I pulled on the rope which was strung between the main building and the firmly locked gates, upsetting a group of cans suspended next to the front door, which clattered into one another and loudly announced my arrival. After a while, a collie ran out to meet me as a face appeared around the corner of a door-frame which had been roughly cut out of the wall. Once I had introduced myself as a researcher interested in the Occupy movement, she unlocked the gates and invited me in with the caveat: ‘you won’t find many activists here – we’re all hippies’.
The disused garden centre in Camden was situated in the middle of Rochester Square. Before the squatters had acquired the property, the derelict space had mostly served as an impromptu site for shelter and occasional drug use, but they assured me it had been empty when they moved in. Having only recently founded the centre as a community space, there was still much to be done. The long glass greenhouses were mostly smashed up and overgrown with a lot of rubbish strewn about, and yet they had already managed to grow some food even in the short time they had been living there. I witnessed the excitement as they discovered their first tomato.
It was hard not to be filled with admiration. Here were around ten people living permanently away from society and attempting to be as self-sustaining as possible: growing their own food, recycling the water (I was given a demonstration of how the washing-up water was funnelled back into the flushing toilet) and repairing the broken-down buildings, greenhouses, and flowerbeds. One of the most pressing tasks was to move everyone inside and out of the tents dotted around the ground before winter set in, and the plan was to build new walls inside the large main building in order to make the interior smaller and more efficient to heat.
Despite being directed here by Occupy activists, there was very little evidence of political organisation, apart from a newly acquired printing press and a couple of the squatters who told me that they had been involved in the Occupy movement. There were a few acoustic guitars with missing strings, a set of bongos, sofas, a projector screen (for community film nights), a bookcase containing radical literature, posters advertising forthcoming events (Yoga, horticulture, meetings, etc.), some broken-down bikes and gardening equipment, as well as an impressively functional kitchen area. They had given up on wider society, and instead decided to resist indirectly by establishing the square as an autonomous space that could facilitate more ‘authentic’ and ‘non-conflicted’ lifestyles, beyond corruption by the state and capitalism, as well as large organisations like Occupy. They wanted to enact and prefigure an alternative, more sustainable way of living, while opening up this previously wasted space to the local community.
They kept the gate locked for security reasons, fearing both an unexpected police or bailiff eviction and an unsustainable overload of squatters. Some were maintaining full-time jobs outside the square and donating some of their wages for food, while others (who had been there the longest) focused more on developing the space: building, cooking, gardening, cleaning, fixing bikes, considering insulation over a joint or two. There were some migrants from Southern Europe also staying there who told me about being involved in similar squats back home. Two women (one of whom was pregnant) appeared to be performing most of the domestic duties, offering tea to visitors, and preparing vegetables from the garden for dinner.
When the squat was suddenly evicted in June 2016, the activists attempted to reaffirm their outsider status through the media coverage of the event. On 4 July 2016 The Guardian reported, sympathetically, that ‘about 30 people have been left homeless from a squat that had transformed a derelict plant nursery in the heart of London into an off-grid, sustainable living hub’ before quoting one squatter ‘who gave his name as “∞just-rob©ofearth” that ‘whatever the claims of the lawfulness of whatever eviction they have done today, what they have actually done is expelled a nature tribe who are outside the English law’. Having chosen to become ‘free men of the land’ and rejecting ‘corporate law used to govern people of the UK by fraud’, the squatters had seen themselves as an autonomous and authentic community, ‘with the aim’, according to their Facebook page, ‘of promoting sustainable living, growing organic food, nurturing wildlife [and] cultivating free artistic spaces’.
This chapter will build on the normative foreclosures discussed above by considering the cultural logic of authenticity in the context of postmodern capitalism. As well as the problematic extension of individualist and libertarian norms outlined in the previous chapter, it is argued that the pursuit of authenticity within contemporary activism provides both the basis of a further tyranny of structurelessness and a normative extension of the very market dominance that movements like Occupy were attempting to challenge in the post-crash moment. By ‘authenticity’ I mean the attempt to establish a critical distance from (what is perceived to be) complicity with the corrupting and stifling influence of capitalism, the state, or other large institutions and organisations which might discipline their actions. Those deemed to be ‘more authentic’ are considered to be far from the instrumental rationality or co-optation of the market or state, while the ‘less authentic’ is considered to be symbolic objects, cultural signs, or identities which have ‘sold out’ and become incorporated into consumerism or parliamentary limits. While, at first, it may seem entirely logical that activists would attempt to withdraw their resistance and adopt a distance from that which they are attempting to change, I will use the idea of the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ to argue that this very pursuit of authenticity has become part of the cultural logical of consumerism itself.
Tracing the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ back to a cultural turn in the 1960s, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that ideas of authenticity were adopted by the market in order to appeal to cultural changes in the global north-west. While the industrial organisation of early 20th-century production emphasised uniformity and mass consumption, this new post-industrial organisation was instead based upon principles of:
autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multitasking (in contrast to the narrow specialisation of old labour), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability, creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experiences, being attracted to informality and the search for interpersonal contacts … taken directly from the repertoire of May 1968.
(Boltanski and Chiapello 2007: 97)
While the 1960s were certainly a crucial period for the emergence of new social movements and politics which had historically been marginalised by a traditional (white, working-class-centric) left; it was also, uncoincidentally, the point of emergence for a new type of capitalism which took criticisms of a lack of diversity and heterogeneity to heart. Western economies adapted and companies began to produce products and subcultures which appealed to individual expressions of difference and authenticity, signalling an attempt to move away from the perceived oppression of capitalist mass production and produce a new vibrant individualism that would directly contrast with the dull, grey uniformity behind the Iron Curtain. Addressing such criticisms, therefore, there was a cultural turn in the west which made authenticity (i.e. a perceived distance from capitalism) part of capitalist accumulation itself.
As I will demonstrate below, the pursuit of authenticity is also a preoccupation within contemporary activism and was expressed widely within the Occupy movement in London. Like the Rochester Square squatters, emphasis was regularly placed on the need to pursue autonomous space from which to authentically organise, equating ‘proper’ activism with purity and adopting the moral high ground, attempting to establish spaces that were uncorrupted, untainted, non-compliant, non-complicit, and ‘outside’ (or at least at a distance from) wider social structures and institutions (e.g. capitalism, parliaments, cultural inequalities). Often, the navigation of authenticity was inconsistent, self-contradictory, and complex, but underlying all narratives remained a common presumption that authentic withdrawal, as much as possible, was ideal for effective resistance.
The pursuit of authenticity created a number of problems for Occupy (in) London. In the first instance, it provided further grounds for a tyranny of structurelessness within the movement, as a number of activists simply saw their resistance as ‘more authentic’ than that of others (usually newcomers and/or younger, unseasoned activists who were dismissed as naïve, stupid, or inexperienced). This created a basis for an internal distribution of the sensible which partitioned some activists as ‘authentic’ and others as ‘inauthentic’, creating further preclusions along these lines that denied the possibility of democratic negotiation of an exclusive collective identity. It also provided the fuel for further unaccountable hierarchies to develop within the movement, between those who considered their resistance as more ‘authentic’ than that of others.
