Anarchy, Geography and Drift

Anarchy, Geography and Drift

Jeff FerrellDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA;

[email protected]

Abstract: The consumerist economies of the late modern city, in combination withcontemporary models of urban policing, operate to close down the public spaces of sociallife. In response, social groups dedicated to democratic urbanism utilize anarchic tacticsof “dis-organization” and direct action to reopen public space and to revitalize it withunregulated activity. Complicating and animating these spatial conflicts is the issue ofdrift. On the one hand, consumerist economies and contemporary policing strategiesexacerbate urban drift, spawning the very sorts of spatial transgression they seek tocontrol. On the other hand, many of the progressive movements that battle for openspace and alternative economic arrangements themselves embrace a culture of drift, andexplore drift for its anarchic and progressive potential. In this context drift can usefullybe investigated as an emergent form of epistemology, community, and spatial politics.

Resumo: O consumismo economico nas cidades da modernidade tardia, juntamente comosmodelos contemporaneos de policiamento urbano, operam no sentido de restringiros espacos publicos da vida social. Em reacao, grupos sociais dedicados a democraciaurbana utilizam taticas anarquistas de “des-organizacao” e acao direta e focam suaacao na reabertura e na revitalizacao do espaco publico atraves de atividades naoreguladas. Complicando e animando estes conflitos espaciais e o assunto de “drift” ou adeslocalizacao e movimento constante do sujeito. De um lado, o consumismo economicoe as estrategias de policiamento contemporaneo exacerbam estas deslocalizacoes urbanas,contribuindo para a difusao dos tipos de transgressao que procuram controlar. Poroutro lado, muitos movimentos progressistas que lutam pela abertura do espaco e poralternativas economicas abracam uma cultura de deslocalizacao, explorando seu potencialanarquico e progressista. Neste contexto, a deslocalizacao pode ser explorada comoformas emergentes de epistemologia, comunidade e polıticas espaciais.

Keywords: anarchy, anarchism, Critical Mass, drift, precarity, public space

The open spaces of contemporary social life are, it seems, being suffocated.Increasingly, urban authorities in the United States, Europe and beyond see fitto privatize public space, to deed sidewalks and parks to developers, and tocreate under the guise of urban authenticity and urban regeneration new sortsof “consumption spaces” that reconstitute whole swaths of the existing city asexclusive, street-level consumer havens (Amster 2008; Ferrell 2001; MacLeod 2002;Mitchell 2003; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011; Zukin 1997, 2010). Meanwhile, legaland political authorities argue that, for the sake of safety, civility, and commerce,both private and public spaces must be subject to ever more elaborate formsof surveillance and control. Countless CCTV clusters and security cameras trackthe routes of pedestrians, the flow of automobiles, and the shopping or sittinghabits of urbanites, in this way gridding social life within intersecting lines ofpanoptic observation. In Britain, authorities use anti-social behavior orders, dispersalorders, and curfews to push undesirables away from consumerist developments.Throughout the United States, legal and political authorities employ theprinciples of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and related

Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2012 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–18 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01032.xC© 2012 The Author. Antipode C© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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“place-based” approaches in an effort to build social control into the spatialenvironment. Uncomfortable park benches meant to inhibit long-term sitting orsleeping, prickly bushes planted to block public access, low walls interrupted byanti-skateboarding abutments, entryways and windows designed for maximumsurveillance—these and other features accumulate into a spatial environmentsaturated with contemporary ideologies of containment and exclusion.

In this way the “holes and gaps” that Peter Marin (in McDonogh 1993:14)argues are essential to tolerant urban life are plugged, the city’s “breathing spaces”closed and choked off, its marginal populations banished from public life (Beckettand Herbert 2009). Where De Certeau (1984:96, 105) saw and celebrated a “richindetermination”, a “proliferating illegitimacy” amidst the collective movement ofthe city’s citizens—a “poetic geography” of free space—there now seems morea forced march of everyday life, a pre-arranged interplay of people, places, andproducts. Echoing De Certeau’s (1984:93) notion that urban walkers “follow thethicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it”,Massey (2006:40, 46) has likewise argued that “both space and landscape could beimagined as provisionally intertwined simultaneities of ongoing, unfinished stories”.The contemporary proliferation of privatized urban spaces, surveillance cameras,and spatial controls suggests an ongoing attempt to negate these very dynamics—to make the text of urban life all too visible and readable, to script the stories of socialspace from beginning to end. In this sense the foundations of an anarchist critiqueof such measures—that is, a critique of power and domination in whatever formsthey may take—are already apparent. From an anarchist view, these developmentsundermine the viability of urban social life by encoding ever more restrictive controlsin the spatial environment, and by containing the unpredictability and disorderessential to an emergent, democratic urbanism (Ferrell 2001). Finding the law’s“distinctive trait to be immobility, a tendency to crystallize that which should bemodified and developed day to day”, Kropotkin (1975:30–31) proclaimed in 1886that “in place of the cowardly phrase, ‘Obey the law,’ our cry is ‘Revolt against alllaws!’” The enforced immobility of contemporary spatial arrangements suggests, ifnot anarchist revolt, then at least a parallel anarchist critique.

