What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.1]

[Illustration by Paul McLean]

[Photos of Magic Mountain & Novad actions courtesy Jez Bold, unless otherwise attributed]

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA]
By Paul McLean

Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.  This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.  An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.  Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.  A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.  Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.  He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.  Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.  I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.  Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them.  It belongs to the sphere of action.  But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. - Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man"

As a matter of fact, setting aside strictly academic art, artists never fall entirely prey to aesthetic co-optation. Though they may abdicate their immediate experience for the sake of beautiful appearances, all artists (and anyone who tries to live is an artist) are driven by the desire to increase their tribute of dreams to the objective world of others. In this sense they entrust the thing they create with the mission of completing their personal fulfilment within their social group. And in this sense creativity is revolutionary in its essence. - from "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" by Raoul Vaneigem (a new translation from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012

It is the "fact" of the physicality of artworks, their necessary existence as objects with their apparent constancy, that in fact highlights the "inconstant," volatile, and transformative event at the core of art. - Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art

1

What is the Soul of Occupy?

Adbusters, the Canadian anti-Capitalist magazine that by accounts issued the call for action which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement in September of 2011, on April 12th 2012 [1] released another provocative proclamation on its blog,* titled "Battle for the Soul of Occupy." The text was illustrated with a black, red and white banner graphic depicting the ubiquitous Occupy clenched fist and the text "#DEFENDOCCUPY." The call-to-arms was issued by Culture Jammers HQ and encouraged Occupiers to "Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!" and warned of co-optation of the movement by MoveOn, The Nation magazine and ice cream producers Ben & Jerry, whose influence threatened, in Adbuster's estimate, to "turn our struggle into a '99% Spring' reelection campaign for President Obama."

I don't know about you, reader, but Adbusters' situating Ben & Jerry in a "cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades" seems to me a stretch, and certainly doesn't incite any Robespierresque post-Occupy-revolutionary fervor. I sat next to Ben of Ben & Jerry at an organizational meeting for Mark Read's Illuminator, which B & J's ice cream fortune helped bankroll, and Ben Cohen in my view is not a blunter of revolution. He's a food businessman made good, retired, with cash in the bank, who's making an effort to support Occupy strategically, not steal its "Soul." If anything, the conundrum posed to such individuals who are sympathetic to the movement by the movement's schizophrenic response to efforts by "outsiders" to align with OWS is worth examining. [2, 3]

Adbusters' April blog post on its face is hysterical, but anyone who has spent seven months as I have in the roiling turbulence of OWS NYC General Assembly Arts & Culture meetings is familiar with the rhetoric and animus, the righteousness and prohibitive gesticulation that prevails among some anarchists, academic Marxists and other ideologues who have been drawn to the core of the Occupy experiment, or claim to be its progenitors, arbiters and guardians.* One problem with reactionary stances for OWS, which the Adbusters' post is symptomatic of, is the default position in which it places Occupy - on the defense. To track back to the first weeks of occupation, Arts & Culture spent significant organizational resources collaborating with other Occupy working groups to formulate a non-cooptation document, driven by a surge of real instances of predatory attempts to exploit the Occupy "brand" by all sorts of opportunists, from media corps like MTV to props like JayZee to low-rent entrepreneurs like local tee shirt vendors. [4] At the time, there was much general concern that Occupy not become cozy with any politicians, unions, businesses or celebrities, that Occupy only be an expression of bottom-up 99% global outrage at the tyranny of the 1%. "Co-optation" was not a word often bandied about in 99% circles previous to 9-17-2011, but eventually it emerged as a movement buzz-word. The collective project to produce guidelines for OWS alignments eventually emerged from conference as the OWS Statement of Autonomy [5], which was passed as a working doc by the GA in November of 2011, and re-passed with some revision on March 3 of this year. The co-optation hand-wringing doesn't stop. Only last week Occupy musicians organizing an event with Gibson (the guitar manufacturer) in another one of those painfully flat (speaking of the medium) email threads, embarked on a lengthy co-optation self-exam. I've participated in threads of this kind that accumulate dozens of notes, containing sometimes beautifully wrought gems of rhetoric, sometimes brutal ad hominem assaults, stretched over weeks of back-and-forth exchange. The Gibson one appeared to resolve in a day, but a later check showed the review to be ongoing. How the dynamic of autonomy is shaping around 99% art activities is not uniform. The complex action produced in LA (All in for the 99%: Citizens Unite to Oppose Citizen's United) involved celebrities like Jack Black and Marisa Tomei and non-celebrities, alike. The org-dynamic of what is okay and not-okay in alliances remains in flux, and seems to be drifting towards a more inclusive model that includes sympathetic organizations, individuals and businesses, as long as they have a (vetted) 99%er track record. Obviously, the conditionals are to a degree subjective.

