The ‘Occupy’ Movement: Emerging Protest Forms and Contested Urban Spaces

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By Judy Lubin

Abstract

The Occupy Movement represents the evolving nature of contemporary social movements. It employs traditional tactics as well as new tools of technology and alternative forms of organizing to articulate concerns. In an era of widening income inequality, record corporate profits, and government austerity measures, Occupy protestors claimed urban public spaces as sites of resistance this past year. By framing their cause as one driven by “the 99%”, corporate interests were successfully linked to a diverse set of economic impacts that united the masses, from diminishing prospects of employment to record foreclosures and crippling student debt. In claiming their right to the city, Occupiers created physical and political space for reasserting the power of the people. Occupiers’ seizing of public spaces and use of social media to promote and report acts of resistance suggest that in mediated societies, protests configured for virtual audiences are likely to become mainstays of urban social movements. The Occupy Movement embodies these developments and underscores the need for new thinking on how public spaces can facilitate participatory democracy. Using scholarly blogs and news reports, this paper tracks the movement and explores its implications on the governance of public space and the future of urban protests.

Keywords: Occupy Wall Street; social movements; protests; globalization

Introduction

On September 17, 2011, nearly a thousand protestors flooded New York City’s Zuccotti Park in a planned action against corporate power, political corruption, and economic inequality (Mitchell 2011). The Occupy Wall Street demonstration touched off an ‘Occupy Movement’ that produced solidarity protests in major U.S. cities and over 80 countries around the world (Karimi and Sterling 2011). These protests highlight the inherently political character of the distribution and use of space in urban settings (Rios 2009, Swyngedouw 2009). As stewards of public spaces, planners can learn from the way in which the Occupy Movement challenged the use of public spaces and the precedent it has set for future urban protests. At a moment when the national discourse focused on deficit reduction and austerity measures, Occupy protestors redirected the nation’s attention to the underlying source of the current economic crisis: global corporate interests. A contemporary social movement, Occupy employs traditional tactics as well as new tools of technology and alternative forms of organizing to articulate its concerns. The Occupy Movement’s most unique features are its horizontal, leaderless “structure,” coupled with its tactic of weeks-long encampments in public spaces. Both strategies contribute to the movement’s successes thus far; yet it is the latter that has raised the ire of city governments as they are forced to respond to protestors’ claiming of public spaces as centers of democratic action (Marcuse 2011).

This paper focuses on the Occupy protests as a case study of the evolving nature of urban social movements. First, I link the Occupy movement to a significant shift in class consciousness in the U.S. Second, I connect it to global social movements with similar political claims and organizational structures. Next, I briefly examine the impact of the financial crisis on cities for the purpose of introducing additional factors driving urban protests today. Finally, I explore how Occupy protestors are redefining participatory democracy by reclaiming public spaces and rejecting traditional models of political organization. By literally and symbolically seizing public spaces, the Occupy Movement has reasserted the primacy of popular interests ahead of corporations. The success of Occupy is evidenced by the diffuse reference in cultural and political discourse to the movement’s framing of the 99% united against the corrupting influence of the 1% of elites who control the majority of global wealth. In an era in which revolutions are tweeted and televised, the Occupy Movement has demonstrated that new urban protests will increasingly manifest not only in physical forms, but in virtual spaces as well.

Setting the Stage for the Occupation

The year 2011 saw decreased prospects for economic opportunity and social mobility, making conditions ripe for the Occupy Movement to take hold in cities across the U.S. The recent economic crisis dashed the hopes of vulnerable populations along with those of millions of middle class college students and workers. As the working and middle classes suffered, corporations enjoyed record profits, often on the backs of taxpayers. On the brink of collapse in 2008 and 2009, Wall Street firms were bailed out by the federal government while millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes. With a shrinking middle class, poverty reached an all-time high, and a record 50 million Americans went without health insurance (DeNavas-Walt et al 2010). Facing unprecented deficits, many state and local governments reduced or suspended essential services. While the nation struggled to emerge out of a jobless recovery, the extension of unemployment benefits was regularly threatened by political wrangling. Adding to the frustration was the realization that the long-held American work ethic—“work hard and get ahead”—was no longer tenable. Perhaps most evident of this reality was the marked presence of America’s new “lost generation” at Occupy protests. These protestors were young, educated and disillusioned by limited opportunities for work and mounting student loan debt (Associated Press 2011). With the widest wealth gap between younger and older Americans ever recorded (Yen 2011), this “lost generation” is unlikely to achieve wealth or even the standard and quality of living of previous generations.

To add insult to injury, in 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision on the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. Then, in the winter of 2011, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin set off weeks of massive protests as he sought to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers. Tens of thousands gathered outside the state capitol to protest and many slept inside the building’s rotunda in February and March (Davey 2011). Some have credited these protests with helping to inspire Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, many of the issues (e.g., sleeping in public spaces) associated with Occupy’s claiming of public terrains were raised during the demonstrations in Wisconsin (Oppel 2011).

Before the Wisconsin protests erupted, the world watched as hundreds of thousands of protestors occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt for eighteen days, leading to the end of the three-decade-long presidency of Hosni Mubarak (Aljazeera 2011). Egypt’s political revolution was preceded by demonstrations that led to the ouster of Tunisia’s dictator of 23 years, Zine Ben Ali, which kicked off a wave of protests in the Middle East collectively known as the Arab Spring. While the contribution of social media to Egypt’s and Tunisia’s revolutions may have been overstated, new media tools such as Facebook and Twitter were used by some activists to coordinate efforts and helped to garner international support and intensify news coverage (Srinivasan 2011). Repressive tactics such as blocking internet and mobile phone access in Egypt only served to push more people out onto the streets of Cairo and built a greater sense of solidarity especially among those following the protests through social networking websites. In the US, a similar trail of protests and police responses focused a national spotlight on the movement in Occupy sites across the country, as in the public outcry over the mass arrests of 700 demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011. The significance of some of Occupy’s other clashes with police is addressed in my discussion of democracy in the public square.

Horizontal Social Movements and Democratic Structures

Occupy Wall Street organizers drew on the lessons of populist movements around the world, learning from tactics used in Egypt, Greece, and Spain to plan the initial Manhattan protest on September 17 (Kroll 2011). Protestors from Spain encouraged organizers to adopt a model of general assemblies for discussions and decision-making, a horizontal organizational structure with no leaders and where everyone is considered equal (Kroll 2011). On the Occupy website, the organizers declared: “The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.” Critics of the Occupy Movement point to this lack of leadership and concrete demands as barriers to achieving political change. However, for many Occupiers, replicating the existing hierarchical structures of political leadership is contrary to their populist, democratic goals. The horizontal organizational structure is a response to the corruption and failure of representative democracy to represent the interests of the people (Gautney 2011) and a realization of a collective class consciousness.

From the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington in 1999, to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the corrupting power of global capital over national and local governments has mobilized and brought activists to major cities to protest against international financial institutions and their role in eroding social, environmental, and labor rights around the world (Kohler and Wissen 2003). Thus Glasius (2011) locates the antecedents of Occupy’s leaderless structure and the rejection of traditional political forms of organization in the anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal movements prominent in the last decade. Sitrin (2012), a participant of the General Assembly that helped organize Occupy Wall Street, observes that the horizontal social relations of Occupy are similar to the horizontalidad that emerged during the 2001 popular rebellion in Argentina. Social media, viewed by many users as emancipatory tools that level the playing field, contribute to the growth of leaderless protests by facilitating independent, multisite actions (Sassen 2011). New media tools have allowed for virtual or satellite protests outside of Manhattan to spring up easily through information posted on websites and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Protestors and supporters created a strong online presence with the daily publishing of photos and streaming of videos of marches and clashes with police. These postings helped to shape the narrative about the movement and increased online conversations (Preston 2011). Nearly two million YouTube videos were tagged with “occupy” in the politics and news section of the site and 400 “occupy” Facebook pages with 2.7 million fans were recorded two months after the protests began (Preston 2011). Despite Occupy’s complexity—the movement challenges traditional organizational structures and encompasses a wide range of interests—it has skillfully articulated its core message, even without issuing demands that critics argue are necessary for creating change.

Why Cities? Financial Cityscapes and Public-Private Space

Public urban spaces are necessary components of the evolving form of participatory cities advocated by Occupy protestors. The world’s wealth is concentrated in cities, especially those that serve as strategic points in the global economic system (Sassen 2000). The density, diversity, and function of cities make them natural sites for social movements and protests (Kohler and Wissen 2003). Cities are beacons of economic activity, where the contrasts between rich and poor grow strikingly evident everyday. With the crash of the housing market and resulting global financial crisis, municipal governments experienced a decline in economic activity at the same time that demands increased for social services due to higher unemployment and homelessness. Cities experienced a sharp decline in revenue as many local governments suffered losses from the banking crisis and stalled real estate market (Paulais 2009). Budgetary constraints at the federal and state levels have only served to heighten the financial crisis in cities, pushing many municipal governments to the brink of bankruptcy. These realities foreshadow a bleak future for cities, and for the residents whose survival depends on urban employment opportunities and essential services.

