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Occupying Gender in the Singular Plural

2012-01-27T07:00:29Z

Call me a sissy, but I've never particularly cared for being referred to as cisgender. Still, the work of transgendered activists within Occupy Wall Street has been one of things that keep me optimistic. At a November 13th teach-in at Zuccotti Park, just days before the brutal eviction, trans activists took over the people's mic for an hour-long lesson in occupying gender, educating their non-trans listeners on the unearned privileges we enjoy whenever we conform to ascribed gender; outlining the work that groups like the Sylvia Rivera Law Project have long been engaged in, against police violence and medical pathologization; and outlining pragmatic and principled tactics for an occupation open to trans and cis-gendered people alike.

The teach-in ended with a song by Justin Bond, who has charted a post-Kiki and Herb career as a singer-songwriter in the tradition of Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. Between releasing the 2009 EP Pink Slip and last year's full length album Dendrophile, Bond has adopted the middle name Vivian, begun to transition, and chosen the pronoun V to represent this new stage of life. Bond's OWS appearance took what a therapeutic and individualistic culture calls "finding one's voice" and performed it against the affective grain.

Justin Vivian Bond performing "The New Economy" at Occupy Wall Street

The pronoun V, and accompanying honorific Mx., occupy a linguistic elsewhere to binary gender, an elsewhere that Bond's memoir, Tango, makes clear V has resided in since childhood. Tango is not a narrative of being trapped in the wrong body, however, but only of being trapped in the wrong society, and Mx. and V are linguistic foils with which to parry that society's imprecations.

Such singular departures from accepted usage antagonize those who assume that they represent instances of amour propre. But coming from a Quaker tradition that rejects the second person plural "you," and holds onto the archaic singular forms of "thee" and "thou," I understand the purpose such speech acts serve. Much like the Society of Friends verbally resist the hierarchical, royal we, Bond's neologisms dispel the ease with which binary gender preoccupies the ordinary. These dissenting gestures trust that the lateral bonds of the common can sustain the twists and torsions they exact. They are a kind of sit-down in grammar, a linguistic and literary demand to be served as we are, not according to how we are seen, surveilled or counted. They disrupt common sense in order to find a commons.

The song Bond performed at OWS was "The New Economy," with it's pugnacious opening lines "They say it's a new depression, so why am I filled with glee? Everybody coming down quickly, now they can all join me." Glee is an affect that a certain television show has made ubiquitous in recent years, but it is not often associated with the style of OWS. Bond took glee and detached it from the ethos of aspirational participation and the compulsion to please, and restored its disaffective and disaffiliative charge. Bond was, by Vs own account, homeless at the time of the December performance, having lost an East Village apartment to gentrification's wrecking ball. But the glee Mx. performed was not schadenfreude but an invitation to queer conviviality, a living and breathing together in conspiratorial difference, a new economy of bodies and affects pitched toward the ethic, as V sang, of "take what you need and give a little back."

I think it matters that a trans person delivered this communist message, insofar as the grain of Vs voice reinflected the conventional rallying cry. Unison singing at rallies and marches, like pledges of allegiance, tend to be rites of assent: sentimental conflations of the one and the many. But the singular grain of Bond's voice, echoed through an enthusiastic crowd serving, sometimes with duty and sometimes with joy, as the human amplification system of the people's mic, defied the sincerity of singalong.

This ability to perform the singular plural, occupying gender without staking a representative claim of speaking as or for any particular position in or betwixt a binarism, leads me to the question I am dwelling with these days. The banal version of this is the journalistic question: if OWS is a new movement, where are its songs? The question betrays a nostalgia for the 60s that was initially helpful in getting people to take OWS seriously at all, but which now presents an obstacle to the emergence of what is new and different about this moment. I want to speculate just a little about what that emergent sound might be.

People are having a field day redescribing the occupation in the preferred jargon of their fields and professions. So why not me? Occupation is a performative: it doesn't so much represent the 99% as it conjures that figure into being as a speculative object of public attachment. This feeling for numbers is non-majoritarian and post-democratic insofar as it expresses a anarchist and antinomian preference for consensus decision making over majoritarian and electoral process. Excluding the 1% certainly articulates a healthy and appropriate smash the rich mentality. But the Lacanian in me also sees the 1% as yet another stand in for object a, the irreducible antagonistic remainder around which the social composes, and which is forever decomposing it. After all, wouldn't claiming to speak as or for the 100% be fascism?

99% is a multitude composed out of antagonism, not identity. Taking what they needed, and giving a little back, the transgender activists reminded those who would hear that cis privilege is not restricted to the 1%, but a necessary fractures within occupation just as other divisions of race, citizenship, and class are. Trans and queer glee become part of the affective work of occupation, not so that occupation can become more inclusive or safe, but in order to keep those minor feelings quilted into the banners and broadsides of the many, both as a formal reminders of precarious bonds that stitch us together, and as an audio analogue of those visible seams.

A version of this blog post was presented at the MLA 2012 roundtable, "Affecting Affect." Thanks to Lauren Berlant for organizing that occasion.

Saudi billionaire Alwaleed Bin Talal Invests $300 Million In Twitter

2011-12-19T17:16:37Z

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal invests $300 million in Twitter, though at the time of this announcement "it wasn't clear how much of Twitter the prince will control."

