SAM HALVORSEN ‘Occupying: The Politics of Process’

I was recently sat in a large gymnasium, towards the outskirts of Nice, with individuals of occupy movements from across the world. We were there for the counter-­‐G20 summit, and had been invited to “occupy” an open space and use it to link up and discuss. As we sat in a big circle and faced each other, it became apparent that we would need some form of process in order to interact. A fantastic team of translators helped with linguistic barriers, but we had no collective basis for facilitating and making decisions in the meeting. What followed was an hour of debate over which hand signals to use during the meeting (the wavy hands in agreement being the most universally accepted), and a lengthy discussion on the best way to carry out our meeting.

The above scenario brought us into very familiar territory for those in the occupy movement: “meetings about meetings” or, if you are really unlucky, “meetings about meetings about meetings”. The failure of democracy, both political and economic, that has been so widely experienced by those occupying has lead to a very strong emphasis on non-­‐hierarchical and participatory politics in the movement. The act of occupation has been a crucial tactic to open up space for democratic experimentation. By collectively occupying a space there are no guests; we are all hosts. This means we must take responsibility for our space, and find a way of organising ourselves that is acceptable to all.

At the heart of the occupy movement’s process is the General Assembly (the “GA”), in which decisions about the group are made, and we express our thoughts to the world around us. For many, the GA will be on the back of a long process of discussions in working groups, and endless meetings about wordings of statements. The decision-­‐making process of the GA is non-­‐hierarchical, and seeks consensus amongst occupiers, finding common ground amongst the diverse collective. It can therefore appear slow, and very drawn out.

Sitting in Nice, after an hour discussing hand signals, it became apparent that we all had very different ways of doing our occupy politics. Our particular socio-­‐ political experiences had shaped our understandings of how we should be engaging with one another (e.g. should we all be allowed to speak, or do we need time constraints and cut off points?). What we all shared, however, was a strong commitment to the process of our politics. It is not the destination that drives us, but the path that takes us there. And it is a path that we make by walking on it, constantly (re)making it in the process.

PATRICIA NOXOLO ‘Occupy: Africa?’

Just browsing around various websites about the Occupy movement, I came across a map of where the Occupy movements have taken place, published on the Guardian website occupy-protests-map-world.  It is stunning to see the spatial distribution, a great swathe of protests occupying the world map.  But what struck me was  – apart from South Africa at the southern tip, and Tunisia and Cairo in the North – the apparent absence of the continent of Africa in this transnational movement.

This could be under-reporting, and it is of course impossible to generalise about this huge and diverse continent, but this absence could indicate a few things about the spatial limits of the symbolism of the Occupy movement.  First, the form of occupation.  In some African cities, for example, temporary or makeshift housing is not a form of protest; it is a way of life.  What impact would it have to erect temporary shelters in public spaces in cities where such shelters are regularly either cleared away or entered, desired or not, into long term co-existence with more solid urban structures? The logic of the occupy movement assumes transgression of regulatory structures that should make encampment unnecessary, not the everyday reality of really living long-term with the insecurity of temporary housing.

Second, the language of occupation.  In the context of a continent that has experienced both colonial settlements, and a range of military interventions, both historic and contemporary, what would be the symbolism invoked by ‘occupying’ urban centres?  The threat of disorder and displacement that is part of the daily life of some people on the continent makes ‘occupation’ a fractured and dangerous word.

Third, the temporality of occupation assumes the freedom to temporarily divest yourself of other pre-occupations, to lift out from the daily round of life and work.  (Not to mention that it has to do with established democratic rights, not only the right to demonstrate, but also the capacity to do so, i.e. disposable time).  What symbolism is evoked by the demonstration of this temporal freedom in urban contexts where so many may not have it?

This is not a criticism of those protests (nor is it of course a complete picture of Africa), it is just an incitement to a question – what will it mean to really build transnational civil society movements that genuinely address global inequalities through the geography of their alliances, not just through their rhetorics?  How do such links get made?  At and in a shared historical moment, how do people find the capacity to make alliances that truly articulate their different but pressing realities?