As global economic forces shape urban life, scholars point to neoliberal policies as the source of widening income gaps within cities (Kohler and Wissen 2003). Higher than average rates of poverty and income inequality is characteristic of cities that have succeeded in attracting global capital interests (Hamel et al 2000). For example, according to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau, from 2009 to 2010 the poverty rate in New York City grew faster than the nationwide average, with one in five residents living in poverty (Roberts 2011). In London, the poverty rate is 28%, higher than any other English region (Trust for London and New Policy Institute 2011). A major source of this social polarization is economic restructuring, which eliminated the manufacturing base in cities, providing fewer opportunities for workers to join the middle class. The 2007-2009 recession further eroded middle class wealth and left many low and high-skilled workers in the U.S. without jobs. As economic, social and political conditions in urban areas increasingly reflect changes in the world economy (Friedmann 1986), activists and the 99% have connected these disparities to global processes. Scholars and activists such as Lefebvre long advocated the idea of “the right to the city” as a response to globalization (Purcell 2002). “The right to the city involves two principal rights for urban inhabitants: the right to participation, and the right to appropriation (Purcell 2002, p.102).”

The fate of cities is largely dependent on their role in international financial transactions (Sassen 2000). With urban policymaking increasingly driven by the need to ensure competitive advantage in the global economy, cities have often been sites of experimentation for neoliberal restructuring programs (Kohler and Wissen 2003). To attract capital and investments, local governments have transferred state functions to quasi-state bodies such as economic development councils and private entities that have no accountability to the electorate (Purcell 2002). Occupiers’ use of Zuccotti Park underscored concerns about the role of private interests in urban governance. A privately-owned public space in New York’s financial district, the park was created as part of zoning concessions to developers, which included an additional 300,000 square feet of rentable space (Berg 2011). A few weeks after the start of the protest, Brookfield Properties, which owns Zuccotti park, released a statement expressing concerns about sanitation and noted that the company was working with the city to “restore the park to its intended purpose” (Chiaramonte 2011). Occupy Wall Street protestors, however, benefitted from zoning rules that require some privately-owned parks to remain open twenty-four hours a day (Foderaro 2011), the lack of clarity regarding the use of quasi-public spaces for new protest forms, and the visibility the movement gained after the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. Nonetheless, the ownership of public space remains an important matter of consideration for planners given the social, economic, and political undercurrents driving contemporary urban protests.

Reclaiming Democracy in the Public Square

Beginning on Wall Street, protestors literally and symbolically reclaimed that which is public (Sassen 2011). Mendieta (2011) observes the irony in the Occupiers’ use of Zuccotti Park, once called “Liberty Plaza” but renamed in 2006 after the chairman of the corporate owner. Elaborating on the symbolism, Mendieta (2011) argues that to “occupy” can only mean to “re-occupy” a space that was formerly public but was sold to a real estate developer. Mendieta argues that, “To ‘occupy’ means to reclaim what belongs properly to citizens and the public, and not some corporation to repossess a bit of our ‘liberty.’” Marcuse (2011) notes that in a city as dense as New York, there are few spaces where citizens can gather to learn, discuss, and confront issues of public concern. Occupy Wall Street protestors transformed a mostly concrete park into a public square—reclaiming a once-corporate public space for the people.

The Occupiers’ appropriation of public space as a rejection of the routines of corporate life in the city presents another layer of symbolic action. Lawler (2011) asserts that an “occupation is a place where people converse…make their voices heard, eat food, play and listen to music…engage in the practice of experimental practice of radical democracy, and generally contribute nothing whatsoever to the production of profit.” This opposition to corporate culture was effectively captured in the Adbusters call-to-action poster, which depicts riot police charging forward and surrounding a ballerina dancing on the iconic Wall Street bull. Adbusters (2011) originally floated the idea of Occupy Wall Street in a July blog post that called for the “seiz[ing] of a square of singular symbolic significance” while employing a “fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain.” Without permits for microphones and speakers, Occupiers amplified their voices through human microphones that operated in call and response fashion: a speaker addressing the crowd states a few words then pauses for those in ear shot to repeat the statement, allowing others to hear the speech. Through their demonstrations, human microphones and opposition to police, Occupy protestors transformed these spaces into squares of liberty. Here, citizens could freely bare their grievances while demonstrating the possibility of a more inclusive and equitable society.

Sassen (2011) asserts that the Occupy movement and recent protests in Madrid, Tel Aviv, and several cities in China and Chile are examples of the public’s taking to the “global street” in response to feelings of a “collective powerlessness.” While the manifestation of that powerlessness may have distinct local and cultural qualities, the encampments provide a uniform way of making these struggles visible. The occupations also create tensions by calling attention to the underlying antagonistic social relations that permeate city life. By making claims to public spaces, protestors make visible the contradictions in urban life. The critical mass of protestors sleeping in tents juxtaposed against skyscrapers highlights the poverty and homelessness that elite city dwellers conveniently learn to ignore.

Marcuse (2011) identifies the eviction of Occupy Wall Street protestors as a “deficit in the provision and management of public space.” In cities across the U.S., mayors directed police forces to evict protestors from Occupy encampments. The execution of these orders often resulted in violent clashes between protesters and police, leading to numerous arrests. To their credit, Occupy protestors pushed back against these efforts far longer than many observers expected. Due to the visibility of the protests, police and city governments were forced to reconsider their initial response to the encampments. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg first denounced the movement, but allowed protestors to remain in Zuccotti Park for three weeks before directing police to evict them, citing health and fire concerns (Calhoun 2011). With the New York encampment weathering several attempts by the administration to disband protestors, Occupy affiliates sprang up across the country—contesting more public spaces and costing cities millions to police the encampments. After nearly two months of protests, cities began evicting protestors in what appeared to be a coordinated effort among several mayors and police departments (Kroll 2011). These evictions did not halt the buzz around the movement, but rather, emphasized the message of the Occupy Movement and rewarded city administrations with negative press. The seizing of public spaces and the use of social media to promote and report acts of resistance suggest that in mediated societies, protests configured for virtual audiences are likely to become mainstays of urban social movements.

By occupying public spaces, protestors forced city governments and mainstream media to acknowledge their presence. While this acknowledgement may not change the status quo position or result in fundamental policy reform, contesting public spaces may give the powerless “rhetorical and operational openings” (Sassen 2011). For example, the police, claimed by the Occupiers as part of the 99%, employed repressive tactics to evict and thwart protestors. These actions helped to elevate the protests in the national news media. What was initially framed by the news media as a movement of “slackers” and “hippie-types” evolved into a national conversation about growing inequality. The injury of an Iraq war veteran at the hand of police at Occupy Oakland provided protestors with an opportunity to highlight the contradiction of a political system that promotes war in the name of preserving freedom, yet responds with violence and oppression to protestors that assemble peacefully in city parks. The pepper-spraying of student protestors at UC Davis outraged many and helped to further garner public sympathy for the movement. With its intellectual roots in the “right to the city” movement, the Occupy Movement is the latest iteration of an evolving form of protest that will likely increase as citizens of the world collectively respond to a growing sense of social, economic and political disenfranchisement.

Planning Democracy: Public Space, Participation and Protest

Through their persistent presence, protestors shifted the national conversation to issues of economic justice and power relations. Indeed, public opinion polls show a plurality of support for the movement. The idea of the 99% up against the power and wealth of the 1% has been firmly planted in the American public’s consciousness (New York Times 2011). While this uneven distribution of power and resources is not a new phenomenon, the Occupy Movement, which formed at a time of great economic distress, used fresh organizing tactics and new media tools to seize and direct the public’s attention to the root causes of its daily struggles.

With the eviction of protestors, some have sought to reconstitute the encampments in other locations around cities. In response, some activists and scholars have warned against the fetishizing of space (Marcuse 2011), at the cost of losing sight of the real issues at stake. Organizers from Adbusters have called on protestors to celebrate their victories and not expend energy on occupying a single location (White 2011). In somewhat of an irony, after evicting the protestors from Zuccotti Park, Mayor Bloomberg asserted, “Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments (Tharoor 2011).” As the movement decides how it will create meaningful change, perhaps through new tactics or rhetoric, the public and city governments must collectively resolve how public spaces will be used to further participatory democracy. With its successes, the Occupy movement is likely to serve as a model for future urban protests. Given the response of city officials to Occupy, future movements seeking to utilize similar protest strategies may be thwarted by stricter regulation of public and quasi-public spaces, increased surveillance of activists, and heavy-handed police tactics. This need not be the case.