People Before Process: the Bureaucracies of Anarchy Pt. 2

2011-12-14T16:29:09Z

Sometime in early October I showed up to an OWS organizer's meeting at 16 Beaver Street. 16 Beaver, like 56 Walker or Charlotte's Place, is one of these magically anachronistic spaces in lower Manhattan that feel like something out of Patti Smith's Just Kids--free space for art, activism, and organizing, embedded in some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Of course, to label these spaces "anachronistic" is to cede to capital its totalizing power. With a nod to J. Fabian, this would deny the coevalness of diverse forms and uses of urban space within contemporary capitalism. So let's invoke both Fabian and radical feminist geographers JK Gibson-Graham, and rejoice that there are such spaces in lower Manhattan today.

But I digress. Walking into the expansive, exposed-brick third floor of 16 Beaver that October evening, there was an Arabic class going on in the back and, in another corner, roughly twenty OWS open source folks having an animated meeting. Roughly thirty of us there for the organizer's meeting made a third circle of chairs in the middle of the space.

As with nearly all OWS meetings I've attended, this one had an over-full agenda, and it started at 10pm. "Process" is the way facilitators handle these time-crunches. Described in Part I of this post, process refers to the combination of hand signals, stack-taking, and facilitated meeting organization used in OWS, and consensus-process more broadly. Process intends to allow everyone's voices to be heard, while also speeding along the often-onerous meetings. If someone goes "off-process" -- say by offering a proposal during the report-back section of the meeting, or offering a verbose and unrelated opinion when participants are busy trying to figure out a logistical problem -- there is a hand signal ("point of process") intended to bring the meeting back on course.

That night at 16 Beaver was one of the first indoor meetings I attended. The four walls and overhead lights enclosed and intensified the space in a way that I hadn't experienced at General Assemblies (GAs) in the park, rendering starker some of the human dynamics of process. In particular, the ways in which this "horizontal" and "radically democratic" process can marginalize people was radically spotlighted.

Race came up in one of the early agenda items, and "Hector"* (a young Chicano man in his early twenties) passionately declared that race was an imposed construct to be intentionally rejected. "Sarah", an African-American woman in her later twenties, at the meeting as a representative of the OWS People of Color Caucus (POC), vehemently objected to Hector's characterization of race. She suggested that he ask the people most vulnerable to racist "stop & frisk" policing tactics in Harlem if race was something one could choose to reject on an individual, intentional basis.

As their debate blossomed and drew others in, hand signals for "point of process" began to go up around the circle, as some participants expressed their opinion that this conversation was not part of the meeting's agenda. The facilitator acknowledged the points of process, and suggested that we move on. Sarah was deeply upset, explaining that the space did not feel safe to her if there wasn't room to talk openly about race. Others felt not that they were foreclosing a conversation about race, but rather that they were "staying on process," and hoping to get home at a reasonable hour. These divergent experiences of the evening did not divide neatly along racial lines. There were different people on different sides of the issue, though the facilitator's white male identity was not helpful. The meeting eventually moved on, and Sarah stood up to leave the meeting, frustrated. Several participants intercepted her and had an intense, supportive, side conversation on process and privilege.

The bureaucracies of anarchy, in other words, are rife with signals of oppression. Today, two months and one eviction after this long-ago October meeting, questions of how an ostensibly inclusive and horizontal process can marginalize people remain at the center of the tensions (productive tensions, in my opinion) in OWS.

These tensions manifest most spectacularly in Spokes Council meetings, held Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at an indoor venue (often 56 Walker) in lower Manhattan. At a Spokes Council meeting in early December, a visitor from Occupy Detroit got up to speak. She noted that in Detroit, people come to Occupy meetings to speak their minds and to hear others speak, but when they try to participate, people more familiar with the movement's rituals wave strange hand signals in their faces, telling them that their most passionately held beliefs are not "on process." This marginalizes people, she said. It makes them feel like the Occupy movement is not for them or their concerns.

Others objected to her that the hand signals and process guidelines are introduced before every meeting, and there is no way to hold meetings in the absence of some agreed-upon structure. They insisted that the process is, by design, open to everyone, and that it contains its own mechanisms for critique and redress. Some insisted further that those who refuse to use the process are being "disruptive" insofar as meetings get "sidetracked" in these conversations. You can read the minutes of the Spokes Council, disruptions and all, here (free registration may be required).

As is so often the case, the label "disruptive" is most often applied across categories of difference. Those people often considered disruptive in OWS processes have different educational backgrounds, class backgrounds, home statuses (often the chronically homeless,) and certainly different psychological habitations of the world. In other words, while race is clearly one category across which "process" marginalizes, it is not the only one. OWS also deals with the serious issues of how to include and empower the homeless, those with substance abuse issues, those with mental health issues.

These debates have derailed two-thirds of all spokes council meetings since the model went live at the beginning of November. For some, this has turned the meetings into an exercise in futility, and increased their resolve toward autonomous action within their working groups. Others bemoan the negative media attention that these gaping wounds in the skin of "solidarity" will surely beckon. But then there are others of us, and I include myself in this category, for whom these "disruptions" have become some of the most valuable time OWS can spend. They show that ideologies of solidarity, horizontality, or radical democracy always already contain their own privilege, their own insides and outsides. True radicalism is much messier, much slower, much more disruptive than any smoothly functioning process can handle.

