A Movement Returning Home? Occupy Wall Street After the Evictions

Abstract

This article investigates the possible geographies generated in Occupy Wall Street’s emergence and subsequent evictions from multiple sites of occupation. As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) moves into other spaces, most notably the home, we counter the application of a priori analytics of traditional social movement studies, through which OWS would be seen as unified (with leaders, corresponding constituencies, and clearly crafted demands). Instead, we argue for a relational conception of spaces of politics, and emphasize the indeterminate multiplicity that we believe is crucial for ensuring continued critique and agitation. The argument is advanced, first, by considering the theoretical disjuncture between OWS and social movements, and second, by turning to OWS’s geographies of movement and settlement. We conclude by suggesting that, when OWS goes home, it does not retreat from politics. From a relational perspective, the home is itself a space of politics and not a secure, enclosed site to which one returns when the political is left behind.

Keywords

social movements relational space politics home Occupy Wall Street

Almost immediately after the Occupy encampment emerged in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was celebrated and/or dismissed as a “movement.” As Occupy encampments emerged in other American cities in the months that followed, their often “prefigurative” forms of activism were met with calls to delimit and define “the movement’s” aims. Crucial questions addressed to earlier social movements reemerged, with refrains of “what is to be done,” particularly after the evictions when occupiers were apparently left with no choice but to return home (cf. Editors, 2011; Žižek, 2012). For us, such questions rein in OWS’s disruptive potential by homogenizing the multiplicity of political subjectivities featured at sites of occupation. Furthermore, such questions suggest that answers lie in a unified movement’s journey back to a familiar space, a “return” that would follow from its crest. The questions themselves draw spatial and temporal distinctions between OWS and its outsides, and between the so-called movement’s homecoming and the multisited occupations of its height in the last months of 2011; they carry with them a conception of “home” as fixed space, set apart from the more exposed, public, political spaces “out there.” In the pages below, we suggest—to the contrary—that “going home” opens new opportunities to negotiate the multiple space–time trajectories by which activists’ “hoped-for” futures may emerge (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010; Massey, 2005). We take the question of “what is to be done” on OWS’s “return home” as a provocation to consider the notions of political community such questions naturalize by cordoning off the complex and multiple senses and experiences of the home (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Against conceiving of home as a fixed space to which a unified movement can return, we rethink the spaces of OWS in relational terms.

Critical analyses of a homeward bound OWS must avoid confining its plurality to a transposable turn away from politics (conceived a priori as “movement” politics). In this article, we link the presumption of OWS’s transposability to a traditional social movement studies analytics that carries with it absolute and relative conceptions of space, and we argue for a relational conception of space as a sphere of contemporaneous plurality, which would admit the possibility of continued agitation. For us, travel “back home” must be understood to induce place-based transformations that frustrate taken for granted spatial distinctions like public/private, inclusion/exclusion, and movement/settlement. To ask what happens when OWS goes home is therefore also to ask what material and imagined geographies the “return home” may produce. Below, we highlight how and to what effect one might conceptualize the possible geographies initiated by OWS. Our analysis is offered with the hope that, by resisting representational closures, we can provoke recognition that “no world is finally ever closed” (Haraway, Harvey, & Smith, 1995, p. 514). Accordingly, though we begin by calling into question the “movement” frame for OWS specifically, we proceed through analysis of spatial constructions that underwrite all protests and are particularly crucial in this case of an “unwieldy movement in search of a narrative” (“Talking About a Revolution,” 2012).

Capturing Movement

Let us begin with what is particular to the collectivities and forms of political action designated as “movements,” and to the limits of placing OWS within a pantheon of movements whose narratives are already cordoned off from their multiple articulations and contestations. For Crossley (2005), the term “movement” has at least two meanings; it is at once an organizational form through which people mobilize to create change and also a metaphorical way of discussing change itself. By bringing the two meanings together, movements can be said to move, in terms of a set of characteristics proper to movement participants (demands, tactics, strategies), and also, as we discuss in the next section, in terms of spatial or temporal diffusion. We advise caution in this seemingly self-evident fit between “movements” of the past and OWS’s putatively destined future, however, because the application of a movement frame for analysis implies, on one hand, the transposition of a durable organizational form—the OWS model (which some scholars suggest is itself derivative of the Tahrir Square model), diffusing from place to place (or “going home”) as if through a process of mimesis (Goswami, 2002, p. 772; cf. Tyner & Rice, 2012). On the other hand, the social movement frame implies that there exists among OWS activists a clear set of demands, or strategies, or tactics, or finish lines proper to movements.