In addition to its responsibility to promote efficiency and safety in the built environment, city planning (and regulation) should be concerned with furthering democratic participation (Marcuse 2011). Marcuse (2011) argues that Occupy Wall Street highlights the need for cities to adopt Public Spaces Plans that take into consideration the spatial requirements of democratic functions. Additionally, when facing conflicting claims on the use of a particular space, cities should grant priority to uses that enable the populace to more actively engage in democratic governance (Marcuse 2011). Similarly, Swyngedouw (2011) calls for a “reworking [of] the ‘creative’ city as agonistic urban space rather than limiting creativity to the musings of the creative class.” This reconceptualization of urban space includes accommodating difference and disorder and “imagining concrete spatio-temporal utopias as immediately necessary and realizable (Swyngedouw 2011).” Occupy DC’s continued occupation of McPherson Square in Washington, D.C. may point to how this vision of public space may be realized. As of April 2012, protestors remain in McPherson Square six months after first occupying the park. The U.S. Park Service, which has authority over the park, has recognized the protest as a 24-hour vigil. Instead of evicting protestors, the Park Service began enforcing regulations that allow tents to remain on the site yet prohibit protestors from camping overnight. This is a favorable yet imperfect solution for Occupy supporters who claim a First Amendment right to sleep on federal lands as a form of protest (Progressive Change Campaign Committee 2012). Government officials, planners, and citizens should work collectively to resolve these issues. In these deliberations, concerns about sanitation and safety must be appropriately balanced with the right of citizens to access public spaces.

Judy Lubin is an emerging scholar, writer, and blogger. Her policy and advocacy expertise includes work in the areas of health and social inequalities. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at Howard University. Her research interests include the politics of health reform, social movements, and the intersection of media/technology, politics, and public opinion. www.judylubin.com

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Occupying the Noosphere: The Evolution of Media Platforms and Webs of Community Protest

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By Michael Glassman

Abstract

This article suggests the emergence of a new dominant ecological system in civil discourse and protest: the noosystem. The idea of a vibrant noosystem is taken from the concept of the noosphere which was introduced near the beginning of the 20th century. The noosphere is a complex, uniquely human system of activity where individual minds use meditational tools to engage in the transfer of information and problem solving activities. The Internet has given the idea of a noosphere new vibrancy, creating a platform where that is capable of augmenting and extending humans minds so that they are capable of engaging in joint activity in ways that transcend traditional boundaries of time and space. The noosystem is offered as a subcategory of the noosphere, an ecological system that not only allows human intellect to guide our perceptions of more concrete settings, but to actually participate in defining and redefining these activity settings. Nowhere has the noosystem had more impact than in the current occupy movement (exemplified by Occupy Wall Street). This article argues that our burgeoning noosystem is redefining both protest and social change. This idea is illustrated through an analysis of Occupy Youngstown, an Occupy Wall Street affiliated group.

Keywords: Internet, protest, Occupy Youngstown

Introduction

This article suggests the emergence of a new ecological system in civil discourse: the noosphere, or sphere of human thought. The noosphere is an emergent “space” for development of autonomous project communities that allows human intellect to guide our perceptions of events and of the built environment, and to actually participate in defining and redefining these events and places over time. The noosphere is a complex, uniquely human system of activity where individual minds use mediational tools to engage in the transfer of information and problem solving activities. The Internet has given the idea of a noosphere new vibrancy, serving as a platform that is capable of extending human minds so they are able to create autonomous community projects that transcend traditional boundaries. These community projects serve as hubs of action, fostering connections with new types of information and sympathetic groups, transcending limitations inherent to local cultural histories and larger hegemonic forces. This can be especially important in movements of dissent and protest against the status quo, where information is tightly controlled and often serves to maintain current systems. Nowhere is the noosphere more apparent than in the current Occupy Wall Street movement and its replication in sites across the country, an idea I illustrate here through an analysis of Occupy Youngstown.

A December 2011 article in Salon magazine describes the development and process of a new website “InterOccupy,” featuring communications tools like a new phone conferencing system that can service large populations simultaneously (Elliot 2011). Emerging out of the Occupy Wall Street (#ows(1)) social/political movement, the website attempted to interconnect many of the different #ows affiliated groups across the world and to provide a platform for multilateral discussion and joint planning. Social and political movements are increasingly engaging through this type of complex, non-hierarchal networking and community building. InterOccupy represents a much broader, Internet-driven phenomenon that looks to interlink dispersed individual minds into a web of evolving community collective action. This interlinking of intellect and action takes place in what has to this point been a relatively unattainable space for the general populace: the noosphere(2).

The noosphere implies a space that enables collective intelligence and shared problem solving through multilateral communications between interested parties. As an ecological and evolutionary model of the relationship between media platforms and communicative praxis, the noosphere is a helpful framework for understanding the discursive online space that became an integral aspect of the #ows movement. Activities in the noosphere offer unique possibilities for the development of autonomous online communities capable of generating meaning and knowledge while holding together disparate populations in pursuit of shared goals. The use of the noosphere has reached its current apex through #ows and affiliated groups’ use of the Internet as a central tool for disseminating ideas, political organizing, and coordinating activity in physical space. Websites such as InterOccupy serve as mediating tools for the noosphere, leading to a community that develops collective intelligence and helps move participants in disparate settings towards united action.

The Noosphere as a Meeting of Minds

The philosophical origins of the noosphere stretch back almost a century. The concept was first introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book The Phenomenon of Man (1959) (the term was actually coined in 1925(3)[Bird 1963]). Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest who was both a geologist and paleontologist, was influenced by the work of Charles Darwin (and most probably the work of the geologist Charles Lyell, who was also an influence on Darwin)(Glassman 2000(4)). He envisioned evolution as occurring in layers, first geological and then covered by the layers of the hydrosphere and then atmosphere, and long afterwards, the biosphere, the “fauna and flora” that envelopes the planet. The most recent addition is the noosphere, a thin membrane of thought outside, above, and interacting with the biosphere. The noosphere is the sphere in which the human intellect spreads through communicative media such as storytelling and song. It is the noosphere which allows for maintenance of tools through generations and planning between individuals engaged in a cooperative activity.

The Noosphere and the Evolution of Media

Initially the concept of the noosphere gained little traction as a conceptualization of human behavior. One reason may be that the noosphere is directly tied to media and communication strategies; because human intellect has no organic corporal manifestation, its shared use depends on the use of mediating tools. However, the conflation of the vehicles of media with the practices enabled by those vehicles often privileges the technology over the spaces created by evolving media platforms, so we are more likely to speak of television rather than the shared community created by a community all experiencing a specific television show.

The noosphere is an important concept to understand the emergent spaces created through the Internet, and especially its progeny of Web-related tools. The concept was first applied to the types of unique, community-driven activity found in Open Source communities on the Internet by Eric Raymond (2001). The Internet enables the noosphere as a platform for collective intelligence, especially in the form of spatially dispersed communities that are capable of reacting to difficult problems and generating unique solutions. For instance, the Websites Dailykos and Firedoglake actually serve as organizing and generative forces in responding to progressive issues (Benkler 2006), while InterOccupy seeks specifically to connect the #ows socio-political movement and Web-based community building. These communities, because they are created, developed, and sustained within the noosphere, are capable of transcending traditional spatial and temporal boundaries to thought and action.

In this sense, the Internet is able to augment the human mind, allowing it to extend out into a new system of activity where it can simultaneously interact with other minds in other locales (Bardini 2000). This new and interactive “space” was driven in part by the development of the Internet, but it did not effectively come to fruition until the development of the World Wide Web and the host of interactive Web 2.0(5) technologies (Glassman and Kang 2010). Interactive Web 2.0 tools (sometimes referred to as the writable Web) offer slower, “cooler” introductions into its information universe. This evolution of media technology towards collective platforms may be understood using a near-forgotten distinction, offered by media theorist Marshal McLuhan (1964), between hot media and cool media.

McLuhan used hot and cold as metaphors for how we perceive and engage information. Hot media draws individuals towards information through its power and immediacy but limits choice about what that information might mean or how it might be used in their lives. Hot media exists on the Web, for example in the form of static websites that utilize a combination of graphics, colors, and professional layout. Hot media tends to be centralized, linear, and controlled, concerned primarily with direct transmission of information. By contrast, cool media is far more decentralized, inviting participants into a relationship with the information source. Cool media on the Internet—e.g. wikis, blogs, and social network sites—are often simple and obscure, and invite different levels of participation.(6) But these Web 2.0 sites can offer the viewer the ability to move from consumer of information to participant in the site, and even to co-developer of the source (Raymond 2001). Because online communities are ongoing and dynamic, they are more likely to operate through cool media producing tools offered through the writable Web such as social networking sites, interactive blogs, and wikis.

