6

Refugees from This Native Dreamland

Perhaps inevitably, this book ends with a set of reflections on the Occupy Wall Street movement, broadly hailed on the Left as the inexplicably postponed, much-anticipated rising of “the people,” engaged in the mass withdrawal of consent from the (in)actions of the state and the profiteers it sanctions and protects. In the months during and following the autumn of 2011, as I shared my thinking on this project and my work in progress with students and colleagues at home and on the road, my ruminations on the end of popular sovereignty were met with a ready and singular rejoinder: But what of Occupy? What, indeed. Here at last, it seemed, was a left social movement that was authentically “grassroots”: the popular sovereign delegitimating with a flourish the massively corrupted institutions of (non)democratic governance. Yet in their practice and their aspiration, the Occupiers encamped in lower Manhattan and across major and some smaller U.S. cities were more reminiscent of Bruce Sterling’s proles, martians, and other “autonomen groups” than of mid-twentieth-century social movement actors (figure 6.1). In this chapter, I argue that Occupy Wall Street registers the dismantling of “the people” as a modern, mass political subject and functional ideological reference point, even as it labors to bring out alternative imaginaries, forums, and forms of collective political agency. My interest lies neither in championing OWS, nor in charting its deficiencies, especially inasmuch as either investment tends to imply that we have ready to hand a calculus for assessing left political strategies. Both the celebrants and detractors of OWS, in other words, tend to take the measure of the occupation by reference to a preexisting view of what constitutes viable left political practice. Yet what seems most significant and compelling about OWS is the organizers’ intuition that our measures of political efficacy are themselves in crisis. No doubt, we know to tally our gains and losses in opposing forms of hegemonic power, as they aspire to norm the terms of public debate and produce broad popular assent to the pursuit of elite interests. But how do we measure ground gained against forms of political power that are indifferent to the disposition of our hearts and minds and that confront opposition through technologies of mass surveillance and securitization, which are also, in themselves, a significant source of capital accumulation? From this vantage, the interesting question about OWS is not so much what it gets right or wrong, but how it struggles to imagine the form and scale of politics itself.

Figure 6.1. Zucotti Park, Lower Manhattan, October 2, 2011. Protesters at the media center work on laptops powered by a portable generator. “Organization is the only thing they’ve got.”

No Demands

“Dear 1%,” reads one of the more widely circulated Occupy Wall Street posters, “We fell asleep for a while. Just woke up. Sincerely, the 99%.” In line with this brief and compelling narrative, many active Occupiers, as well as sympathetic demonstrators and left observers have tended to frame the movement as the resurgence of a temporarily incapacitated citizenry. What Occupy Wall Street signifies, or signified—it is not entirely clear whether the movement is dormant or dead—is in many respects too early to say; for those who suspect that its interest lies in its staying power, or at least the staying power of other movements like Occupy and perhaps modeled on it, the question is how Occupy or its analogs will present five years from now, or in a decade. Yet it seems impossible not to address Occupy in a necessarily premature and speculative fashion, if only because it appears to represent the fulfillment of a prospect long deferred: the popular insurrection that oppression and misrule will inevitably spark, a “civil revival,” in the words of one protester, in which the Occupiers are “becoming citizens” (quoted in Rolling Stone 2011, 61). This idea of civic “becoming” cuts at least two ways, suggesting the need to relearn what has been forgotten (becoming citizens) and also the aspiration to remake the category through new practices of active inhabitation (becoming citizens). The formulation conspicuously invokes earlier historical contexts—the bourgeois revolutions in which subjects became citizens—yet in so doing, also remarks the different, seemingly attenuated scale of transformative politics in the present moment. Within those earlier historical contexts, the political power of “the people” is bound up in the double menace of their becoming and unbecoming citizens, the prospect of their political ascension within the structures of representative democracy and their decomposition into the lawless mob that aims not at political recognition, but at the destruction of the power to confer or withhold that recognition. In the contemporary United States, it is no longer the people who confront the state in the always twinned guises of sovereign and mob, but rather it is the state and its allied institutions that dissolve the people into an undisciplined multitude, or at any rate, no longer act to avert this dissolution. This is the reason that today the practice of “becoming citizen” is not (yet) a confrontation with state power, but an attempt to repurpose the category of “citizen,” which is available for reconstruction precisely because the operations of the state seem no longer to require the existence of a people.