A fuller anarchist analysis of these developments, though, requires a good bitmore complexity. To begin with, this contemporary closure of open public spacecan be traced to the cultural and political economy of the late modern city. Withthe withering of urban industrial production in many American and Europeancities, and the global exportation of production to developing countries, thesecities increasingly rely on economies organized around service work, entertainment,and consumption. Researchers like Markusen and Schrock (2009:345, 353) arguefor this sort of “consumption-driven urban development”, noting that “superiorlocal consumption-based offerings help to attract skilled workers, managers,entrepreneurs, and retirees”, and emphasizing that “economists and geographershave recently stressed the significance of lifestyle preferences of skilled workers asan important determinant of economic development”. Confirming this economictrajectory, if less enthusiastically, David Harvey (2008:31) concludes that “qualityof urban life has become a commodity, as has the city itself, in a world whereconsumerism, tourism, cultural and knowledge-based industries have become major

C© 2012 The Author. Antipode C© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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aspects of the urban political economy”. To paraphrase Marx, cities built the firsttime on the tragedy of industrial labor are rebuilt on the farce of image andimpression; Monterrey, California’s Cannery Row now offers Steinbeck-themedshops and a world-class aquarium, and Ft Worth, Texas’s bloody stockyards andslaughterhouses now process only the kitsch recollections of cowboy boots andcattle. In such worlds urban authenticity, like urban quality of life, emerges asan upscale commodity (Zukin 2010). More to the point, where cities once tookshape around the interests of industrial capitalists, late modern cities are nowreshaped by developers who reconfigure relatively open urban environments intocarefully integrated zones of high-end consumption. And to protect these privatizedzones from those who might trespass on them or their intended meanings vis-a-vislifestyle preferences and urban authenticity—to protect, that is, the image-basedcommodity that is “quality of urban life”—policing in turn comes to focus as muchon perception as on populations. An economic official in the USA argues during anurban revitalization campaign that panhandling is a problem precisely because “it’spart of an image issue for the city” (Ferrell 2001:45; see Amster 2008). An Americanlegal scholar agrees, positing that “the most serious of the attendant problems ofhomelessness is its devastating effect on a city’s image” (Mitchell 2003:201). AsAspden (2008:13) concludes in regard to the recent transformation of a decayingBritish industrial city into a “corporate city of conspicuous consumption”: “Thereseems to be no place in the new Leeds for those who disturb the rhythms of theconsumer-oriented society.”

This control of panhandlers, homeless populations and other undesired groupsin turn rests on an ascendant late modern model of risk-based urban policing.Developed and supported by major insurance companies—and in the case ofprograms like Neighborhood Watch, even funded by them (O’Malley 2010:26–27)—this model emphasizes a rationalized, actuarial approach to crime preventionthrough systematic surveillance and “the collection of information in order tomake predictions, and the formation of preventative interventions based on these”(O’Malley 2010:31). By this model’s logic—”the military and neo-liberal logicof security”, as Shukaitis (2009:157) calls it—surveillance cameras and tightlycontrolled public spaces function to prevent crime in the present, and to provide thesorts of calculable data on people and their movements that can be used to curtailcrime in the future. By the same logic, the unregulated and the unpredictable—thecity’s “holes and gaps” and “rich indetermination”—stand not as markers of urbanvitality, but as open invitations to criminality and the breakdown of crime control. Forconservative criminologists like Wilson and Kelling (1982) the presence of homelesspanhandlers or the public paintings of graffiti writers are likewise defined only assigns of social disorder—as metaphorical “broken windows”—that serve to dispiritcitizens and to invite more violent forms of criminality. What some might see ashallmarks of a democratically anarchic urbanism—open public space, unregulatedoccupation of it and interaction within it, unfettered movement through it—a newgeneration of politicians and police officials sees as unacceptable components ofurban risk. Risk-based policing and consumer-based urban economies coalescearound a central consequence: intolerance toward open urban space and thosewho would occupy or traverse it inappropriately.


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Significantly, a variety of contemporary social groups and social movements areequally determined to keep urban spatial arrangements open, and to breathelife back into those spaces, those holes and gaps, that have been closed. Whileorbiting around various social and political issues, such groups see open publicspace as essential to a democratic society—that is, as the primary forum in whichdirectly democratic processes and collective cultures can be invented and negotiated(Springer 2011). “The conceptual link that I operate from is trying to preserve spacesthat are historically dedicated to the public”, says anarchist activist and scholarRandall Amster, “because it’s my belief that without public spaces, any kind of talkabout democracy basically goes out the window” (in Ferrell 2001:52). Likewise,they conceptualize public space as an ongoing cultural accomplishment, and so animportant public venue of contested symbolism and cultural progress (Amin 2008).Linking these concerns with issues of environmental sustainability and social justice,groups like Critical Mass and Reclaim the Streets engage particular public spaceissues—road building, automotive domination, spatial exclusion of the homeless,urban privatization—within a broader ethos of spatial justice. Chris Carlsson, oneof the founders of Critical Mass—an anarchic, take-back-the-streets urban bicyclingmovement—argues for example that collectively abandoning the automobile toembrace public bicycling is not only an act of spatial democratization, but “an act ofdesertion from an entire web of exploitative and demeaning activities, behaviors thatimpoverish the human experience and degrade planetary ecology itself” (Carlsson2002:82; see Carlsson and Manning 2010). Pushing back against the closure andcontainment of social space, then, are a host of groups and movements that valorizethe sorts of direct, everyday democracy that can flourish in such space—and thatemploy DIY (do-it-yourself) activism, “direct action”, and other anarchist strategiesboth to liberate this space and to re-animate it with just such democratic activity.

Over the past decade or so I and others have documented in some detail thedistinctly anarchic ideologies and strategies of these groups and movements—the ways, for example, in which they utilize non-hierarchical social networks to“dis-organize” on-the-fly collective bicycle rides, road blockages, street carnivals,and sidewalk sit-ins—with these ephemeral public events meant to unravel thelegal and spatial controls of city life (Amster 2008; Carlsson 2002; Ferrell 2001;McKay 1998; Shantz 2011; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011). These are indeedclassic confrontations between order and authority on the one hand and anarchistpolitics on the other—confrontations that have defined many contemporary spatialconflicts, and that continue to do so. As already seen, economic and politicalauthorities increasingly strive to keep public space under tight surveillance andcontrol in the interest of risk management and late modern consumption, and workto encode ordered predictability into such space; anti-authoritarian activists in turnfight to keep such space open to fluid spatial relations, to preserve the spatial rightsof the homeless and other marginalized groups, and to make room for spontaneityand creative urban disorder.