KATHRYN YUSOFF ‘Mayor, Commonalty & Citizens of the City of London v Persons Unknown (being persons taking part in a protest camp at St Paul’s Churchyard, London EC4)’

To occupy is in its most basic form to refute indifference. To render visible those that are unknown in the political system (the isolated subjects of capital), not so they become known but so they become present in their anonymity. Sometimes this anonymity is a mask, a rebuttal at the powers of surveillance or a mask of carnival. Sometimes anonymity is the possibility of community. In so much as the 99% names the multitude of unknowns who toil under conditions of precarity and injustice, it is this very anonymity that names their/our emergent subjectivity as one that is built around the collective. This is Felix Guattari’s notion of the “collective production of subjectivity”, a collective production in which we are all implicated in and responsible for. “Persons Unknown” names that collective as legal body and as body politic, but it also names it as an opening, an invitation to join in. Occupation is a reminder of what John Berger calls the “shape of a pocket”, of what a pocket of resistance might look like and how it can occupy the imagination with thoughts of the possible. Berger always reminds me of the need for gentleness and generosity in critique, a kind of patience in opposition that is neither idealistic nor arrogant, but revolutionary in the ways that it seeks to readdress not just the locus of power but its aesthetics. By questioning what can be spoken and how it can be said, occupation emboldens the quiet refrain of frustration that is the speech of the unnamed and unspoken for.

The thing that is clear straight away is that the democratic process that is part of what conserves Occupy LSX’s integrity is that it is very slow. The meetings are highly conscious of democratic participation, of freedom from ideological rigidity, as if democracy is something be coaxed out of its hiding place, with no fast moves, no shortcuts to establishing the basis of trust. The waving of hands in agreement is a special sign, no doubt developed in the many camps that came before, in Copenhagen, in Europe, where democracy was practicing, finding its feet. This slowness in a fast City operates something like Deleuze’s idiot or Stengers’s cosmopolitics; experimental knowledge practices, “slowing things down” in the fast flows of capital and its laboring city workers. Stengers asks, “how to slow things down, to stop the rush to consensus or to a new dogmatism or to denunciation… to open up the chance of a common world.” Standing still—tenting—becomes the epitome of resistance in the furious flows of the workaday Corporation. Slowing down involves paying attention to the hard work of cohabitation, to understanding and accommodating different needs, problems and aspirations among persons unknown. This slowness has been an aggravation to the media and the Corporation of London alike, “What do they want?” “What are their demands?” have been the constant refrain, as if not to have a dominant unifying narrative somehow disqualifies you from participation in politics. As if it is not politics until there is a proper name. The camp is a space of learning in more ways than one. Learning about process, learning with patience, learning in a tent-city university that good things may come to those who wait… (even in the form of Alan Bennett).

What characterizes all this learning is an engagement with precarity (and the prominent inclusion of precarious workers of all forms—sex workers, cleaners, minimum wagers, youth unemployed—in the university timetable is testament to this). Precarity is the common ground for the 99% it seems, albeit for some of us more than others, but it yet might be somewhere we learn to meet. While this precarity is differentiated, it is also common to many and on the rise in most spaces of labour. Is not an attack on pensions, on working conditions and security about introducing more and more precarity into the conditions of labour? Is not environmental degradation and biodiversity loss about scenes of precarity? For nonhumans and the humans alike? How then to build institutions and assemblies around precarity so that we might make it visible as a collective attack (not suffer it alone), and begin to stand against it so that precarious unknown lives do not disappear without a trace? What might such institutions look like? The tent cities that now occupy our cities are an opening, their very precarity a strength that inspires and illuminates the difficulty and possibility of occupying a space, a thought, a change.

ANNA TSING ‘Occupy the ruins’

Occupy Fukushima—and all those ruins in which we still must live.  To occupy is to take up the work of living together even where the odds are against us.  It is to refuse—and also to recuperate.  If we are to live, we must learn to occupy even the most broken spaces of life on earth.  Our rage is necessary.  Without it, we wither.

In a wake-up call for life on earth, the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, a cost-saving U.S.-Japanese commercial product, spilled radioactivity all over northeastern Japan—and subsequently, spread by state, business, and geophysical forces, far beyond.  How are we to live in these ruins?  At the very least, we must occupy, occupy, and occupy.  (To join one small Japan-and-beyond occupation of the post-Fukushima public imagination, write a mini-essay for Naito, et. al. eds. To see once more the stars, dnaito@gmail.com)

Occupy food.  Between the monocrop deserts and charnel houses of industrial agriculture and the impatient lips of consumers lie signature ruins of our times: our deadly food supply chains.  Yet over the past decade, grassroots mobilizations, from slow foods to fair trade, have had stunning success in showing that this arrangement is not inevitable: We can make a difference.  Food policies are under scrutiny; alternative food systems are blossoming.  We have a chance.  Occupy food.

