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.