General Assemblies still happen in the cold dark of Liberty Plaza Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. At this past Saturday's GA (December 10th) the first proposal on the agenda was from RAHKA - the Radical Activist Homeless Kicking Ass working group, many members of which had been routinely characterized as "disruptors". Their representative asked the GA to approve funds that would allow members of their group to spend the night in the 24-hour McDonald's across the street from the plaza - $2 per person per 12-hour period, to buy the coffee or other menu item that allows them to occupy the space legally. She explained that members of her group are not welcome in the church shelters OWS is using -- they are pregnant, have psych disabilities, are trans, have been abused in or kicked out of church shelters; hence the need for another option. As their proposal was debated (through OWS process of clarifying questions, points of information, etc.) it came up that they had been offered office space at 52 Broadway. Why didn't they just take that, as the Accounting working group had, rather than support McDonald's? Their representative answered that RAHKA sought to be a beacon of radicalism and transparency in the movement, and because that office space had not been offered to everyone, they refused to occupy it.

RAHKA's proposal passed and the group's many members present were jubilant. They hugged and invited everyone to join them for a coffee in McDonald's between 10pm and 5am. Using the process effectively, RAHKA also subverted its attendant privileges in multiple ways -- by refusing the "insider status" that office space would've conferred upon them, by allowing one man who routinely disrupted their presentation with drunken outbursts his time to speak. In short, RAHKA's proposal, and this post, is a call for the productivity of disruption in the face of persistent privilege. People before process, not only profits.

Salon

2011-12-02T04:52:49Z

"There is no reason to believe that these abrogations of popular sovereignty cannot be sustained for a very long time with the tactical application of force." Africa? Latin America? No, Western Europe and the U.S..

#meme

2011-11-30T17:23:48Z

When will the "meme" meme die?

Neoliberal reform in Greece

2011-11-29T15:37:37Z

There is nothing wrong with higher education in Greece that a little less democracy couldn't solve, according to an international committee that included the chancellors of University of California-Davis and New York University.

We interrupt this dispatch ... Occupy Oakland and the General Strike!

2011-11-23T22:46:01Z

I didn't realize how claustrophobic Wall Street's Liberty Park was until I arrived at my home Occupy in Oakland. Rather than the jumble of tarp-covered shelters that grew and morphed rhizome-like through Liberty Park, Occupy Oakland's colorful tents felt positively suburban, arranged over hay-covered ground, navigable by palate paths. The tent village occupied open public space surrounding city hall, overlooking the sunken architecture of a nouveau Greek Amphitheater directly in front of the mayor's door. Occupy Oakland held their General Assemblies in this amphitheater, an ironically unwelcome reclamation of the original intentions of that architectural form. (The Occupy movement in Oakland and elsewhere has repeatedly called the bluff of contemporary urban "public" architecture-as-simulacra--the aestheticization of the public--showing that the much more unruly and sustained presence of the revolting public is in fact unwelcome.) In Oakland GAs, we would sit on the steps of the amphitheater and respond to the facilitators on the stage, as they led us through proposals and break-out discussions on the reclamation of Oakland's foreclosed and bank-owned properties, or the question of multiple and incommensurate forms of violence (police violence, property-as-violence, black bloc tactics.)

My first GA under downtown Oakland's starry skies (you can see the sky here, and not merely Wall Street's towers!) was on Halloween. More than one participant milled around dressed as Robin Hood or Jesus, with one humorously gruesome "Headless Social Movement" costume. Mere days before Oakland's historic General Strike, to be held on November 2nd, the Halloween GA was calm and spirited. Widely credited as the mastermind behind the upcoming port action, hip hop MC and local activist Boots Riley stood with many others on the stage, and the crowd cheered with the announcement that the Clorox Corporation had already decided to move a major event when news of the strike hit. Our breakout discussion topic that evening in the GA was how will we each participate in the strike? We were asked to discuss in groups of 10-20 our relative arrestability levels, and other forms of privilege or vulnerability in direct action situations. We were all invited back to a strike-planning meeting the next day.

Like Liberty Square--the park-formerly-known-as-Zuccotti--Occupy Oakland also renamed their first occupied space. Formerly Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, after a civil rights leader and the first Japanese American to serve on Oakland's city council, Occupy renamed the space Oscar Grant Plaza, to commemorate the senseless and "accidental" New Year's Eve killing of a young man by transit officer Johannes Mehserle. Where Occupy Wall Street has made strong claims around inordinate corporate power and the perils of financialization in public life, yet struggled to relate those issues to questions of race and everyday violence, Occupy Oakland's symbolic and thematic content moves in the opposite direction. With the Oscar Grant case as only the most recent installment in a long history of egregious, racist police brutality, racialized inequality and ongoing forms of violence in the community are Occupy Oakland's gravitational center, and the struggle is to make the tenuous dis/connections to how few Oakland residents even have a pension fund, let alone the opportunity to own stock.

When I got back to Oscar Grant plaza for the strike planning meeting on November 1st, the amphitheater was filled with high school kids participating in an event called Swag'n 4 Justice, in which youth leaders talked passionately about the relationship between unemployment and violence, and advocated, among other tactics, to "Ban the Box," in reference to have you ever been convicted of a crime? questions on employment applications. The sound system boomed with hip hop and reggae beats, and in honor of local hip hop legend Mac Dre's birthday, "I'm in the building and I'm feelin' myself" played over the speakers as kids popped and locked across the stage and spilling out into the crowd. In short, as we say at home, that sh*&t was hella Oakland.