Mass Self-Communication and Autonomous Project Communities

The noosphere concept helps to tie together Castells’s (2007) idea of mass self-communication and Benkler’s (2006) description of reactive and generative online/Open Source communities (Raymond 2001). Some of Castells’s work suggests that the Internet allows individuals to self-initiate communications with new and different populations and find information beyond sanctioned sources, transcending pathways provided by the traditional systems enveloping the individual’s intellectual and social development. The Internet allows these communications to build on each other, sometimes exponentially, creating the potential for almost any connected individual to initiate or participate in mass communicative strategies and processes. The mass self-communication made possible by the Internet is the critical first step in expanding public discourse and moving it past traditional material, spatial, and socio-cultural boundaries.

Perhaps the most unique and important implication of this mass self-communication is the ability to develop and engage in “autonomous projects” that are beyond the control of traditional power structures. The noosphere then serves as an information-based ecology that enables disparate individuals and groups to cut through other dominant systems to create communities undertaking autonomous projects based in collective engagement. It is these autonomous online communities, especially when functioning within an Open Source model, that can create qualitatively unique ongoing projects focused on shared concerns and goals of participants. These communities can then independently develop reactive strategies to difficult problems quickly and at any time; they can also develop their own ongoing problem-solving processes that are capable of generating unique solutions (Benkler 2006).

The Protests and the Noosphere: Making the Future a Guide to the Present

An important component of the noosphere is the nonlinear, ecological mode of development and evolution that corresponds to collective intellectual practice. This makes possible sustainability of autonomous project communities where experimentation and emergence are the logical models: the future of the future (is) in the present (McLuhan 1967). The noosphere is a collaborative space where actors engage in collective knowledge development processes. This model contradicts previous social movement models that emphasize heroism and individualism, where individuals claim ownership of the actions, in media spaces such as speeches and protest acts, and where protests are endangered when they lose leaders or critical symbols of dissent.

The importance of online autonomous communities capable of acting outside of traditional social and cultural boundaries is especially salient in authoritarian societies with strict controls on the flow of information. Protests against entrenched institutional systems can be hampered by prior experience, including those of previous generations. Members of a society can believe they are not capable of effecting change and have little choice in the life trajectories (Sen 1999). The “Arab Spring” was a surprise because the protests occurred in societies that tightly controlled the capabilities and choices of their citizens. The Internet offered not only a vehicle to quickly share and disseminate information, but more importantly, a platform to develop autonomous online project communities. These autonomous project communities were able to react to emotional and physically dangerous circumstances like military retribution, as well as to generate new strategies and approaches. The protestors were able to sustain and even expand these project communities through even the most debilitating military responses, demonstrating that the concept of the noosphere might be critical to dissent in the Internet age.

The noosphere offers a way to conceptualize a space that melds together actions and ideas emanating from various physical activity settings in ways that can be sustained over time, even in the face of dramatic changes to those physical settings. As a counterhegemonic or insurgent space, the noosphere provides a place for mass self-communication, allowing social movements the platform to develop autonomous project communities. Autonomous project communities are capable of developing their own information sources, creating new strategies in reaction to changing circumstances, and generating new possibilities for cross-community action. These online communities are both central to actions taken by the protest community in specific places and within other systems, and autonomous from traditional, often carefully choreographed information sources and pathways promoted within and sanctioned by these systems.

The Noosphere in Spatial Form: Occupy Youngstown

The role of the noosphere in current civil discourse can be traced through a small slice of the larger #ows movement – the Occupy Youngstown (OY) community. OY offers an important example of the noosphere, as it enables new creative and productive phenomenon in political and social protest. OY went from a small, materially circumscribed protest to a networked, multilateral, autonomous community with multiple links to affiliated local, regional, and national initiatives. OY started as a local movement emerging in response to the momentum created by #ows and its affiliates. Initially, OY, like most #ows affiliated groups, was intent on fostering change by occupying physical spaces that are geographically meaningful, with the aim of forcing institutions to reconsider their policies. Occupy Youngstown began on October 15, approximately a month after #ows began their occupation of Zucotti Park in New York City. The group received a one-day permit for a demonstration in Central Square in downtown Youngstown, Ohio, the center of the city’s business and shopping area. At the end of the protest day a group set up a burn barrel, chairs, and a tarp in the Square. Three days later the group set up a tent next to the burn barrel which became an initial, place-based symbol for the group, and these remained in place with at least twelve protesters maintaining vigil. OY was summarily evicted from their space on November 11 as part of a large-scale, nationwide eviction process at a number of #ows sites around the nation.

When the eviction of OY from Central Square occurred and the tent that served as the symbol of the protest was removed, protesters first directed their energy on re-taking the physical space and maintaining some presence there in defiance of institutional demands, but with very limited success. Based on Youngstown’s economic and social history, along with the loss of a physical space critical to the identity of OY, one would have expected despair and dissolution among its members. Instead, OY evolved and expanded, and a little over a month later its activities were documented on a national television news show. This was largely due to the redirection of OY energies to other settings, especially on the Internet. OY used the social networking site Facebook as cool media in response to the eviction. On its Facebook site (http://www.facebook.com/occupyyoungstown), participating individuals and groups from a number of disparate and decentralized settings were able to communicate with each other easily and quickly. The OY Facebook page served as the site of community building, allowing participants to continuously redefine and re-energize the small movement in the noosphere, no matter what was occurring at specific local settings.

The Facebook page became a space where individuals and groups could meet, offer and find new information, discuss interrelated ideas, and make calls to action. Other active communities and individuals, like those attempting to establish a winter farmers’ market and leading the Stop Fracking Ohio movement, became central to the ongoing conversation. One of the groups discussed relatively early on the page was occupyourhomes– an #ows affiliated national group attempting to respond to the foreclosure crisis. The group became a central topic on the page after a call to action against the eviction of a local family and subsequent protest joined by OY members at the targeted home. The Facebook page also served to document the evolution of the protest while keeping links to the other affiliated groups open and active.

One of the most interesting aspects of OY is the fact that Youngstown is one of the geographical areas hardest hit by the changing economy—a concrete example of many of the issues at the heart of the #ows protests. The occupation in downtown Youngstown was never large but it managed to gain national attention. The resonance of Occupy Youngstown with social political movements in larger communities, and the power that this small local group was showing over an extended period of time, is evidenced through their inclusion on a national television news show.

This is Occupy Youngstown, Ohio. Remember them? You may remember our earlier reporting on Occupy Youngstown in one of America’s most impoverished cities, turning out with their senior citizens and their few tents outside a bank and what’s left of the downtown in Youngstown. Well, these are Occupy Youngstown’s tents today, where they camped out in the yard of a mother and her family facing eviction from their home just in time for the holidays. This is politics too. (Rachel Maddow, December 15, The Rachel Maddow Show)

An analysis of the Facebook page from November 11 until the Rachel Maddow Show segment on December 15 suggests that OY not only thrived but actually evolved on the Internet so that occupation of a specific physical space became much less important. Prior to the eviction of November 11, the OY Facebook page had only limited postings and few links; it was something of an online ghost town. Only after the eviction did the page begin to evolve into a functioning community. Initially conversation on the page focused on the idea of keeping enough “bodies” at the site so that it remained “occupied.” But as more individuals and groups began visiting the page, the idea of what “occupied” meant seemed to expand—not tied as closely to that single, physical site in downtown Youngstown.

The critical question in (re)defining OY is how a movement whose primary geographical locus had become a “protest ghost town” was being hailed a month later as a powerful, dynamic group for change on a national newscast. Occupy Youngstown no longer actually existed in the space taken up by the tent set up in Central Squares outside of a bank, but as an online autonomous project community. The OY Facebook page fostered evolution within the noosphere, and served as the hub of the system holding Occupy Youngstown together as an autonomous project community. The movement evolved from a unilateral battle between participants and institutional systems in physical space to a Web of interrelated activity that cut across and in many ways transcended specific physical settings.

When the Rachel Maddow Show discussed Occupy Youngstown as occupying an individual house to ward off foreclosure, it was presented as the next logical step in the movement. She imagined a localized battle between the microsystem of the endangered household and the institutions behind the eviction. What actually happened is that the occupation of the endangered home was simply one extension of a community web being continuously defined and redefined in the noosphere. Occupation of endangered homes became a primary idea when a call for help was put out on the Facebook page, but it was only one of many possible valences of OY’s new online, autonomous project community. Other extensions of the noosphere web, such as integration with the Stop Fracking Ohio movement and development of a year-round farmers’ market, were important tentacles of the growing autonomous project community. Different movements were integrated into action-based projects with little concern about traditional power relationships between them. OY continues to be an active, integrated protest community through its Facebook page to this day.

