As direct, physical evidence of citizen personhood, the Occupy movement brings together human bodies in a symbol of speech made in stark contrast to the 2010 Citizens United ruling upholding the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment. There is no place for corporate personhood in this vision of democracy, as muddy, dynamic and diverse as the protest sites themselves.
The General Assembly is a signature form of the Occupy Movement, both for how it recalls earlier conceptions of collective, consensus-based deliberation and for how it devised expressive innovations—such as the human microphone. Notions of assembly and assemblage have specific aesthetic histories as well. Dubuffet used the term to expand the practice of collage into the three-dimensional; others emphasize the terms’ kinship with practices of pastiche or appropriation, each of which sees a different kind of political edge or political evacuation in the assembly of the miscellaneous.
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