After news of the initial eviction and arrests at Occupy Oakland spread, thousands of people gathered for a general assembly outside the Oakland Public Library. After 5PM that day, some two thousand people marched from the library toward the jail to demand the release of the protesters. Marchers held signs regarding economic justice, racial justice, and re-funding education and health care.
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With the rise and fall of corporate greed, the 99% collectivize in order to protest social and economic inequality and demand a shift in the distribution of wealth and systems regulating it. The very reversal that they insist upon can also be seen in the form they use to insist.
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“We are the 99%.” The catchy tagline resonates with a diversity of protesters and spectators, calling for solidarity across lines of difference. But how solid is that solidarity?
Who do those who identify as “the 99%” imagine to be the fellow occupants of this righteous percentage? They seem to allow for hipsters and hippies, artists and activists, unemployed millenials and involuntary early retirees… But do they include as one of their own the homeless man who occupied the park before it was Occupied?
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I am interested in the ways in which the burgeoning Occupy movement inhabits an affective, social temporality of permanence that forcefully breaches the already available time-slots of reified, rationalized administration of public space. It has often been discussed how specific occupations reclaim public sites in the interest of rebuilding the commons, and the gravity of spatiality in determining particular formations of Occupy activities – tents arranged by task; safe spaces for queers, women, and minority groups, boundaries that must be patrolled by community security, etc.
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As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement mushroomed city by city in states across the country, the need to make room to expand a vision of racial equity through the participation and leadership of communities of color came to the fore. In early October, OWS participant New Yorker Malik Rahsaan launched Occupy the Hood in order to involve more people of color in the OWS movement.
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The word “radical” has more or less become a pejorative in the mainstream, narrowly associated with (senseless?) acts of violence, and consistently applied in this way to marginalize actions, actors, and ideas which would otherwise call into question structures of dominance. It’s become so deeply ingrained that one wonders if truly radical thought itself isn’t on the verge of becoming unthinkable, even among cultural workers.
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Among the numerous memes, tropes, and forms associated with the Occupy movement is that of a concerted, public refusal to make specific demands. Although advocates of this tactic have seen it as a potent way to argue that the existing political system must be overhauled, rather than accomodated, many liberals have criticized such a position as impractical, while conservative pundits tout this apparent irrationality as proof that Occupy can’t be trusted.
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The Occupy movement is a virus. That is obvious. But the metaphor veers disturbingly into the real—exhibiting the virus’ trademark capacity for metalepsis and contagion—when we think of the lurid stories that broke out in November: “Zucotti lung” at OWS, the deadly canine parvovirus over the bridge at OccupySF. The evictions that followed, in turn, are consonant with what we have known for some time now about the political project of public health.
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Although the word occupy has experienced new use since the Sept. 2011 occupation of Liberty Park, the real evolution of Occupy does not lie in its political usage but its movement from a transitive to an intransitive verb, in which it now acts as a macro-term encompassing/suggesting many keywords (encampment, occupation, sit-in, protest, etc) without a qualifying place/object. Occupy today is rapidly moving away from its connections to physical space and is no longer limited to a specific political action but functions as an ideology.
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There is this parable, which for the life of me I can’t find on the Internet. It’s pretty much “The Tragedy of the Commons,” but I think I heard it first at summer camp. It goes like this: There is a town. In the middle of this town is a giant fruit tree that always has plenty of fruit, as much as anyone in the town needs. Whenever they want fruit, they just go to the tree and take exactly what they need. So this tree is around for a while, and people are happy and well-fed and everything is great.
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