Concluding Thoughts

The Internet expands both access to and purpose of the noosphere, making it a space capable of facilitating change on a number of levels. Any person with some type of connectivity is capable of entering the space created by the noosphere, not just as a consumer of information, but as an active contributor to the generation of new ideas and strategies. The noosphere facilitates the development of online communities to create bottom-up solutions to problems and threats, and to effect change in ways that are not restricted by traditional boundaries imposed by time and place. These communities emerge to address common concerns and work together in a multilateral, non-linear manner with shifting decision-making structures. The communities that develop in the noosphere are effectually promoting new kinds of action because they are capable of transcending the history of a particular place, as well as the predominance of elites over the flow of information (Castells 1999).

The noosphere offers a new metaphor for effecting change. Far different from the war metaphor—the battle for control over territory—the noosphere model of change might be more akin to fishing in the ocean (Glassman and Kang 2012). The individuals participating in OY, and in the #ows movement, are like fisherpersons throwing nets out into the ocean, searching for new activities and ideas that flow through the ocean with the tides. The noosphere brings together the fisherperson, the meshing of the net, and the ocean.  Hot media has a bias towards portraying the world as moving in unilateral, well-defined directions. Cool media not only enhances our abilities to portray information as a web of possibilities, but as it evolves, it actually enables that web to grow and evolve. Facebook as cool media is another step in the evolution of cool media, part of the transformational quality of the Internet. The noosphere, as illustrated in the case of OY, and in the form of the Facebook page, allows the participant to experience the community extending out, casting its nets, and pulling in new ideas. It allows every participant to play a variety of roles such as fisherperson and net maker. It is a system that not only impacts the ways in which we understand geographies, but allows us to recreate those geographies beyond the boundaries of traditional system interactions and our imaginations.

  1. The “#” is known as a hashtag, a metadata tag indicating an ad-hoc group or topic of discussion on microblogging sites such as Twitter.
  2. Noosphere is derived from the Greek word “Nous” or “Noo(s)” meaning intellect or understanding, in some cases translated as mind.
  3. The Phenomenon of Man was published posthumously four years after the author’s death. The church had ordered Teilhard de Chardin not to publish any of his writings, and even at one point to stop lecturing. The book seems to have actually been written during the years 1938-40. But Teilhard de Chardin first seems to have used the phrase in his writings in 1925.
  4. One of the reasons it is important to recognize Lyell’s influence on Darwin’s theory is because it reflects a non-teleological interpretation of evolution—what Gould (1977) referred to as “descent with modification” as opposed to the more unidirectional interpretation championed by Huxley. See Glassman (2000) for an extended discussion.
  5. Web 2.0 is often defined through enabling tools such as social network site (SNS), wikis, and interactive blogs. When O’Reilly coined the term it was more a description of the processes of collective intelligence that the Web made possible. This is also why it may not be productive to equate the term social media with Web 2.0.
  6. Consider the steps even in participating in a Social Network Site such as Facebook: receiving a friend request, visiting and examining profile information, visiting a wall and scrolling through posting information, participating by posting on the wall.

Michael Glassman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the Ohio State University.

References

Bardini, Thierry. 2000. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Accessed March 10, 2012. http://sisudoc.org/sisu/the_wealth_of_networks.yochai_benkler/landscape.a5.pdf.
Bird, James. 1963. “The Noosphere: A Concept Possibly Useful to Geographers.” Scottish Geographical Magazine 79 (1): 54–56.
Castells, Manuel. 1999. “Grassrooting the Space of Flows.” Urban Geography 20 (4): 294–302.
———. 2007. “Communication, Power and Counter-Power in the Network Society,” International Journal of Communication 1 (1): 238–266.
de Chardin, Pierreand Teilhard. 1959. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper.
Elliott, Justin. 2011. “Occupations in Winter.” Salon.com, December 26. Accessed January 12, 2012. http://www.salon.com/2011/12/26/occupations_in_winter/singleton.
Glassman, Michael. 2000. “Mutual Aid Theory and Human Development: Sociability as Primary.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 30 (4): 391–412.
Glassman, Michael and Min Ju Kang. 2010. “Pragmatism, Connectionism and the Internet: A Mind’s New Storm.” Computers in Human Behavior 26 (6): 1412–1418.
———. 2012. “Intelligence in the Internet Age: The Emergence and Evolution of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).” Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2): 673–682.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton.
Levinson, Paul. 1999. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. New York: Random House.
———. 1967. The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Random House.
O’Reilly, Timothy. 2007. “What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” Communications & Strategies no. 65 (1st quarter): 17–37.
Raymond, Eric. 2001. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates Inc.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books.

Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times: A Dialogue with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

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By David Hugill and Elise Thorburn

Abstract

The Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetime participating in revolutionary movements and thinking through their complexities. He is best known in the English-speaking world for his association with the Italian autonomist movement Operaismo (“workerism”) and its prominent attempts to transform communist politics by resituating the “needs, desires, and organizational autonomies” of workers at the foundation of political praxis (Genosko and Thoburn 2011: 3). This text assembles excerpts from three interviews we conducted with Berardi over the course of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversations coincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and our interviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points in the transcript. Yet while Berardi is generally optimistic about the revolts and the “reactivation of the social body” that they seem to imply, he reminds us that protest alone will not be enough to win the genuine kinds of autonomy that he suggests are necessary. He argues that dogmas of growth, competition and rent have so colonized every sphere of “human knowledge” that they have begun to threaten the very survival of what he calls “social civilization.”  The hegemonic grip of this “epistemological dictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another, severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. Yet in spite of this dark diagnosis, Berardi is not a doomsayer and he always leaves open the possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels that our best shot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategies of withdrawal, refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight” from the late-capitalist forms of domination.

Keywords: crisis; precariousness; Italian autonomism; capitalism; revolution; the occupy movement; the “Arab Spring”; neoliberal education; universities; debt

Introduction

The Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetime participating in revolutionary movements and thinking through their complexities. He is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his association with the Italian Operaista (“workerist”) movement – known colloquially as “Autonomism” or “Autonomist Marxism” - and its prominent attempts to transform communist politics by re-centering the “needs, desires, and organizational autonomies” of workers as the foundation of political praxis (Genosko and Thoburn 2011). The Autonomist tradition is primarily concerned with the autonomy of human subjects: it is a Marxism that insists on the primacy of laborers as active agents. Thus where Western Marxisms have tended to focus on the dominant logic of capital itself, Autonomists have sought to affirm the power of workers first, understanding transformations in the capitalist mode of production primarily as responses to class struggle (Dyer-Witheford 2004); the political history of capital, in other words, can be read as a “history of successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class” (Tronti 1979 quoted in Trott 2007). This inversion of the dialectical relationship between labor and capital (sometimes called the “Copernican Turn”) is thus often considered the hallmark of Autonomist theory (Moulier 1989).

What follows are excerpts of three interviews that we conducted with Bifo over the course of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversations coincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and our interviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points in the transcript. Our first encounter was at an Edufactory meeting in Paris at which a range of groups had come together to build a common front against the neoliberalization of universities in Europe and around the world. The conference was held just weeks after the ouster of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the proceedings were routinely interrupted by live updates from the ongoing revolution in Egypt. Indeed, news of the emergent ‘Arab Spring’ coupled with the energy of attendees from ongoing student mobilizations in Britain, Italy, Chile and elsewhere, animated the conference with a palpable sense that a new cycle of struggle was once again upon us. Our follow-up conversations with Bifo - both held remotely - were animated by a similar backdrop of upheaval as that revolutionary spring bled into an equally oppositional summer and then gave to an occupied fall. Yet while our interviewee remains generally optimistic about the events of 2011 and the “reactivation of the social body” that they seem to imply, he is also quick to remind us that protest alone will not be enough to win the genuine kinds of autonomy that he suggests are vitally necessary.  As we shall see, Bifo’s primary concern is with the ways in which particular dogmas of growth, competition and rent have colonized the spheres of “human knowledge.” He argues that the persistence of these “mental cages” threatens the very survival of “social civilization” and remains critical about the capacity of protest to interrupt their pervasiveness. There are tactical implications to these observations and Bifo - both in the text below and elsewhere - asks tough questions about whether marches and occupations are effective strategies for targeting contemporary arrangements of domination. Unlike the geographer Eric Swyngedouw (2011), who insists that the seizure of urban space continues to be at the heart of “emancipatory geo-political trajectories,” Bifo points to the limits of too enthusiastic an embrace of space-based urban struggle. His point is not to deny the importance of marches and occupations but to suggest that a more formidable foe resides in the deterritorialized orbit of software and algorithms, financial flows and behavioral automatisms. Indeed, he argues that the hegemonic grip of this “epistemological dictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another, severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. As he puts it elsewhere:

We have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualization has destroyed empathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to work and virtual exchange (Berardi and Lovnik 2011).