In the second instance, the problem with the pursuit of authenticity was that it played into the same external police order distribution of the movement which was attempting to dismiss their appearance and voice as ‘non-sense’. By taking seriously accusations of their inauthenticity – that they were hypocrites who needed to go away and take a long, hard look at themselves before criticising anyone – Occupy inadvertently accepted those normative co-ordinates which dismissed their politics as ‘nothing to see here’. Using the stigma that surrounded Starbucks coffee and V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks, I will show how the very concern over whether the movement was rendering itself inauthentic by using such cultural items, played into wider claims that the movement was ‘non-sense’.
Finally, I will argue that the pursuit of authenticity allowed a problematic extension of market norms at the very moment that they were attempting to challenge the ideological hold of capitalist realism. It will be argued that myths of co-optation (i.e. that resistance culture is authentic at first but is then incorporated into consumerism) plays into wider market norms of obsolescence, competition, and product development. Rather than pursuing authenticity – which creates preclusions and hierarchies; plays into wider distributions of their appearance as ‘non-sense’; and extends market logics at the very moment they are attempting to challenge them – it will therefore be my contention that such striving for authentic distance is not only structurally unachievable (and therefore a waste of valuable activist time and energy), but a dead-end for resistance and a foreclosure of possibility.
In order to broach the topic of authenticity and find out whether activists considered co-optation of their resistance to be a problem, I often asked occupiers about the notion of an ‘activist identity’. More often than not, this had the desired effect of implying a collective subcultural conformity within the movement, tapping into concerns that libertarian left-wing activists might be creating an ‘inauthentic’ target market of lucrative rebel consumers. Thus, asking about an activist identity steered the conversation towards criticisms of consumerism within social movements and subcultural identities within activist circles, reflecting upon the apparent paradox that cultural signifiers of dissent might be commodified and rendered inauthentic or tamed by commodities that carried (and sold) sentiments of protest. What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was the pre-existing sensitivity towards such a view, which manifested itself in sophisticated defences and arguments that interviewee appeared to already have at their disposal in order to defend the authenticity of their activism against the implied criticisms of an ‘activist identity’.
Harry, for instance, who had attempted to join the movement late in the day and was faced with the difficulty of trying to become part of the ‘in group’ (not least because he was distrusted for fear that he might be undercover police, see Chapter 5), was particularly candid about his thought process about what clothes he should (or should not) wear to Occupy meetings:
You do kind of … we do I suppose in some way purchase goods that help us feel part of something, that connectivity with other people … so I guess it’s part of it. It’s just, I don’t think it should be that important. Yeah, I don’t think it should be that valued ’cause you know … when I go to these meetings, it’s like ‘well, should I wear my more baggy jeans? Or my ripped clothes to feel that slight kind of original activist look?’ It’s like no, it’s like no, bollocks. I’m just going to be myself.
Wanting to fit in and identify with the movement, as well as develop ‘connectivity’ with the existing members of the community, Harry weighed up what he (sarcastically) called ‘the original activist look’ – baggy jeans, ripped clothes – with the authenticity of ‘just being myself’. The activist look, he concluded, was the inauthentic option and not a price to be paid for belonging, while the individual liberty of being true to himself was seen as the authentic decision (i.e. distancing himself from the consumerist performance of an activist identity).
He then continued by reflecting back on the styles, fashions, and trends which he had adopted in the past, as well as to the fact that he used to belong to alternative subcultural groups:
I guess you’d call me part of the ‘alternative spectrum’ (although I don’t know how actually meaningful that word is anymore … I think the ‘alternative’ really has become ‘mainstream’). But if you go back to the early 1990s/2000s, I was … I suppose you could call me a ‘grunger’. I used to have hair down to here!
Despite appearing to encapsulate a distance from the ‘mainstream’, the authenticity of the alternative, for Harry, was now problematic because it had become co-opted into consumerism and was therefore no longer ‘meaningful’. Referring to the grunge scene of the early 1990s – a subculture which was continually tormented by the balance between popularity and authenticity, as detailed in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note – is indicative of this. As more and more people pursue an identity which demonstrates authentic distance, it is quickly considered too popular – too mainstream, too profitable, too trendy – and therefore no longer authentic.
Harry was not alone in expressing concern for the authenticity of his resistance being jeopardised by a consumerist co-optation into some sort of shallow popular subcultural fad. As one activist who had travelled around to some of the other Occupy protests in Europe observed, for instance, ‘the German occupiers look exactly like Finsbury Square … the same lingo, the same movements, the same … every bit of detail was the same … like they’ve created some kind of subculture … the way they rolled their joints, the way they were talking’ (2014, int. 6). This implies that this similarity was a clear sign of inauthenticity – these individuals weren’t being ‘true to themselves’ (to use Harry’s phrase) but were simply buying in to a subculture and following a trend.
For many, it was therefore important to defend their activism and the Occupy movement from the criticism implied by an activist identity, because this would suggest that they had been co-opted and turned into a mainstream popular subcultural trend. One activist, for example, sought to play down such subcultural characteristics as simply pragmatic or inadvertent results of direct action:
With anarchists, army surplus is very popular because it’s very cheap and very hardwearing. So, this creates an identity by itself as well … it’s always the case when they say ‘bunch of crusties … get your hair cut you bunch of hippies’. Unfortunately, you just don’t have a choice sometimes.
(2014, int. 3)
Attempting to downplay elements of the movement which resembled some sort of fashion statement or sign of conspicuous consumption, the argument was that individuals were justified in buying army surplus gear, or growing their hair long, because these were practical decisions and simply by-products of direct action. They weren’t doing this just for the sake of fashion or to belong to a subculture (which would be ‘inauthentic’) but because the pragmatic demands of living on the street or in a protest camp meant that they had ‘no choice’.
Another defensive narrative used to downplay the charge of an inauthentic activist identity was that such attempts to belong through purchasing signifying items were part of a natural human inclination to belong and identify with others:
It’s not that I’m second-guessing you, but when I hear question like that [on activist identity] I kind of feel like people search for excuses not to do things, y’know? Now, yes, there are some people who have that identity, and people also … in a way, a lot of people who are more into that identity are more into it than formulating a more sophisticated critique. So, its fashion really. And it’s not totally superficial, but it is in a way a fashion that appeals to certain people who I imagine are jobless a lot of the time – or ‘creative’ – and it’s an avenue for them to express themselves. I’ve never really had a problem with it, but I’ve been a part of that, so I’ve never been intimidated by it. Doubly so, I’ve never needed to put it down. It’s generally people trying to do the right thing and bonding … human cliques … it’s very ordinary.
(2014, int. 10)
‘But I’m wearing black and red and I look like I’ve just stepped out of Camden … I have just stepped out of Camden … I bought this hat in Camden, I’ve got dreads … and certain people will look at me and … It’s all uniforms: that’s the way identity works’
(James)
Signifiers of resistance – the black and red of anarchism being incorporated into a hat to be sold at Camden Market (itself a cathedral of rebel consumption, with the appearance of an authentic marketplace at street level, but with glass towers above) – might be co-opted by capitalism, but ultimately such items are defensible as merely being ways of belonging and a natural process of identification. What’s more, for the former activist, people who buy into such an ‘activist identity’ simply lacked a more sophisticated critique, insisting that while ‘some people’ might be like that, it didn’t characterise Occupy as a whole.