The notion of “dis-organizing” and “dis-organization” exemplifies this anarchicorientation. As with Kropotkin, these groups see the immobility of rule andregulation as inhibiting human freedom and human progress—even if the rulesand regulations are their own. As a result, they emphasize dis-organization—that



is, just enough coordination to propel social activism forward, but not so muchas to become a static end in itself. In this sense they seek not only to reintroduceindetermination and uncertainty into the spaces of urban life, but to do so bymeans that are themselves indeterminate and uncertain. Chris Carlsson has forexample noted his pleasure at overhearing Critical Mass participants explaining theessential meaning of a Critical Mass ride, especially when their explanations differfrom his own and those of others; the anonymous punk/anarchist author of Evasion,a chronicle of squatting and street living, has likewise written that, “I always secretlylooked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn’t limited by my ownimagination. That way anything can, and always did, happen” (in Ferrell 2001:107;Anonymous 2003:12). More pointedly, Reclaim the Streets, which describes itself as“as direct action network seeking the rediscovery and liberation of the city streets”,felt compelled at one point to issue a press release, “On Disorganization”, in responseto media attempts to report on Reclaim the Streets “leaders”. Reclaim the Streets,they announced, “is a non-hierarchical, leaderless, openly organized public group.No individual ‘plans’ or ‘masterminds’ its actions and events. RTS activities are theresult of voluntary, unpaid, co-operative efforts from numerous self-directed peopleattempting to work equally together.” A recent public event, they added, was puttogether in this way “in part previously, in part spontaneously on the day itself”(Reclaim the Streets 2000). As the Situationists, one of the precursors of Reclaim theStreets, said back in 1963: “We will only organize the detonation. The free explosionmust escape us and any other control forever” (in Marcus 1989:179–180).

Here a seemingly simple dualism—activist groups battling legal and economicauthorities for control of urban space—can be seen to harbor a more subtle dynamic.To the extent that these groups found their spatial activism in anarchic traditions,their goal is not so much to retake control of urban space as it is to obliteratespatial domination and control itself in the interest of spontaneity and emergence.Recalling the old anarchist cry, the goal is not to seize power but to destroy it; asWard (1973:38–39) says, the belief is in the “revolutionary” potential of “leaderlessgroups” to unravel, not replace, everyday arrangements of power and control. Inthis context, a too-sharply drawn duality between spatial control and resistance toit also omits from our observation and analysis a complementary trajectory, and avariety of groups and situations carried along by it. This trajectory, it seems to me,can deepen our understanding of contemporary urban space and conflicts over it,and our understanding of the interplay between anarchism and authority in thespatial realm. We can refer to this trajectory as drift, and those caught up in it asdrifters, and we can anticipate two central ironies in this regard. The first involves theways in which contemporary economic and legal developments promote the verysort of drift that contemporary spatial controls seek to contain. The second involvesthe ways in which activist and marginalized groups sometimes embrace drift for itsdis-organizational possibilities.

Drift and Its DiscontentsThe contemporary social forces that cast people and populations adrift—that dislocate them and leave them without firm spatial orientation or


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destination—pervade contemporary political and economic developments. Broadly,these include widespread political expulsion on the part of repressive governmentalregimes, mass migration forced by economic or political marginalization, andthe creation of swelling refugee populations as the consequence of civil andtransnational warfare. In more domestic domains, the ongoing destruction of low-cost housing as part of urban redevelopment schemes, the corporate criminality ofthe mortgage/foreclosure crisis of recent years, and the proliferation of part-timeand low-wage service work all conspire to preclude for millions any certainty as tohome or shelter. Moving from one temporary housing arrangement to another,sleeping in cars, haunting homeless shelters and wandering the streets when suchshelters are closed, those cut loose from home or job find little in the way ofspatial stability. Nor is this dislocation confined to any one region or country. Whileimpoverished Central Americans hitch rides through Mexico atop US-bound freighttrains and itinerant “gutter punks” hop US freight trains from city to city, ruralmigrants flood “arrival cities” (Saunders 2011) outside Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai,and Africans in search of work or political asylum crowd rickety boats to crossthe Mediterranean toward the cities of southern Europe. Meanwhile, in southernEurope itself, a native-born generation finds that today, even advanced degreesleave them lost between dead-end jobs and unemployment—not unlike the youngin Japan, left to piece together “irregular” jobs amidst a collapsing career structure,or the North American workers who discover that the current economic “recovery”is predicated mostly on “temp work” and day labor. Suggesting the scope of thiscontemporary drift, Bauman (2002:343) notes that refugees are “perhaps the mostrapidly swelling of all the categories of world population” today, and Saunders(2010:1) estimates current worldwide rural-to-urban migration as involving “two orthree billion humans, perhaps a third of the world’s population”.

As these contemporary constellations of the dislocated drift amidst the predationsof the late modern crisis, they are all but sure to catch the attention of securitycameras, to trespass on newly privatized spaces, and to encamp in curfewedparks and closed off public squares—perhaps not with the same transgressiveintentionality as anarchist spatial justice activists, but with their own desperatemomentum nonetheless. Camping in the flood drains beneath the streets of LasVegas, sleeping rough around London’s Westminster Cathedral, moving in andout of abandoned air-defense tunnels underneath Beijing, they are all but sureto reintroduce De Certeau’s “indetermination” and “illegitimacy” into the spacesof urban life, and so to transgress, both spatially and normatively, the ever moreenforced boundaries of the contemporary social order (Butler 2011; Lichtblau 2009;Wong 2011). As a consequence, they seem certain to be caught up, increasingly,in contemporary conflicts over public space and social justice, and to become afocus of concern for those interested in spatial security. Writing about the dynamicsof “liquid modernity”, and more particularly the increase in those who imaginethat they are being stalked by strangers, Zygmunt Bauman (2000:93, emphasis inoriginal) has noted that, as opposed to other historical forms of paranoia, “what istruly novel is that it is the stalkers (in company with prowlers and other loiterers,characters from outside the place through which they move) who carry the blame