Historically, of course, to speak of civic mobilizations in the United States is to presuppose and affirm the relation of the sovereign populace to the representative state. In this modern context, “the people” is necessarily a national people—comprised of citizens, the dependents of citizens (women and children), and (or) segments of the population pressing claims for (full) citizenship. Even from this broadly sketched perspective, it seems dubious to understand Occupy as the revival of a slumbering citizenry, not only because most elements of the movement, to their credit, reject the premise of an exclusionary nationalism and embrace citizens, as well as legal and undocumented immigrants, but also, and perhaps more profoundly, because it is not clear that OWS represents a demand for recognition, much less a demand addressed specifically to the institutions of the state. Indeed, the absence of specific demands was a source of left consternation from the get-go, mitigated by the insight that the consensus-based operations of the movement’s general assemblies was bound to delay the production and publication of demands. Predictably, there was no shortage of academic sympathizers willing to educate the Occupiers on the need for demands or on the optimal form these demands might take, as though the activists had simply overlooked this point, although from the first, the most perceptive commentators began to discern that the focus of Occupy was directed inward, on the movement’s political self-fashioning.1 In Douglass Rushkoff’s canny evaluation,

Occupy is anything but a protest movement. That’s why it has been so hard for news agencies to express or even discern the “demands” of the growing legions of Occupy participants around the nation, and even the world. Just like pretty much everyone else on the planet, occupiers may want many things to happen and other things to stop, but the occupation is not about making demands. They don’t want anything from you, and there is nothing you can do to make them stop. That’s what makes Occupy so very scary and so very promising. It is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living. . . . [Occupiers] are not interested in debate . . . but consensus. They are working to upgrade that binary, winner-takes-all, 13th century political operating system. And like any software developer, they are learning to “release early and release often. . . .” This is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going. (2011, 3, 4)

From this perspective, Occupy stands as the epilogue to modern democratic citizenship, rather than its continuation. If Occupy is the awakening of the people, as the placard insists, it is of a people who now longer exist at the level of political institutions, and so find themselves compelled to devise other arenas in which collectively to conceive and cultivate modes of political identification and political agency. This agency appears in—and is produced through—the capacity to simulate an autonomous reality, in a gesture that mimes, even as it repudiates, the practices of elite power. The strategy of Occupy is about the production of virtual realities in the (erstwhile) public spaces so pivotal to the cultures of democratic nationalism (figure 6.2). The circumstance that occupation on this model requires exceptional proficiency in the material practices of urban camping—that the entire enterprise rests on specific forms of material labor and exchange, as well as affective labor and structures of political organization—stands as a salient reminder that virtual constructs are self-referential, but not (necessarily) immaterial.

Figure 6.2. People’s Library, Occupy Wall Street, 2011.

As Chris Hedges has observed, the core of Occupy—those who launched the encampments—are comprised of people living off the grid, outside the formal economy, “traveler types,” in the self-description of one, practiced street dwellers and squatters with anarchist leanings and no interest “in the traditional political process” (2011, 2). While in various locations and for various durations a much more heterogeneous contingent has supported the movement at the street level—eating, sleeping, or working in the encampments—the initial project to occupy and repurpose existing infrastructure was imagined and begun by dissident drifters. Hedges himself is committed to situating this core—and, by extension, aspects of the wider Occupy movement—in the tradition of anarchist politics and lumpenproletariat mobilizations, citing Bakunin’s rejoinders to Marx and the value of theory forged in committed activism, or “fierce physical struggle” (2011, 4). Indeed, in Hedges’s rather sweeping account of both socialist and anticolonial revolution in the twentieth century, Bakunin’s vision is supposedly affirmed, as in every instance, Hedges avers, the “alliance of an estranged class of intellectuals with dispossessed masses creates the tinder . . . for successful revolt” (2011, 4–5). Yet in many respects, Hedges’s account of Occupy’s drifter core is more in line with Rushkoff’s analysis than his own, insofar as it makes central to the movement’s genesis a group whose politics is the practice of an alternate “way of living,” predicated on underconsumption, refusing the hold of property on subjects, and rejecting individual self-interest as antithetical to the value of community.

