Occufest, Part II: Spread the News

By Christopher Moylan

The contraction of Occupy Wall Street after the police stormed Liberty Square was to be expected, but with the return of longer days and warmer weather something peculiar happened. The movement remained in a dark chill while everyone else walked about in shorts and short sleeves complaining of the unnatural heat. Activists came back to the streets, the energy at demonstrations returned, yet little of this was reported in the news. For all anyone in the greater world knew, Occupy was dead.

To those who took part in the Million Hoodie March or the demonstration against police brutality, it was obvious that this media silence resulted from the collusion of forces more imposing than those of the editorial staff of Eyewitness News or, for that matter, The New York Times.  The police mobilizations at each protest were too large, the disruptions of traffic and business the protesters caused were too widespread and dramatic, the arrests too violent and arbitrary for all this to be too trivial for comment. If thousands marching down Fifth Avenue on a Tuesday evening rush hour could not draw attention, then what would it take?



Perhaps this is the wrong question. For one thing, it is obvious what it would take to grab the attention of corporate news: mass arrests, violence, smashed shop windows and burning cars. If Occupy activists allow the police and their corporate/political sponsors to write the narrative that would discredit the movement, then the narrative would receive plenty of attention. That could happen, but let’s hope it doesn’t.  So, isn’t this the question; if one could write an Occupy-related lead story for The Times, what would it say? Better yet, if it were possible to hold the attention of one disinterested person for a while—half an hour or an hour—what would one say? What would one hope to accomplish?

Would we want Mr. Smith to come away knowing the head count of the demonstration, or the three or four talking points for the day, if there were any? Then what? Wouldn’t one hope to persuade this person that the cause was just, that the goals of the movement were of importance to him or her, that it was in his or her interest to join in a direct action?

But we aren’t talking about news anymore, or are we? It is obvious to everyone by now, isn’t it, that news is propaganda—or, to use the preferred euphemism, that every news source has its bias. In mainstream American commodity culture that means there are two ways to see the world: the right of center and the left of center. But there are other ways of seeing things…

Occupy posits an interrelationship among issues of finance, environment, class, food policy, race, sexuality, peace, and human rights that others do not see, if one is to credit as at all genuine the endlessly repeated mainstream news criticism of Occupy as a hodgepodge of issues without a unifying focus or goal. If Occupy has produced one evolutionary change in the human brain, it is that those in the movement can see the unifying focus where others don’t.

Here is the paradox; it is true that this unifying focus has yet to be encapsulated in a phrase or sentence, and it is also true that most of the people who come out to demonstrations know what that phrase would say.  A list of social and economic proposals would, in all likelihood, not say it. Photos, interviews, demonstration head counts and socioeconomic analysis of the composition of the movement don’t say it entirely either, indispensable as all this information is. Occupy says it, but not in a way that is typical of what occurs between ads for adult diapers and luxury automobiles.

Since the end of the encampments, Occupy Wall Street has come to refer to a social agenda and a culture that has developed as a consequence of this agenda. The Occupy list of causes, ranging from financial regulation to ending the drone attacks in the Muslim world, gains the most attention when OWS is discussed in the media, to the extent that it is discussed. OWS culture receives far less attention, even within the movement, despite the clear need to replace the unifying material and spatial focus of the encampments—as meeting places, launch pads for direct actions, centers for logistics and planning—with a decentralized and yet reliable network of relationships, forms of communication, and signifiers of identity and common cause. Add to all this the gradual dissipation of the sense of international crisis as the recession yielded to a minimal and halting recovery. In short, the challenge for OWS was to renew the excitement and solidarity of the Fall and early winter of ’11 without the material and economic conditions that gave rise to the movement in the first place.