Even with the more sceptical activists, there remained a desire to be unconflicted (and therefore authentic) even if it wasn’t always considered to be possible. The overriding concern remained to establish an authentic politics by creating a distance, as far as possible, from a life conflicted with consumer capitalism, either by avoiding certain goods that contradicted their politics (boycotting) or by obtaining more ethical options and alternatives (or what we might call buycotting, a term I first came across in Albinsson et al. (2010). Speaking via Skype, Ollie made it particularly clear that he disagreed with the artificiality of consumerism, outlining his distaste of capitalism and defence of authenticity in relation to what he would or would not purchase:
I’m really against this marketplace which I’ve tacitly agree to be part of. Every time I purchase in that marketplace, I am tacitly saying this is a good thing to do. So more and more I try to buy second-hand stuff, build my own kit. I’m in the process of building a bicycle generator, second hand solar panels, second hand batteries … that’s still benefitting from the market that’s there, but at least it’s withdrawing.
While recognising the ubiquity of the market and his complicity with it, Ollie nevertheless sees the answer as withdrawing as far as is possible and pursuing some sort of authentic distance through exercises of individual consumer choice. By purchasing second-hand stuff and building his own kit – including generating his own energy in order to be off-grid – the argument was that he was no longer being inauthentic and ‘tacitly saying that market is a good’:
That’s the kind of world we live in. It’s a world full of contradictions. And if there was a fair trade-type phone, I’m going to migrate to that. You know, I love my Converse All-Stars … but the same thing applies. I would love to live an unconflicted life where every item of clothing I wore was not made at the expense of someone’s health or poverty.
In an ideal world, the ‘unconflicted’ life would allow Ollie to avoid hypocrisy by maintaining his desire for products (such as his Converse) or the need for technology (like mobile phones) without having to compromise his ethical or political authenticity. I asked whether this meant he was an advocate of Black Spot branded trainers (which look very similar to Converse but are produced by Adbusters as an ethical alternative):
For instance, Black Spot … if I was able to entirely dress in ‘right-on’ stuff, I could stop at any point because I’m not living a conflicted life. I can wear hemp, my trainers were made by people who were given good wages, etc. … But if I use that as a way of saying: ‘well, I feel good about myself, so I don’t need to worry about anything anymore’. I’m much more interested in somebody that’s alive and active and seeking … and wearing Converse … than I am about a self-satisfied smug git who’s wearing an anarchist t-shirt, an Anonymous mask and ‘right-on’ sandals.
Here, then, Ollie adds another level of complexity to his argument. Not only are consumer goods themselves conflicted, but even buycotting ‘non-conflicted’ goods could be seen as inauthentic, because such a distance prevents activists from being ‘active and seeking’ in their politics. In other words, the argument appears to be that a certain level of hypocrisy is necessary to motivate resistance.
Such a careful and elaborate navigation through the field of authenticity involved many layers of argumentation which sometimes appeared self-contradictory – e.g. why is purchasing a fair trade phone as an ethical buycott any different to someone opting for ‘right-on’ sandals? – but the underlying point here is that activism should always pursue authenticity. It’s therefore less my suggestion that these arguments are simply either right or wrong, and more my intention to highlight the presupposition of such ready-made sophisticated defences that were deployed at the mention of an ‘activist identity’. Such arguments, I suggest, indicated a persisting, underlying discomfort with possible accusations of authenticity and hypocrisy. Those who were deemed to be pursuing an activist identity, who lacked a sophisticated critique and who simply treated Occupy as a subcultural trend, were either dismissed outright as ‘inauthentic’ or were defended using pragmatic or pseudo-social psychological arguments that such cliques were ‘natural’. Either way, what was considered to be at stake was the authenticity of the Occupy movement, and whether their resistance was clearly distanced from the shallow, trivial, and corrupting influence of consumerism. Such rapid defences of authenticity suggested that the ideal position for activists was not to be incorporated or to comply, and instead to locate purer autonomous positions from which to express one’s resistance. However, this preoccupation and anxiety within the movement, as I will now argue, created numerous problems and foreclosures for the Occupy movement in London.
The first problem that the pursuit of authenticity caused for Occupy (in) London is that it became yet another source and basis of hierarchy and preclusion – another ‘tyranny’ within the ‘structureless’ (inclusive and horizontal) democratic space. Like Harry’s dilemma over what to wear to a meeting or Lucy’s concern with her purchase of Burberry-branded items in the previous chapter, the ‘core’ of the movement sometimes gave the impression of an exclusive subculture which saw their resistance as more authentic than others. In particular, such hierarchies and preclusions developed around those who were deemed to be impure activists, because they had mistakenly bought in to signifiers of dissent offered by the market:
Che Guevara T-shirts man! They make me laugh! You know, it’s this whole: ‘oh, it’s cool to be left wing’ thing. That sort of thing does my head in, y’know? Those people, they’re not into any cause, they just want to be part of the ‘gang’. And people like that, in my opinion, should just be avoided.
(2012, int. 10)
Those who purchased goods – like Che Guevara T-shirts – in order to be ‘rebellious’ or ‘dissenting’ just ‘didn’t get it’ and therefore should simply be avoided as facetious, inauthentic, and not truly into the cause. Such an attitude seemed to develop into a mechanism that caused newcomers to the movement to be thoroughly judged for signs of inauthenticity, as well as a method through which cliques became stigmatised as ‘less authentic’ than others:
In Occupy it was so obvious … because Anonymous is a very diverse group (anyone can call themselves ‘Anonymous’) and then there’s this really good part of Anonymous that are like the hackers and doing a really good job. And then just like a bunch of people that are really just trying to create trouble. And they are really confrontational. They don’t have a strong politics. They’re lost really, they don’t know what they’re doing.
(2013, int. 10)
This, I argue, is indicative of that distribution of the sensible which developed within the Occupy (in) London movement of whose voice and appearance was considered to be legitimate and whose was not. For this activist (above), for instance, the Anonymous group at the campsites were not the real, authentic, proper Anonymous, but just some confrontational group in Guy Fawkes masks who didn’t really know what they were doing:
And then they really just like pose with the mask to the camera, so they would just stand there … but in the camp, there was never any energy given to them to improve, or to participate with what’s going on, they would never engage with us. They would just sit there in the tent with the flag waving around and as soon as the media arrived they were like posing. But they never worked for it, they didn’t believe in the idea.
