Alexis. A Greek Tragedy
If Occupy is a “square,” as I discussed yesterday, what does that space contain? How is the boundary marked? And should it be? These sound like philosophical questions and so they are: but the scandal of occupy, wherever it happens, is the appropriation of such legislative process by those who should stay in their place. This projects a series of questions ahead about bodies in space, the history of the anonymous, their self-visualization in past and present crises and the embodied experience of self-visualizing in the space of Occupy. We’ll walk through these in the week(s) ahead.
To begin with, the very practical and tactical choices about where and how to occupy have pushed the question of public space into widespread discussion. A few months ago, few of us were aware that there were such things as privately owned public spaces (POPS), such as Zuccotti Park and the Atrium of 60 Wall Street where most of the business of OWS takes place. Intended as a sop to the notion of the public, POPS have become a key tactical resource in New York. Meetings are now taking place in such unlikely sites as the Atrium of Trump Tower, where the Donald is unlikely to be in attendance.
It is not the case that POPS are a diminished form of the public. Rather they offer a space of ambivalence that the public never did, permitting the possibility of Occupy. We could do this by theory but here’s an anecdote. There is an Institute for the Humanities downtown, full of people from the universities and the New York Review of Books, all self-designated public intellectuals. Once a friend was speaking and invited me to come. No sooner had I opened the door than a genteel gatekeeper was asking me who I was and why I was there: in this view, the public know who they are and why they should be there. The rest of us should keep out. The POPS are in fact much more the space of public intellectual thought than such enclaves ever were.
Quietly, governments are moving to eradicate such ambivalent spaces. The Danish government recently attempted to resolve the contradiction of the squatter city Christiania, after nearly 40 years of occupation. They forced the occupiers to buy the land where they were living: the residents responded by a campaign to “buy it free.” They stopped by OWS last October, and apparently sold $10 of shares at the New York Stock Exchange. This was seen as being ridiculous but the resulting publicity generated enough support to buy the land. Residents now see themselves as “carers” of the shares, not owners. More informal arrangements are being targeted in the UK, where the neo-liberal Coalition government added a last-minute amendment to unrelated proposed legislation, criminalizing all squatting, even of vacant buildings–which number 700,000 at present.
While such legal loopholes are certainly necessary, the Occupy sites are not simply vacant space in which people have pitched tents, like new typing in a blank document. By interfacing the attention economy of the spectacle with the historical built environment, the space of Occupy is an unpredictable and volatile combination. The Greek neighborhood of Exarchia, where Alexis was set, is evidence of that interface. It gains a certain energy from being adjacent to the Polytechnic, the leading university in Athens where students resisted the military dictatorship in 1973. The gates knocked down by military vehicles back then are preserved as a memorial. Gradually reclaiming the streets, Exarchia became accustomed to a form of autonomy within the system, like Christiania, only for Alexis’s shooting to make visible how fragile that autonomy actually was. That sudden awareness, combined with the rapidly disseminated news of the tragedy, brought people out onto the streets without having been told to do so by any organization. It is as if the spectacle and historical experience are two layers of space, co-existing but not usually coming into contact. A disruption like Alexis’s death brings them into contact, a clinamen of atomized modern experience, producing a catalytic force.
The occupation of Zuccotti Park and its transformation into Liberty Plaza are the subject of two long journalistic essays this week in Vanity Fair and Harper’s [paywall]. Both are interesting first-person accounts–the former is a weaving of many voices, while the latter is told by blogger Nathan Schneider. Each nonetheless misses the opportunity to explain the key phenomenon that made OWS different from so many other attempts to create alternative space in New York: people came. David Graeber, the anthropologist and a leading light of OWS, recalls:
I was thinking, Oh, it’s a couple hundred people. This is O.K. I was feeling a little disappointed, but then more and more people started streaming in, and a lot of them were from out of town. They obviously had no place to stay. So they had to occupy something one way or the other.
As Graeber notes below, they had not all come intending to do so. Many had simply intended to protest and came to decide to occupy. If there were a thousand people, then there are probably a thousand individual reasons why they chose to do that. But in their different ways, each person had learned about OWS, mostly via the Internet or in some cases a personal communication with the relatively small organizing group and thought, “I have to do this.”
OWS had, and continues to have, that spontaneous coming-to-action form such as that which brought Exarchia into the street. It did not have a history to draw on–no one had occupied Wall Street before. But now they have, and the Occupiers (meaning the people who camped) refer to Liberty as “our home.” It has reconfigured the “map” of New York and created a place of fragile autonomy, which is still perhaps stronger than Exarchia was when it took on the colonels. The very density of attention around “New York” guarantees that.
At the same time, there’s a curious invisibility, a “move on, there’s nothing to see here” about the Financial District. If we know where the Stock Exchange is, and the awful bull sculpture on Broadway attracts a crowd of tourists with cameras, who knew who Brookfield Properties were before September 17, 2011? One of the most intriguing new developments in OWS is the organization of a series of Occupy walking tours of downtown, visiting POPS, pointing out the locations of the various now-infamous financial institutions, and de-anonymizing (if that’s a word) the capitalist towers. As the police seek to enclose everything, Occupy moves away from its “home” to visualize the mechanics and spectacle of that enclosure.
For what it’s worth, no – they hadn’t all come to occupy. Not at first. A lot had come to do an action directly at Wall Street. Others had come to a protest. There was a lot of debate the first night, as there had been over the previous month, over what people really wanted to do.
Thanks for the clarification, David–it sounds as if the quote was taken out of context, no surprises there. I altered the text above in what I hope is appropriate fashion. And there’s still a lot of debate over what people really want to do! So what’s still really interesting to me is how people come to change their minds from protest to occupy, such a transformation from the traditional ritual to something open-ended.