While the movement as a whole embraces portions of this ethos (Occupy’s manifestos are pervasively if implicitly opposed to practices of accumulation that perpetuate structures of social inequality), at the same time, the movement’s documents cite broadly from a range of quite heterogeneous political traditions, promiscuously cathecting disparate elements from the discourses of political modernity. The formation of general assemblies, for example, draws (somewhat unexpectedly) from the French revolutionary tradition, although nonviolent civil disobedience is central to the imaginary and practice of the Occupation. Occupy’s emphasis on leaderless and radically anti-authoritarian self-governance is clearly indebted to autonomist thought and practice, while (other) aspects of the movement’s communalist orientation seem to gesture to nineteenth-century utopian socialist traditions, routed, perhaps, through more accessible recollections of 1960s counterculture. But these historical citations, so to speak, are arrayed on an improvised performative terrain that also encompasses an orientation to liberal proceduralism (knowing your rights, taking evictions and other repressive actions to court), as well as, crucially, an affirmation of responsibility, transparency, and accountability, which are surely the neoliberal mainstays of contemporary institutional cultures.

Consider, for example, the draft “Principles of Solidarity” of the New York City General Assembly:

Here the liberal sanctity of individual privacy sits alongside unlearning privilege and participatory democracy, aligned, in turn, with the exercise of “responsibility,” a term currently central to the prescription for “the neoliberal citizen-subject” and the recoding of austerity as the opportunity for self-determination (2005, 43). Indeed, the NYCGA’s principles might be read, in part, as the reorientation of “responsibility” from the individual to the communal level, at least insofar as they posit the agency of social transformation as fully internal to the community of Occupiers, who will realize transformation in the very form of their self-organization. To be sure, the relation between what we might call the disposition of a movement, its political ethos as expressed through internal structures and protocols, and the movement’s aims, its designs for (and on) the larger world, are always complexly interrelated. Yet in reading through the statements approved by the general assemblies, it is often difficult to maintain the sense of the distinction, as approaching the desired disposition of the movement begins to appear as its primary political aim.

The creation of what one OWS participant-observer calls “democratic spaces” is thus detached from actions leveled at the state. Describing the conversation at an OWS working group, Marina Sitrin explains:

We discussed and debated the question of demands and what would define the movement, but we agreed not to use the frameworks of demands at all. So what are we about? Most of us believe that what is most important is to open space for conversations—for democracy—real, direct, and participatory democracy. Our only demand then would be to be left alone in our plazas, parks, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods so as to meet one another, reflect together, and in assembly forms decide what our alternatives are. And from there, once we have opened up these democratic spaces, we can discuss what sorts of demands we might have and who we believe might be able to meet these demands. Or, perhaps, once we have assemblies throughout the country, the issue of demands upon others will become mute. If there are enough of us, we may one day only make demands on ourselves. (2011, 8)

Other participant commentators, such as Eli Schmidt, Astra Taylor, and Mark Greif, frame the absence of demands not simply in terms of prioritizing communal self-development, but also in relation to the difficulty of apprehending a complex system and discerning the root causes of one’s real conditions. Yet in these documents, as well, the postponement of demands is presented not as a failure or an impasse, but rather as a situation generative of alternate ways of imagining political activity.

We still don’t know exactly what are the demands. One of the members of our group, in discussing the criteria for a good demand, noted that Americans like to “get something” out of a political action. Repeal, enact, ban. We want visible, measured outcomes. But we have no Mubarak, no Qaddafi. We are the country that reelected Bush, that bailed out the banks, that has stalemates in Congress about paltry tax increases. Our partial joblessness and our alienating democratic system may be very real, our reasons for congregating concrete, but the precise causes of our distress are still far off, the specific solutions perhaps further. (Schmitt et al. 2011, 6)

Interestingly, in this account, demands are associated with a nationalist ideology of accumulation (“get[ing] something”), the very thing, in other words, that OWS repudiates, even as the value of demands is less thoroughly dismantled than in Sitrin’s account.

Along these lines, one might note that the “Principles of Solidarity” are concerned exclusively with the conditions for attaining solidarity among movement participants. Moreover, reading through testimonial pieces and blogs and scrolling through online posts, one gathers that the preponderance of debate among Occupiers pertains less to priorities for change in the world, and rather more to the movement’s (in)adequate efforts at constituting an apparatus of genuinely nonhierarchical, consensus-based (self-)government. At any rate, the fusion of aspirations for participatory, leaderless democracy with a kind of nonmercenary entrepreneurialism (collectively making one’s own opportunities) and communalized iterations of self-care appear with regularity in the statements and other “living documents” posted online.

