Toroidal [Occupy] Effect

By Paul McLean

1

Occupy is not an object. 

[Time is the only object. 

Everything else is a subject. 

True time is 4 dimensional, 

Heidegger deduced.] 

An object is not recursive. 

A machine can be reverse engineered. 

A system can be monkeywrenched. 

2

[To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility...But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.] - Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Occupy is an idea that cannot be evicted, whose time has come. To paraphrase, more or less. What do you think? Did you Occupy Wall Street, or any of the 1500 towns & cities across the USA where an occupation popped up? To do so was to participate in collective and direct action. So occupation is a verb thing. Doing the Occupy, a strange circular pantomime, a version of dance, if not exactly dance, as such, called also a General Assembly by anarchists and/or direct democracy practitioners. The sound circle formation, or sphere, as old as humankind. Until we don't occupy anymore, for whatever reason, and there have been many given, by many authoritative and even some supportive voices, and it's not a "Why?" thing, whatever that is to whomever, which is to say, we do incessantly self-evaluate, critique, deconstruct, parse, negate. A redress of grievances. A gathering of souls. The only way to catalog Occupy is for Jez to invent the Anarchives. It has been done, or did itself. Occupy is play, then, let's say. A revolutionary game. Players are called Novads. We have a literature that is time-based, aspiring joyously to timelessness, dimensionally operating in all time zones we know of & don't, with rules that aren't, LULZ. We are legion. Nobody is Occupy. Everyone can. What isn't Occupy, really? Occupiers discovered much is unoccupied, and many otherwise occupied, and an occupation isn't forever, even if in one aspect it might be, at least in its metaphysics. Occupy is a dream. A network. 

Adbusters red-flagged the endangerment of the Soul of Occupy just before the dumb and beautiful May Day protest. We were warned about Move.On and Ben & Jerry's and co-optation. We were exhorted to be autonomous. Michael Moore and other famous people Occupied with us and moved on. We are the 99 percent. I am the 99 percent, but no one occupied Wall Street like the slaves who built Manhattan, whose bones lay just beneath the concrete upon which we erected a tent city, for a moment. Until plutocrat Mayor Bloomberg and his army erased it with a clearing brutal and effective, a pogrom. Where were the 99%, then? Rise Up! the poster proclaimed. Indeed. A nation of spectators, of prevaricators, of Others, did not. My nation, the mass, as Baudrillard so truly depicted it, in his analysis, returned to its regularly scheduled programming, and some wonder where Occupy is. Occupy is a design form. DIY. Open source. A commons. A wireframe concept spanning a multiverse producing poets and street theater and anthems and marches. OWS was a theater. A puppet show. An incubator for the Illuminator and projections on the Verizon building for the crowd's procession across the Brooklyn Bridge. A new world is possible. 

3

A non-object like Occupy does not die, but it lives still. The immaterial can exist as such, as a meme, as a term, as a movement, in the abstract, in a universe where everything that moves, is, in a Lakota word - translated into English, its language of occupation - "HOLY." Wakan. I smelled the patchouli in Zuccotti Park, and 1000 other smells, including smoked dope, pizza, unwashed people, piss, incense... The drums shook all other senses almost all the time, the sticks on five gallon buckets. The signs abounded, and OWS outperformed the Continental Theorists, and seemingly we had a contingency for every situation, provided for by some invisible committee of anarchists, spoke for by David Graeber and Marisa Holmes, etc. When the authorities threatened to wipe us out, using sanitation as the reason, the response was to make the park immaculate, immediately. We had our own media wing, emerging when the corporate news refused to cover our story objectively, like journalists, master of spin appeared to Occupy the message of OWS, via blog, via small screen video, by mobile phone, through tweets and ubiquitous digital photography. Was everyone an artist at Occupy? Or was everyone a reporter? It was hard to tell. The practicum was multi-tasking, if uni-disciplinary. Occupy.

