“Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is.” – Freud
I’m curious about the resonance of the word “occupation” which connotes both non-violent strategy and employment. The Occupy Movement is fueled by frustration over unemployment: many of its participants are out of work.
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How does the consensus decision-making process function on an embodied level? Moving through downtown Oakland the night after the police raid, I am struck by the heightened kinesthetic awareness evident in the hundreds of bodies that fill the streets. True to the Occupy ethos, there is no top-down leadership, and yet the group is certainly moving together, en masse, with implicit nonverbal agreements about directionality, pauses, speed, and – in particular – a highly attuned empathetic response mechanism that kicks in as we encounter the blockades of riot police.
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The horizontal governance and DIY aesthetic politics of Occupy foster a visual culture of creative diversity–letting “a thousand flowers bloom.” Occuprint, a website showcasing donated graphic designs of protest from all over the world, makes this case visually. As part of the creative commons, the graphics can be freely downloaded for noncommercial use.
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