Occupy sounds like fun. It has a pleasant, amusing sound. It creates a soundscape that promises better things. It is not a metaphor: it is an analogy, it is analog. Since the days of the Puritans what the capitalist U.S. cannot stand is precisely the thought, let alone the sound, of someone else having fun. Here I’m going to assemble some nodes within that soundscape from memory and experience. Later I’ll try and formulate some more general thoughts about the analog and the digital in Occupy.

*Murmuration

Mic check

This is the signature gesture of Occupy, which breaks through the murmuration of a meeting or the ambience of public space.

Occupy Wall Street: Mic Check from NYU Local on Vimeo.

Although it’s now come to be used to challenge politicians and others (usually using amplified sound so they can easily drown out the challenge) the mic check was originally the analog equivalent of tapping the microphone: only much more fun. There’s something very exhilarating about shouting as loud as you can in a public space and having people shout back.

The People’s Mic

Which forms the people’s mic. The call-and-response pattern of OWS discourse has a number of interesting features. Unlike religious or choral patterns, it is not given in advance what people may say. Some people, especially academics, tend to speak for too long before pausing so the crowd has trouble repeating the phrase. A skilled user knows how to break sentences into four to six syllable phrases but also to let conjunctions stand by themselves.

The stress pattern of the People’s Mic changes the dominant demotic speech of the past decade. On the one hand, you can’t use Valley Girl intonation because “Occupy? Wall Street?” is altogether different to “Occupy Wall Street,” let alone “Occupy! Wall Street!,” which is how it has been mostly used.

Nor is it the ironic, hipster tone of more recent years, the Brooklyn-ese of the 2010s. Rather than fall away on the last syllables–as in “what-ever“–People’s Mic uses strong but even stresses that generate a sense of confidence and optimism. When it’s being used, people smile, even when the content is challenging. Or perhaps especially when it’s challenging, the pleasure coming from the disjuncture between content and form.

Noise

Another aspect of the Occupy soundscape is, however, loud noise, whether in the form of drumming, noise makers or musical instruments. At Liberty Plaza, the drummers sat on the West side in a circle, making an almost constant percussion for the first six weeks until negotiations reduced the time slots, at least a little. The noise marked presence in a direct and unavoidable fashion, in intended contrast to the spoken discourse of the East side centered around the steps.

It is not wholly random. For example, the “Noise Demo Against the Prison Industrial Complex, for the Liberation of Political Prisoners & Prisoners Of Wars,” held in front of Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown on New Year’s Eve, noise was used to get the attention of those detained. Then the people’s mic declaimed: “You. Are. Not. Alone.”

Yelly people

On the other hand again, there are the Yelly people. These are people who come to the General Assembly or Spokescouncil–rarely, in my experience, to the working groups–and yell. Often these yellers are permanent occupiers, sleeping in Liberty till the eviction, now in churches and other refuges. They are not easy to talk to and I don’t know many of them personally so I can’t generalize: some people assert that they are police provocateurs. Some yellers, like Nan and Sage, have become sufficient characters that they seem more driven by their role as disrupters and the attention it brings. Right-wing hack Andrew Breitbart is happy to give them as much publicity as they want.

Each person at Occupy is, in the manner of Sabina Spielrein, a “dividual,” yelling to themselves, calling-and-responding internally and externally, trying to work out perhaps the hardest question: are you having fun?