Nonetheless, Occupy lives. Judging by the Mayday and Chicago actions, the movement remains formidable.  This is remarkable considering all the things that Occupy does not have at its disposal. There is no Occupy headquarters. There is no Occupy Fund, hardly any money in the movement, nor much interest in raising money. There are no Occupy commercials, newspaper ads, or pr offices. The movement has no representatives in Congress, offers no slate of candidates for upcoming elections and so lacks the negotiating strength of other social movements. The resources it does have are fairly humble: word of mouth, organizational meetings in public parks, coffee shops, houses and apartments, exchanges through Facebook or email, postings on blogs or Youtube…

Much of this is fairly direct, person to person exchange. Even within the virtual realm OWS depends on interpersonal relationships to sustain itself. Facebook pages organize by town and sometimes specialized interests within a town, so environmental activists meet other activists, bicyclists meet bicyclists in the general context of OWS.   The OWS ethos of inclusion combined with the powerful us vs. them symbolism of the %99 means that all kinds of people believe that they have a say in the movement, that they have a place in it. Of course, those who feel most comfortable declaring themselves politically and making such connections are, in the  main, those who hold positions of privilege in American society. Even if the prevailing imbalances in American society—class, race, gender, sexual orientation—hold within Occupy, as is probably inevitable despite the best of intentions, the emphasis on solidarity and mutual assistance has so far prevailed over the centripetal force that these divisions have so often exerted in left coalitions.

Part of the reason this doesn’t get much attention is that the cultural (or countercultural) development of the movement seems to just happen, naturally and spontaneously. Ask a person how he or she got involved with the movement and the answers tend to sound quite similar; I was feeling angry and frustrated about the state of the world and something about what the Occupy people were doing made sense. I went to a demonstration or to Zuccotti and suddenly I was at home, in the midst of all kinds of interesting, alive people, all kinds, who thought the way I did and were doing something…

These sound like conversion narratives, except, of course, the people telling these stories didn’t have to be converted—not, that is, to the social agenda. On another level, however, something does change, there is a conversion. It is as if a new performative, a word or phrase that makes something happen by uttering it in an appropriate context, should be added to the familiar I do (in marriage), I swear (in testimony), we declare (in a political manifestoe): Occupy.

Occupy is never used with a personal pronoun (I Occupy the bank) but there is a sense in which that initial, positive contact with the movement can result in a change of consciousness. In that instance (or instant, as the case may be) the word can be thought of as a performative that places one on the left in certain reversals of power and responsibility, among other things. An OWS activist understands that ordinary people didn’t “cause” the Great Recession, Wall Street and the banks did through the derivatives market and other forms of speculation. Consumer debt isn’t a moral obligation, it’s a form of usury. Multinational corporations aren’t people, they are, in many instances, enemies of the people. The one per cent aren’t job creators, they are, many of them, job destroyers (unless one considers outsourcing jobs to wage slaves in China or Thailand job creation). So, to ‘occupy’ a bank in a neighborhood somewhere usually does not mean to seize it or otherwise take it over, but to frame it in terms of that understanding….

Occupy begins as a form of emotional and intellectual detachment from various forms of oppression and leads to the assumption of personal agency to resist this oppression—if sometimes it comes down to you and a neighbor standing with a sign in front of a bank, in the rain, ok... And Occupy goes further to construct this agency in terms of social improvement, celebration of community, encouragement of expression and creativity.

What all this amounts to is a way of life that reinforces a broad understanding of the world and the way it works. This understanding is not particular to OWS, yet sometimes it can that way. It is no secret what kinds of legal and structural changes Occupy activists and others on the left (and left of center , etc.) would like to see. There is a great deal of mystery, on the other hand, as to why one can tick off and explain these changes to someone and the next day that person will claim that he doesn’t know what the pragmatic goals of the movement are, or will remember some of them but wonder what all the fuss is about.  Thus, the metaphor of the news: the news is what brings someone to see what all the fuss is about. The ambition or goal of Occupy is not merely to change the world—the world will change one way or another anyway-- but to help clear out and renew the moral, intellectual and interpersonal spaces that help us make sense of the world and our place in it. There is no sense in returning to the Garden if all we can think about is apple pie.

Occupied news is any form of informational and emotional delivery that brings about and reinforces such understanding.