It is a Catch 22 contingency. OWS and its general assemblies must maintain strict non-authoritarianism as a non-heirarchy, while non-enforcing organizational discipline inside and outside the movement. As has been chronicled by observers inside and outside the movement, the intractable or extreme, often itinerant participants, in the flat, horizontal, consensus bodies of Occupy have proven to be a real problem for effective action by many working groups. The models derived from communes elsewhere have by many measures failed here. The structural experiment - anthropological, psychological, sociological, anapolitical - cobbling democratic processes with tribal modalities integrated into digital frameworks to produce movement action, has not shown itself to be workable past a range of a few hundred people who know each other, more or less. True believers in the consensus GA process have suggested various arguments as to why this is. Measures to fix the shortcomings were generated by a facilitation working group, and by practitioners from elsewhere whose experiences of the GA model were more positive, but eventually, disruptions attributed at times to police provocateurs, the homeless, unstable or drug-addled made many meetings ugly exercises in futility. Still the amount of work that did get done, across an impressive range of issues and concerns, is impressive and indisputable. By any estimate, the astounding contributions of the all-volunteer occupant community to the development of new models, platforming of important 99% topics in an initially, almost wholly unreceptive mainstream media, the formulation of diverse interventions across equally diverse communities of activists generated by OWS should be acknowledged as such.  

It's important to note at this point that the NYCGA as of this writing is barely a shadow of itself, compared to the GA's thriving bustle of daily meetings that occurred at 60 Wall Street and dozens of satellite sites, during the actual occupation of Liberty Square. OWS was the locus and focus. Every time I visit the old haunts, I encounter low-level but palpable dolor. Others I've spoken to echo this sense of lost attachment and nostalgia. The diminishment of the GA as the hub of Occupy organization has been attributed to all kinds of factors, from within and outside the movement, such as police brutality and other tools of authoritarian oppression; constant and well-funded media monopoly campaigns to subvert, undermine or otherwise distract the public from the movement and its activities; activist burnout; the absence of any clearly defined OWS mission, and any cohesive leadership; and so on. Enforced displacement has been inarguably the most critical of these factors. Place is the material necessity that rationalizes occupation, although the notion that Occupy is an idea that cannot be evicted has been roundly dispersed as a kind of antidote to clearance. Whether an idea is enough to bind a diaspora to its ideological, conceptualized homeland [Liberty Square, for OWS] remains to be seen. Barricades, marginally Constitutional regulations and thuggish cops operating oppressively with the support of a plutocratic mayor - Bloomberg - aided by a global communications network, funded by endless reserves from corporate war chests, and condoned at the highest levels of federal government, in a dimensional combination, go a long way to suppress a localized free speech movement.^

...Which perhaps begs the question, does Occupy have the wiggle room to engage in internal debate about an ineffable like its "soul?" When one acknowledges that OWS has had the unprecedented authoritative force - of a surveillance-, militarized police and prison state & propaganda machine (vested from the top-down with tyrannical, undemocratic largesse) - our reality in post-9-11-2001 America, and in the works for decades prior - turned on it, thinking about the "soul of a movement," under the terroristic gaze of Big Brother, 2012 might seem impossible. However, for any person or movement dedicated to freedom - not only as a real-world matter, but as the linchpin of political, philosophical and metaphysical domain; and a moral or spiritual essential - reflection along this "soul" line is exactly the correct measure. For Occupy the issue of freedom seems a bottom-line concern. To paraphrase the old adage, when the going outside gets tough, as it undoubtedly has been for OWS, the super-tough get going - on the inside job, as well as the outside ones. Organizational and individual endurance and tenacity depends on evaluation of intangibles, as much as force.

