Concentric Circles

Occupennial co-organizer Paul McLean penned this essay on concentric circles and the structural dynamics of #OWS, plus related phenomena for his blog AFH2011. To read the essay, click the images above or below.

[NOTE: The final pre-publication draft version is HERE.]

Concentric Circles: A Conjecture about the Dimensional Nature of the Fast-Spreading Global Occupation, in Text and Images

∞

Interdiction is always a rule of the State; impossibility is a regulation of the real.” – Alain Badiou, “Highly Speculative Realism on the Concept of Democracy”

We’re living in a Post-9.17 World.

Two months + 1 after the #OccupyWallStreet movement (and it is one, now) congealed in Zuccotti Park, a sketch of the New World Order is in order. Last August, those of us who took Badiou’s seminar at the European Graduate School witnessed this trajabadore philosopher map infinity and finitude, using set theory, to assert a vision of the universe in which series of derivative values constituted a whole that itself existed as a beautiful, animated array of derivative components. The Omega of Badiou and the sets of finite phenomena, which are Its expression, are hinged in a conjecture. #OWS is such a conjecture: a being-event that impossibly de-regulates the real, and defies the parameters of superimposition. But how does such a moment work?

It’s my contention that Time is the only Object, and everything else is Subject. I asked Badiou during a coffee break whether Philosophy needed Art. It had become clear to me that art required the love of wisdom, the evaluative functions of philosophy, after encounters with the likes of Kittler, Lotringer, Agamben, Ronnell, Badiou and others. What wasn’t clear was whether philosophy, which could think about anything it seems, needed art. Badiou said, “Philosophy needs art, now.” I would suggest that #OWS proves this, because perceptually we appear to be spanning dimensions, and on this side of the void that attaches to progressive perceptual consciousness, we seem to have returned to the beginning. In the beginning there were concentric circles...