Yet Bifo is not a doomsayer, in spite of this dark diagnosis, and he always leaves open the possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels that our best shot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategies of withdrawal, refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight” from late-capitalist forms of domination. There are good reasons to be optimistic as we reflect on the flourishing of this new “spring” of resistance but as Mike Davis (2011: 5) warns us “spring is the shortest of seasons.” Bifo’s observations are critical reminders that the hardest work will come as we try to sustain, transform and hone the insurrectionary energies of 2011. We hope this dialogue contributes to that process in some modest way.

Interview

Q: We’d like to begin by asking about the emphasis that you and others have placed on the role of financial capitalism in undermining what you call “social civilization.” You’ve suggested, among other things, that it is a deterritorializing form of predation because its violence is primarily conducted through a virtual circuitry. With this in mind, we’d like to ask a tactical question: if the architecture of contemporary domination is less and less linked to the control of physical spaces– if its more virtual and algorithmic than material and locatable – then where can that domination be meaningfully challenged? 

A: In my view, imagination is the central field of social transformation in the age of semiocapital. Capitalist domination is sustained by the persistence of mental cages that are structured by the dogmas of growth, competition and rent. The epistemological dictatorship of this model – its grip on the different spheres of human knowledge – is the very ground of power. So the task of transformation requires us to imagine and make sensible a different concatenation of social forms, knowledge, and technology. Of course, imagination will never be enough on its own. We need to build forms of social solidarity that are capable of re-activating the social body after the long period of its isolation and subjugation to competitive aggressiveness. Solidarity – in contrast to this aggressiveness – is based on empathy, on the bodily perception of the presence of the other.

This word, solidarity, is a crucial word in the language of our movements but it needs to be better understood. What does solidarity mean, exactly? In general, we use the word in an ethical or political sense but this does not allow us to grasp its inner meaning. Solidarity, in my view, has to do with psychic and emotional relationships between living bodies. When we see that solidarity has broken down in our daily lives, the form that it takes is usually not political. Rather, it is an experience of dis-conjunction, a breaking down of empathetic bonds between living beings. The virtualization of communication, the precarization of work, and a range of other contemporary phenomena, have disconnected our capacity to feel empathy towards each other. In my opinion, this is the main problem of our time. Building and sustaining solidarity has to be much more than a political project. It is about reactivating the sentience of the social body much more than it is about political organization. Do you see what I mean? Ultimately, what we have is a problem of therapy, which, in my parlance, does not imply a process of re-connecting, or reducing language, behavior, or feelings to established norms. For me, therapy implies a process of re-activating empathy between living organisms. This empathy is the foundation of the solidarity we need today.

Q: In your view, has the wave of revolts and occupations that have unfolded over the past year or so, initiated this therapeutic process, this process of reactivating interpersonal empathy in the face of particular forms of domination? 

A: I am still trying to understand what happened in 2011 but I do think the uprisings can be seen as a challenge to the dis-empathetic pathologies that are crossing the social skin and social soul and as the reactivation of the social body. They can be seen, in other words, as therapy for a psychopathology, as a process of healing.

For too long the dictatorship of financial capitalism has compressed the social body and the cynicism of the ruling class has become increasingly repugnant to many. This is why we should not be surprised that the uprisings have sometimes taken the form of violent explosions and will continue to do so. Of course, violence is itself a pathological demonstration of impotence and there is little tactical justification for a violent anti-capitalist movement today. Nevertheless, we will continue to witness massive explosions of precarious rage and violence, like the ones that were unleashed in Tottenham, Peckham and elsewhere in the UK in August and in Rome in October.  Future uprisings will frequently give way to the psychopathology of violence and this shouldn’t surprise us. Neither should we condemn such acts as criminal.  But in terms of the therapeutic meaning of the uprisings in general, I don’t think it is simply a matter of political negotiation, of struggle, denunciation and demonstration. Rather, the main problem that is addressed by the uprisings – from Egypt to the occupation movement but also the violent riots in London and many other cities in Europe – is the reactivation of the link between human bodies, which is also a reactivation of a relationship to the city, to land, to territory.

Q: If imagination is the critical site of struggle, as you’ve suggested, then has it become less important for oppositional groups to fight battles in actual physical space? Has holding city squares or disturbing the ordered functioning of various financial districts became on obsolete or merely symbolic tactical approach or can it still be productively disruptive?

A: I don’t think that we will be able to win a fight against financial capitalism by demonstrating in the street. Destroying banks isn’t useful if we are seeking emancipation from financial dictatorship. Financial power does not exist in the banks; it is embedded in software, in the techno-linguistic automatisms that govern daily life and the psychic automatisms of consumerism, competition and fear. Nevertheless we are in the midst of a process – a movement – that will deploy itself over the course of the next decade, maybe longer, and we have to start from where we are and what we know. What we have today is the memory of past forms that our movements have taken, including occupations, strikes and demonstrations, both peaceful and violent. All of these are part of the legacy of 20th century social movements. Recently, we have tried to resurrect some of these old forms of struggle – these old forms of expression – but this hasn’t worked particularly well. Established forms of peaceful demonstration have absolutely no possibility of changing the politics of financial capitalism. They don’t work when democracy is dead - and it is totally dead, the European experience is demonstrating that clearly. But on the other hand, violent riots or bank bombings are also useless because they don’t challenge the sites of real power. Real power is in the cybersphere, in the algorithms of financial control, in the quantitative analyses that undergird trading, and so on.

We continue to use old forms of action but we will have to begin to imagine new forms that are capable of actually struggling against financial dictatorship. In my opinion, the first task – which we have begun to experience over the last year – is the reactivation of the social body that I have already described. But as I have said, this will not be enough. We will also have to begin to learn to create new forms of autonomy from financial control and so on. For instance, in Italy we have been talking increasingly of “insolvency.” Of course, insolvency means the inability to pay a debt but we don’t think of it strictly in monetary terms. There is also a symbolic debt that is always implied in power relationships. Imagination might mean the ability to create the possibility of insolvency – to create the right to be insolvent, the right not to pay a debt – at a semiotic and a symbolic level. We need to imagine forms of social relationships that escape monetary exchange or invent new forms of exchange, like time banks, new forms of currency, community currency and so on. Do you see what I am trying to say? The process of imagination begins with the reactivation of the social body but next this body has to create new levels of social interaction. Escaping financial dictatorship, in other words, means imagining new forms of social exchange. I don’t know what form emancipation will take in the coming years. I can only propose this little methodological starting point from what we already know.

Q: We want to build on this discussion about the “reactivation of the social body” by asking you a question about alliances and movement building. It’s our view that the ways that we talk about questions of “class” have been profoundly diminished in North American popular discourses. The geographer Neil Smith recently suggested that it has gotten so bad in the United States that there are now really only three classes that are acknowledged in public debate: millionaires, homeless people and the middle class (Hugill and Smith 2011: 88). In this context, we are extremely interested in your commitment to understanding “precariousness” as a central dimension of the contemporary. Do you see precariousness as a category that can be meaningfully mobilized as a basis for coming together and identifying with each other? In other words, do you think the idea of precariousness itself is substantial enough to form the basis of a new class politics?

A: Precariousness is not a marginal feature of contemporary labor relations. It is the general character of work in the age of globalization. We shouldn’t abandon class categories but they need to be redefined in every sense. The working and capitalist classes have changed dramatically since the dawn of industrial capitalism. The deterritorialization of property and work is the general trend that has lead to widespread precarization. The old bourgeoisie was a territorialized class, linked to the physical property of factories, built environments and material assets. They were intimately connected to particular territories and territorial communities, which were the markets for what they produced. Today’s predatory financial class has no territorial affinity, no interest in the future of particular communities. The accumulation of capital is no longer based on the physical properties or the growth of physical quantities of goods but on the abstraction of digital and financial signs. Labor has been similarly detached from territory and community. Workers no longer meet in the physical space of the factory and if they do it is usually provisional, temporary, precarious. This is why I think that precariousness has become the general condition of labor in addition to the general condition of social existence and self-perception. At its core, precariousness means the fragmentation of the work force. People no longer meet in the same place and social time has become fragmented, fractalized. The recent wave of movements are a way to re-connect some of these fragments that might otherwise have no way, no time, no space to meet. This, essentially, is what an occupation is. I use the language of reactivating the social body but one could also call it an attempt to bring together that which has been broken apart by the generalization of precariousness. I see the Occupy movement, for example, as an attempt at recomposing the broken body of the precarious community.