(Julia)
While a more disciplined organisation might have been able to draw lines of exclusion and inclusion with such groups, the structurelessness asserted at Occupy meant that they were automatically precluded as inauthentic, without democratic negotiation. Interestingly, the same activist who criticised Anonymous as inauthentic then went on to blame the symbolic inefficiency of wider society for encouraging such people to join movements at such a shallow level:
And I think there’s a problem within activist circles sometimes and more mass movements (like Occupy was at some point) are that people become … They’re maybe more, like, excluded from society, and they see social movements as: ‘be part of something like a community’. Because activist groups are like that, you don’t just go to your protests then go home, there is a sense of family, we’re really close to each other, we support each other in our everyday life. And I think people are really attracted to that … but maybe don’t engage in the politics so much (and that’s really a massive problem).
(Julia)
The result was that some activists considered themselves ‘better’ or ‘more authentic’ than others (who were deemed to be engaging at a shallow, non-committal level, and were subsequently dismissed as ‘non-sense’). Those who were considered to be left wing because it was ‘trendy’ or ‘cool’ or ‘fashionable’ were considered not to have ‘strong politics’. They should only be considered ‘posers’ who have never really ‘worked for it’. Once again, my point is not so much that these arguments are necessarily inaccurate, but that the problematic logic which they represent (a preoccupation with pursuing authenticity) continues an unaccountable tyranny of structurelessness (creating un-negotiated and undemocratic hierarchies, distributions and preclusions in the movement’s organisation).
Another way in which this distribution manifested itself was on a meta-level: those activists who recognised the problems of pursuing authenticity, and subsequently saw their politics as ‘more authentic’ than those who were naïvely concerned with being authentic:
‘People have this – even if they don’t realise they have it – a lot of them have this stupid idea about purity. We’re never going to get anything that is completely black or completely white. We’re never going to have anything that’s completely good or completely evil. That’s not going to … in the real world, that just does not happen, y’know?
(2012, int. 14)
You know, initially, when my politics were more liberal and unseasoned, I really would have bought into this idea of cultural capitalism. I would have boycotted things, particularly the Israel-Palestine thing at the time (boycott Marks and Spencers). At the time, I would have given into that.
(Lucy)
I think a trail of thought that emerged – the idea of ‘purity’ – this emerged within activist movements and activist mentality as well, and it kind of goes along the terms: ‘unless you’re living out of … unless you’re a freegan living out of dumpsters, unless you’re squatting or not paying rent, unless you’re not buying things from a commercial store … then you’re not pure and that’s problematic’. This is a real extreme idea of things and I think its foundation is the idea that an individual can change society by changing their behaviour and things like that. I don’t really buy into that. I think this stuff is hypocritical because we’re so like entrenched and locked into the market system that you can’t just make a clear break from it, whilst trying to actively critique it or participate in an alternative of it … I think it’s quite true that there’s no real alternative to what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’ as a dominant imaginary. And I think it’s a dominant imaginary because the market is reality. You can’t just step outside that market, I don’t think, I think it’s a really unfair idea.
(2014, int. 4)
The problem here is the way in which these activists criticised the pursuit of authenticity by other activists, assuming that they had become aware of the ‘truth’ behind the pursuit of authenticity and purity, overlooking how their criticisms also presupposed their own distance from complicity. For these three interviewees, purity was an idea pursued by the ‘stupid’, for the ‘liberal and unseasoned’ activists that they themselves ‘didn’t really buy into’, asserting their expertise and authority on this issue by positioning themselves as above such trivial activities. There is no democratic presupposition of ‘reason between equals’ here (see Rancière 1991); instead there is a presupposition of inequality, in that some activists ‘know better’ than others how to create an authentic movement and protest.
Rather than extending the movement and democratically negotiating organisational lines of collective identity, therefore, such ‘unseasoned activists’ were dismissed and marginalised within the movement. This also played out in activist biographies, with those newcomers who didn’t have a background in activism and therefore were without experience, understanding, or expertise, treated as second-class members of the movement. Some occupiers distanced themselves from such newcomers by boasting about their involvement in previous movements:
I’m not here personally for Occupy … but I’m here with Reclaim the Fields, Reclaim the Streets. But this is what I am as a home. Occupy is home for me.
(2012, int. 1)
I think it’s true that a number of people who were active in the sixties – such as myself – will have a different view of what is happening because we’ve seen a lot more. And we’ve also seen … we were opposed to what was happening in the sixties which was much more progressive than what’s happening today. Now we never expected it to go back, but what we had from ’45 to ’75 was probably an aberration.
(2014, int. 11)
Like, one of the things that pissed me off at St Paul’s was just how short-sighted so many people were. Like, I could see some article by some guy being like … saying: ‘those of us who learnt our politics in 1999’ like ‘Seattle protests’ or whatever. And you think like, it’s not like 1999 was significantly different from the sixties. Like we have the internet … but like, the world is still recognisable. Even life today, the world is still recognisable to what it was, y’know, sixty years ago.
(2012, int. 14)
Belonging to a previous movement or era, especially if it already had some kind of legendary status attached to it (such as Reclaim the Streets), provided a certain claim to authenticity for longer-term activists above those who had perhaps come to activism for the first time. Those who had already earned their reputations and social capital as being committed activists were subsequently distributed as possessing a more ‘sensible’ voice and appearance within the movement, able to assert their opinions and views on authority within the ‘structureless’ space. As the frustration of the last activist suggests (see above), the hierarchies which then developed off the back of this – between seasoned activists and those deemed to be unseasoned newcomers – developed into further divides and fractures, as the newer activists became fed up with the condescending attitudes and unequal distribution of voice afforded to them.
In an apparent echo of Freeman’s tyranny of structurelessness, one activist even described to me what he called ‘the tyranny of the founders’, or ‘a sort of inner circle that were “experts” in activism, teaching us “how it’s done”’, sarcastically adding: ‘I suppose if I was an expert on activism in London – and I’d been around and I’d earned my spurs and my credit rating was high – then I could probably meet these people and they could vet me… but one phrase that appeared at the end was the ‘circle of trust’ and it became an identity thing: them and us’ (Burgum 2015b). Those who claimed to have founded and started the movement, who had ‘been there since the beginning’, laid a certain claim to Occupy (in) London as more ‘theirs’ than any newcomers, creating preclusions that foreclosed the possibility of a democratic negotiation over the boundaries of the movement. In particular, those who attended Occupy LSX at St Paul’s seemed to use this as a ‘go to’ reference for their personal claim towards representing the authentic Occupy London (in contrast to the trivial, inexperienced, and shallow engagement of late arrivals).
In addition, claims to being an ‘original occupier’ which provided authenticity and authority over others, were also expressed in terms of a willingness to put oneself at personal risk, either through direct violence (e.g. altercation with the police) or via personal sacrifices (e.g. ‘holding the fort’ by staying in the tents):
We’re sort of family, we are a community, I mean we started as a community in St Paul’s churchyard and we … somebody referred to us this week actually as diehards … and I think that’s about right. Those of us who are still active, as much as they can be, are diehards … they’ve decided to stay because … a few people I know say it’s a way of life for them.
(Sally)
Direct action, physical work, direct action is needed. I’m not denying the amazingness of the internet, but we need more than just signing petitions and talking about it. You have to talk before you do action, but you know … to me you feel alive when you do direct action, you feel alive, like you’re doing something, like you’ve made some change.
