now, in the year of the beginning of the globalized insurrections against the imperial order of things.


The popular insurrections in Cairo and Caracas remind us that the seemingly deterritorialized power of media conglomerates is ultimately grounded in the actual spaces where a select group of individuals manufacture and disseminate “news.” And those events reveal that under conditions of media censorship it is ultimately in those spaces that these actors are politically most vulnerable and, in the US, most sensitive to their public image as sources of news. Any such protest at the gates of The New York Times will no doubt trigger, aside from aggressive tactics by the NYPD, predictable accusations that it involves “fascist thugs” trying to curb the media’s “freedom of expression.” But the past eight days in New York have made apparent that this is just the freedom of corporate America to shut down the growing grassroots opposition to its ongoing looting of public wealth.