Q: Elsewhere, you’ve spoken about how the generalization of precariousness and crisis has made space for new alliances to be formed, including between academic or university workers, so-called “cognitive” laborers, and other kinds of workers. Would you expand on this on little?

A: I am interested in looking at this problem through questions of subjective consciousness, the ways in which crisis has been perceived by different social subjectivities. Over the last decade our consciousness of the centrality of “cognitive labor” has been increasing. For example, in just the last two years in Italy the university has become one of the central foci of struggle. The situation is becoming so dramatic everywhere that new forms of alliance and connection between the social crisis and the problem of the university are being made and this is new. For example, in Italy, in recent months, a new organization has been created called United Against the Crisis – it is a meeting point for metalworkers and students and researchers. In some sense, it is reminiscent of the 1960s or 1970s but it is also absolutely new in other ways.

Q: How successful have these experiments in alliance building been?

A: Well, in January 2011 there was a general strike of the metalworkers all over Italy and it was very successful. In my region around 90% of workers were striking in their factories. And what was interesting was that the squares were full not only of metal workers but also of students. Just after that, in Porto Marghera (an important city for working class memory because everybody associates it with autonomous workers movements of the 1960s and 1970s) the FIOM (Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici), the main union of metal workers, and the so-called disubbidientes, which is a national organization of students and precarious workers, decided to hold a common meeting that roughly 2000 people attended. It was the first time in 40 years that unionists and students met together to decide common actions against the crisis. I want to stress the novelty of this. The government and leading classes had been saying for so long that nothing was happening but now it has become completely evident that we have a massive awakening of social cultures.

Q: There aren’t many precedents for these kinds of alliances between students and university workers with other kinds of workers in contemporary North American contexts. So, on this side of the ocean, we don’t have much of a blueprint to begin building them today. Can you tell us how these connections were forged and sustained?

A: In Italy there is a long legacy of students and workers “united in the struggle.” In fact, this was one of the main slogans in the 1960s and 1970s. And it wasn’t just rhetoric either. It was really something deep. Of course, this was thirty or forty years ago and in the meantime many things have happened. But over the last five or six years, the precarization of workers has created a new common ground between workers and students. Students are precarious workers in most instances and factory workers know that precariousness for students is also a problem for them, a blackmail to be used against them. Additionally, the public discourse and the consciousness of generalized precariousness has been growing dramatically over the last few years and this has had a significant impact. I think that the problem of precariousness is felt differently in Italy and Europe than it is in North America. Precariousness is something that is inherent to labor relations in North America. Of course, I can’t give suggestions to North American activists but I think that working to understand the new character, the new cruciality, that precariousness has taken on in the present time is of critical importance. Once upon a time, precariousness was a marginal space of labor in general but today it is fixed labor that has become marginal. And so, we need to do things like change the perception of what a student is. Most students are precarious workers, first and foremost.

Q: Can you elaborate? In what sense is a student a precarious worker? 

A: First of all because students are increasingly learning in small parcels, small fragments, small fractals of knowledge, and they are becoming more and more accustomed to think of their knowledge not as knowledge but as intellectual availability to exploitation. In North American forms of education this is already well established, it is nothing new. It is new in much of Europe and it has begun to provoke some reactions. But it is also a fact of a networked and globalized world. What does precariousness mean today? What is the relationship between precariousness and globalization? It means that you can buy a fragment of labor in Bangkok, a fragment in Buenos Aires, and a fragment in Milan and that these three fragments become the same product from the point of view of capital. Knowledge is headed the same way. You no longer need – from the point of view of capital – to know in the humanistic sense, the meaning, the finality, the intimate contradictions of knowledge, you just need to know how particular parcels of knowledge can be made functional. There is something new and something old in this. Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) One Dimensional Man already identified this problem of the functionalization of knowledge but in his time it was only a kind of prediction about how capitalism would be transformed. Today, this functional consideration is the dominant form of our relationship to knowledge. So, we should question people about what is happening to our knowledge. Are we really learning things, knowing things? Or are we simply learning how to become part of the productive machine? Additionally, I think we need to ask people, especially young people, about their suffering in the relationship with knowledge, with communication and so on. I think that the problem of psychic suffering is of central importance our time. Problems of depression, panic, massive suicide, are very real. Do you know that suicide has become the main cause of death among people between 18-25 years old? Suicide is becoming a political weapon. I’m not only thinking of Columbine or of Mohamed Bouazizi, the man who killed himself and started the Tunisian revolution. Suicide has something to do with knowledge. When your knowledge is becoming more and more something that does not belong to you, this is a problem of personal identity, of psychic identity.

Q: Do you see a relationship between this psychic suffering and the virtualization of communication that has been associated with new kinds of technology?

A: This is a tricky and difficult question to answer because I see a profound danger in reactionary technophobia. I am absolutely not a technophobe but I do want to question the ambiguity of new technologies. It is evident that new technological forms are in some sense tools of empowerment for social movements – we see what has happened in Egypt and Tunisia, for example. This is clear enough but it is only part of the question. The other part concerns the relationship between bodily perception of society, affective perception of society, and work. Thirty-five years ago I read a book called The Show and Tell Machine, by an American anthropologist called Rose Goldsen. I read this book in 1978 or 1979 but I was so struck by one sentence that I can still repeat it, “we are breeding the first generation that will learn more words from a machine than from mothers.” I remember that Freud said that the main place of affective creation – of the creation of personal affection – is language and the relationship between language learning and bodily affection. The dark side of new technology is this distance from the body of the mother, and by the “body of the mother” I mean the body in general, the ability to perceive oneself linguistically in relationship to the body. This is being lost. You know, psychiatrists say that twenty years ago the word panic meant nothing, but today panic is a new symptomology. Today, it effects 15% of the young people, especially women. And this is absolutely new. So why is this happening? It is because panic is a problem of the relationship between the body and information, the acceleration of information in conditions of competitiveness. This is pathogenic. There are new forms of pathology that are emerging from the acceleration of the technological rhythm of information and the separation of the body from the social process. Our social processes are less and less bodily processes and more and more informational processes. I like the Internet very much and particularly the possibilities that it creates. I don’t want to renounce it but I see that the new technologies have this dark side but I don’t have a solution. There are key problems here in terms of subjectivation, political understanding and so on, and we should work on this ambiguity, this double bind. I think we need to be cautious about the triumphalism that associates new technologies with democratic possibilities etcetera. Yes there are these possibilities but new technology does not mean only that.

Q: Do you invest any hope in the capacity of new technologies - particularly virtual communication technologies – to accomplish the reactivation of the social that you mentioned at the outset of this interview?

A: Of course I do. I am not a reactionary, nor am I a nostalgic person who wants to go back to a time of low-tech communication. The technological struggle is part of a living body of society but the problem is that during the last twenty years new technologies have also cancelled or obscured the possibility of a bodily relationship between social beings. In one sense, social networking and social media technologies have been useful in calling bodies to the street but this dynamic of virtual embodiment has to be reactivated from the point of view of the body, of eroticism, of social relationships. I don’t want to suggest that we should forget about new technology, but rather that we have to inscribe these technologies within a new bodily relationship to each other in physical space, not only in virtual space.

David Hugill is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at York University. Elise Thorburn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

References

Berardi, Franco Bifo. 2011. After the Future (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press).
Berardi, Franco Bifo and Geert Lovnik. 2011. “A Call to the Army of and to the Army of Software,” published online by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2011/10/12/franco-berardi-geert-lovink-a-call-to-the-army-of-love-and-to-the-army-of-software.
Davis, Mike. 2011. “Spring Confronts Winter,” New Left Review 72 (Nov/Dec), pgs. 5-15.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2004. “Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society,” published online by Multitudes, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?page=rubrique&id_rubrique=464.
Genosko, Gary and Nicholas Thoburn. 2011. “The Transversal Communism of Franco Berardi” in Franco Berardi After the Future (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press).
Goldsen, Rose K. 1977. Show and Tell Machine: How American Television Works and Works You Over (New York: Doubleday).
Hugill, David and Neil Smith. 2011. “Revolutionary Ambition in the Age of Austerity: An Interview with Neil Smith,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action #13, pgs. 81-90.
Marcuse, Hebert. 2002 (1964). One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London and New York: Routledge).
Moulier, Yann. 1989. “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Swyngedouw, Eric. 2011. “Every Revolution Has Its Square,” published online by cities@manchester blog, http://citiesmcr.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/every-revolution-has-its-square.
Trott, Ben. 2007. “Immaterial Labour and World Order: An Evaluation of a Thesis,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation 7(1).