(2013, int. 9)
The consumeristic model is so much easier … ’cause you just … you buy your T-shirt and you buy your mask and of course [speaking sarcastically] you’re part of it, ’cause you’ve got the T-shirt! You got the mask! But you didn’t have to spend any time in the tent or in the mud protesting to feel like you’re then part of that thing.
(2012, int. 3)
The ‘diehards’ who were willing (or, at least, had a reputation for being more willing) to risk their safety through direct action, or who made personal sacrifices by spending time in the mud, were deemed more authentic than those who were imagined to be only belonging to the movement at a superficial level (and therefore were not far enough removed from the mainstream). Even the inhospitality of the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral was celebrated as being beneficial for the movement in performing such sacrifice:
and the space itself was so unhospitable. That alone made it quite perfect! … I think because people just look at it and think: ‘how extraordinary that these people are actually living here’, y’know? Actually creating a life there, they’ve got a kitchen and a library and … it’s all functioning!
(Jenny)
For Jenny, the very challenge and adversity of camping in the city streets was a ‘perfect’ way of demonstrating the activists’ authentic commitment to the cause. Yet she was also no stranger to the problems of hierarchy and preclusion which could be created by such authenticity through sacrifice, drawing links between her experience at St Paul’s and similar ideas which had circulated at the Greenham Common women’s peace camp in the 1980s:
I think there is an ‘activist identity’ and, again, it happened at Greenham and needed squashing. It becomes an accidental hierarchy of the people who are deemed to have done most. The difficulty of Greenham was that those of us who had been to prison were given a lot more respect than people who hadn’t. And I think the same thing applies – or did apply at one point – in Occupy. There was a notion that you, kind of, if you’d been arrested you’d kind of got your colours. And if you camped in the camp, compared with visiting, then you were more of an activist. And if you spend a lot of time online rather than physically attending meetings, then you’re less of an activist.
Being willing to put oneself in harm’s way or to have altercations with the police was seen as endowing some activists with an aura of authenticity, performing their activist identity that they were at a clear distance from capitalism and the state, but also above others who were considered ‘less of an activist’ for not doing so. While on the face of it, such commitment to the cause seems to adhere to Badiou’s (2012) argument for fidelity; in a disorganised and structureless movement like Occupy, there was simply no overall idea for which this commitment to risk and sacrifice was being performed. Thus, these acts only achieved in the development of individual kudos and authority for some at the expense of others, developing unnegotiated exclusions and unaccountable hierarchies between those deemed more or less ‘authentic’.
The pursuit of authenticity was yet another blockage to the movement’s ability to organise collectively, once again deepening divisions, fractures, preclusions, tyrannies, and an undemocratic distribution of voices along the lines of who were considered to be the heroic vanguards of the movement versus the facetious newcomers. Rather than organising a basis from which to make a collective intervention and refigure the wider police order, therefore, there was instead a preoccupation with purity and authenticity – whether seeing oneself as ‘authentic’ or as ‘more authentic than others’. The Occupy movement in London inadvertently created further unchecked distributions of power within its horizontal and structureless space which meant that, when it did inevitably coalesce and become more exclusive, it did not do so under conditions of acknowledged and reflexive negotiation, but upon presuppositions of who was (or was not) considered authentic. Those who were able to claim expertise, knowledge, originality, and authority – or at least demonstrate their commitment through physical risk or sacrifice – were seen to carry more authenticity, thus creating a situation in which some were able to claim authority over the movement at the expense of others.
In addition to the problem of creating further preclusions, unaccountable hierarchies, and unequal distributions within the movement, the concern and preoccupation with pursuing authenticity can also be an issue for the wider distribution of the movement as a whole. In pursuing authentic resistance, the concern was to avoid criticism that the movement was somehow hypocritical, by acting in ways which demonstrated its secret reliance on capitalism while loudly announcing its criticism of it. By taking such dismissals seriously, however, the activists inadvertently played into the normative co-ordinates that positioned them as ‘non-sense’, despite the problem of hypocrisy being relatively inconsequential. It is not necessary, I argue, to adopt a pure, authentic, non-hypocritical ‘moral high ground’ before making an intervention or criticism of the status quo, yet such anxieties were widespread within the movement and flared up around a few key examples.
The first was the question of whether Occupy activists could remain ‘authentic’ while drinking coffee from the global corporate chain Starbucks. What is particularly interesting about Starbucks as a case study of authenticity, is that the company originally fashioned itself as a buycott by positioning its fair trade products as an ethical alternative to other coffee suppliers, offering an opportunity on the market to ‘have your coffee and drink it too’ (i.e. consume without ethical guilt towards the exploitation of coffee farmers). Yet the corporation’s in-store employment practices, tax avoidance, criticism of the limit of fair trade schemes, as well as its sheer uniform ubiquity in every major city, has led Starbucks to attract the same alter-globalisation scrutiny as did other worldwide corporations in the 1990s (e.g. McDonalds, Microsoft, Nike). In the centre of major cities like London, Starbucks coffee had become so common that it is often the only choice for hot drinks, Wi-Fi and toilets, as more ‘authentic’ independent cafes struggle to compete. Both the camp at St Paul’s and at Finsbury Square had a local branch of Starbucks nearby and, while trying to keep their protest going during the coldest part of the year, the activists visited them regularly.
Yet this caused great tension within the movement, with some questioning the authenticity and hypocrisy of buying coffee from such a global corporate entity and consumer-capitalist flagship as Starbucks. For some, it was clear that Occupy should be boycotting the chain:
Well, obviously it’s kind of hypocritical to our whole message if we’re buying Starbucks or stuff like that. It’s not the perfect look if we have people from Occupy sitting outside Starbucks drinking frappuccinos. But it’s all down to choice and at the end of it … it’s kind of difficult in this day and age not to consumer those things. Like it’s pretty hard to survive when we’re not getting donations unless someone pops into Tesco’s and gets some reduced food … it’s better to boycott, but there’s not much you can do sometimes.
(2012, int. 5)
Well I was just walking past Starbucks and one of my gripes with the whole thing was how often we’re in Starbucks and pubs and things to use the internet … and now I’m using the stuff in the Barbican a lot (which I think is ‘better’ just about, using the Barbican, even though it’s City of London). Again, me going in the Barbican and being followed around and questions about what I’m doing is … y’know, I’m not going to call it ‘Occupy’. This is the thing. I consider this stuff [the tents] to be ‘occupation’.
(Greg)
Once again, we encounter the palpable discomfort of consumption associated with the activist identity. The activists were concerned that, through consuming coffee from Starbucks, they were contradicting and undermining their cause, rendering the movement’s resistance inauthentic and hypocritical. While admitting that it is difficult to avoid complicity altogether, we also encounter the argument that it’s ‘better to boycott’ or that some contradictions are better than others (e.g. using the Wi-Fi at the City of London-sponsored Barbican instead). The overriding issue, however, was how activists drinking coffee at Starbucks portrayed and distributed the movement, arguing that it wasn’t achieving the ‘perfect’ appearance for occupiers to be sitting outside a branch of the chain.
