OCUPE A PIEDADE

"mage, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation W. J. T. Mitchell Critical Inquiry Vol. 39, No. 1 (Autumn 2012), pp. 8-32"

Civic City Cahier 5: Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis Author: Erik Swyngedouw Publisher: Bedford Press Language: English Pages: 64 Size: 11.5 x 19 cm Weight: 74 g Binding: Softcover ISBN: 978-1-907414-19-0 Availability: Out of stock Sign up to get notified when this product is back in stock Price: €9.00 Product Description Reading the urban revolts and out-bursts of irrational violence preceding and following the crisis of neoliberalism as sings of discontent and of a desire for alterna-tive designs of the urban, Erik Swyngedouw reintroduces the idea of the (dead) polis as a space of political encounter. Techno-managerial policies of governing colonised the polis. Politics as dispute is replaced by the neoliberal, postdemocratic consensus. This condition, which designers of all kinds helped to shape, excludes disagreement and disavows conflict as the constitutive element of democratic politics. For Swyngedouw, designing dissensus in the context of a post-political regime requires transgressing 'the fantasy that sustains the post-political order'. It would strive to redesign 'the urban as a democratic political field of dispute' and to produce 'common values and the collective oeuvre, the city'. While the city as polis may be dead, spaces of political engagement occur within the cracks, in between the meshes and the strange inter-locations that shape places that contest the police order. It is here that design, as a renewed political practice, can intervene.

American Ethnologist on Occupy by Zachary MenchiniTweetFacebookEmail The May 2012 issue of American Ethnologist has three open-access articles focused on the Occupy movement. In "The Occupy Movement in Žižek's hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming," Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik write: We trace the development of decidedly minoritarian forms of decision making-the "democracy of direct action," as it is known locally-to activists' experiences of organizing for migrant and minority rights in the face of ethnonationalism. We compare the democracy of direct action to Occupy Wall Street's consensus-based model. In conclusion, we ask how ethnographic attention to the varieties of emergent political forms within the current global cycle of protest might extend recent theorizing of radical politics and contribute to broader efforts to reimagine democracy. Jeffrey S. Juris offers "Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation": Whereas listservs and websites helped give rise to a widespread logic of networking within the movements for global justice of the 1990s-2000s, I argue that social media have contributed to an emerging logic of aggregation in the more recent #Occupy movements-one that involves the assembling of masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces. However, the recent shift toward more decentralized forms of organizing and networking may help to ensure the sustainability of the #Occupy movements in a posteviction phase. And David Nugent comments on the first two articles and the questions they raise "about the temporalities of capitalism and about the dilemmas of inclusion in the recent Occupy movements." Tags: activism, becoming, capitalism, coauthorship, democracy, direct action, direct democracy, globalization, inclusion, inequality, new technologies, Occupy, political protest, public protest, public space, Slovenia, social media

Occupy Ethnography: Reflections on Studying the Movement by Zoltán Glück and Manissa McCleave MaharawalTweetFacebookEmail Winter has seen Occupy Wall Street shift gears. Meetings have moved indoors, and the movement is now more a network of decentralized groups working on symbiotic projects and campaigns. Winter has also brought a moment of self-reflection. Conversations about strategy abound, as do conversations about how best to use one's time and energy. This moment of self-reflection is also an opportunity to turn the analytic gaze upon ourselves and ask what it means to do research on a constantly changing social movement and what lessons Occupy may have to teach the ethnographer. Here in New York, since January, Occupy has been planning for the General Strike on May 1st. These meetings, which started as unwieldy debates about the very idea of a general strike, are now becoming focused planning meetings where important decisions about march routes, alliance-building, tactics, and points of negotiation with organized labor are being decided. In such a context, participation often means being involved in an outreach cluster, taking on some share of the labor in your working group, and thereby becoming implicated in the success or failure of the tasks of the day. The "participation" of participant observation, then, is a process whereby one becomes part of the group (ethnos) that one is writing (graphos) about. Far from being unique to these planning meetings, we argue that because of the structure and process of Occupy, ethnography becomes a practice through which the researcher is inscribed in the movement. The Occupy movement is one deeply concerned with its process, seeking to realize ideals of inclusion and democratic participation through the practice of consensus decision making. With this practice, the process of making a decision is just as important as the decision itself. Consensus explicitly aims to prevent the oppression that occurs th

