Verticality reverts. It revises and revisits. It is not so much tenacious as insidious. And yet what is so interesting is how the horizontal approaches resurface, refract and resist the vertical. I’m at the end of a three-day contest of the horizontal and the vertical within the frame of the academic event, in particular my Now! Visual Culture participation event. I felt at several points that vertical organization had reasserted itself, perhaps decisively. For the general will of the event pushed back against such ideas as breakout groups or time-allocated agendas, which are central to Occupy.

Yet it seemed that a reversion to the norms so carefully calibrated in the neo-liberal academy was, finally, not so simple. The insistence on practice as the means of articulating politics was resisted. But by means of a triangulation of performative art practice, new media forms of publishing and the direct evocation of Occupy and its “epistemology of anarchy” as WJT Mitchell put it, there was a sense that “make something” was the new prime imperative. As I have argued already here, the refusal to move on, the refusal to accept that there is nothing to see here, the insistence that the authority of visuality should be resisted is that anarchy.

There was old and new, a disciplining by interdisciplinarity and a setting loose by performative practice in new media and artwork. I have missed the midnight deadline for the first time but I am relying on the idea that my “day” is as long as I happen to be awake.

Twitter can act as my flickering memory here:

That was kind of what it was like. A more coherent report tomorrow will compare this event with the Occupy Theory Assembly on debt and education.