This controversy came to a head when right-wing commentator and ex-Conservative Member of Parliament Louise Mensch condemned the movement publicly on the satirical BBC news programme Have I Got News For You (YouTube 2015). For Mensch, the activists were clearly hypocrites for buying coffee from the chain, arguing that ‘if they prop up a corporate titan like Starbucks, they’ve got to ask themselves how much of capitalism they really don’t like’. While her suggestion that the activists needed to adopt the moral high ground before pointing any fingers was excellently refuted by others on the game show panel – such as Private Eye editor Ian Hislop who stated that ‘you don’t have to want to return to a barter system in the Stone Age to complain about the way the financial crisis has affected huge numbers of people in the world, do you? Even if you’re having a cup of coffee and you’ve got a tent!’ – Mensch’s comments clearly hit a nerve:
There’s a slight contradiction and people who do it recognise it’s a contradiction. But it’s so minor, it’s not even worth giving much time to, there are so many more important things. And if you’re out there camping and you’re cold and there is a Starbucks literally right next to your tent … I don’t think it’s worth [Mensch] having a go at people for that.
(2013, int. 6)
Yeah quite a lot of people criticised … there was that person on Have I Got News For You who came out complaining that Occupy were drinking coffee in Starbucks. If you’ve got a choice of two different coffee shops, it would make sense to boycott and buycott, but in central London where we didn’t have much choice … in terms of pragmatics, I’m not sure how much weight that has.
(Shaun)
I’d rather see my mates drinking Starbucks [coffee] and fucking with the heads of the system. Coffee is as important as coffee, that’s it. And it’s just a cheap shot, it’s just a cheap shot … y’know, not to talk to a member of the public or scorn them because they’re drinking Starbucks. No, there’s more to their choice of being than their choice of coffee.
(2012, int. 9)
Similarly to the wearing of army surplus clothing and long hair, the insistence on the practicality of drinking Starbucks coffee suggests a deep-seated feeling that the activists needed to defend themselves against such an attack on their authenticity, making it clear that, while drinking Starbucks coffee may seem contradictory, it was simply a pragmatic decision. The problem is that simply by addressing such comments, it was clear that they had considered this dismissal of the movement as important and consequential enough to be taken seriously. In other words, it suggested a normative agreement that Mensch had been correct to suggest that drinking Starbucks coffee undermined their resistance and rendered their whole appearance ‘non-sense’. She had tried to designate the movement as inauthentic, but by attempting to protect the integrity of the movement against such an accusation, the activists’ response extended the same normative distribution which she was appealing to (i.e. that authenticity matters).
In addition to Starbucks, another focal point around which defences of authenticity were quickly deployed was the infamous Guy Fawkes mask lifted from the graphic novel and Warner Bros’ film V for Vendetta. First used by Anonymous in a protest against Scientology in the USA, the mask has quickly become a popular image for resistance all over the world, and yet it remains a copyrighted plastic commodity, mass-produced in the Far East by multi-national toy companies (Sheets 2013). Thus, while some insisted that the mask were simply a symbol of belonging – with one activist commenting that ‘I thought I had found my people because of the Guy Fawkes masks’ (2014, int. 6) – others felt conflicted over the mask’s authentic credentials for activist purposes, comparing it to Che Guevara T-shirts:
‘I will never buy a T-shirt with Che Guevara on because if it becomes fashion it loses its real meaning. There was a great picture of this factory producing all these Anonymous masks in a massive factory, and to me, it’s like we should give an example of the sort of society we’re trying to create, and you’re basically supporting this consumerist culture while you’re trying to oppose capitalism and the exclusion it creates. So, to me it’s completely wrong. I mean it shouldn’t be done. It’s good for the media, but then just maybe I think it’s because of the visuals (the visuals are very good).
(Julia)
You’ve got the mask, people covering their faces, this whole Anonymous thing along with the tents, the banners … the iconography and the visual symbols and logos gave the movement identity and these are important. I mean the masks … people don’t wear it to the [General] Assembly anymore … that has become a cliché. People in the movement are upset with a lot of people who have used that image. I mean, who was the famous house DJ from Radio One who did a DJ set inside Parliament and he wore that mask – ‘I’m occupying Parliament!’ – and most people are never going near that mask again. It’s like when you see hipsters turning up to fancy dress parties and [it gets] hijacked in the same way as Che Guevara’s face did.
(James)
I think popular culture can be useful, but after a while things become cliché, don’t they? So, I think wearing the mask is almost a cliché now. But if that’s what people want to do, I don’t have any problem with it.
(2013, int. 6)
The concern here is that the mask has become too mainstream, too popular, and therefore too much of a cliché, to be used as an authentic activist tool. Despite having some potential for the movement’s collective appearance and identity, therefore, the argument here is that the mask had become co-opted by consumer culture and rendered an inauthentic commodity, thereby contradicting the movement’s aims and ‘the sort of society we’re trying to create’. The references to mass consumption – sweatshops, mainstream DJs – was therefore seen as damaging the mask’s symbolic potential. James’ reference to hipsters is also striking. For him, the mask had become hypocritical because it was being worn for non-activist purposes of enjoyment (e.g. fancy dress parties) and yet if we define the term ‘hip’ as attempting to avoid cliché – as being ‘concerned more with advanced knowledge about the illegitimate and staying one step ahead of the consumer crowd than with any ideology of good community faith’ (Frank 1997: 30) – then James’ criticism of such products becoming hip seems to suggest a certain ‘hipsterdom’ in staying one step ahead of co-optation.
Perhaps one of the clearest examples of the pursuit of authenticity with regards to the Guy Fawkes masks came from my very first interview at Finsbury Square. Sitting at a table in the kitchen tent that morning, I noticed that the activist I was talking to was wearing a Slipknot T-shirt and a raver ‘smiley face’ pin badge. He told me about the music he was into (rave music, mostly, he wasn’t really into Slipknot although had seen them about five times) and that he enjoyed going to ‘hippie gatherings’ (in fact, as it turned out, he was leaving the protest to go to a festival that very afternoon). As the conversation turned towards the masks, I asked whether he thought it was problematic that they were essentially a commodity:
Well … Anonymous brought out their own mask. It was only a little adaptation, but it has little rosy cheeks, so it wasn’t V for Vendetta masks. So, the people can’t make money off it. It was more a case of: ‘if you buy the mask, that’s how much it costs to make’. Down at St Paul’s, they were selling them for a pound each. Just ’cause that’s how much it costs to make them. So, no one was making any profit.
(2012, int. 1)
By producing their own ‘authentic’ alternative product, it seemed that Anonymous were attempting to circumnavigate hypocrisy altogether by competing with the V for Vendetta mask. Suggesting a certain entrepreneurial spirit, therefore, the movement had opted for innovation: activists didn’t have to buy the Warner Bros’ trademark, they could buycott a more ethical version:
Well, the V for Vendetta masks … I used to know a few of the Anonymous here, like proper hardcore Anonymous that used to live in here. But they don’t even wear the V for Vendetta masks. The true symbol for Anonymous is a man in a suit with a question mark for a face. That’s what the true thing it. But because it’s been adopted and it went viral, that way it got adapted into it. And I’ve spoke to the guy who made V for Vendetta the book, he was on a protest march with Anonymous, and he says he does not feel the mask should be used like that. But at the same time, it’s not the mask itself, it’s the symbol it represents. And it’s more symbolism than the mask itself.