My point here is not to cite Occupy for its tactical amalgamation of heterogeneous—and in part contradictory—tenets, and certainly not to insinuate that the movement is somehow “really” itself “neoliberal.” But we do well to remember that opposition necessarily belongs to the same historical moment and the same conditions of possibility as the power it opposes. And in its central emphasis on autonomy—that is, on autonomous action by self-organizing communities that do not depend on external recognition or sanction—Occupy duplicates, as much as it refuses, the tactics of elite power (and powerbrokers). The institutions of the state systematically repudiate and dissolve any obligation to the general welfare of a national people (the 99%, in OWS parlance), and “the people,” in turn, give up on the state. But the specular relation of the state and its opposition cuts still deeper. Even as the state has come to abdicate the task of hegemony, of producing and reproducing citizens who identify with its aims and projects, so too, has the opposition to the state in the form of Occupy. As Occupy’s founding documents make plain, it is not conceived or designed to emerge as a political party, or bloc, that might rise to dominance by absorbing a broad cross-section of society, and indeed, its rigorously anti-authoritarian and participatory ethos precludes the possibility of speaking for anyone besides the active Occupiers themselves. Arguably, a central aspiration of Occupy is to reimagine the form of the body politic as no longer abstract and anonymous but participatory and communal. From this vantage, Occupy cannot be understood as counterhegemonic, both because the power it opposes no longer operates hegemonically and because it is not, itself, an incorporative political project, even as it is radically open to all participants. Direct democracy as Occupy envisions it can accrete adherents and proliferate in the form of leaderless, self-organizing communities both geographically and in network-based forms, but it cannot assimilate multiple political constituencies to a normative set of aims and beliefs, since what Occupy refuses is precisely the prerogative of dominant institutions to elaborate those norms for a mass public.

From this perspective, arguments about the racial and ethnic composition of Occupy, and whether it centers on issues of concern to the newly precarious white middle-classes while peripheralizing others vital to the futurity of black and brown people, tend to misapprehend how the problem of racial divisions manifest in the context of a proliferative (rather than an incorporative) political movement. It is worth noting that Occupy, as it reads through posted documents, could hardly be more self-conscious about the history of racial antagonisms within twentieth-century, left social movements, and it attempts—all too earnestly, at least in print—to redress the effects of these historical fractures, through the persistent interrogation of privilege (a leitmotif of movement manifestos) and an emphasis on direct democracy, rather than consensus-based, majority rule. What this has meant at the level of the actions and cultures of specific occupations in specific cities and communities, and the extent to which they do (or do not) appear to foster cross- or multiracial solidarity remains, quite legitimately, a matter of debate. Yet significantly, the nonhegemonic character of Occupy means that it is not a matter of interrogating which particular interests have been forwarded under the sign of a general (collective) mobilization. In the context of a more recognizably (counter)hegemonic movement, this negotiation between the particular and the general is rightly understood as the central question, one whose answer is decisive for an evaluation of its actual political alignments and the terms (and limits) of its inclusiveness along racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, or other lines. But in the context of Occupy and what it would appear to herald about the tactical balkanization of the Left into a series of self-organizing entities, the question seems less whether something called Occupy Wall Street (in the singular) is inclusive, but rather whether the various Occupations of which Occupy is comprised will (or will not) divide along racial and ethnic lines: Will we have (primarily) black and brown Occupations in some places, and (predominantly) white ones elsewhere?