The encampments provided the ritualized place of origin for this process of psychic renewal and liberation. The Declaration of Occupation at Zucccotti deliberately echoed other ritualized concretizations of revolt from the Tennis Court Oath to the Twitter feeds Tahrir Square. Somehow the next step had to be taken; for a while the movement seemed to do anything but, to be stuck on a desire to hold ground, stay put. Ironically, the police breakup of the encampments provided the ritualized moment of disbursal. It was heartbreaking when the police evicted the occupiers, and seized and destroy their belongings, but in doing so they relieved OWS of many of its spatial and logistical limitations, transforming the struggle by necessity from a low key, passive war of occupation into something much bigger.

 

Occupying ground was an intrinsically political act, an assertion of power in the face of power. With the GA’s, libraries, food distribution system, places for legal advice and press outreach, it was very much like the occupations were setting up as states within a state. Clearly, this was premature, although inspiring while it lasted. After a period of mourning and tactical confusion, the movement began to recuperate from the evictions, a process assisted with inevitable missteps from the right: Rush Limbaugh’s bizarre misogynist rant, the war on women, the defensive reaction of conservatives to the outcry over the shooting of Travon Martin, and so on.

 Even as the numbers in the streets continue to grow, it is clear that the movement has lost some of its teleological, take it down fervor. That is the best thing for the movement, given the range and power of the forces that oppose it: local police intelligence, FBI surveillance, Homeland Security, multinational corporate interests, Wall Street and, given the international reach of the movement, no doubt the CIA.  One hopes that wiser heads in the corner offices realize that Occupy rhetoric of world revolution is rhetoric, and that street demands for immediate structural changes in the government and financial systems come with the general understanding that such a fundamental overhaul of the American way of life will take a while… OWS is not a revolutionary movement at all, if by the term one means a systematic, organized insurrection against state power. Paul Graeber, in his recent Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, has argued as much; revolution, as he suggests, is a much overused term in any event.

It is instructive to consider what Occupy is not. OWS is not an exercise in third party politics, militant resistance, separatist insurgence, or utopian communal organization. It is not an anarchic assault on private property and corporate symbolism. It is not an army of people who hate other people. So, if it is not any of these things, if it does not conform to any of the paranoid fears of white, middle class reactionary America, then what is Occupy?  Here, the roles mentioned previously are reversed; activists within Occupy know clearly what the movement wants, but those without know, or claim to know, what Occupy is: an alternative culture, shades of the Hippies and the Beatniks, with the essential difference that this movement claims to represent the %99.

That’s a big, scary difference from other countercultural movements, made all the scarier (for the %1) by the glaring inconsistencies of twenty first century American capitalism: the wealth gap (the rich get filthy richer and we get laid off), the tax gap (the rich get tax breaks, we don’t), and all the disparities and injustices that follow (housing, health insurance, education, government expenditures and funding cuts and so on). What on earth prevents ordinary people from saying Enough! The familiar is the screen. OWS is one way to turn off that screen and turn our attention elsewhere.

Political occupation begins in cultural occupation. A change in structures and institutions begins in a change in mind. Holding ground is powerful symbolically, but preparing and then holding imaginative, and theoretical higher ground is more powerful still, by some orders of magnitude.  The large scale protests that command the greatest attention within and without the movement are made possible by a constant behind the scenes process of developing the ideas, rituals, and objects around which a protest coheres: chants, songs hand signals, signs, street puppets, banner drops, light projections, masks and clothes.  Add to all this paintings, photographs, films and Youtube clips, the ephemera of glitter bombs and sidewalk chalk drawings, the Occupy-related poems and song lyrics, web-based art and community building resources, including augmented reality (http://augmentedrealityactivists.blogspot.com), Occupy with Art ( http://www.occupywithart.com/) and Our Goods, an online barter community with a an arts emphasis (http://ourgoods.org).

Cultural occupation is the news.