The Swag'n 4 Justice event came to an end, but all the organizers and many of the kids stayed for the strike planning meeting that followed. Strike actions would start at 9am the following day, with a speech by Angela Davis and a march on banks. There would be mass meet-ups at 14th & Broadway at 9am, 12pm, and 4pm, the last of which would head down to the Oakland port and shut it down in solidarity with longshoremen whose contracts forbid them to strike. Once we all had a good idea of what the following day would entail, the meeting ended and we all danced to Michael Jackson and made signs: Informed, Educated, Employed, Occupied; and I'll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.

The next day, with 20,000 other people, we shut down the port of Oakland. At one point, a mass march of teachers and students from area schools poured up the street as the port action poured down it, and we came together in a sea of elated activist confusion. By 9pm on the night of the strike thousands of us were spread between each strategic entrance to the Oakland port, waiting for the union arbitrator to declare us a health and safety hazard and officially shut the port down. As we waited, milling around in the cold, someone shouted over the people's mic, "who knew the revolution would require so much waiting around?" Someone else shouted back, "the Russians!" Trucks still seemed to be entering and exiting the port, and there was a lot of confusion and miscommunication, but eventually our action was victorious, and we shut down the fifth largest port in the country. It was the first General Strike in our country since the 1940s. And the last one? Also in Oakland.

In a movement like other movements filled with evictions, violence, false starts, deep imperfections and systemic shortcomings, moments like the Oakland general strike, or dancing to Michael Jackson with people I don't know but who I could never call strangers, are indispensable to replenishing the well of activist energy in all of us. It was a moment, as they say, at the beginning of the beginning. Give thanks (and happy Thanksgiving.)

UC Davis

2011-11-21T19:55:32Z

When did "health and safety" become a euphemism for "shock and awe"?

The Ritual of General Assembly and the Bureaucracies of Anarchy

2011-10-30T23:06:49Z

If you have spent anytime with Occupiers, you have seen people (sometimes by the thousands) hold their hands above their heads and wiggle their fingers. Jazz hands? Cult sign? Known as "twinkling" when it expresses a positive sentiment, the hand signals are perhaps the most visibly and phenomenologically ritualistic part of Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly process, a protracted exercise in mass participatory decision making.

At a minimum, the phrase "General Assembly" has two meanings in the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together movement (see General Assembly Guide). On the one hand, it is used to refer to the collective Occupy participants in and beyond Liberty Park, (as in, we are all part of the General Assembly). On the other hand, and more specifically, it refers to the nightly, open meetings held in the park and across the country at 7pm. That these rituals of contemporary anarchist activism have made their way quite seriously into the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine tells us something about the destabilizations of our present moment.

A "general assembly" means something specific and special to an anarchist. In a way, it's the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies. A "GA" is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are made--not by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands. It can be an arduous process. One of the things Occupy Wall Street has done is introduce the GA to a wider audience, along with the distinctive sign language participants use to raise questions or express support, disapproval, or outright opposition.

Since September 17th, 2011, General Assembly (GA) in the second sense has been held nightly in Liberty Park. After the GA on Sunday evening, October 30th, however, this will no longer be the case. What was this nightly ritual? What is taking its place? In offering partial answers to these questions, this two-part Dispatch attempts a brief ethnographic meditation on the bureaucracies of anarchy and the spaces of politics.

Every night, the GA meeting at Liberty Park starts with members of the facilitation working group (WG) introducing themselves over the people's mic to those assembled. All are welcome at these meetings, and downtown's after-work crowd often fills in the twilight square, with others lingering around the edges. Meeting facilitators change every evening, and anyone can facilitate a GA after attending a facilitation training, held every afternoon at 5pm. In general GAs are co-facilitated, and meetings begin with the two facilitators introducing themselves, followed by introductions from those filling the other facilitation-team roles: stack-taker, stack-greeter, time-keeper, and minute-keeper. There is clearly an increasing effort to keep this nightly team diversified by gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality, though less-so by age. "Stack" refers to the list of people who would like to speak in any of the GA's four phases: agenda items/proposals, working group report-backs, announcements, and soap box. As each phase of the meeting begins, the stack-taker compiles the names of those who wish to speak. GAs follow "progressive stack" and "step-up, step-back" guidelines, described at the beginning of every meeting as twin processes in which those whose voices are traditionally marginalized will be prioritized, and those who speak often are asked to step back so that others can step up. Lovely, in theory; unsurprisingly complicated in practice.

After the facilitation team introduces themselves and defines stack, the ritual of GA proceeds to descriptions and demonstrations of the hand signals. One of the facilitators narrates and demonstrates, and she is echoed on the people's mic: "Hands up, fingers waving means 'I feel good! I like this!'" Hands in the GA shoot up, twinkling, and the group responds "Hands up, fingers waving means 'I feel good! I like this!'" The facilitator continues, "Hands flat, fingers waving means 'I'm on the fence. I'm not so sure.'" (The echo of voice and gesture) "Hands down, fingers waving means 'I don't feel so good. I don't like this.'" (Echo, gesture.) The narrator continues to explain and demonstrate the hand signals for Point of Process, Point of Information, Clarifying Question or Comment, Wrap It Up (to be used with compassion, it is always specified,) and finally, a Block: arms crossed in an x in front of your chest. "A block is very serious" the facilitator always explains. (A block is very serious, we all repeat.) "A block means you have ethical or safety issues with the proposal on the table, and you are willing to leave the movement if it passes. If you present a block, you will be asked to explain your block in front of the whole GA."