now . . . ” Yet as Bauman goes on to note, this paranoia resides not only in the mind,but in the spatial politics of contemporary society—in the fact that “public moneyhas already been set aside in quantities that rise year after year for the purpose oftracing and chasing the stalkers, the prowlers and other updated editions of thatmodern scare, the mobile vulgus—the inferior kind of people on the move, dribblingor gushing into places where only the right kind of people should have the rightto be . . . . ” For public officials, private developers, and affluent citizens invested inregulated urban space, drifters of all sorts constitute a ready target for paranoia andmoral panic. As above, it is not only that homeless drifters are alleged to createimage issues for contemporary urban economies; it is that they are, in the wordsof a Seattle economic official, “feral”, and in the language of two Phoenix/Tempeeconomic officials, “all on some kind of substance . . . all kind of extreme”, and“horrific . . . human carnage” (in Beckett and Herbert 2009:181; Ferrell 2001:49, 54).

Ironically, all of the individuals just quoted are directly involved in promoting thecontemporary trend toward “consumption-driven urban development”— a formof economic development that spawns the very sorts of drifters they condemn.Invoking the ghosts of those displaced by Haussmann’s sweeping reconfigurationof nineteenth century Paris, and by the “brutal modernism” that Robert Mosesapplied to twentieth century New York City, David Harvey (2008:28, 34) emphasizesthat this sort of contemporary urban development is likewise predicated on “thecapture of valuable land from low-income populations that may have lived there foryears”. For Harvey, this dispossession constitutes a sort of spatial imperialism, andan abrogation of “the right to the city”—and this is certainly so. Yet complementingthis are the ongoing spatial consequences for those dispossessed—put bluntly, thelikelihood that many of them will remain cut loose and cast adrift in ways that theywere not before. Noticing a high-end condominium complex where once therewas an historic working-class neighborhood, we see the physical evidence of therevanchist city (Smith 1997); less easily seen, less in focus, are the neighborhood’sformer residents, many now scattered throughout the city, moving perhaps betweenone short-term abode and another. The boutique hotel put up in place of the oldSRO flop stands still for observation; the SRO’s one time residents, now homeless onthe streets, do not. As Thrush (in Beckett and Herbert 2009:27) says of Seattle’s sharpdecline in SRO housing due to high-end development, “As the [SROs] closed, thepeople who remained downtown tended to be poorer, sicker, more often homelessand unemployed, and less likely to be white.”

Just as the development of a late modern consumerist economy promotes drift,so does the risk-based policing model that accompanies it. CPTED programs thatundertake to reduce crime by building social control into the spatial environment—and so to discourage the presence of transient populations by, for example, installinguncomfortable public benches or closing public toilets—may succeed in forcingsuch populations from parks or town squares, but in doing so they underminethe fragile spatial communities that emerge there, and put these populations backon the move in search of even minimal comfort or convenience (Ferrell 2001).Likewise, the proliferation of banishment orders and exclusion zones in New York,


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Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, and other US cities is such that homeless individualsare often forced into perpetual movement between them; as one homeless Seattleresident complained, “No, you know I don’t understand these zones . . . they’reeverywhere. They try to tell you that you can’t walk around, can’t be in them,but where can I go, I’m homeless, I got no place to go. They’re everywhere”(in Beckett and Herbert 2009:130). Similarly, the contemporary criminal justiceemphasis on the “broken windows” policing model and “place-based” crimeprevention produces approaches like that utilized in Santa Ana, California, whereaccording to an official’s memo, the policy is that “vagrants are no longer welcomein the city of Santa Ana . . . the mission of this program is to move all vagrantsand their paraphernalia out . . . by continually removing them from the places thatthey are frequenting in the City” (in Mitchell 2003:197). Programs like the LosAngeles Safer Cities Initiative (SCI) institutionalize this approach further. This “place-based policing intervention” deploys police officers who move through Skid Rowareas with entrenched homeless populations, “breaking up homeless encampments,issuing citations, and making arrests for violations of the law” (Berk and McDonald2010:813, 817) for the purpose of dispersal. As Culhane (2010:853) notes, suchinitiatives are not designed to address the root problems of homelessness, but onlythe (alleged) problem of “spatial concentration” among the homeless—with suchinitiatives to be complemented by the “dispersal of homeless facilities” and supportservices throughout urban areas as well. Vitale (2010:868, 870) argues that, dueto aggressive fines and arrests, such initiatives only further entrap those targeted inhomelessness; to this we can add that such initiatives also force the homeless intoever more dislocated ways of living. Interestingly, Vitale wonders also if “the primarygoal of the SCI [is] really to reduce crime and homelessness or instead to remove alarge concentration of poor people forcibly from Skid Row in hope of encouragingthe subsequent gentrification of the area . . . . A major effort to gentrify Skid Row hasbeen underway for years . . .”1

If one meaning of drift is to be carried along by forces outside one’s control, thesethen are the forces today: the predatory political economy of global capitalism andthe exclusionary urban economies of consumption, the revanchist spatial politicsof urban environments and the policing strategies that support them, and theprivatization and privations of urban space that result. In all of this the iatrogeniceffects of law and economy—the “ironies of social control” (Marx 1981) by whichthe doctor can be seen to create the disease—are evident. The spatial controls meantto contain urban space, to protect it from the feared dribble and gush of transitorypopulations, only serve to make such populations more transient; put simply, theclosure of urban space to drifters exacerbates urban drift. Likewise, the reconstitutionof urban economies around managed meaning and conspicuous consumptioncasts adrift the very sorts of citizens whose peripatetic presence threatens thosepreferred patterns of meaning and consumption. And speaking of ironies andcontradictions, there is one more: various social groups and social movementsthat battle these forces—that fight for open public space and alternative urbaneconomies—sometimes engender drift themselves, and explore it for its subversivepotential.