Doug McAdam and his colleagues (McAdam, Sampson, Weffer, & MacIndoe, 2005) have argued that the inception of social movement studies, inspired by the iconic “movement family” of the late 1960s and 1970s, has produced a “stylized image” of movements, which is insufficiently revised to account for observable changes in recent social movement practices and epistemologies (cf. Day, 2004). The memories of 1960s’ social movements are today put to work in service of refining contemporary movement tactics and strategies, as made evident in the insistent calls to OWS for a programmatic statement of goals, a clear statement of demands, and so on. Behind these calls are attempts to delineate an object that can be unearthed and discovered at all sites of occupation. Indisputably, things have changed; the “stylized image” of movements is out of date. But transforming the heuristic will not be enough. More fundamentally, the move to project an object with universal features onto dispersed sites of occupation brings with it an elision and inhibition of the multiplicity of political subjectivities that allowed so many Occupy encampments to emerge.

Frustrating for many, OWS replaces the drive for a singular goal (such as gaining control of the state apparatus, or ending the occupation of Iraq, or achieving campaign finance reform) with a panoply of practices that are differently imagined and negotiated in distinct spaces of politics. The universalization of these particularistic struggles would perhaps situate OWS as inheritors of past social movements’ heroism, but staging such a family portrait would not come without a cost (Ross, 2002). Narrating inheritance of a domiciled 1960s radicalism might, on one hand, facilitate the articulation and consolidation of decentralized protest in multiple sites (cf. Nicholls, 2009). But, on the other hand, and more significantly, if occupiers’ diverse practices are subsumed by a movement identity that has already elsewhere been captured, the dynamism of processes through which hoped-for futures are created is also likely to be foreclosed.

After Jacques Rancière (2010), the delineation of a unified movement would give the occupiers qua “movement members” a proper place within a naturalized “distribution of the sensible.” That is, the identification of particularistic struggles with an overarching movement would resolve the crises of governability that the occupations brought forth. It would rigidify the “frame within which common objects are determined” (2010, p. 139) and thereby facilitate a reestablishment of sociospatial order. That objectifying OWS in this way facilitates a restoration of governability was evident in Washington, D.C. as we wrote this article. On the eve of a January 2012 regional census, Occupy D.C. was seen as a complicating factor for the work of counting the city’s homeless. When asked about counting people without stable shelter, the Executive Director of the city’s Coalition for the Homeless reportedly stated, “those who are regular Occupy protesters will not be considered” (Craig, 2012). Apparently natural for both homeless advocates and district officials was a distinction between the protesters and the nonvolitionally homeless: the homeless belong in the parks, while the occupiers (a temporary nuisance for state service provision) are not to be counted.

Of course, the problem is not that “regular Occupy protestors” were not counted. At issue is how, through the objectifying technologies of the census, protestors became visible as distinct from nonvolitionally homeless people who were nonetheless understood by the state to be in their proper place. Against the category confusion elicited by protestors, governability was again made possible through the classification of protestors and homeless as distinct social groups. This distinction led to the eviction of Occupy D.C. protestors from Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square shortly after the census was conducted. By making visible an object that effectively encloses OWS, not only agents of governmental power but also self-identified critical commentators have created for OWS a “proper place” on the assumption of which space is partitioned and governable order established (Dikeç, 2005). In that sense, characterizations of “the OWS movement” as a recognition-oriented majoritarian statement that “we [The 99%] are here” (e.g., Tarrow, 2011) do more than distract from the prefigurative experimentation through which occupiers disrupt boundaries of inclusion and exclusion; they conceal, and even suffocate occupations’ place-based potential.

From the Traces of (Other) Movements to the Spaces of OWS

In addition to facilitating governmental practice, the projection of a “movement” onto sites of occupation carries with it their reduction to derivatives of an existing model. Narratives of OWS’s spatial-temporal diffusion risk ascribing to it a univocal, modular movement across time and space (Tyner & Rice, 2012). Here, even if spatial variation is acknowledged, it is reordered into a temporal sequence so that “going home” suggests a retreat from material and imagined geographies produced in unsettling times to a “politics as usual” that reabsorbs the circumscribed “movement.” The November 2011 edition of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, for instance, captured the year’s protests on an apparent assumption that global space is merely a surface of diffusion. Unrest is seen touching down in site after site, one following another in a temporal sequence: from Tunisia to Spain to New York, as if from 1848 to 1968 to 2011. While we are optimistic that occupiers’ roads “home” may present paths that stretch across adjacent unrest, and may unearth buried histories of protest, we are less sanguine about how such narrations of popular uprising erase the specific spaces through which political subjectivities are articulated. Our concern is with the attenuation of OWS’s possible geographies through a restricted vision of space as not so much a sphere of coexisting differences as a surface across which an ideal-typical movement moves (cf. Massey, 2005).