Once the ritual of explanation and demonstration of the hand signals is over, GA proceeds to agenda items and proposals, always the first and generally most important issues covered at nightly meetings. Proposals are ideas that require consensus in order to proceed--various forms of direct action, spending OWS money in excess of $100, endorsing a particular march or event as "OWS," or a new form of bureaucratic procedure. Proposals can only be brought by or through already-existing working groups (WGs) though anyone can join any WG at any time, and suggest a proposal. Proposal content spans the sublime to the ridiculous, but the rituals and rigor of the consensus process makes them all seem hyper-bureaucratic and arduous. A few examples:

As of mid-October, OWS was receiving 500 packages per day of donated goods, all of which were delivered to a P.O. box at a family-owned UPS franchise store near Wall Street, for which OWS was paying $40/month. The Shipping, Inventory, and Storage Working Group (which operates out of a space donated by the local Teacher's Union) proposed that, after negotiating with the business owners, the movement begin to pay $500/month for an ironically named "corporate account," given that the mass volume of goods received far exceeds the business' stated maximum volume for P.O. box accounts. After a series of clarifying questions and friendly amendments from the GA about the precise relationship between this franchise and UPS corporate, and the relative merits of changing our account to a USPS account, their proposal reached consensus.
The Stop Stop & Frisk Working Group proposed that OWS officially endorse their action in Harlem, (at which Cornel West and Communist Party spokesperson Carl Dix were both subsequently arrested, see video below). The GA agreed overwhelmingly and consensus was reached without clarifying questions or friendly amendments.
The Legal Working Group introduced a recent proposal by explaining that, "so far, we have been focusing our energies on getting you out of jail and applying for permits." Going forward, they proposed that no individual person or WG apply for permits, injunctions, or file a lawsuit through the city in the name of Occupy Wall Street without first consulting with Legal. "If you're taking legal action that will effect this occupation as a whole, or if you're taking legal action in the name of this occupation ... we propose that you consult us before you do so." This was a controversial proposal, and though it eventually reached consensus, many present were worried that they were being asked to abdicate their individual legal rights and volitions to a team of "experts." Only when the Legal WG clarified that all were still welcome to file lawsuits and permits as individuals did the proposal pass.

Each of these and many other proposals I've seen - from Media asking for $25,000 to upgrade their IT equipment to the conciliatory proposal finally brought by the Pulse Working Group (the drummers) in conjunction with Community Relations and Direct Action -- were in their own ways contentious and arduous. Moreover, those just passing through the movement's symbolic center on their way home to dinner, often hoping for clarity or even a brief shot of economic justice talk, were often sorely disappointed that GA is overwhelmingly taken up by questions of bureaucracy: how much do we pay UPS? how long can the drummers drum? do I have to consult legal before filing for a permit?

This brings us toward questions about the spaces of politics, which I take up in part two of this dispatch. What is the relationship between the making and maintenance of Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan (its mail, its legal procedures, its noise statutes) with the making and maintenance of the broader ideas and actions of a growing movement that exists as much in the media and social networking as it does in disobedient reclamations of the commons? For a month and a half, it has been an almost-sacred tenet of OWS that the medium is the message, that the reclamation of privatized public space not only for engaged citizenship, but also for free food, shelter, clothing, health care, libraries, education, wifi, and more, is OWS politics. Logistics, the claim goes, are politics. And yet even to those most dedicated to that position, it rarely feels like enough. Bureaucracy rarely feels transcendent.

In the latest developments of the bureaucracies of anarchy in OWS, these contentions over the spaces of politics have been brought to the fore in the single most controversial GA proposal in the movement's young life: to change the very process of consensus itself, and to move from a nightly General Assembly to a Spokes Council Model. What is at stake? If logistics are politics, as many in the movement have strongly claimed, then this move looks to signal Bakunin's warning about the hierarchy of the bureaucrats. If, on the other hand, as the movement has grown, GA has become so hyper-bureaucratic that it has effectively stalled effective organization, the Spokes Council model claims to remedy that by giving those who determine where and how we eat or receive mail a separate decision-making structure through which to work, enabling the rest to use GA to consider "larger" ideas, for instance, the constitutional amendment abolishing corporate personhood and overthrowing Citizen's United. Regardless, on Friday October 28th a 9/10ths vote (note: not consensus) passed the Spokes Council Model, and there will no longer be nightly GAs at 7pm in Liberty Park.

Top photo of special session of OWS General Assembly held in Washington Square Park by Matt McDermott.

2011-10-28T02:50:58Z

Great aerial footage of #OWS action in solidarity with #OccupyOakland

2011-10-20T00:08:55Z

Brown University faculty issues statement of support for Occupy Providence

Days of Rage

2011-10-18T21:46:28Z

What Days of Rage looked like around the world.