Precarity, Dis-organization and DriftAs already noted, any number of groups battling for open urban space drawon anarchist and anti-authoritarian orientations in developing a politics of directaction and creative disruption. Confronting an Arizona plan to privatize publicsidewalks and criminalize the public presence of the homeless, for example, RandallAmster and the Project S.I.T. movement that he helped (dis)organize called ontraditions of “anarchist direct action, the I.W.W . . . . the civil rights movement . . . thephilosophies of Gandhi and King . . . passive resistance, civil disobedience . . . [and]the burgeoning WTO, World Bank anti-globalization movement” to stage sidewalksit-ins and create “a kind of space for spontaneity” and resistance (in Ferrell2001:51–52; see Amster 2008). Over the past couple of decades, Reclaim theStreets activists in the United States and Europe have likewise blocked urbanautomotive traffic, held illegal street parties, and otherwise launched “ephemeralfestivals of resistance”—all while referencing and reinventing the Paris Commune’s1871 “festival of the oppressed”, the Situationist interventions of Paris 1968,and other moments in anti-authoritarian history (Jordan 1998:139). During the1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago—itself preceded by homelessroundups and the destruction of low-income housing—the anarchist group ActiveResistance (AR) likewise “highlighted the significance of the spatial dimensions ofconflict and the territoriality of social struggle” by ignoring designated protestareas and staging an illegal “festival of the oppressed” in the streets around theconvention (Shantz 2011:70). In New York City, Bike Lane Liberation Clownsattempt to “bridge the space between the joy of riding free and possibilitiesfor public-space environmental activism” by playfully ticketing drivers parked inbicycle lanes (Shepard and Smithsimon 2011:188). And in New York City, Madrid,and other cities around the world, Jordan Seiler and members of the Public AdCampaign undermine the commodification of public space by illicitly removingcorporate advertising from public areas and replacing it with independent art, inthis way striving to help “communities regain control of the spaces they occupy”(www.publicadcampaign.com). In this sense these and other groups work to uprootthe conventional signposts that define and delimit urban space—legal statutesand police lines, automotive traffic, corporate advertising—and to institute insteadspontaneously self-made encounters within public venues.

Two groups in particular embrace the progressive possibilities of drift,disorientation, and disruption even more overtly—the first directly in the realmof public space, the second in the broader realm of cultural and political economy.Critical Mass—the anarchic bicycling movement whose participants now ride incities around the world—disavows traditional models of leadership and organizationin favor of the sort of decentered, dis-organized dynamics that operate throughdirect action, do-it-yourself media, and loose affiliations among riders. This approachdefines the preparation for a collective ride, with participants encouraged to createand distribute their own fliers promoting the ride. It also defines the ride itself. Theroute the ride will take is left open to discussion, or simply allowed to emerge intransit; if a map materializes, it is considered provisional, or designated as leading“to wherever” (in Ferrell 2001:106). During the course of the rides—”open-ended,


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leaderless and democratic free-for-alls”, as Shepard and Smithsimon (2011:171)describe them—the bicycles’ collective flow trumps the rigidity of traffic laws. Asriders approach an intersection, a few will break off to temporarily “cork” theintersection—to block it from cross-traffic as the ride progresses through it, whetheror not stop signs are present or traffic lights green or red—and then rejoin the ride; atthe next intersection, other riders will voluntarily take on the corking (Ferrell 2011a).Unlike other forms of urban traffic—hurried, hyper-regulated, anxious—Critical Massrides are meant to drift through urban space as organic, on-the-move collectivities.In their drifting uncertainty, they are in turn meant to embody the dis-organizationthat produced them, and to demonstrate that such fluid direct action can effectivelyreplace the usual policing of public space. As Graeber (2007:378) argues, anarchistactivists dedicated to direct action have understood “mass mobilizations not only asopportunities to expose the illegitimate, undemocratic nature of existing institutions,but as ways to do so in a form that itself demonstrated why such institutions wereunnecessary, by providing a living example of genuine, direct democracy”.

Critical Mass participants emphasize that this approach is not a form of protest,but rather a playful, celebratory enactment of alternative spatial community andreclaiming of public space (Ferrell 2001:105–121). Not surprisingly, this direct,collective liberation of urban space from automotive traffic and traffic law has ledto countless encounters with city officials and police, innumerable arrests, and anumber of violent incidents with motorists, including a recent Brazilian case in whichan angry driver accelerated into a Critical Mass ride, injuring some 30 riders (Domitand Goodman 2011:A5). Among these, two cases in particular highlight the ways inwhich Critical Mass’s drifting uncertainty challenges conventional spatial controls.In 1997, with San Francisco Critical Mass rides drawing thousands of participants,then San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and his administration undertook to controlthe rides by negotiating designated routes and police escorts—but could find noCritical Mass leaders with whom to negotiate. As a result, San Francisco police wereordered to stop the next Critical Mass ride and arrest participants, and while manywere arrested, the majority simply scattered and escaped along various spur-of-the-moment routes. “It was not possible for the mayor to engineer what wouldhappen with Critical Mass”, said Jennifer Granick, an attorney for some who werearrested. “How was he going to stop the ride? There just wasn’t any way. There’sno leadership . . . And what were they going to do, arrest everybody? There’s justtoo many people to arrest everybody . . . And I think the bicyclists realized that (inFerrell 2001:108–109). A few years later in New York City, it did seem they weregoing to arrest everybody, and for similar reasons. Following numerous arrests ofCritical Mass riders during the Republican National Convention, the New York Citypolice department demanded (unsuccessfully) that Critical Mass obtain a permit forits rides, posting fliers claiming that it was “dangerous and illegal to ride a bicyclein a procession” without a permit (in Shepard and Smithsimon 2011:174).