Mic Check: How the 99% Pitched a Movement from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Cal

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By Jacob Bintliff On September 17, 2011, a small group of people set up tents in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, renamed it Liberty Park, and announced their intention to “Occupy Wall Street.” This bold symbolic action was the beginning of a movement that shook the nation’s political discourse free from a sanitized narrative of taxpayers and budget deficits, and awakened the American public to the stark inequities of daily life in the 21st century. The Occupy Movement, widely broadcast via traditional and new media alike, shifted public opinion and spurred policy initiatives such as President Obama’s “Buffet Rule” and the “Millionaires Tax” in California. For the first time, a majority of Americans see class conflict between rich and poor as the top source of social tension in the United States. (Morin 2012).

Crowds gather at a rally protesting tuition hikes to point fingers at the administration. Photo by Emma Lantos, Nov. 9, 2011.

Within a couple of months, the national consciousness was awakened, not by any public relations campaign or mass rally, but through the public’s reimagining itself as “the 99%.” This emergent public defined itself in a new language of symbols and shared practice—of tents, general assemblies, and the “people’s microphone”—that transformed countless public spaces. Throughout the fall of 2011, from Zuccotti Park to the wide sidewalks of Market Street in San Francisco to Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza and beyond, the 99% sprang up in a repeated ritual of reclamation—of space, of community, and of political discourse. Spaces that had been accepted unquestioningly as monolithic civic manifestations of “the public at large” were suddenly occupied by an insurgent civitas. Central squares and public parks, all policed and passive places, were recast overnight as the symbolic loci of struggle against 21st century capital’s destabilizing redistribution of wealth and civic access.

Student teach-out in front of Sproul Hall during campus general strike. Photo by Andrea Broaddus, Nov. 9, 2011.

The University of California, Berkeley, itself a manifestation of growing inequity, became one such site in Fall 2011. The University system was once cherished as a public good at the core of California’s development strategy, with the Master Plan of 1960 famously promising free higher education to all California residents (Center for Studies in Higher Education 2012). Over the last several decades, though, the University has slowly been transformed into a profit machine, measured not in students educated but in abstract economic units of revenues and capital investment. Support from the state legislature has been cut by hundreds of millions of dollars, forcing fee hikes, layoffs and service cuts. Since 2002, in-state tuition and fees in the UC system increased by 242%, while the median California family income increased by only 25% (Rosenhall 2012). Throughout this transformation, crowds of students and faculty have gathered in protest on the campus’ “Main Street,” Sproul Plaza.

Police isolate and disassemble tents erected in front of Sproul Hall on November 9. Photo by David Herschorn, The Daily Californian.

Student protesters used tents, a symbol of the Occupy Movement, to politicize and transform the space into Occupy Cal. Photo by Anonymous, November 9, 2011.

On November 9, a crowd of over 1,000 adopted the newly minted lexicon of occupation, set up tents on Sproul Plaza, and declared Occupy Cal underway. Suddenly, the university found itself in the company of financial hubs, civic centers, and parks and plazas the world over, when it too was re-appropriated by the sleeping bags and “mic checks” of the 99%. The Chancellor’s reaction was swift and brutal—riot police were called in from Oakland and Alameda County to break up the Sproul encampment, and they attacked students and faculty in several incidents throughout the day. Documented moment by moment by the UC Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, the police beat student and faculty protesters with batons, breaking ribs; ultimately they tore down the tents and made thirty-nine arrests (The Daily Californian 2011).

The author on November 9, before being beaten by police batons. Photo by Jessica Kuo.

Clearly, the potent lexicon pioneered by the Occupy movement by no means constituted a universal language. In fact, as the Chancellor’s response made obvious, Occupy Cal was lodged squarely between two dueling publics. On one side were police, agents of the state hiding behind Plexiglas visors, who took violent action to secure the campus. On the other side was an unarmed crowd defending a small circle of tents on a patch of grass. For the police, “the public space” being defended was defined by the campus administration, an open space, safe and predictable for appropriately sanctioned use. For the students, that public space was a symbolic site that served both to represent themselves, as an economic class and as a majority—the 99%—and to critique the institution and the state apparatus. At Occupy Cal and Occupy encampments everywhere, these two publics—one defined from above, the other on the ground, distinguished by its ethos of consensus and solidarity—clashed over the right to impose their own lexicon of order over a particular space. One sought to impose a system of curfews and public order, the other a language of community and justice.

Police engaged in “gentle ribbing” with batons, here striking City Planning student Logan Rockefeller Harris. Photo by Noah Berger, November 9, 2011.

Despite the violent police response, Occupy Cal re-installed itself and served as a hub of organization and expression for the full gamut of campus movements for the rest of the semester. A general strike was called and widely supported by student, faculty, and staff union governance bodies on the shocked campus (UC Berkeley Budget Crisis 2011). On November 15, Sproul Plaza teemed with art, performances, a rally, and a march to protest student debt at the Bank of America. Faculty and graduate student instructors signed up to hold “teach-outs” on the lawns of Sproul Hall, as part of Occupy Cal’s “Open University.” The day of action culminated with the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, delivered by professor Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor (The Daily Californian 2011). A crowd of over 3,000 filled Sproul Plaza to the absolute brim to hear Reich discuss unemployment, foreclosures, student debt, and class warfare from the steps of Sproul Hall, recalling the police conflict that transpired on that very spot during Berkeley’s Free Speech movement in 1964 (Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund 2011). As the speech ended, the crowd chanted, “Whose University? Our University!”

This echo of history underlines the durable power of physical space as a tactical tool and a locus of resistance and expression. Occupy Cal sought to challenge the education system by redefining the university campus itself—by extracting it from the reigning narrative of fiscal logic, and representing the university instead through a language of access and equity. The aim, in short, was to occupy the university; to insist through physical demonstration that it be understood anew as a place of tangible social value. In so doing, Occupy Cal translated years of resistance to rising tuition, decaying state support for higher education, and growing administrative salaries into a palpable image of the University as a space by, of, and for the people of California. In this space, local struggles were at once connected to a rising global consciousness of injustice, and brought back to the campus grounds where they are lived each day.

On November 15, students and faculty used art and dance at the “Open Uni- versity” to express support for the Occupy Cal movement. Photo by Andrea Broaddus.

Massive crowd attending the Robert Reich speech in Sproul Plaza, November 15. Photo by Sean Goebel, The Daily Californian.

A stick tent constructed during the November 15 general strike to symbolize the fragility of the protesters. Photo by Andrea Broaddus.

At Wurster Hall, home to the College of Environmental Design, students of landscape architecture, city planning, and architecture embraced public space to speak this insurgent language, but infused it with particular levity. They could have remained holed up in the studio as the din of helicopters and sirens buzzed around, but instead, planners and landscape architects responded. While police wielded batons against their colleagues’ bodies, Environmental Design students directed a message at their spirits, in the form of tents filled with helium balloons. It was an iconic way to summarize the new language of occupation and visibly demonstrate contested notions of public space: tents floating over the very site from which protesters had been forcibly removed. This design intervention qua protest tactic begged the question: where exactly does the intersection between competing lexicons of order and dissent begin and end — an inch off the ground, ten feet? The answer was clear: in our minds, where there is no end in sight.

City planning students bring floating tents and “Our Space” banner to Sproul Plaza. Photo by Jessica Kuo, November 15, 2011.

Jacob Bintliff is a Masters student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.

References

Morin, Richard. 2012. “Rising Share of Americans See Conflict Between Rich and Poor.” Pew Social & Demographic Trends, Washington, DC. Accessed February 10, 2012. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2012/01/Rich-vs-Poor.pdf.
Center for Studies in Higher Education. 2012. “The History and Future of the California Master Plan for Higher Education.” Accessed February 20, 2012. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~ucalhist/archives_exhibits/masterplan/index.html.
Rosenhall, Laurel. 2011. “Middle class feels tuition squeeze at UC, CSU.” The Sacramento Bee. Accessed February 20, 2012. http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/12/3763136/middle-class-feels-tuition-squeeze.html.
The Daily Californian. 2011. “Live Blog: Updates from the Nov. 9 Day of Action, Occupy Cal.” Accessed February 21, 2011. http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/09/live-blog-day-of-action-2.
UC Berkeley Budget Crisis. 2011. “Graduate Student Assembly – Day of Action – Wednesday Nov. 15.” UC Berkeley Budget Crisis (blog). Accessed February 21, 2011. http://budgetcrisis.berkeley.edu/?p=3116.
The Daily Californian. 2011. “Transcript: Robert Reich’s Speech at Occupy Cal.” The Daily Californian Blogs. Accessed February 21, 2011. http://www.dailycal.org/2011/11/18/transcript-robert-reichs-speech-at.
Mario Savio Memorial Lecture Fund. 2011. “In his own voice: Speeches and interviews.” Accessed February 21, 2011. http://www.savio.org/speeches_and_interviews.html.