The debates around Occupy Oakland, for example, are instructive on this point, even as they suggest how the stress on rhetorical self-constitution as political activity (not the precondition of political movement, but its ground) is replicated across the board, among organizations that secede from OWS in anger, as well as those that retain the affiliation. In 2012 in Oakland, dissatisfaction with what was cast as the abiding, “unchecked racial privilege within Occupy Oakland’s organizing structures” led to the formation of Decolonize Oakland by angry former and would-be participants in Occupy Oakland. Substituting the metaphor of decolonization for that of occupation, Decolonize Oakland contends that OWS effectively continues the centuries’ long European occupation of others’ lands, resources, and prospects for futurity, despite its apparent intention to reclaim literal and symbolic ground from the forces of capital that drove the process of colonial annexation through the opening decades of the twentieth century and sustain neocolonial relations in the present. Although foregrounding decolonization rather than anticapitalism as their central imaginative axis, Decolonize Oakland seems otherwise to reproduce the organizing gestures and forms of Occupy, however, especially in its founding declaration of autonomy. “Decolonize Oakland . . . (formerly the QPOC/POC caucus/committee of Occupy Oakland) would like to reintroduce themselves to you, our communities, as an autonomous collective,” the group proclaims in its “Communiqué” of March 18, 2012. Interestingly, in an allied publication articulating similar grounds of disaffection with OWS, the authors fault the movement’s “leaderless” character as a cover for covert (white, male) leadership and specifically object to the absence of clear demands, complaining that OWS seeks allegiance from people of color without being willing to specify to what it is, precisely, that their support is pledged. “We demand that any movement be clear about its goals, intent, and strategies to ensure that our communities, which are already suffering police violence in the forms of criminalization, incarceration, and surveillance, can make informed decisions about our participation,” write the collective authors of “For People Who Have Considered Occupation but Found It Is Not Enuf.” Yet they also suggest that a movement practice geared to decolonization cannot be corralled into any specific set of already-articulated demands: “When calling for decolonization, when demanding that we be heard, when calling for justice after incidents of abuse, you have asked us, What do you want us to do? Do you want us to leave, this space, these lands, this continent? We do not have the answers for you because we haven’t yet found the answers for ourselves. We want you to strive to find your way. We want you to recognize that the ways that you seek liberation often comes at the expense of ours. We expect you to act from that knowledge with integrity.”3 In other words, the same writers also embrace a process-oriented, open-ended politics that proved one of the most distinctive and arresting attributes of OWS. Likewise, Decolonize Oakland, while seeming to echo the perception that OWS has cast under the sign of open-endedness an agenda that fundamentally elides the concerns of participants of color, insists that the value of their organization lies precisely in the elaboration of “answers” that cannot be stipulated at the outset: “As a new collective, we do not pretend that we have answers to all the problems and injustices that face our communities, nor do we presume to speak for all people of color in Oakland. Instead, we invite people of color and allies to work with us to build relationships, share information and wisdom, and take actions that align with our Points of Unity.”4

Another organization, the Oakland Commune, which shares some of the sensibilities of Decolonize Oakland but sees itself as having evolved from Occupy Oakland, rather than broken with other Occupiers, identifies, not so much as a singular autonomous group, but rather as the name for a “network” of articulated (but not massified) actors: “This is what we began to call The Oakland Commune; that dense network of new found affinity and rebelliousness that sliced through seemingly impenetrable social barriers like never before.”5 For the advocates of the Oakland Commune, the value of the Occupy movement—and its enduring legacy—appears to be precisely this networked structure and the emergent character of the “affinities” and “rebelliousness” for which it allows. In the end, I am suggesting, both Decolonize Oakland, which overtly severs its ties to Occupy in order to foreground matters of concern to poor communities of color, and the Oakland Commune, which shares an orientation to the conditions of working-class black and brown people, but does not disaffiliate from Occupy Oakland, are invested, like Occupy Wall Street, in a model of political opposition based in networked, process-oriented, autonomous collectives. The political ethos of Occupy Wall Street with respect to differences of race and ethnicity, as well as of gender, sexuality, class, or ability—an ethos that it arguably shares with defectors such as Decolonize Oakland—is nicely rendered in a position paper that emerged from the matrix of Occupy Oakland. Placing equal emphasis on the importance of “widespread” and “autonomous” political organizing, the paper specifically validates both identitarian and cross-identitarian autonomies and prioritizes neither:

As a group of people of color, women, queers, and poor people coming together to attack a complex matrix of oppression and exploitation, we believe in the absolute necessity of autonomous organizing. By “autonomous” we mean the formation of independent groups of people who face specific forms of exploitation and oppression—including but not limited to people of color, women, queers, trans* people, gender nonconforming people, QPOC. We also believe in the political value of organizing in ways which try to cross racial, gender, and sexual divisions. We are neither spokespersons for Occupy Oakland nor do we think a single group can possibly speak to the variety of challenges facing different constituencies. We hope for the diffuse emergence of widespread autonomous organizing. (My emphasis)6

In this framework, the question is not whether OWS has marginalized communities of color, but rather whether and to what extent the autonomies it proliferates will divide along identitarian lines.

Aestheticized Politics?

Occupy’s effort to reclaim an idea of citizenship and self-governance from the ruined institutions of modern democratic politics in the United States entails, then, a kind of inward orientation—a focus on self-transformation as individuals and delimited collectives—that has been routinely dismissed, on the Marxist-oriented political Left, as a merely aestheticized politics, a politics of being (or self-fashioning) rather than becoming (or mass social mobilization).7 Of course, as others on the Left have pointed out, it is not at all clear that the aesthetic and the transformative are simply alternatives, rather than complexly interrelated elements of all modern social movements. But what Occupy Wall Street shows us, I think, is how the terrain of self-fashioning becomes immediately political as the institutions of hegemonic political power collapse.