(2012, int. 1)
Having met the original author of the graphic novel – presumably Alan Moore who had visited Occupy (in) London on a few occasions (Occupy London 2012) – this activist knew what the real (authentic) used of the mask should be. But even beyond that, his argument was that ‘proper hardcore’ activists didn’t even use the masks anyway as they had their own un-corrupted logo.
The activists of Occupy (in) London demonstrated varied and relatively sophisticated reflections upon their complicity with consumerism, which demonstrate how both the pursuit of authenticity and the attempt to avoid hypocrisy were clear preoccupations within the movement. The problem, I have suggested, is that such a logic indicates a conformity and extension of wider norms, which inadvertently play into the police order distribution of their protest as ‘non-sense’. As demonstrated by Louise Mensch’s attempt to dismiss their appearance and voice on the basis of their (apparent) hypocrisy for drinking Starbucks, the attempt to defend themselves against such criticisms only indicated that they shared the same idea (that authenticity was an important thing to establish). This distribution of the sensible was also reiterated by the V for Vendetta masks, demonstrating a clear market logic: ‘don’t like the status quo? Then innovate and release your own authentic product, a competing consumer choice which is more ethical and ‘right-on.’ In other words, both the persistent concern with authenticity and the approach of producing more ‘authentic’ imagery and cultural products, indicated yet another extension of (and foreclosure by) the very system they were attempting to challenge.
Activist concerns that their protest might be rendered inauthentic or hypocritical through an immersion and incorporation into capitalism need to be understood within a wider context, and in particular, the notion that we (in the over-consuming societies of the global north-west) live under a ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007) in which ‘authentic experience matters’ (Žižek 2009a: 54). Beginning with the move away from alienating and stale uniformity of mass consumption in the 1960s – driven as much by Cold War competition and the perception of grey uniformity behind the Iron Curtain, as by the cultural turn – Boltanski and Chiapello argue that western capitalism adapted by incorporating and commercialising criticisms of the mass market as disenchanting, inauthentic, standardised, regimented, and destructive of beauty. For them, because capitalism is an inherently amoral economic system, with no notion of the ‘common good’, it always has had to look outside of itself for cultural justification, which (from the 1960s onwards) created a convergence between economic ends and emerging trends of individualised cultural freedom. The argument is that those who opposed the mainstreaming tendencies of the market, therefore, counterintuitively extended the new spirit of capitalism by supplying the moral support and cultural material from which ‘authentic’ alternatives could appear. Liberating ‘people’s aspirations to mobility, to multiply their activities, to greater opportunities for being and doing [that] emerge as virtually boundless reservoirs of ideas for conceiving new products and services to bring to the market’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007: 437). Consumerism appeared to become more diverse, more exciting, and more authentic by apparently accounting for its own critique, developing normative principles of difference, creativity, and individual freedom that both mass production and collective conformity (whether the market, state or party) were said to stultify.
For Boltanski and Chiapello, this subsequently led to a seemingly paradoxical situation in which a commodity, in order ‘to earn the label authentic … must be drawn from outside the commodity sphere, from what might be called ‘sources of authenticity’ (2007: 443), endowing products with a value ‘that cannot be equated with the commodity and would be destroyed if they were introduced into the commodity circuit’ (ibid.: 466). Through such co-optation, we end up with a capitalist consumerism that can sell its own criticisms via commodities that appear to offer an authentic distance from profit, monotony, or a de-individualised lack of freedom and choice. Liberated consumer-citizens are offered endless innovations and options on the market, with each round of boycotting and buycotting creating further opportunities to be ‘hip’ and get ahead of the inauthenticity and cliché of the mainstream. In other words, the new spirit of capitalism is one that actually ‘needs its enemies, people whom it outrages and who are opposed to it, to find the moral support it lacks and to incorporate mechanisms of justice whose relevance it would otherwise have no reason to acknowledge’ (ibid,: 27).
While I agree with the overall argument, and especially the centrality that Boltanski and Chiapello afford authenticity within this new spirit, I would argue that they somewhat overstate how much anti-capitalist criticism comes from ‘outside’ of the market. Instead, the pursuit of authenticity, something which is beyond the instrumental ends of consumerism, is often itself an idea that is ‘precorporated’ into commodities via ‘pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes of capitalist culture’ (Fisher 2009: 9), with commodities sold with their self-critique already built in (like ‘prefaded blue jeans’ (Hall et al. 2008: 110). While capitalist consumer culture is clearly operating through a cynical self-distancing, therefore, we should also recognise that this doesn’t mean that there is some ‘authentic space’ to be located outside of capitalism which then becomes corrupted. Instead, we might describe the existence of a ‘myth of co-optation’ (Frank 1997), in which the very idea that capitalism or other oppressive institutions (like the state) will incorporate authentic resistance and critique, that it will corrupt and soften dissent, and is also part of the new spirit. And yet the idea of co-optation was widespread within the Occupy movement in London:
A lot of rebelling got co-opted though, didn’t it? I mean, the whole thing of revolution: it’s just the same sixties stuff, you know? It’s the fact of … where are all the people from 1968 who were throwing bottles in France? Where are they? And where are all the hippies?
(Greg)
Icons of resistance, like many of these totems of resistance, they’ve been sort of monetised and captured by and perverted by the forces that we’re seeking to overturn. I mean, I’m a child of the sixties, which was another period of great hope when we thought we would change the world, love, peace … and within less than a decade it was monetised and bastardised. Our heroes become tax exiles and financial whiz-kids rather than artists (I mean, not all of them …) but the whole thing was sucked into the money machine and created accordingly.
(Brian)
There is a danger in the activist scene of the commodification of some of these ideas – anarchism or something like that – it can be easy to package up these ideas and sell them to people, rather than explore them in a more honest way.
(2014, int. 4)
Well, if you want to look at the ways in how capitalism can swallow up its own contradictions, it does it very effectively, y’know?
(Nick)
As Gitlin (2012) has argued, the Occupy movement might even be described as having suffered from a ‘co-optation phobia’ with a popular fear of commodification, monetisation, capture, perversion, bastardisation, and anxiety that its authentic resistance might be packaged up and swallowed by that which it was attempting to resist. But such a fear of being rendered inauthentic only added to the myth of co-optation, which actually indicates an extension of market norms. As Hall et al. explain:
manufactured and mass-marketed rebellion must be passed off as ‘co-optation’ in order that the perpetual cycles of competition and obsolescence in which the subject feels trapped can be blamed on the oppressive ‘system’ rather than the true source in the underlying code of bourgeois individualism manifested in the competitive consumption of positional goods that signify individuality.
(2008: 109)
The preoccupation with authenticity and the fear of being co-opted and rendered inauthentic, in other words, plays into the drive for individual freedom, flexibility, symbolic inefficiency, and the postmodern injunction to ‘enjoy’ which define the new spirit of (consumer) capitalism.