A second progressive group especially attuned to the collective politics of driftand disruption is southern Europe’s emerging “precarity” movement. Variouslyunderstood as “chainworkers” (www.chainworkers.org) or members of the new“precariat”, those engaged with this movement argue that the global economy ofthe late capitalist city leaves them with little but aborted careers, part-time service



work, unpredictable “flex scheduling” at the jobs they do find—and so a life definedby precarious prospects and constant uncertainty. Moreover, with the “infiltration ofmodels of non-standard employment from low-wage service sectors” into middle-class and creative occupations, a “multi-class precariat” may now span conventionalclass divisions and so be emerging as “the post-Fordist successor to the proletariat”(Ross 2008:34–35). As Braverman (1974) has documented, the degradation of workin the twentieth century resulted from the systematic deskilling of physical laborand imposition of Taylorist models of scientifically managed efficiency; such is thedegradation of work in the twenty-first century that “immaterial” labor is now alsosubject to measurement and regulation, without even the small compensationsof Fordist security and social welfare that accompanied this earlier process(De Angelis and Harvie 2009). As a result, a new generation confronts a present and afuture cut loose from the social contract—a present and future without conventionalanchors of education, career, and identity. In this way the consumer-driven culturaleconomy of the contemporary capitalist city not only dislocates impoverished urbanresidents and closes public spaces; it also spawns a young, peripatetic army of low-wage service and retail workers who drift between part-time jobs and temporaryhousing, negotiate irregular work schedules, and find little hope for spatial or socialpermanence (Seligson 2011).

In developing a critique of precarity’s economic and historical origins, thoseassociated with the movement have also begun to explore its cultural and politicalpossibilities. Christina Morini (in Galetto et al 2007:106), for example, argues thatwhile precarity suggests the negativity of instability,

it is at the same time also connected with the idea of re-questioning, of becoming, ofthe future, of possibility, concepts which together contribute to creating the idea of thenomadic subject without fixed roots . . . . The precarious subject has no fixed points anddoes not want any. He/she is always forced to seek a new sense of direction, to constructnew narratives and not to take anything for granted.

The new narratives of the precariat do indeed explore alternative ways of collectiveliving and being—and the potential for turning precariousness back on those whoseeconomic and political policies promote it. Many of these alternatives also pointbeyond traditional labor unions and political parties and towards forms of culturalactivism that use “visual tools and images extensively” and employ “theatre, cinema,music and stunts to effect political change” (Gill and Pratt 2008:10), as developedfrom “an understanding that cultural production is not an adjunct or additionto the ‘real work’ of capitalist production but increasingly . . . is the work that isa key component of it” (Shukaitis 2009:170, emphasis in original). Members ofthe Italian Chainworkers movement, for example, have invented San Precario—thetransgendered patron saint of disenfranchised workers and companion saint to SantaGraziella of the Milan Critical Mass—and have paraded San Precario though thesorts of retail spaces that employ such workers. Subsequently, they have used theirdigital and media skills to promote the imaginary fashion designer Serpica Naro (ananagram of San Precario), and used her to infiltrate a fashion show at Milan FashionWeek 2005. In the course of the show, “it was announced that Serpica Naro doesnot exist, [and] the whole prank was revealed to the media, which duly reported


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the entire story, thus highlighting the issues of casualized work behind the glitter ofMilan fashion week” (Tari and Vanni 2005; see Shukaitis 2009:172–174).2

For Critical Mass riders as for members of the new precariat, then, drift is not simplythe consequence of economic and political arrangements; it is also the foundationfor what we might call an anarchic culture of drift, and for new styles of spatialactivism and cultural resistance to those arrangements. These new styles are as fluid,ambivalent, and dis-organized as are the lives of those who create them. They driftacross spaces, situations, and social categories as readily as do the young peoplewhose lives they reflect, and draw on the sorts of portable skills that they carrywith them from job to job—when a job is to be had. All the while, such approachesconfront the spaces of law and commerce not head-on, but glancingly, subversively,playfully—much as drifters themselves move though urban space. Because of this,these approaches also hint at alternative orientations for knowing the world, formoving through it, and for living collectively in it—orientations that echo, at least,with anarchic possibility.

Drift, Space, and Anarchy: A SpeculationA number of scholars concerned with the precarious dynamics of contemporaryoccupational and social life have argued that such precariousness is not anaberration; rather, it was the period of Fordism—with its regulatory controls, relativestability, and social welfare state—that was the exception within capitalism’s longand chaotic history (Fantone 2007; Neilson and Rossiter 2008; Shukaitis 2009:165–166, 179–180). From this view, a syndrome of itinerant laborers, unstable workopportunities, and enforced drift is not simply a symptom of “late capitalism”or “late modernity”, but as much so a return to the sort of endemic predatoryuncertainty that was interrupted, briefly and partially, by the decades of Fordism inthe United States and Europe. Widening this view, it might be argued that modernityitself, while at times producing bureaucratic stability and enduring regimes ofpower, has consistently produced profound and ongoing dislocation, and withit an endless stream of migrants, refugees, and wanderers. Taking this analysisfurther still, we might wonder whether the nature of human existence is not itselfdeeply precarious, beset at some fundamental level by longing, rootlessness, andwanderlust. Certainly there is plentiful, if sometimes contradictory, evidence forall these views—from small nomadic groups to waves of global immigrants, fromDepression-era dustbowl drifters and Beat Generation roadtrips in the United Statesto lost populations shuttled between post-World War II Displaced Persons camps inEurope. But whatever the case—whether our analytic focus is economic, historical,or existential—it does seem that the spatial politics of drift exists before and beyondany one episode or group.

In this light the project undertaken by Critical Mass riders and precarityactivists can be widened as well: exploring the possibilities of drift as collectiveexperience and collective political action. Put another way, we can consider howthe contemporary trends already seen—the increasing closure and control of urbanspace, the dynamics by which new urban economies and the spatial policing thatprotects them spawn drift, and the uses of drift by anarchic groups in confrontation



with emerging economic and spatial arrangements—might intertwine as theycontinue to emerge. Shukaitis (2009:166–168) notes that, among progressivegroups in 1970s Italy, the phrase precario bello—beautiful precarity—was regularlyused to denote opposition to, and withdrawal from, the all too stable world ofroutinized industrial production. Now, he argues, an “inversion and transformation”has occurred whereby capitalism largely imposes precarity and flexibility as theconditions for new sorts of degraded labor. Building from the work of Critical Massriders, precariat activists, and others, I speculate in what follows on the possibilitythat this contemporary, imposed precarity might be remade into, or at least infusedwith, precario bello—and so with some new sort of critical or progressive politics. Ifmore and more people are forced adrift by emerging economic and spatial forces,might we find in this any hope of a deriva bella as well?