So it follows that among the primary genres within the movement’s published archive, alongside editorials and short analytical essays (often produced by academics sympathizers), are manifestos (or “principles of solidarity” or “communiqués”) and reports from the scene of occupation by participant observers. In the vein of the NYCGA’s “Principles,” the manifestos focus on defining the social protocols of the occupying community: the conditions, in Sitrin’s phrase, “to meet one another, reflect together,” and deliberate in assembly form. They establish a communal ethos, rather than a political aim—or perhaps more exactly, they posit the elaboration of an ethos and of the collective political subject it sustains as the condition of any (outward-oriented) political aim.8 Whether implicitly (by the omission of demands) or sometimes explicitly (by affirming the impossibility of knowing one’s demands prior to the sustained democratic encounter of participants), the manifestos frame the subject of occupation—the political sensibilities and sentiments of the Occupiers—as the movement’s defining, and indeed its only, specifiable feature.

This focus on the political character of the Occupying subject helps explain why the accounts of participant observers tend to dwell on the observer’s inner transformation via contact with the Occupying collective. Nikil Saval’s report on “Occupied Philadelphia” offers an interesting example because, in contrast to someone like Sitrin, he remains considerably more skeptical of the operations of the general assembly as it aspires to enable open deliberation and consensus-based decision-making. His journal entry from November 11, 2011, opens with a positively caustic account of a GA meeting convened to discuss moving the encampment so as not to impede the city’s plans to make the subway station in the camp’s present location accessible to disabled users. “A willingness to move would imply an openness to movement, a sense of clarity over the real target—inequality, financialization, a broken political system—and proof that it’s about the 99 percent, not a piece of pavement,” Saval suggests, and then goes on to detail the reception of a proposal by the “radical caucus,” consisting, in its entirety, of the sentence: “We propose to resist eviction” (2011, 160). The group’s main spokesperson, a man whose “Stalin mustache harmonized uneasily with his soul patch,” advances “solidarity with Oakland” and “not wanting to be seen as caving to the authorities” as the reasons for refusing to relocate, and what follows, in Saval’s account, is a tedious and unproductive debate that he leaves two hours later “in frustration” after hearing “someone compare this struggle to King making his stand at Selma” (2011, 161). Feeling that he has no particular “right” to vote and “confident that the vote will go well,” he goes off to see a movie, but returns home later that night to

discover that, after five hours of discussion—by which point many of the people gathered had left—the GA has voted to stay in Dilworth Plaza! . . . I pour myself a beer and pray for the destruction of the planet. I realize I should have stayed and fought, even if my vote or my “clarifying questions” wouldn’t have saved the day. I had a responsibility to do so. I supposed I hadn’t realized how much I cared. The next morning, I read more emails: social movements suffer setbacks, they make decisions that they can reverse, this isn’t the only time a potential move will be debated, etc. It’s true, and it makes me think that a disaffection with the importance of holding a single space will move outward—“horizontally,” as an occupier would say—to the rest of the 99 percent. Perhaps there will be general assemblies in the future that are less about how to live, more about what to do. The decision may have woken everyone up from the self-love that had come to afflict our bitter celebration; after all, the point was never just to hold a park. (2011, 162, my emphasis)

Even as Saval’s report appears to end with an indictment of the movement’s focus on “how to live” as a form of narcissism that risks obscuring the political “point,” at the same time, the account of his disaffection with the GA’s decision models precisely the process of political self-fashioning that the GA—as a space of democratic “meeting,” to recall Sitrin’s phrase—is imagined to promote. Saval comes to realize a “responsibility” to participate that is measured not by the likelihood that his participation will affect the outcome, but by the political value of ethical conduct. The experience of (non)participation in the failed GA meeting brings him into a fuller recognition of his own political feelings (his “caring”), and significantly, too, it is the proliferation of feeling, in the negative form of “disaffection,” that is presented in the concluding lines as the motor force of transformation. Like Saval, other disaffected Occupiers will emerge into a finer sense of their responsibilities as movement participants. Even as Saval’s entry of November 11 explicitly identifies the risk that Occupy will degenerate into vainglorious political posturing, the antidote to narcissism turns out to be more self-fashioning: the self-reconstruction of the (spread-out) Occupying subject to guard against self-absorption.