[...The criticism can also be framed like this: what is the exact status of the reference to a specific historical moment...which asserts that the project of radical democracy is 'the result of a pluralization of social struggles anchored in the new structures of contemporary capitalism'? Does this mean that 'radical democracy' is *merely* the political project which fits today's constellation of pluralized struggles, while in previous situations, other more 'essentialist' and even undemocratic projects were appropriate?] - Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle

I witnessed a mime on a soapbox Occupy Wall Street. He was good. Where did he come from? How long did he stay? The guy with the dollar bill taped across his mouth foregrounds in my recollection. Because the issue is expression. Free. The evil of the market's antithesis, subverted by the SCOTUS in Citizens United. The obfuscation is all-directional, too, which explains the necessity, in a homeopathic remedying of the perceptual unbalance, inextricable from communications. In a suspension of endless war. Terror the obverse of Occupation, which is not a job, but a calling. I cannot say with certainty that Occupy is a reflection of anything. Law & Order attempted a simulation of Occupy, and the result was improvised profundity verging on the comedic, a conflation of scripted and unscripted realities occupying one contested space for an instant, and, as usual the cops intervened. The Occupied Wall Street Journal was a miracle, straight out of a Capra film, a newspaper voicing the image of an event hiding in a phenomenon reading as a text, becoming a memorial, to ...what? Us? What was possible? The new world order? It's so easy to be optimistic, when you have each other, and there's a chance of your picture being published in the paper. Ketchup interviewed by Colbert, Jesse punking that Fox douchebag, Chris and his fake video camera, and the actual one, making a kind of art that isn't, but isn't not, too, a mystery of deflection that can be identified as insurrection, but ultimately is for the record. We were historical. 

4  

Occupy can be an objective. Like in Iraq. Now, in October 2012 we have a year of attaching Occupy to Everything, like Art, which is one of the only nouns that does more than Occupy. Although we do have Occupy Art, occupied art, Occupy with Art, the Art of Occupy & so on. We have no consensus, whether Occupy is art, exactly. Would it be performative, or performance? Definitely not plastic. Street art? Not to be confused with the hastag Occupy, or Occupy tags. Artists are central to Occupy we are told. Is this true? Where are they? Does an Occupy artist have a studio? Is Liberty Square a studio? For some it was and is, like James Rose. But now there is rarely any occupation there. The subject of his plein air drawings and paintings has gone somewhere else. Spain, maybe. Oakland. Alex Schaefer is painting burning banks. Burning Man burned Wall Street. Yet Wall Street is still there, although we have been told its business has moved uptown, or just midtown. The Germans bought the stock exchange during the occupation. We hardly noticed. Of the million cash flowing into the Occupy war chest, artists received little. Maybe 20K. What kind of art can an artist make with a budget like that, when the whole world is watching? It's easier to just get pepper-sprayed in the face.

[Unlike architecture or sculpture, painting can exhibit to us some of man's most intimate thoughts. It "makes the *soul* of man itself the subject of its creative work." However, it is not the task of the painter to deal with all emotions. He looks for those which seem to suggest something godly in man and then he endeavors to externalize these emotions in permanent form. For this reason the painter can never be called an imitator. Plato was wrong. The painter captures in his imagination that one fleeting moment in which suddenly men are not simply social, political, or economic animals, but beings endowed with certain strange and marvelous powers. This is a difficult job. The moment is elusive and memory is often weak. But the great artist can nurture this moment and finally set it down so that all can feel its impact.] - Jack Kaminsky, Hegel on Art

