Occupy as Form: Shane Boyle
Since the start of Occupy, “direct action” has gone from being a term hardly spoken to a pair of words on everyone’s tongue. Accompanying the term’s discursive proliferation, however, has been a proliferation of what direct action signifies—a development that threatens to make direct action as a term essentially meaningless. Direct action has become a category used to encompass everything from lobbying days and mass rallies to encampments and pitched street-fights with police. It has become a blanket under which Occupy’s diverse tactics are forced to restlessly fit. Its current discursive meaninglessness is symptomatic of the generally impoverished vocabulary we have for addressing the non-identity of the forms that Occupy takes.
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