All the best characteristics of the Occupy movement can be glimpsed here too, such as the overwhelming diversity of our people and causes and our ability to form empowering connections across continents, cultures, and species.  Old ladies with neatly printed signs and swaggering Rasta boys; tree huggers and techno-whizzes; propaganda by the deed and Occupy Congress: Bring on them all.

Occupy good fortune.  In a world colonized by the entrepreneurial spirit, it is hard to know how to resist.  “Don’t make money” hardly works, and “Do make money (our way)” is even worse.  But isn’t there still a place for other kinds of fortune—the lure of curiosity; the pleasure of working with strangers; the mystery of the world in all its wild exuberance?  When security and money are everyone’s common sense, we are dulled into compliance. Occupy the familiar.  Refuse and recuperate everyday life.  Learn more languages and practice other ways to dance.  Rage against common sense; reach for what they say we can’t have: the common.

Below: Ordinary towns and vegetable gardens—and the Geiger counter sounding its alarm.  

JUSTIN CLEMENS “Occupied”

Aside from anything else, ‘globalisation’ has meant that the discourse of the cosmopolitan command class has become utterly homogenous. Almost everywhere that there have been protests, these have been subjected to police violence and to a rhetoric that holds that every protest has gone too far: it seems that to protest at all is, beyond all the pseudo-democratic drivel to which the command class still pay derisory lip-service, pretty much prohibited. In Australia, Mayor Robert Doyle called the protestors he had evicted from the Melbourne City Square ‘a self-indulgent rabble,’ a strong statement which didn’t quite capture the oleaginous smoothness of his American counterparts’ more measured disquisitions.

But the language of Occupy is also noteworthy, marked by several linguistic peculiarities. The word ‘occupy’ itself is deployed as an absolutely unqualified injunction, but without the urgency most often conveyed by an exclamation mark. Occupy — but where? how? with whom? Occupy is a universal that calls for a particular. To designate its particular manifestations, the word is hitched to a place-name, the name of a town or city: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London, Occupy X…. Certainly, not every place is as significant as every other: New York has played a key role due to its proximity to Wall Street and the media-dense situation of the US. But Occupy also implies that the occupation of any place equalizes all places. Wherever we occupy, that place is our place. Occupy is at once an injunction to take (the) place, and a declaration that this is already the case, that this place is already ours.

Moreover, the universal shows itself in its particularisation, which is refractory to any particular proposition or even bundle of propositions. As Giorgio Agamben predicted in Section XIX of his book The Coming Community (1990), entitled ‘Tiananmen’: ‘What the State cannot tolerate in any way….is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging.’ What the Occupy movement has incontrovertibly done, by organising the mere gathering of singularities without the announcement of any particular message, is expose the laws of the establishment of place, as it has opened new possibilities for the use of places. To occupy means to keep busy, engage or employ: to occupy a city space is to find a (new) use for it. Property, power and protest are already implied in the term.

Yet, if one looks at the Oxford English Dictionary’s list of definitions of ‘occupy,’ something else starts to become apparent. As one moves down the list, the entries become more and more archaic, taking on a flavour of violent usurpation and sexuality. Think of the common tag ‘Occupied,’ geared to a lock, which informs a wannabe user that a public toilet is already in use: the desperate will just have to hang on or go elsewhere. As Dominique Laporte writes in History of Shit, citing Sigmund Freud: ‘To cleanse, to order, to beautify: the fact that this discursive triad manifests itself so openly in the policing of both city and speech should give us pause.’ Everywhere government functionaries cited ‘business,’ ‘health,’ and ‘security’ reasons to legitimate their evictions; everywhere, obscure old laws or brand-new provisions were pressed into service to ensure the non-return of the protesters. Above all, the discourses of sanitation and public health prevailed: the parks occupied by the Occupiers had allegedly become filthy, unsanitary, disorderly shitholes. As Mayor Bloomberg put it, ‘From the beginning, I have said that the City had two principal goals: guaranteeing public health and safety, and guaranteeing the protesters’ First Amendment rights. But when those two goals clash, the health and safety of the public and our first responders must be the priority.’ If everybody — including the radical left — prefers the idealisations and abstractions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’, the agencies that enforce the laws of capital aren’t in the least confused: their violence is simply part of a waste-disposal program, regulated by commissions of public hygiene.