In a recurrent motif, the self-elaboration of the Occupying subject is presented as the necessary counter to practices of hypermediation that have vitiated people’s ability to move in the world—or to make the world in which they desire to move. Writing in the journal Tidal, which describes itself as a venue for the movement’s self-theorization, one anonymous commentator frames the incitement to Occupy this way:

We were born into this world of ghosts and illusions that have haunted our minds our entire lives. These shades seem more alive to us than reality, and perhaps by some definition are more actual, hyper-real. We grew up in this world of screens and hyperbole and surreal imagery, and think nothing of a long-dead actor appearing on a wall in our homes to urge us to buy or live a certain way. Some generations ago, we might all have been burned, perhaps rightly, as witches. After all, who knows where these images come from? We have no clear idea how life should really feel.

We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual. That is what we seek to occupy. We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world. Many believe we have come to Wall Street to transact some kind of business with its denizens, to strike a deal. But we have not come to negotiate. We have come to confront the darkness at its source, here, where the Big Apple sucks in more of the sap from the national tree than it needs or deserves, as if spliced from some Edenic forbearer. Serpent size worms feast within, engorged on swollen fruit. Here, the world is chewed and digested into bits as tiny and fluid as the electrons that traders use to bring nations and homeowners to their knees. (Communiqué 1, 2011)

Interestingly, this manifesto broaches a desire for something that now appears as a critical realism—a world predicated on precise and value-laden distinctions between the “actual” and its mediations—as a well a desire for a normative orientation (“A clear idea of how life should really feel”). By the logic of her curiously chosen trope, this anonymous author finds herself aligned with the guardians of the Right and natural order against the world-making of the “witches.” Yet the manifesto ultimately elides any such foundational agenda: Occupation is figured as “seeking asylum”—as flight, not annexation—in the interest of affective self-reconstitution (learning how “life should really feel”).

If self-fashioning represents the most fundamental of proto-political impulses, it is not yet intelligible as a political project when evaluated by the criteria of modern emancipatory movements, which would require the Occupiers’ arrival (so to speak) into a mass political agency that can produce and represent its interests, through the relay of its designated representatives. This is the basis of much of the critical rejoinder to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude, as the authors themselves acknowledge in their sequel publication, Commonwealth. For Hardt and Negri, “multitude” is the name for those who live by their labor and are now increasingly—as they contend—in a position to claim autonomy from capital and stage their “exodus” from its regimes. “Cognitive labor and affective labor generally produce cooperation autonomously from capitalist command,” they assert, “even in some of the most constrained and exploited circumstances, such as call centers or food services. Intellectual, communicative, and affective means of cooperation are generally created in the productive encounters themselves and cannot be directed from the outside” (2009, 140, my emphasis). Indeed, they propose, rather than orchestrate cooperation, capital now “expropriates” it, harnessing productive energies wrought “on the level of information flows, communication networks, social codes, linguistic innovations, and practices of affect and passions” (2009, 140, emphasis in original).9 Setting aside the dubious logic on which this claim to the self-directed character of “biopolitical labor” pivots—isn’t the architecture of the “communications networks” through which information flows and sociality is (re)coded and language is innovated itself the product of capitalist design, no less than the factory floor where cooperation was so palpably enjoined in an earlier era?—I note simply that the multitude as they conceive it is not a politically unified entity but a “multiplicity of irreducible singularities,” and the burden of the critique, especially by Pierre Macheray and Ernesto Laclau, has been to ask how a collection of singularities (or small, functionally disaggregated groups) might work together politically. “How then can the multitude organize itself,” writes Macheray, “without sacrificing the autonomy of the singularities that compose it?” (quoted in Hardt and Negri 2009, 166). Laclau poses the problem specifically in terms of hegemony, arguing that in order to articulate singular social agents, forces must be in play to direct the process of articulation and provide common points of identification. “The political operation par excellence,” he writes, “is always going to be the construction of a people” (quoted in Hardt and Negri 2009, 167). From this perspective, the multitude—like Occupy Wall Street, which so palpably instantiates the multitude’s political characteristics—is a subject on the road to politics, rather than a properly political subject.10

My own inclination is to split the difference, refusing on the one hand Laclau’s essentialist construction of politics (as being always about the construction of a people) and, on the other, Hardt and Negri’s seeming dismissal of the problem of the political altogether: in their utopian scenario, the need for any “political operation” to articulate the singularity to the collective simply evaporates. Rather, I am suggesting, in a historical context where Laclau’s apprehension of politics dissolves, the self-cultivation of disaggregated (“pre-political”) agents emerges as the primary terrain for “civil revival,” as well as for the elaboration of a new political operation, or operations. At the same time, against Hardt and Negri, I would insist that a new operation is both necessary and as yet fundamentally unknowable (that is what it means to encounter the end of an order—that one lacks the analytic resources to apprehend what is emerging); nor will the slow, difficult political work of its elaboration be preempted by our felicitous attainment of cooperative sociality through the radical autonomy of the multitude’s singularities.

