Occupy as Form: Laurel Butler
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.
Continue to read…