Occupy's Expressive Impulse by Todd GitlinTweetFacebookEmail Matthew Noah Smith has written a most cogent critique of Occupy's current direction-its prime direction, anyway. I agree with almost everything he says, not least his pithy summary: "Occupy is all play but no power." But how did Occupy get here? And what's the alternative? As I show in Occupy Nation, the movement's core has been more expressive than strategic from the beginning. This core, those who clustered around Zuccotti Park and other such hubs, and remain the reliables who make up the so-called Working Groups, are not the majority of the demonstrators who turn out on major occasions (Oct. 5, Oct. 15, Nov. 17, May 1)-far from it-but they are the movement's beating heart. They take the initiative. They make plans. They act. They are not 99 percent of the 99 percent. Much of the initiative that surfaced so volcanically last fall came from a sort of counterculture, an anarchist post-punk core-often of anarcho-syndicalist and Situationist inspiration-that proclaimed itself "horizontalist" and "anti-capitalist" and "revolutionary" and had no qualms about doing so. Its theatrical elements were not incidental; they were central. The General Assemblies, with their "human mic" rituals, were the way in which the movement's core displayed itself to itself. What it created was, as Matthew Smith says, an aesthetic. The statement they made was: We're here, horizontal, improvising. We want to secede, more or less, from the market economy. We abhor the capitalist organization of work. We want to pool our skills. We ourselves, the way we relate to each other, constitute our demand, our agenda, our program. The movement, well aware of its theatrical potential, was superficially visible to outsiders, bystanders, and the media, but those forms of its visibility weren't its central point-the movement's most binding transaction, let's say-and bystanders and mainstrea

In this Oct. 18, 2011 photo, an Occupy Wall Street protestor speaks into microphone for a live-streaming online interview at the media area in Zuccotti Park in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)   From its inception, the Occupy movement has had a contentious relationship with the mainstream media. On September 17, a few hours into the first day of the occupation, as a couple of hundred people assembled in Zuccotti Park, some demonstrators were already complaining of a "media blackout." I was there, as an enthusiastic participant, yet even I wasn't convinced the event was particularly newsworthy: in May more than 10,000 people had marched through nearby streets airing similar grievances; a month later protesters camped for two weeks outside City Hall as part of a protest called Bloombergville. Yet accusations flew through the Twittersphere. The traditional media are ignoring us! Why aren't we big news? About the Author Astra Taylor Astra Taylor is the director of the documentary films Zizek! and Examined Life. She has written for Monthly Review,... Also by the Author Occupy Wall Street on Your Street (Occupy Wall Street) Banks trying to foreclose on homes are surprisingly vulnerable to direct action-a fact that Occupy Our Homes intends to exploit. Astra Taylor 7 comments The Other Prison Population (Movements, Disability Rights Movement) Disabled people march on Washington to protest policies that keep them out of sight, out of mind. Astra Taylor Related Topics Entertainment Religion Social Issues Technology War Before long, Occupy Wall Street would be. When protesters managed to hold their ground through the weekend, sleeping on hard concrete and eating pizza donated by well-wishers from around the world, reporters began dutifully to file stories. But the charge of a media "blackout" persisted until September 24, when shaky video of several young women being cordoned off and pepper-sprayed point-blank by a white-shirted police officer was up