The Dirt, or, Matter Out of Place

2011-10-17T22:00:00Z

In her 1966 book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas famously explains dirt as "matter out of place." Dirt does not index an objective category of pathogens or pollutants she suggests, but rather the designation of "dirt" indexes a contravention to a social order, and by extension, its boundaries. That which transgresses boundaries of a given order is dirt or dirty, thereby reaffirming the validity, naturalness, and purity of that which remains within. Perhaps needless to say, the occupiers are matter out of place. And, for an 18-hour period between the afternoon of Thursday October 13th and Friday October 14th, it seemed that "dirt" might finally send them back where they belong.

On Thursday morning, OWS received a memo from Mayor Bloomberg stating that Brookfield Office Properties, the owner of Zuccotti Park, was demanding that protesters evacuate the following day for a cleaning to start at 7 am, after which they could return. When I arrived in Liberty Park (as OWS has renamed Zuccotti - see Dispatch 1) on Thursday afternoon, an emergency General Assembly (GA) had been called to discuss the memo and the movement's response. The tone of the meeting was urgent and strategic, with content limited to discussion of the OWS strategy in response to this memo.

The Facilitation Working Group explained to those of us present that Occupy Austin (Texas) had been thrown out of their space in the wake of a verbatim letter. The Austin occupiers had taken the letter's contents in good faith, evacuated for the cleaning, and were never let back in. City governments and landowners had also used the dirt(y) tactic successfully in Madrid and Barcelona. With this accumulated historical knowledge, OWS declared that the cleaning notification was a pretext for eviction, and developed a plan to effectively call Bloomberg's bluff. We were not leaving. "This is an occupation," one presenter declared, "not an invited picnic. We don't need permission to be here." The rest of the emergency GA was spent laying out the plan.

First, some background on "dirt" in Liberty Park. As the occupation began, OWS requested port-a-potties and dumpsters from the city. These requests were denied, arguably to hasten a situation in which the city could label the occupation a public health hazard. And yet, with neither on-site bathrooms nor adequate waste facilities, the Sanitation Working Group and the citizens of Occupy Wall Street have kept Liberty Park remarkably clean. Not only is the ground free of trash, but there is a recycling system in place as well. The kitchen, which feeds up to 2,000 people per day, not only maintains astonishing cleanliness in service and disposal, but filters used dish-water through a plant and stone gray water filtration system, using the cleaned water to nourish the park's flowers.

With these practices of as-clean-as-possible living already in place, the OWS response to Bloomberg and Brookfield's cleaning order set out to prove that "dirt" or sanitation was not in fact the issue, but rather that the occupation's contravention of social norms--matter out of place--was at stake. The Sanitation Working Group (who had spearheaded the effort to keep the park clean from the beginning) requested that the General Assembly approve the release of $3,000 to pay for environmentally-friendly cleaning supplies, mops, brooms, and the rental of a pressure washer to launch our own park-wide cleaning effort. The GA reached consensus easily, and we all pledged to spend the rest of the afternoon and night cleaning the park. The Storage, Inventory, and Shipping Working Group opened up their nearby storage facility (donated by the Teacher's Union) for people's individual belongings, and groups of people moved the park's contents there while the rest of us joined Sanitation for the evening.

The Direct Action Working Group--generally tasked with organizing marches and other non-violent actions of civil disobedience--then presented their strategy for the next morning's visit, where we all anticipated not only Brookfield's cleaning crew, but also a police descent into the park to enforce the cleaning order and potential eviction. The original memo specified that Brookfield's group would clean the park in thirds, and each third would take four hours, suggesting a twelve hour evacuation. Direct Action suggested that we facilitate the cleaning according to these specifics, but without leaving the park. We would simply occupy the park two-thirds at a time, clearing one-third for Brookfield's cleaning to proceed. That way we would comply with the request without ceding ground. Those who were willing (depending on "arrestability levels" -- the acknowledged varying consequences of arrest across class, race, education, and gender lines) would sit in rows to divide the park in thirds, arm in arm in a "soft-lock." Behind them another row would stand in soft-lock, and behind them the rest of those willing to stay in the park would stand with signs, drums, etc. Those who did not want to risk arrest were of course free to leave the park, including the legal option of taking up half the sidewalk around its borders.

With the plan in place, we cleaned for hours. As news spread of the potential eviction, New Yorkers streamed down to Liberty Park, and the cleaning thus served as a visual indicator of dirt-as-pretext as we all mopped and scrubbed. To highlight the contradiction, the Public Relations Working Group had a 6' x 3' sign professionally made, which they displayed in the front of the park as we cleaned:
Cleaning and strategizing stretched into the night. Those of us who were willing to risk arrest attended de-escalation trainings, drilled the direct action plan, and wrote the number for the National Lawyer's Guild on the inside of our arms. By 1 am the park was clean, the direct action plan was in place, and it was pouring rain. Nearly one hundred of us occupied the McDonald's across the street from Liberty Park for several hours (yes -- the daily contradictions of occupation) while others danced or huddled in the rain.

By 3 am the rain cleared. Expecting police intervention as early as 4 am, we streamed back into Liberty Park. Anxious meetings were going on everywhere. Much of the energy was nervous: could we trust our fellow occupiers to remain non-violent? Could we trust our fellow occupiers to follow the plan? Others talked about occupying another park, forfeiting this location. Those hours were uneasy and scattered. Few slept. But slowly the energy of the park changed. New Yorkers from all neighborhoods began streaming to the park. Union rank and file milled around in the dim dawn in yellow and purple T-Shirts. I met a group of people who had come from Boston in the wake of the potential eviction news, and a man who had used his frequent flier miles to buy a last-minute flight from Chicago.