That is, if the goal is to emancipate the dignity, creativity, independence and economic security of the individual within the social, to diminish or eliminate the ills of predatory consumer debt, escalating student obligations, illegal foreclosures, corporate control of government, arbitrary exercise of state power on the citizenry, union busting and job outsourcing, and all the mechanisms of soul murder deployed in commodity culture, not to mention racism and the wars on women and the LGBT communities, if this is at least part of what Occupy is doing, then what form of news could encapsulate all this, and do it justice?

The limit of discursive, evidentiary, and eyewitness reportage is the starting point of experiential, intuitive, and imaginative information delivery. The point where trust in commercial media and their sponsors in Congress and corporate America ends is the place where the determination to build new platforms, media, and forms begins. These will be media that we can not only trust but own and control.

Put simply, there are many ways to spread the news.

Consider what it was like during the Fall of ’11 to walk down Broadway from St. Paul’s Chapel toward Zuccotti Park. For a block or so all was normal: tourists wandering around, business people dragging their brief cases along like Geiger counters, security guards smoking on their breaks... Then the noise began to register; from near the chapel it sounded like dozens of jackhammers pounding away just out of sight. With each block the noise got louder and more insistently physical. It was like walking into a thunder cloud. Taking that right past the phalanx of cops, the percussive thump of the drum circle was like a birth slap, then a heartbeat, then conversation. The drums broadcast into lower Manhattan that OWS was unavoidably, defiantly there. They did so, moreover, in a way that resonated with various aspects of popular and traditional culture: Stock Exchange gong vs. ten drummers and a circle of twenty or thirty kids dancing free form…

Over the short period of the occupation, the drum circle became increasingly problematic; neighbors complained of the noise, drummers and others in the encampment had disputes.  Like a few Occupy cultural expressions, the drumming circle was limited by the very impromptu, anyone can join ethos that inspired it.  But the drum circle was not an end in itself, though some of its participants may have thought otherwise. One important, and encouraging aspect of cultural engagement is that it is not self-contained, and not linear; it sends dendritic branches this way and that, unpredictably. The drum circles led to the marching bands at demonstrations, the marching bands inspired the guitarmy on May Day, and who knows what will follow, but something will follow, much as Occupy This Album will probably inspire the production of other cd’s.

There are many examples of this organic growth and development in the New York area. Display of Occupied visual art began with a window display in Printed Matter, continued with shows in Brooklyn galleries, expanded to the Main Street to Wall Street town-wide display of work in the Catskills. Occupy Co-op in Huntington, Long Island has turned to a community garden and barn restoration and this is already projected as a model for the development of a meeting and resource center; a similar project, Occupy Storefront, is well underway in a rented space in Ronkonkoma further east. The storefront, responding to a demand for ready information, has developed a news service through cable open access and a Youtube channel offering commentary and reports from direct actions on the island. The Occupy Film Festival at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington has scheduled a filming in late July and plans are underway for mixed media projects in the same space…

In short, culture spreads and engages much in the way that those doing political organizing, Occupy for example, might want their messages to circulate: freely, unobtrusively, integrating with the conditions of a given place, be it a middle class suburb, a rural town, a Greek and Italian neighborhood in Queens... The point is to reverse the dynamic of art-middle class relations as they have held from the avant garde through the imperial iterations of Art Basel Miami Dubai Disney; attack the bourgeoisie or, these days, pretend to do so and make sure one doesn’t offend wealthy collectors…  Let the community by way of Occupy produce its own cultural critique and development. The art world will be there, doing what it does, and OWS will be here, doing what it does, envisioning and building the mind-inhabited world (to use a phrase from Dilthey) it wants. The hope is that OWS will become a vanguard cultural force over time, relegating the art world to the marginal status of salon production for the wealthy, which pretty much it now is…

If Occupy does arise within the %99, as is the claim, then the industrial centers of cultural production and market valuation—Chelsea, Williamsburg, the Lower East Side, Hollywood, you name it—are irrelevant and of no importance in this case. The work I am describing does not require confrontation with or rejection of what is produced in those places—any more than it would require confrontation with the cultural productions of Major League Baseball or Prada. Attention within OWS has been devoted to a quixotic battle with art world institutions—MOMA, auction houses, galleries. Such actions constitute an extension of the larger socio-economic struggle but, I argue, they present needless career risks for artists who participate and offer little to no benefit to ordinary people.    