Occupy is a subject. Therefore, Occupy was teach-ins. Occupy was students. Occupy was school, without curriculum, without principals, without demands. The content is the problem, the context the solution, the equation insoluble, the numbers, like derivatives impossible to accurately measure, because they flow in all directions at once, simultaneously, infinitely. How many occupiers were there, are there? Is a percentage verifiable? Does it matter? Occupy is an idea, but that is not the basis for its strength, sustainability and power (or powerlessness). Occupy is dimensional, so whether an occupation can be evicted is not really the bottom line. The occupation of Zuccotti Park is a point of origination, linked to many others, including the one at Tahrir Square, the Indignados, sure, but also Homestead, also Concord's commons, which in one aspect, as a locus for revolutionary democracy, is unavoidable as a referent. So, the crackdown on all these most recent revolutions, coded as Occupy, is really a seam, just as the occupations themselves are, winding through our history for at least thousands of years, through the Church, starting with Benedict's corporation for monk-made wine and such, and its articles of spiritual + financial incorporation, commingled with the Corpus Dei, if you would believe it, through the tyrannies of Kings and Queens of Europe in the West, and the destruction of the tribal, mostly by the Phalanx (always back to the Greeks, or the Macedonians, more correctly), as Vision Circle Societies were crushed by Squares of brutality, of bloody steel and shields, of tactics, ordered movement, conscription and force of command. Through to the colonization of the World, and then the ever-New World Orders of extraction and exploitation, governed always by the Clock and Ownership, Property and artificial Time, until the formation, in the heady early years following America's successful agrarian revolution against England and millennia of accrued Evil, of man-over-man, man-against-nature, over it, as domination matrix, the imagining by John Marshall's Supreme Court, in an episode of most banal and Serious Betrayal, with consequences beyond linear or even binary comprehension by man or his counting machines (via Turing), in 1825, of the ensconcing in our national LAW, the species of Artificial Person, endless, of property, of the labor of man, born to own and eradicate man and nature as free and natural entities, sentient, and all of sentience, enslaved to the gift of John Law, a Scottish gambler and genius, who for that King of France, invented paper Cash, for institutionalized purposes, for currency, for purchase, for ownership, for debt, for the divorce of the real from itself by abstraction and reduction, the great fungible flattener, the bane of Levelers, of all farmers, of all revolutions, including the spinning of the orb on which we find ourselves (is it propelled, or destined?)... THE MAKINGS OF THE LAST GREAT WAR, THE ONE TO END ALL OTHERS...

5

["A cell for citters to cit in."

The idea of detention in a closed space as a form of human punitive corrective action seems to have come in very much in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - at the time perspective and pictorial space was developing in our Western world. The whole concept of enclosure as a means of constraint and as a means of classifying doesn't work as well in our electronic world. The new feeling that people have about guilt is not something that can be privately assigned to some individual, but is, rather, something shared by everybody, in some mysterious way. This feeling seems to be returning to our midst. In tribal societies we are told that it is a familiar reaction, when some hideous event occurs, for some people to say, "How horrible it must be to feel like that," instead of blaming somebody for having done something horrible. This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into - a world of total involvement in which everybody is so profoundly involved with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore.] - Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage

Not exactly. E for effort. D for Derivatives. L for Libor. G for Goldman Sachs. In a democracy somebody is accountable, even if that somebody is artificial, not human. CC: Mitt Romney. Or at least that's the idea. Or the should-be idea, which is the architecture of legality, the determinant of crime and punishment. Or to put it another way, Corrections. Not for profit. Not for the market. For the future. Not the futures. Justice, by judgment, via Hannah Arendt. At the end of the day, we still have to live together. We do get to choose, to a degree, how that works. At least, that's true in a free society, or one that aspires to freedom (a revolutionary premise). Beyond Kings. Plutocrats. Dictators. CEOs. Governance Syndicates. Tyranny. Money is not free speech. Slavery is not a word. Neither is only human. 

6

OCCUPY is subjective. Your occupation is not mine, and vice versa. The Point of View is fundamental and inescapable. Each one a proposition in all directions, pointing spears inward, outward and all around towards the multiverse, the in all ways possible, the innumerable. Of course the powers-that-be, the Pimps of Davos, the Warlords and profiteers, the Masters of War, the Time-Slavers (look to Switzerland), the 1-4 Reich, the genocidal maniacs, the Princes and Princesses of Darkness, the Torturers, the Management.... Of course they will do anything to destroy Occupy. Just because nothing is there to kill, does not mean they will not relentlessly hunt down and kill it, whatever it is, whoever it is. If they cannot murder it, they will starve it. If they cannot starve it, they will target anyone and -thing that aids it. If none of this works, they will lie it to death, through defamation. If none of their usual protocols work, they will pretend they invented it, embrace it, and then murder it through subterfuge and conspiracy, games of smoke and mirrors, over time, their time, clock time, the Lie, their man-made artificial iteration of Time, non-absolute, for sale, owned, quantifiable, absent Truth, divorced from itself. Occupy was created to win this war. It will win this war. In fact, it already has. Now, it's only a matter of Time, before the Old World Order crumbles to dust and/or goes up in flames, or surrenders, which would be best, in order to avert so much unnecessary suffering in all directions, in the interim, in the span between now & then, as we cross that bridge we're coming to. We are awake and alive. This genie will not go back in the bottle. Be warned, though. They, these haters of all human, these demonic fiends, would destroy all of us and everything to keep their power. To maintain the status quo. To "win" our freedom, individually and collectively, we must risk everything, therefore, and with the understanding that this is the unnatural nature of our foe, who is even less than single-minded. Our enemy, who is a great Deceiver, who appears or manifests as nothing like an enemy, has no "mind," is INSANE. & HAS CHOSEN TO PROCEED BEYOND REDEMPTION. We really only, then, have a few options. Americans, learning this through the first two world wars, then the Cold War, know it, and one, the only one, is total victory. No alternative is also true. 