Between 4 and 5 am the park surged with people and positive feeling. Soon it was so crowded that it was impossible to move. We stood together and chanted: "Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!" Individuals got up and spoke over the people's microphone (see Dispatch 2) about the movement, about economic justice, about solidarity, about love and the importance of the moment. At 6 am Facilitation announced that those for whom arrest would be too risky were invited to leave the park and form a ring around the outside. I did not see a single person leave, though the area was already surrounded by a wall of people.

And then, the announcement. Shortly after 6 am, OWS received official word that the cleaning had been postponed. Brookfield thought it could find a way to "work with" the occupiers. Jubilation. The park erupted in a roar of triumph. Dirt had not been a sufficient pretext. New Yorkers and citizens from around the country and the world declared that the occupation was not matter out of place, but rather was stretching the boundaries of our current social order in directions that an overwhelming number of people support.

I would like to suggest, however, before we congratulate ourselves, that we be attentive to the other ways in which even those of us who support the movement are often insistent on its dirtiness in other ways--the ways in which it remains stubbornly "out of place" by refusing to have identifiable leaders, a narrow set of demands, or a unified plan of action. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Bernard Harcourt differentiated OWS' tactics as political disobedience, vs. civil disobedience: "Civil disobedience" he writes, "accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period." Reminiscent of anthropologist Partha Chatterjee's distinction between civil and political society, Harcourt's argument is an important one, and echoed in less academic language on Occupy Oakland's homepage: "Our only demand is an invitation: join us!"

While I too have struggled with my own normative assumptions about what "effective" political mobilization looks like, and had a tremendous amount of anxiety earlier in my participation, OWS has helped me understand ethnographically -- in a lived way -- the power of effects over plans, practices over strategies. I would encourage all of us to expand what is imaginable with Occupy Wall Street, and to acknowledge the fundamental shortcomings of only focusing on a liberal democratic electoral platform, for example. When matter out of place is defended by so many within a social order, it is that social order that is showing signs of change.

(Top photo by Michael Ralph).

The People's Microphone

2011-10-13T14:25:13Z

"Mic check!" The shouted exclamation punctuates the days at Occupy Wall Street (OWS). A lone voice yells it from somewhere in the crowd, soliciting the hoped-for response, "mic check!" yelled back by all within earshot of the initial call. Often the response is weak the first time around. Maybe the caller is surrounded by people new to the movement, who aren't yet familiar with the rituals, or don't yet feel comfortable making them their own; maybe the voices around her are tired, from so many days and weeks of the people's microphone. But with a second, often more insistent call, "mic check!" the surrounding voices rise in response, "mic check!"

Amplified sound requires a permit in New York City for which OWS has applied repeatedly, and been denied. While this ordinance is unevenly enforced across the city's landscape, violating it in Liberty Park would give the police an expedient rationale to end the occupation. Yet messages still have to be communicated to thousands of people, whether during decentralized days of small-group work or during the nightly General Assembly meeting at 7pm. The people's microphone is the solution. Perhaps tracing a genealogy to the phrase's use in hip hop, the call of "mic check!" followed by its response, "mic check!" from all who heard, begins what is one of the most definitive experiences of communication at the occupation--the repetition and amplification of one another's voices.

"There will be-" shouts a caller,
"there will be-" responds the collective,
"a teach in-" she continues,
"a teach in-" we respond
"on cooperative economies-"
"on cooperative economies-"
"under the red sculpture-"
"under the red sculpture-"
"in ten minutes!"
"in ten minutes!"

Amplified by the voices of many, the voice of one can spread through the crowd without amplified sound.

The people's mic is available to anyone in the park at any time, and it becomes both a tool of radical equalization and an embodied ritual of spending time in the movement. Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein, Russell Simmons, Michael Moore, and other public figures who have come to the park to express solidarity all used the people's mic, speaking in short bursts and pausing as they listened to the amplified chant/echoes of their words spreading through the assembly. When particularly large crowds gather--on the weekends or in nightly General Assembly meetings--there can be two and sometimes even three "generations" of amplification, so that the original utterance echoes outward into the far reaches of the crowd. In talking to MSNBC about his experience at Liberty Park, Joe Stiglitz commented on the people's mic: "we have too little regulation of banks, but too much regulation of our democratic processes. I could not talk yesterday with a normal bullhorn. I've talked [to activists and gatherings] in other places, and this is the first time that there's been that kind of restraint to communicating with a large group ... This is not the way other countries have allowed their demonstrations to communicate with each other."

Stiglitz's criticism on the strictures of democratic processes juxtaposed with the libertine deregulation of financial processes is well taken, and it points us to the ways in which the people's microphone is a synecdoche for the larger issues at stake: Occupy Wall Street aims to show that despite living in a democracy that has been radically attenuated by the financialization of everything from our personhood (credit scores) to our citizenship (private campaign finance), we can and will speak back. Our numbers will amplify us if our money will not.