At the outset, let me be clear: The experience of drift for many, perhaps formost—the political refugee, the impoverished migrant, the homeless family–isundoubtedly suffused not with political possibility, but with sorrow, anger, anda sense of irretrievable loss. In such cases alienation from home, career, or culturalhistory produces a degree of existential disempowerment and emotional pain thatdefines drift as anything but a beautiful adventure. Moreover, those who drift amidstprecarious circumstances are fractured along lines of social capital, privilege, andintentionality; a poor family displaced by urban development or a homeless womanrousted by an LA police officer drifts differently than does a Critical Mass rideror wandering artist (see Cresswell 1997). Among all these groups, there is alsothe matter of present state versus preferred state. As Saunders (2011) has shown,many rural migrants who drift toward urban areas—or as commonly, drift backand forth repeatedly between rural village and urban area—do so driven by thefirm hope of eventual and permanent settlement in the city. These closing remarks,then, are neither a comprehensive catalogue of drift’s experiential dimensions nora celebration of drift as such, but rather a speculation on the complex politics ofdrift.

Within that complexity, there are some commonalities. “The more insecure jobsare still and above all carried out by women” (Galetto et al 2007:106), for example,and “youth, women and immigrants are disproportionately represented in . . . theprecariat” (Ross 2008:41; see Aubenas 2011). Moreover, these commonalities oftenintersect within particular groups or spatial situations—as in a recent illegal streetblockade by Australian taxi drivers, many of whom were also international universitystudents on limited visas. “The question thus arises”, write Neilson and Rossitor(2008:66), “as to whether the blockade should be read as taxi driver politics, migrantpolitics or student politics. We would suggest that one reason for the effectiveness ofthe strike . . . is the fact that it [was] all three of these at the same time.” Broadeningthis view, Ross (2008) and others wonder whether common cause can be foundbetween relatively high-end “creative class” workers and lower class service workers,even with the shared precariousness of their work and lives. Perhaps not, in manycases; yet as the Serpico Naro episode shows, creativity and dislocation can attimes come together to form powerful alliances across differences of occupation orstatus. One precariat manifesto suggests something of this, and reflects as well theprofound uncertainty that now links many young people’s lives from Europe and


14 Antipode

the United States to North Africa and the Middle East: “We are all migrants lookingfor a better life” (in Tari and Vanni 2005).

Among today’s late modern migrants, then, a social and cultural geography ofdrift might include also hobos, wanderers, and nomads traversing North America,Europe and beyond (Daniels 2008; Grant 2003); Gypsy Travelers moving acrossand against governmental boundaries (Shubin 2011; Ward 2000); economicand political refugees on the move from country to country in search of work,safety, or political renewal; migrant workers, regularly victimized by state andeconomic authorities, but also carrying with them the potential to “evade statescrutiny and capitalist discipline” (Ross 2008:37); those operating outside traditionalwork routines by way of urban scrounging and trash picking (Ferrell 2006), or“homeworking, piecework, and freelancing” (Gill and Pratt 2008:3); sex workersand migratory prostitutes who remain dislocated both from their home communitiesand their current communities of residence (O’Neill 2001; Oude Breuil 2009);and unknown others whose day-to-day lives are shaped by spatial and ontologicaluncertainty. Across this heterogeneity of people and approaches, various dynamicswould suggest at least the potential for commonalities of experience. The first is thegreat likelihood that such groups will continue to breach increasingly rigid spatialand legal boundaries as they drift across cities, countries, and occupations. As alreadyseen, this spatio-legal transgression is all but assured not only by the movement ofdrifters themselves, but by the contemporary reconfiguration of public space as aseries of closures, boundaries, and obstacles designed to criminalize free movement.Because of this, the experience of drift will include, in many cases, the sequencedexperience of exclusion and alienation. In these cases the drifter exists as an ongoingoutsider—outside the boundaries of home country, conventional labour market,designated space, or legal citizenship. To the extent that this drifting continues,the exclusions accumulate, and in so doing reinforce the drifter’s identity as oneoutside the frame many times over. Here is the sorrow, loss and alienation of drift,the emptiness of dislocation as well—but here also is the impetus for living andlearning outside the usual bounds of the social order. A serial transgressor by lawor by choice, the drifter may acquire—may be forced to acquire—a sense of selfand society unavailable to the sedentary. “On the back of the card . . . it says whenyou sign this card . . . you trespassed from all these places on the back of the card,”says a homeless urbanite caught up in a banishment/exclusion zone order. “That’severywhere! You can’t go to Sorry’s, you can’t go to Feathers, you can’t go to RainierBeach, you can’t go to Bank of America, you can’t go to the Moore place, you can’tgo the Safeway, you can’t go nowhere!” (in Beckett and Herbert 2009:131).

Richard Grant’s (2003:263) summary of his years wandering the United Stateswith itinerant rodeo cowboys, freight train hobos, and peripatetic neo-hippiesis similarly instructive. “They have a quintessentially nomadic attitude towardsedentary society”, he concludes.

They don’t pay taxes, they don’t vote, and they don’t consider themselves bound bythe social contract. And thanks to vagrancy laws, begging laws, laws against sleepingin parks, laws against hitchhiking and riding freight trains—laws, in short, that make itillegal to be poor and nomadic—they are locked into conflict with the sedentary stateand its coercive power.