Occupy is an adjective. Occupy Poetry. Occupy Foreclosure. Occupy is an attachment. A peripheral. A utility. A complement. A definer. Art needs no definition. Art is sentient, as object, and herein is its value and meaning. To eradicate the supply chain for the Enemy, separate sentience from any buying and selling. The New Rule: Anything with sentience cannot be bought or sold. Consuming must be stripped of its association with accumulation past immediate need. Certainly, we have much more to untangle, in the messy mash-up of means + meaning, values + value, but we have to start somewhere. The Old Ones recognized this point of order, understood its implications for the development of faith, trust, matters of spirit, harmony, balance. The abbreviation is the gift. Not a bank balance or balance sheet. One with all, all with one, like the 3 musketeers, like Dr. Bronner's soap, like the 3 Stooges. Economy and Ecology are only distinguishable alphabetically by a four letters. More or Less. Now, is the Time to say, "ENOUGH!" 

There's an significant difference between optimism and confidence, the difference between morale and moral. Morale is conditional. The Moral is a feature of the human, social condition. Conditioning is in the end amoral, unless you/we/I decide otherwise, to be other-wise. A related distinction is the one between riches and abundance. Riches = Cerro Rico, over its timeline as conquered property. Abundance = Earth, if we determine to live on it as our spaceship of plenty, for the good of all, all our relations. The latter is a moral condition. The former is conditional, and the result of amoral conditioning. It's up to us/you/me to figure this out, and behave accordingly. Harmoniously - or else. By the way, Earth has its own protocols. Talk about "creative destruction!"

∞

OK, what's a post-break world look like? We can practice this exercise/exorcism of the imaginary, even though the truth is, we can't afford speculation, in any of its forms; we need dreamed action, not derivative notions. We could ask John Lennon, who was gunned down by a madman - or we can imagine it, envision it, model it, and create it, ourselves. Or at least try to. Why not? The alternative is hell on earth. Which would you prefer? Endless war; slavery; clock-determined consciousness; plastic love; addiction; lovelessness; isolation; poison food, and so on? Or clean living. Permaculture. A Garden of Delight. Heaven on Earth. A promise. Not a promissory note. Not a debt. A condition of existence. A life way. Not a deadline. A Lifeline. Your choice. Our choice. 

[Pick it up and pull.]

7

My latest theory on Occupy (thanks Chris & Blake, plus Buckminster Fuller & dolphins), is that Occupy is an all-directional toroidal phenomenon. As such, we all are playing and whatever Occupy actually is (besides its first name), Occupy is impossible to prevent. It is precessional and has happened already. Is happening, never will not happen, expanding infinitely as ripples (concentricities), as when a stone is dropped into the center of a perfectly-not-perfectly-it-does-not-matter-it-is-perfect pond. The question to ask, maybe - what do I know? - is, "What are the shores?" Is this a metaphor for consciousness-in-a-body-temporarily? 

Love. Is that the medium for this movement/event? Besides its name. Is this the rippling water? Can we think of Occupy, or ourselves, like a White Lotus, floating in the muddy water of our pond, sustained through Dark Matter (a book by Greg Sholette)... Finally, are we occupying a life that is better than any movie we could ever hope to watch? Am I? Did the "me" I thought "I" was ever exist? Knowing-not-knowing this, what will I/we do now, with the time we share? 

One good answer, I would suggest: Found a School of Life, an Occupational Art School. We are doing it. It's (in) Bushwick. There are nodes in Brazil & Colorado. Come join us. It's fun.

Paul McLean

October 21, 2012

Bushwick