Indeed, in Hardt and Negri’s account of the multitude’s political prospects, the operative force is denominated “love.” “As the motor of association, love is the power of the common in a double sense,” they write, “both the power that the common exerts and the power to constitute the common. It is thus also the movement toward freedom in which the composition of singularities leads towards not unity or identity but the increasing autonomy of each participating equally in the web of communication and cooperation” (2009, 189). This seems rather an oracular pronouncement than an arguable proposition. Even so, it is hardly apparent why of all things “love”—an emotion so deeply bound up in institutional and psychic structures of property—would be the name to give to this principle of a collective movement towards autonomy. Speaking more generally to the affective dimensions of contemporary political life, Lauren Berlant reminds us that affect has always stood as “the register of belonging to inhabit when there are few adequate normative institutions to fall back on” (2011, 226). But Berlant is more cautious about the character of affect unbound from institutionalized social and political life, where it operates to “dramatize experiences of freedom to come that have no social world for them yet,” and she notes how such emancipatory affect sustains alternate solidarities without, however, intervening in the operation of prevailing “neoliberal” interests (2011, 222). In this regard, Berlant hews to the suspicion of a too thoroughly aestheticized politics, though it is noteworthy that she, too, is drawn to the possibilities of what she terms an “ambient citizenship,” where “the drama of the distribution of affect/noise meets up with scenarios of movement” (2011, 230, emphasis in original). I am suggesting that what is at stake in this attention to the “motor” force of love/affect is precisely recuperating a terrain of political engagement in the face of the “break-up,” as Berlant puts it “of modernity’s secure institutions of intimacy and reciprocity” (2011, 222). In Berlant’s account, however, affect is both more heterogeneous than “love” and not, itself, the sufficient “political operation” for the emergence of new social worlds.

Coda: Simulacral Politics on the Left

Here and throughout this book, I have been arguing that opposition is always bound up in the form of the power it opposes. This is not to suggest that domination preempts or coopts its opposition, but simply to affirm that our implication in the forces and institutions that bear on our lives is rightly understood as the condition of our agency. Because OWS presents as a repudiation of so much that defines political modernity, by reimagining mass publics as networked singularities, for example, or reconstituting the always nonempirical “people” as live assemblies, it is easy enough to infer that it breaks with established forms of power. But the forms of modern, democratic governance are already, fundamentally disestablished. In abandoning the incorporative project of modern mass politics, as the state does, OWS commits to the production of virtual realities—beta-testing other ways of living, “releasing” other possible worlds “early and often,” to recall Rushkoff’s astute formulation. It is this implication of OWS in a derealized politics that the anonymous author in Tidal misrecognizes, when she urges the pursuit of “asylum in the actual.” Confronted by such authenticating gestures, we do well to remember that reality is not so much real as it is given, a reality-effect, anchored by discourses and institutions that police the limit between the mutable and the fixed, between the field of human activity and the solid-seeming contours of the world in which we are “free” to act. In other words, we do well to remember that the “actual” and the real world are names for the very constructions it was, not so long ago, the business of oppositional intellectuals to un-think.

Yet in general and, I would say, at its best, OWS tends exuberantly to break with a (realist) politics of representation, in both meanings of the term: it seeks neither to array an iconic subject who stands in for the anonymous mass of movement participants (representation as delegation), nor even, more simply, to cast its participants as already-constituted political agents (representation as depiction). The movement subject imagined in the archive of OWS, the manifestos and participant testimonials, is more often than not a kind of hologram—a projection of how one might choose to move in the world. The peculiar and generative achievement of OWS, which is also its confounding limitation, is to show that there is no actually existing subject of occupation. Instead, the motive for occupation and its aim is to simulate an alternate plane of political life, outside the ruined institutions of modern democratic politics, but equally, “orthogonal” (in Sterling’s phrase) to the networks of an institutionalized neocitizenship, where other iterations of a civil society and other avatars of the citizen-subject might yet emerge.