And yet at the same time, as an inhabited practice, the people's microphone is difficult. It is strenuous and cumbersome, vulnerable to fatigue and a lack of mass participation. An otherwise brief announcement, sent over the people's mic to a large crowd, can take ten minutes or more. Attention spans wane; voices get hoarse; rhythm gets off and instead of a unison echo, people's words get jumbled into a polyphony of partial repetition. And other noises are everywhere. The vigorous drumming and chanting that continues from morning until night in the down-slope corner of Liberty park does not stop during the General Assembly, in deference to radical democratic ethics in which everyone can freely express their participation without being policed by others. In addition, there is a city work crew which begins to jackhammer an adjacent sidewalk every evening shortly after the 7pm meeting time. (Talk about passive resistance! Lovely to see the city having to resort to weapons of the weak.) With its difficulties and aural competitors then, the people's mic seems also to be a lesson in the burdens of direct democracy, a lesson in the obstinacy required for intentional, durable citizenship.

At the General Assembly on October 11th, a young man who introduced himself as Ian ("Hi I'm Ian," "Hi I'm Ian") explained that he had developed an app for the movement.

"It amplifies my voice-"
"It amplifies my voice-"
"through your phone!"
"through your phone!"

In other words, were his idea to be implemented, people could call his number for free access to the application, and then sit together in smaller groups in order to hear what was being said, without having to yell. Perhaps it will be an elegant solution to the problem of amplification. Undoubtedly, it will come with its own difficulties and exclusions, and require its own forms of obstinacy. But the cry of "mic check!"--one voice seeking many--will surely endure.

Hannah Chadeayne Appel is an anthropologist, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia's Committee on Global Thought. (Top photo by PAVDW.)

An Introduction

2011-10-12T18:19:55Z

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of updates from Occupy Wall Street, written by Hannah Chadeayne Appel, a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. Photo by Matt McDermott.

Ethnographic Observations from Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street's numbers have swelled to thousands here in New York City, not to mention the Occupy Together Movement across the country. At the October 10th General Assembly meeting--held every evening at 7pm--the kitchen announced that it serves 2000 people free food every day. The Occupied Wall Street Journal is in its second edition, with the first also translated into Spanish.

As these details intimate, there is a highly and horizontally organized working structure to the occupation. Moreover, contrary to some media coverage, there is also shared message among the thousands. The message is articulated differently, from anarchists to church ladies, union members to homeless youth, but it is shared. A widely circulated leaflet at the occupation described the movement as "an otherwise unaffiliated group of concerned citizens who have come together with the general purpose of holding Wall Street accountable for their fiscal recklessness and criminal perversion of the democratic process." Citizens at OWS are raising their voices against the rapacious excesses of the financial system, and the aiding and abetting of that pillage by our elected officials. For those who believe that language sounds excessive, consider the 14.2 million home foreclosures that have occurred between 2006 and 2010. Think of dwindling pension funds, California's public education system, the lavish executive bonuses juxtaposed to the noose tightening around public services and working people across our country. In response, Occupy Wall Street offers citizens a space where "the 99%" can begin to imagine and enact a reinvigorated democracy and a more equitable financial system.

With this openly shared message in mind, is important to push back against the rhetoric of "disorganization," or "a movement without a message" coming from left, right, and center. Occupy Wall Street is practicing an ethic of radical democracy: every voice counts and every action is meaningful. Eschewing hierarchies of charismatic leadership, narrow messaging, or sound bites, the movement makes room for multiples, and asks that disagreements make room for one another. The thousands of voices, bodies, minds, and hearts on Wall St. everyday do not have to agree in any constricted sense in order to be effective. Indeed, space for multiple voices and multiple concerns defines the movement. It is stronger in its multiplicity.

The process of "occupation" (hundreds of people camped permanently in Zuccotti park) is modeled explicitly on the occupation of Egypt's Tahrir Square. Zuccotti Park has been renamed Liberty Park. The movement is overtly international in its influences and scope, and routinely invokes similar occupations of public space not only in Egypt, but also in Spain, Greece, Senegal, and elsewhere, where citizens have also been demanding less precarious lives: affordable education, food, shelter, and health care; the right to a fairly-remunerated livelihood.

Some of the more specific goals of the movement are recognizably liberal and achievable within our current political economy:

more progressive taxation policies including a definitive end to the Bush tax cuts;
new regulation, and renewed enforcement of existing regulation of large banks;
regulations on the mis-allocation of capital toward speculation and fictitious investment vehicles, steering it toward productive uses in infrastructure, the arts, and other paths that will create employment and the greatest good for the greatest number.
banning of private campaign finance

Some of the more specific goals require imaginative work:

How can we end the false scarcity created in this moment of global financial panic? We CAN afford to build an inclusive society in which all citizens have affordable access to their basic needs. What would that require?
What would popular control of the financial system look like? How can we democratize economic analysis
What would it look like for credit unions and cooperative businesses to play a larger role in our economy?

What can you do?

If you're in New York, come! Talk to people! If you have any flexibility in your schedule, come to New York!
Wherever you are, please express your support for the movement. Please start conversations about the economic and political environment you would like to live in, and how we can realize that together.
Donate! Again, the movement is well organized and the Finance Working Group is taking donations to pay for the free food, free medical care, art supplies, and media campaign they prepare and distribute every day. For information on donating money, go to: nycga.cc
You can also donate goods. As of Tuesday October 11th the items needed most urgently were: sleeping bags; tarps; large umbrellas; first aid; and warm clothing. Please see nycga.cc for mailing details