Occupy: the movement has brought to consciousness (to visibility, to representation, to the media, etc.) the waste products of global capitalism: massive numbers of human beings are now literally the excrement of capital, shit to be hosed away.

Money versus shit: this is the true message of the Occupy movement.

MARIEKE DE GOEDE “How to Fight a Derivative”

The question of how to grasp, challenge, critique the mobile, abstract and invisible nature of speculative capital is as old as the futures markets themselves. In the late nineteenth century, when options and futures were standardised and first traded on a large scale within new Exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade, the mobile, invisible, future-oriented trading practices were likened to gambling, considered to be trading in wind, or cast as the work of the devil. As bread prices fluctuated while grain speculation proliferated, a diverse alignment of Marxist, nationalist and religious commentators condemned and challenged the speculative markets. “While a few men really buy and sell wheat [on the Exchanges],” one New England preacher wrote in 1888, “the majority of speculators buy and sell promises….The paper contracts of the various Exchanges…[involve] billions of dollars…This enormous sum of money does not represent any benefit conferred upon the community, but is absorbed by the fortunate speculators without any return whatever.” Debate on the political legitimacy of financial speculation and the morality of futures trading was rife.

Today, debate on the politics and legitimacy of speculative practices is more muted and more difficult. At least, the nineteenth-century political opponents of the Chicago futures markets had visible enemies, imposing brick buildings and classic façades to direct their anger against. Today, the question of how to protest against deterritorialised, abstract, virtual, circulating, speculative capital has become much more complicated. This is not just because of the emergence of electronic, automated, algorithmic global trading, in which the iconic trading floors of the large Exchanges have given way to computerized visualisations of price fluctuations and yield curves. It is also because the dividing line between the financial participants and the excluded, between the traders and the victims, has become much more difficult to draw. If at the root of the current credit crisis are the ways in which ordinary household debts including mortgage payments and credit card receivables have been turned into speculative investment vehicles for the global financial markets – as Paul Langley has shown and analysed his excellent The Everyday Life of Global Finance – then we are (nearly) all implicated in the making of disaster. To name but one example, the Dutch pension funds, which hold the future income streams of millions of ordinary citizens – including government employees and university lecturers – are amongst the wealthy investors in the world.

But as financial markets continue their search for what Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thift have called ‘the capitalization of almost everything,’ challenging the legitimacy of speculative practices is all the more important. Occupy anchors its anger at the doorstep of the Exchanges, the Financial Districts, the Investment Banks. Does it matter that ‘finance capital’ – whatever it may be – does not necessarily reside behind those doors? In Amsterdam, Occupy has occupied the Beursplein, location of on the one hand the contemporary Euronext Exchange and on the other, the famous nineteenth century Beurs van Berlage, where financial trading has ceased long ago in favour of cultural activities and conferences. At Euronext, floor trading has also ceased, but it is still the base for a number of investment companies, brokers and related institutions such as the Dutch Securities Institute. However, Beursplein represents only a fragment of contemporary financial power – the real home of which is perhaps better found in the unspectacular trading rooms of the large banks in the Amsterdam south district, at the aforementioned pensions funds or – in the European context – in London, Paris, Frankfurt.

It is perhaps not the absence of the defined agenda and clear list of demands that is the most striking feature of Occupy. Its striking feature is its impossible promise to anchor and call to account speculative practice. Its stasis and occupation contradict the mobility and fluidity of contemporary speculation. Its ambition to stay, to extend its presence, to remain immobile, interrupts the constant drive to commodification and circulation of investment capital. With the same people in charge of ‘solving’ the crisis as have participated in bringing it about, and while the international bond markets hold European politics hostage, Occupy has hit the right target – even if the derivative is impossible to locate and the culprit banker does not necessary reside behind the occupied doorsteps.

Photos by Kathryn Yusoff