The trouble with trying to tell the story of Occupy Wall Street was that it was always a million things at once. You could go to one meeting, or one action, which might have seemed especially important, but there would be something else going on meanwhile that could just as easily be the next big thing. Each sub-thread of the story, each concurrent reality, made some kind of claim to be a genuine article, an authentic manifestation of what this movement was or should be all about. You needed a lot of eyes to see it all. You needed, perhaps, a social-scientific study.
As if in defiance of the general lack of curiosity about Occupy that tends to prevail these days, but in search of a better future for the movement’s diasporic remnants, a group of the Occupy participants has been conducting a study to document the shape of the movement during the first half of 2012. This was after the cataclysmic eviction from Zuccotti Park, in fervent anticipation of a May Day that would come and go, holding an under-determined hope that the rupture might still grow. The name of the “draft of findings” report, being released this weekend, is fitting: Occupy’s Precarious Pluralism.
Among the major findings of the study is the overwhelming emphasis of the various Occupy projects on “public communication” rather than particular issue-based campaigns. This is a valuable reminder of the ways in which the dominant nature of Occupy Wall Street was, generally speaking, one of a public performance rather than a platform for long-term organizing. And it was in precisely those terms that it was wildly successful — “changing the conversation,” putting wealth inequality on the discursive map, making “the 99%” and “the 1%” into universally recognized political signifiers.
There are other striking findings. One is that, despite the movement’s reputation for revolutionary rhetoric, more of the groups within it were focused on seeking reforms of the existing system than were attempting to replace the system altogether — though many reformers would probably have articulated their goals in revolutionary terms. The study also explores the ways in which the movement served as a locus and meeting point among existing organizations in New York City working on a variety of issues. In this sense, Occupy would be better understood as a place (and time) of convergence than as an organization unto itself.
Occupy, as a viral phenomenon replicated worldwide at will and whim, resisted boundaries between what it was and what it wasn’t. What, for instance, does one make of the recent Talking Transition event in New York? A giant “tent” was erected by liberal foundations at a site Occupiers once coveted; there were drummers and open discussions about the city’s future under the de Blasio administration. Occupy-ish, but safer — as if a band of bureaucrats sought to reconstitute the parts they’d liked about Occupy Wall Street without the stuff they didn’t. Like Precarious Pluralism, it remains to be seen whether this was (or was meant to be) merely a relic of the past or a step into the future.
In the meantime, though, the study is a worthwhile read — an unusual and insightful example of activists taking a close, critical look at their own doings.
“The next big thing”…This is a strong evidence for the idea that Occupy is a fruit that didn’t fall as far from the tree as it thought it did. The retributive justice-capitalism system is the tree and its roots, although this overall system and complex relationship remains veiled to most, as evidenced by the dominance of the usual formulation, the “prison industrial complex”, a worthy and frequent target of criticism. This broader system, however, requires an engagement of thoughtaction that most are not ready for yet. So those who understand what I am saying must do the work, not at all unfamiliar to true nonviolence, of making the way to that readiness.
The general form of the true dominant system is that there is a requisite cognitive/phenomenal orientation that is fostered and required by both sides of this doublet, and these feed into one another. The requirement of retributive justice is that people be dumbed down enough to accept its illusory fruits as bona fide things that are what they purport to be. Tears of remorse, words of apology, actions of compliance with the law, empathy are all illusions for more original conditions. In the form brought into false being by retributive justice, we know that we have crocodile tears, being sorry one is caught, compliance of those who would commit crimes but don’t want to get caught being “taught” to feel pain through incarceration so that criminals now “know what it feels like”. All illusions for which a certain dumbing down of mind is required to buy. Buy, buy, buy. But that orientation to phenomena taken at far too great a degree of face value and uncritically in turn feeds into the buying that we associate with materialism.
The predominant criticism of society is, of course, that it is too materialist and capitalistic. This doesn’t go deep enough. We are told this story again and again, and many will note that TV and cinema are about selling. Yet these are in fact dominated primarily by the illusion of force/violence/retribution, for which minds must remain oriented to receiving and believing these fruits.
Such minds, then, are prone indeed to rush into many new fruits for the dissatisfied, the various next big things you mention. These give evidence for a “buying” mindset, taking phenomena at face value, etc. What is seen less clearly is that there is such an intimate relationship between the veins of justice spread throughout such a righteous movement as Occupy and how these bring with them the general problem of the buying mentality, especially in the form of retributive justice. While some in Occupy are critical of retributive justice, few really seek to deconstruct it, let alone are they open to what is truly required for its transformation, something I enterm “enconstructive” (which I hereby enterm econstructively). Indeed, Occupiers with a more philosophical/postmodernist bent would be very much inclined to talk of the “deconstruction” of the prison industrial complex, while this would in fact be tying right in with the dominance of negation of postmodernism, leading to the prevailing malaise of impotence.
This thinking may seem too difficult, but then, that is par for the course of the problem, after all. The enconstruction of justice itself is the radical disruption and change of the system that links together in the complex nexus of capitalism inherent in both what is called justice and capitalism. Occupy, like the hippy movement decades before, can not go deep enough to enter the thoughtaction — neither simply thought nor simply action — that is necessary here.
What is required is not revolution, but envolution, not deconstruction but enconstruction, not anarchy, but enarchy, not post-modernism, but post-postmodernism in the form of nonviolence thoughtaction. Occupy rode the wave of Tunisian protest (Tunisia is a mess now, of course), capitalizing on the idea of occupying the streets, demanding change from tyrants in a world in which the dominant tyrant is not the dictator, but this very system of the retributive justice-capitalism complex. There is no way to break apart capitalism today without at the same time deconstructing what is called justice. But justice can’t be deconstructed; it must be enconstructed, for essential reasons. And this can not happen without passing through nonviolence in an essential way. Nonviolence is the deconstruction of justice into a more original form. Its path is utterly founded on the very shift in cognition-phenomenality that the dominant system doesn’t want, the cognition-phenomenality that still rules Occupy in its now waning excitement, its decent hopes, it’s inability to move past negation to position, from deconstruction to encontruction, from anarchy to enarchy, from revolution to envolution. This turning on negation is likewise essential, and again, for essential reasons these must all pass through a more original nonviolence than what obtains in most settings. It can not be enacted in the form of the kind of tactical nonviolence exhibited by protesters goading on police, staring down college deans in admonishment, creating false arenas of skirmish lines, calling for the heads of pepper spraying cops or demanding the very same “justice” that is so actively linked with the overall problem. The seeds of this degraded nonviolence are already there in the concept of “occupying”, which amounts in may ways to soft force, not to fundamental transformation. True, many would like fundamental transformation, but few are willing to undertake the thoughtaction that is require for this, especially the “thought” side of it, and fewer still want it to be truly fundamental, at the level of the radical shifts of enconstruction, enarchy, thoughtaction, envolution, truly giving up retributive justice while actively doing the work of creating true restorative justice and not even calling for the jailing of Wall Street barons and bandits. They would rather expend their energy in the illusions, the hope and the hype that go along with the dominant phenomenality, that is, the dominant “truth”.
The truth is that the bandits of Wall Street, the overpaid CEO’s, the police, the policy makers are all our brothers and sisters in a common humanity the practice of enconstruction begins to reach in more original ways than can possibly be accomplished through the enactment of force, retribution, negation and destruction.