Instead, I argue that the visual occupation of a stanchion of Hellgate bridge in Astoria, or a barn in Iowa or a billboard in L.A. is a good thing to do to people, and a necessary component of Occupy strategic outlook.

Unfortunately, this good work has not been supported as it should be. Building the culture of Occupy has yet to be recognized, within the movement, as one way, a big wheel, if you will, alongside the tactical work of street protests and other direct actions. Art initiatives developed at 60 Wall Street have gone by the wayside for lack of pr or monetary support. Theoretical and practical consideration of how occupied culture can contribute to realizing the new human has been left to affiliated groups that come and go with little recognition by the protest core of the movement. Support is available from external sources—galleries, museums, independent cinemas, film festivals, small publishing  houses—but that is a route to assimilation into middle class life. Sooner or later we all come to it, but one would hope that an interlude of activist art making would be possible….

This is not to suggest a programmatic or, for that matter, propagandistic shaping of content and form, merely a more deliberate and responsive engagement with the ways that Occupy is constructing an actual and virtual culture in advance of implementing a political system congenial to it. Occuculture will grow and develop anyway, but one can easily envision developments most of us would not condone, if we paid attention: to subcultures of violence, say, or to commercialized ventures... Most of the more promising cultural projects underway within the Occupy movement, moreover, remain sporadic, underfunded (if funded at all) and often rudimentary. What’s more, Occupy has yet to appropriate the usual derisive comparisons conservatives make to historical movements they consider discredited—Hippy, Yippy, Beatnik culture and so on. Occupy is continuous with these earlier movements, and we should only hope that the movement will produce as many long-lasting social benefits as those earlier movements gave us: natural childbirth, organic food production, environmental consciousness, sexual liberation, sustainable production of all sorts, educational reforms, and so on.

Perhaps there is, on some level, a tendency to avoid such comparisons…If Occupy activists are the new Hippies, then where is their Haight-Ashbury, or more to the point, their Tape Music Center, Open Theater, Straight Theater, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Canyon Cinema Film Makers Collective…If the comparison is to the psychedelic underground, that most anarchic of cultural moments, then Occupy has a long way to go to approximate the collaborative, spontaneous, creative atmosphere and production of that period.

Then again, who remembers the Tape Music Center anymore? Occupy should look to the activist of the sixties for comparison but also as an object lesson in the hazards of allowing corporate culture to seize the narrative and identity of the movement. The police-demonstrator battles in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City in ’68 had nothing to do with the current popular image now of sex, drugs and rock and roll in sixties culture; this was bloody, terrible business.  The Zuccotti eviction can become the Bunker Hill of our time by a process of cultural self-determination. The beatings at the Nato protests in Chicago, the reactionary legal response to the students protests in Quebec and Montreal, the militarist police crackdown in Oakland fall within the cultural domain of Occupy; these moments belong to us. But as David was to the early days of the Revolution, Malevich to the early days of the Russian Revolution, Padraig Pearse to the Irish Uprising, who in the movement is to those critical moments in the developing narrative of our time?

It is up to the cultural workers in Occupy to keep our focus on the enormous problems we face: two wars, a global financial crisis, environmental degradation and global warming, corporate control over government that hasn’t been seen since the days of the Teapot Dome scandal ninety years ago. Each cause on the long list espoused by Occupy entails a more or less focused place of resistance, opposition, rejection, and a corresponding list of constructive choices: matters of diet, spending, saving, energy consumption, dress, and friends. Culture is becoming another point of choice; are you content to remain part of the Great American Middle Class, or are you ready to leave? What does leaving entail? Envisioning what this new class, more space than class, will look like is easily as important as deciding what target to protest, what slogan to response to make to police intimidation. As the one year anniversary of Occupy looms on the horizon, it is time to recognize the importance of this work, and to support it.