Grant’s notion of a “nomadic attitude” hints at a second dynamic, this oneperceptual—the dynamic by which drifting can create commonalities of alternativeknowledge and perception for those caught up in it. Geographers have noted thistendency, both in their own studies of spatial mobility and attitude (Prince 1973),and in their invocation of the flaneur (Keith 1997). For cultural geographers asfor literary scholars, the flaneur embodies a distinctive model of urban citizenship,not only by the flaneur’s ongoing and uncertain movement through the city, butby the particular sorts of knowledge that such movement produces. As an urbandawdler and drifter the flaneur builds a holistic, comparative understanding of thecity’s spaces that has the potential to undermine the more settled understandingsof the sedentary. Keith (1997:145) argues that, “spatially, the order of things isnever more clearly revealed than through disruption, the striking juxtapositions ofthe street walk . . . ” De Certeau (1984:101) agrees: “The long poem of walkingmanipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be”, he says.“It creates shadows and ambiguities within them.”

Perhaps the most provocative possibility in this regard is the Situationist practiceof the derive—a fluid drifting through urban space, a “rapid passage through variedambiances”, in order “to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself” (Debord1958). Graeber (2009:258, see 526–528; 2007:394) notes that the “situationistlegacy is probably the single most important theoretical influence on contemporaryanarchism is America”, and indeed the Situationist notion of creating a “revolutionof everyday life” from moments that disrupt and reverse dominant arrangementscan be seen in the performative spatial politics of Critical Mass, Reclaim the Streets,Project S.I.T., and other anarchist groups (Ferrell 2001). Essential to this sort ofspontaneous, subversive politics is the derive as Vaneigem (2001 [1967]:195) wrote,the nature of the derive is such that “in losing myself I find myself; forgetting thatI exist, I realize myself . . . . The traveler who is always thinking about the length ofthe road before him tires more easily than his companion who lets his imaginationwander as he goes along.” Here we see a direct and intentional intertwining ofanarchist politics, drift, and space, in the hope that drifting through spatial structurescan create the sort of comparative, critical experiences necessary for individual andsocial liberation. Significantly, precariat activists have recently undertaken to link thispolitics of the derive with the lives of those for whom drift has been not a choice butan imposition. Seeking to highlight the overrepresentation of women in precariouswork, the feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva has employed the derive to “driftthrough the circuits and spaces of feminized labor that constituted their everydaylives”. Drifting through the spaces of female domestic workers, telemarketers, foodservice workers, and others, the members of Precarias a la Deriva have been ableto “find points for commonality and alliance”, and to “find ways to turn mobilityand uncertainty into strategic points of intervention” through the defamiliarizationof taken-for-granted environments, collective gatherings, workshops, and othercontagious techniques (Shukaitis 2009:152–156; see Makeworlds 2003).3

All of this implies that drifting often produces a kind of critical, comparativeexteriority by which drifters are able—or are forced—to see beyond the certaintyof any one situation. Here perhaps the pain and potential of drift intertwine.The sorrows of a global migrant’s endless journey, the outrage of a homeless


16 Antipode

person caught between endless urban exclusion orders, the fluid insights derivedfrom the long walking poem of the derive or the flaneur—each is profoundlydifferent, yet each is built from the recurring experience of radical dislocation. Ineach case the experience of drift seems to produce an emerging intentionality,and with it a sense of the self as somehow separated from the more sedentarysocial order. Whether this ongoing normative and spatial alienation is imposedby contemporary arrangements or embraced for its liberatory possibilities, it doesseem to create at least the potential for a progressive critique of the existingorder of things. Given the complex experience of drift, this critique would seemto embody something of the sociologist’s critical eye for social arrangements, theanthropologist’s keen eye for comparison, and the geographer’s cartographic eyefor spatialities of power (Ferrell 2011b). Further, the recurring, radical exteriority ofdrift would seem to promote the sort of anarchist epistemology that Feyerabend(1975) has outlined—an epistemology attuned to noticing the dimensions ofpower and authority embedded in otherwise taken-for-granted understandings andperceptions. Then again, for the desperate temp worker or the banished streetperson, all such insights may be overwhelmed by the task of simply surviving evermore exclusionary spatial, legal, and economic regimes. For them, some sense of aself-made deriva bella may or may not emerge amidst the inequities of contemporarydrift.

If the many contemporary trajectories that spawn drift continue, we will certainlybe afforded the chance to find out. As with Precarias a la Deriva, Critical Mass,and others, the key to realizing drift’s progressive potential may well lie in theparallel potential for creating shared cultures and communities of drift. The workof Precarias a la Deriva suggests that drifters may be particularly well placed—ordisplaced—to discover the spaces of other drifters. If so, perhaps the pervasivenessof contemporary drift will lead to new sorts of communities—uncertain, unsettled,and anarchic in nature, yet provisionally connected by the common experiences andperceptions of drift. Perhaps drift will become a preferred form of dis-organization,a form that by its own dynamics guarantees loose alliances and evolving lines ofdirect action. Perhaps, in classic anarchist terms, drift carries the potential for newdynamics of mutual aid, for new fluidities of collective self-help (Kropotkin 1902). Inthe face of contemporary trajectories, perhaps the question is not whether we willdrift, but only whether we will drift together or drift apart.

Endnotes1 Ward (2000:49–57) notes similarly the contradiction by which English “travelers” areinstructed to settle in one place and then denied the right to do so.2 The recent Spanish Yomango movement—its name a play on a Spanish chain store andthe Spanish slang for “I steal”—similarly embraced shoplifting from corporate retailers as anact of episodic civil disobedience and economic survival amidst the uncertainty of part-time,minimum wage retail work (see Ferrell, Hayward and Young 2008:110–112).3 With their notion of the nomad and nomadology, Deleuze and Guattari (1987:380) likewisepropose that “the life of the nomad is in the intermezzo”—that is, that the nomad’sknowledge of the world becomes “smooth”, uncontained, and comparative as it formsbetween and beyond particular places.



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Anarchy, Geography and Drift