Of course, the occlusion of spatiality in political commentary is not unique to treatments of OWS. Eschewing the geographical imagination we advocate here, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s early 2011 piece in The Guardian on “leaderless Middle East uprisings” of “the Arab Spring” impedes our appreciation for the constrained/enabled situatedness of these agitations. Hardt and Negri reconvene diverse place-based struggles into their global altercation between two great, even if purportedly decentered antagonists—Empire and Multitude. At the same moment they identify Arabs as “democracy’s new pioneers” (apparently inheriting the torch from Latin Americans of the 1990s), they present them as placeholders that will at some point be succeeded by another wave of pioneering revolts against Empire’s frustration of “expressive capacities.” If Hardt and Negri’s late 2011 article in Foreign Affairs is any indication, this succession has taken place; the occupiers are the newest successors. Geographies of self-immolation and occupation are inheritors of a model (Multitude) already elsewhere captured. In this move, spatial copresence becomes unintelligible, and the encounter with difference proper to a “politics of possibility” becomes unrealizable (Fraser & Weninger, 2008; Giardina & Denzin, 2011).

Undergirding Hardt and Negri’s story of a messianic counterpower snaking from Jacobin France to Latin America to the Middle East, and then finally the United States, is a notion of space as absolute and relative—space as a self-evidently partitioned surface on which can be mapped a distribution of insurrectional events. Our assertion is perhaps contentious, and no doubt Hardt and Negri would refuse the suggestion that they presume regional containers in advance. Indeed, their inversion of class struggle, so that Empire is authored by Multitude and not the other way around, on its face suggests that global order is emergent, not given in advance. Furthermore, they explicitly align themselves with scholars who conceptualize space in relational terms (2000, p. 426, n. 2). But if Hardt and Negri’s gesture to relational space is helpful, it is also incomplete. Absent a more robust theory of spatiality, an affirmation of singularities through a common call to arms—“Long live movement!” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. 211)—is inadequate to disrupt the apparent fixity of sociospatial order (Saldanha, 2009). When projected onto the prefigurative practices through which many contemporary activists perform desired futures, Hardt and Negri’s Marxist reinscription of a universal antagonism not only reveals continued indebtedness to a political logic of hegemony (Day, 2004) but also silences the cacophony, dissonance, and contingent solidarities that are brought centrally into view with a relational sense of space.

Our challenge to the partitioning of absolute space does not deny that OWS may “go home,” but provokes us to consider what returning home could mean if “home” is not a nonpolitical space of monotonous security and familiarity. In a 1992 essay still relevant today, Doreen Massey (1994) asks whether home was ever the stable, self-same, enclosed space that common sense stories of globalization as a unified trajectory suggest. Against a reactionary-defensive politics of place, as well as Left-unitarian dismissals of difference, Massey has it that relatively elite anxieties over loss of home express a breakup of imagined coherences that long precedes the time–space compression of so-called Late Capitalism. A felt need to establish “a unity of emancipatory struggle” (cf. Harvey, 1989) is revealed to be a lament over homeless disorientation. But rather than secure an identity through “negative counterposition” with “the Other beyond [the home’s or the movement’s] boundaries” (Massey, 1994, p. 169), Massey suggests that one can welcome a coming together of disparate trajectories that trouble precisely the partitioning of space through which such identities are naturalized. If, for a homeward bound OWS, we hope for continued critique, agitation, and transformation, this is the home to which occupiers must return: not a place of origin or font of being, but a home open to lateral connections and pulled into political significance.

***

In short, if the occupiers will “go home,” we suggest that it be considered home in this sense: as a coming together of differences, which repels the representational closure of a program or plan and generates new ways of thinking, speaking, and doing. The prefigurative practices and radical democratic experiments for which OWS has become known are now allowing us to imagine a world open to change. But this is fragile, and the framings through which analyses proceed will do political work. With Benjamin Arditi (2012), we suggest that holding at bay the absorption of OWS by “politics as usual” will require a willingness on the part of commentators to let “Enough!” be enough. It is only in the service of oppositional and governmental rituals that we erase the specificity of 2011’s unrest in the figure of a single movement identity. And it is to the detriment of space. Or perhaps better, it is with an impoverished conceptualization of space that our engagement with OWS is likely to naturalize a unified trajectory that suffocates its potential.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Nicholas Jon Crane is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University. He is currently writing a dissertation on young people’s politics and how 1968’s Tlatelolco Massacre is remembered and forgotten in Mexico City. His work has been published in ACME, Fifth Estate, Human Geography, The Geographical Bulletin, and Reviews in Cultural Theory.

Ishan Ashutosh is a Lecturer in American Politics at Northumbria University. He is a human geography specializing in political and urban geographies of migration and diaspora. His work has been published in Urban Geography, Citizenship Studies, and South Asian Diaspora.

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