Once again, this has an added effect of undermining collective organisation. The pursuit of authenticity, supported by myths of co-optation, promotes norms of individualism as ‘conformity quickly became the new cardinal sin in our new society’ (Heath and Potter 2006: 31). In place of commitment to any collective, disciplined identity, rebel consumers are instead encouraged to opt for the freedom and authenticity of individualised and unique identities, without realising that ‘it’s the non-conformists, not the conformists, who are driving consumer spending’ (ibid.: 106). With each apparent act of non-conformity, including attempts to be ‘off-grid’ or to establish autonomous spaces, the myth of co-optation extends market innovation and norms through boycotting and buycotting, and demonstrating how ‘the eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing’ (Klein 2001: 64). The problem, therefore, is not necessarily consumerism itself, but an activist tendency to simply ‘identify consumerism with conformity … [and] as a result they fail to notice that it is rebellion, not conformity, that has for decades been the driving force of the marketplace’ (Heath and Potter 2006: 102). Or as Frank puts it, in ‘resistance, obsolescence [has] found a new and more convincing language’ (1997: 31) as ‘consumer capitalism did not demand conformity or homogeneity, rather it thrived on the doctrine of liberation and continual transgression that is still familiar today’ (ibid.: 20).
Ideas of authenticity as an attempt to avoid hypocrisy and co-optation by (as far as possible) establishing a cultural distance from the market, are therefore a central mechanism of symbolic inefficiency and postmodern consumer capitalism. By criticising all conformity as co-optation, activists problematically extend the normative distribution of the market, and it is in this way that the ‘critique from the left not only accepts the basic terms of neoliberal capitalism, but actually promotes ‘alternatives’ that ultimately advance its cause’ (Hickel and Khan 2012: 206). By framing political action as a matter of boycotting or buycotting certain commodities, such an approach plays into the planned obsolescence of product turnover, allowing our ‘anxieties over consumption’ to create ‘niche markets’ (Littler 2009: 1), ultimately revealing ‘the scale of our collective failure to deal with these problems on any significant level other than through small palliative measures orchestrated through lifestyle choices of the sufficiently privileged’ (ibid.: 14). Building upon the libertarian distrust of conformity as dampening individual free will, the new spirit of capitalism and the myth of co-optation directly promote ‘many of the individualistic and libertarian ideas that have always made neoliberalism and free-market ideology’ (Heath and Potter 2006: 72). The possibility of collective solidarity and organisation is, therefore, once again, foreclosed by norms which filter cultural desires for change ‘through individual lifestyles’ with the ‘organisation of individual actions in terms of meaning assigned to lifestyle elements (e.g. brands, leisure pursuits and friend networks) [which] results in the personalisation of issues’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2011: 771).
On the one hand, it is problematic that resistance has become a lucrative cultural resource for consumer capitalism, as this raises a number of important questions about the possibility of actually undermining or challenging such a system. Rather than a homogenising force, the new spirit of capitalism thrives off symbolic inefficiency, encouraging heterogenous, unique, undisciplined, and perpetually unsatisfied libertarian, non-conformist identities, which are always in search of a more authentic experience and in the process of moving on from those deemed co-opted clichés. Thus, this is a consumer market which is always (seemingly) able to overcome its own cultural limits, and remains popular by appearing to address its shortcomings, creating a culture where ‘not only resistance but even our distaste of the artificiality of consumerism itself has for a long time been incorporated into marketing strategies’ (Hall et al. 2008: 100). And yet, on the other hand, we need to be careful that our argument that capitalism ‘incorporates’ its own critique, doesn’t lead us to mistakenly situate resistance as something which is authentic and outside such normative structures, as this would itself feed into the perpetual pursuit of authenticity and myths of co-optation. We also need to recognise that this very pursuit of distance from capitalism is already an extension of market norms which underpin such a system.
As I have argued above, through all the twists and turns in logic and argumentation, the pursuit of authenticity – such as through boycotting and buycotting, through being original members of the movement, or through self-sacrifice and risk – was a prominent underlying principle within Occupy (in) London. It has been my contention that this is problematic, as insofar as we find evidence for the pursuit of authenticity, purity, and the ‘moral high ground’, we also find evidence of a certain normative foreclosure of the movement, unintentionally reiterating the normalcy of the very distributions it was attempting to resist. There is even some evidence that a few activists were allowing such norms to directly limit the horizon of their own politics:
I want to make it perfectly clear, I am not an anti-capitalist at all. I buy cigarettes, I buy tobacco, I buy clothes … we live in a capitalist world! I think it’s personally impossible to be anti-capitalist in a capitalist system. You can avoid the system as much as you like but I mean … even nowadays … if you are making your own clothes, you are buying the fabric off someone, you’re buying the sewing machine off someone … there’s no possible way you cannot be capitalist in this world I don’t think.
(2012, int. 4)
Prelimiting her resistance, this position suggests that if her protest cannot be authentic and free from hypocrisy, then she simply cannot adopt that political stance. The possibility of anti-capitalism is therefore foreclosed to her by the very police order that reasserted capitalism after the crash as the only sensible (rational, reasonable, possible) socio-economic system. Not that this is a problem unique to Occupy, as ‘even in the case of the most radical movements, it shares ‘something’ with what it seeks to criticise … [which] stems from the simple fact that the normative references on which it is based are themselves in part inscribed in the world’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007: 40).
It is concluded that activists need to avoid such tendencies of pursuing an authentic, pure, autonomous identity from which to adopt the moral high ground and must try not to get caught up in the games of hypocrisy and co-optation. Rather than fearing the inauthentic, movements should simply accept the Foucauldian double bind that there is ‘no outside to power’ and instead concentrate their energies on refiguring wider normative distributions through symbolically efficient collectivity and making ‘non-sense’ appear. Or in Jenny’s words:
Capitalism is so pervasive that I think it’s exhausting to try and do it ‘right’ all the time. Sometimes you just have to say: ‘we’re all contradictory’. We’re contradicting sitting here, right now, this minute, having a conversation about it!
Instead of playing into police distributions of the sensible/non-sensible, movements like Occupy should avoid making unwinnable defences against claims that they are ‘inauthentic’ or ‘hypocritical’ (‘nothing to see here, they drink Starbucks!’). Such an approach can only play into the idea that this is a legitimate ground from which to marginalise and designate their appearance and voice as ‘non-sensible’ and ‘powerless’, while perpetuating ideas of marginal righteousness where movements decide ‘not to take the risk of winning [when] … defeat, at least, can’t be co-opted’ (Foucault 1989: 106). The pursuit of authenticity creates a culture of resistance that aims to be ‘always morally correct and never politically responsible’ (Dean 2009: 6) in that, by locating ‘authenticity’ in a ‘distance’ from the mainstream and powerful institutions, activists are led to celebrate powerlessness and marginality. In order to intervene in the distribution of the sensible and force the appearance of two worlds in one, the ‘non-sense’ idea that there could be an alternative needs to be asserted through a collective aesthetic, democratic authority, and political responsibility.