David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst* By gregdowney Posted: October 15, 2011 Wall Street is in the grips of an 'occupation,' and activist and anthropologist, David Graeber, now at Goldsmiths, University of London, is in the centre of the action.  Graeber has been doing a few television and radio interviews of late (check here for his interview on ABC Radio National, Australia), talking about the organization of the Wall Street occupation as well as his new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House). The juxtaposition of Florida Governor Rick Scott's recent comments about anthropology and the fact that Graeber is offering what may be among the most penetrating and accessible analyses of an important dimension of the current global debt crisis is striking. Of course, maybe clear-eyed analysis of our current economic situation, and the ability to point out that other societies do perfectly well with other sorts of economic and political systems, is precisely the sort of academic work that Gov. Rick Scott thinks universities should give up.  After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt.  Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs.  Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain! Graeber is doing exactly what many of us want university-based social and cultural anthropologists to do more of: not just doing outstanding, useful applied work (which is bloody brilliant, of course), but also showing how our distinctive intellectual perspectives - comparative, evolutionary, cross-cultural, critical, even deconstructive (and 'post-modern') - provide academic analyses with important, 'real world' implications. After all, part of the current problem in the global economy is not just that we have bad applications of economic theory-we have b

May 1, 2012 Pt.1 A Call To Strike To friends who don't live in the US, or others who have not yet been touched by the call for a General Strike on this day, we write this short note, as a kind of update. Some of our earliest discussions in the space began with considerations of what could or could not be considered work; who is included and who is excluded when we talk about labor. And what constitutes labor today in this everywhere and nowhere paradigm of production. Moreover, we have reflected together on what could potentially constitute a political activity today? It is no surprise then that the most intensive global attempts at responses in recent memory come precisely when the living labor of humans is in its most deformed and devalued form, and political space everywhere appears the most foreclosed, by a logic that would prefer to reduce politics to a managerial task of order and administration. A call for a national general strike in the United States has happened perhaps only once, for May 1st, 1886 [to be expanded by historians?]. In our January retreat/seminar, The Crisis of Everything Everywhere, we had a session, "On the General Strike". We asked: How it could be deployed? What are our historical and political conceptions of the strike, how do they relate to our present contexts, and what forms of communication and solidarity are necessary to see the strike we want to see? Who calls for the strike, who strikes, what do we do during the strike, and is there an AFTER the strike? What activities do we expect to precede this call, and what do we expect to follow? Can we have a general strike which is not instrumentalized, but is a political act, a step towards definitive refusal or revolt? The efficacy of this meeting was to be found neither in its valor for organizing, nor the theories we developed together. Its efficacy came in its indiscernibility between intellectual work, cultural work, and political work. To

Charting Hybridised Realities:  Tactical Cartographies for a densified present In the midst of an enquiry into the legacies of Tactical Media - the fusion of art, politics, and media which had been recognised in the middle 1990s as a particularly productive mix for cultural, social and political activism [1], the year 2011 unfolded. The enquiry had started as an extension of the work on the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for tactical media practices worldwide [2], which grew out of the physical archives of the infamous Next 5 Minutes festival series on tactical media (1993 - 2003) housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. After making much of tactical media's history accessible again on-line, our question, as editors of the resource, had been what the current significance of the term and the thinking and practices around it might be? Prior to 2011 this was something emphatically under question. The Next 5 Minutes festival series had been ended with the 2003 edition, following a year that had started on September 11, 2002, convening local activists gatherings named as Tactical Media Labs across six continents. [3] Two questions were at the heart of the fourth and last edition of the Next 5 Minutes: How has the field of media activism diversified since it was first named 'tactical media' in the middle 1990s? And what could be significance and efficacy of tactical media's symbolic interventions in the midst of the semiotic corruption of the media landscape after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? This 'crash of symbols' for obvious reasons took centre stage during this fourth and last edition of the festival. Naomi Klein had famously claimed in her speedy response to the horrific events of 9/11 that the activist lever of symbolic intervention had been contaminated and rendered useless in the face of the overpowering symbolic power of the terrorist attacks and their real-time mediation on a global scale. [4] The