My contributions to OWS have been made mostly through Occupy with Art. OWS, in my experience, from the beginning has an ambivalent view of art, which seems entrenched not only in the leaderless leadership, but also through the rank and file. While art in support of protest is acceptable, and protest against the art market, public institutions and labor practices are welcomed, for the most part, Occupy has reduced its advocacy of art to several kinds of creative expression. Summarily, these include a selective range of public performance approaches, posters, documentary photography and moving images, design and protest-support applications of artistic media. Most other types of "traditional" art are treated systematically with what might be characterized as organizational suspicion, denial and outright disdain. The conflation of the art market with art is endemic. Prohibitions against elitism are common. In short, OWS has been susceptible to the "old left's" anti-art biases, especially those typical to Marxian and anarchist orthodoxy (or anti-orthodoxy). Very little material or promotional support for programmatic development of democratic 99% models has been forthcoming from the movement, whatever the party line might be (i.e., "OWS is an artist's movement"). Given the enduring convergence of spirit and art in the humanities over centuries, as commingled facets of shared experience or vision, one might think that Occupy would be producing a spectacular array of innovations and new expressions to re-orient the "art world" towards a more 99%-friendly definition of art. I would argue that, in fact, OWS artists are doing just that, only the internal (and external) mechanisms for celebrating these achievements is looking the other way. Why? I think the reasons are as complicated as Occupy itself, but well worth investigating.

Peaceful protest, or to put it in Constitutional terms, the public redress of grievances, is a force function. The aim is to apply mass force to fix problems in the democracy, non-violently. Art, which is in a democracy more a function of free speech (or more generally, freedom of expression), is less a force than it is an environmental quality or effect, or symptom even, of healthy free society. As such, its impacts, and its requirements for being manifested are very different from those needed by protests, and the effects of the two are very different, especially in the aspect of time.      

"Force" in relation to art was explored by Krzysztof Ziarek (Force of Art, 2004, Stanford University Press). Ziarek's ideas about art and force speak directly to the dimensional phenomenon of OWS and the complex associative capacity it has demonstrated for evoking at times hyperbolic reels on the movement as a nascent art form. Force is not sufficiently described by imitation, taste, mechanical reproduction and the manifold assignments that have artificially been applied through the idea to art. Art's historical association with the soul, especially in religious contexts, and optics, in the so-called decorative or tribal expressive arts, as well as art inspired by machine or digital processes, make the question of how art and soul today can be applied as force [for (or against) x] a compelling one. Seth Price seemed on the verge of a resolution for art-force in his much-acclaimed "Dispersion" text, but Occupy in many aspects obviated Price's arguments, in much the same way it positively negated Situationist praxis and much else in the Continental Theory catalog. OWS as event, eruption, through its use of signs and inspiration for design, by virtue of its many organizational and promotional contingencies absent command, etc., exceeded the entrenched but increasingly inoperable model deconstructions of the 68ers targeting Authority and displaced the burdens of psychoanalytic philosophy, which has become the instrument of Authority. When the movement refused to refuse the mad homeless of Manhattan and its (un-romantic) drug addicts shelter, food and community, while simultaneously confronting the extraction/exploitation complex which produces "human waste" as a by-product of its standard operating procedures, Occupy forced new models to be envisioned. It did so by practicing with them, without anyone's permission.

And now, while no one was looking, or maybe, while everyone was looking the other way, a true 4 dimension phenomenon has happened, and all must be forgiven. Whatever shortcomings OWS has evidenced in its messy, cacophonous emergence, it has afforded the opportunity to a small band of Novads to do what Jackson Pollack would do in 2012, in the wretched innards of Babylon/the financial district of Manhattan, in the shadows of endemic, epidemic corruption and waste. In the format of the Revolutionary Games, a tiny motley crew has sprouted as the latest iteration of the many-headed Hydra to confront the "Hero" of tyranny. They are mutable transnational shadows, and their medium is life in shared code, the message is archival and the memes are optimized to go viral on the web of Iktomi, the Trickster. Neo-poetry, neo-painting, occupational installation as squat, a superficial reading of their Text is almost sure to generate incorrect assumptions, if the investigative critic attempting to parse their transmission is armed with predetermined narratives of any category. Their platform is multi-faceted and layered, embraces Google docs, Etherpad, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and a hundred other softwares. Their hardware spans the traditional and the deep well of waste their enemies spew into the filthy, sparkly system as a matter of course. As a matter of historical fact, these merry pranksters have made a home in the dark matter of Capital, named it Magic Mountain, and laughed like Thunder, when they were evicted by the Marshall. The most remarkable thing about it, is that Time is their only Object, and even that isn't a big deal, but they will make a movie about it. I'll give their IT a working title here, which has nothing really to do with them: Wetawarenez. It's a spontaneous flipflop, but so what? A witness is not an archive, unless it lives conscious of itself, as another subject in time.

Vaneigem asks, as a preface to the statement above, "But is not the desire to produce a durable work the very thing that prohibits the creation of imperishable instants of life?" The dimensional answer is, "Art is never an either/or proposition again, now." Jump, jump, jump...

[NOTE: Footnotes at the end of the final segment]

*As of this writing, five additional posts in the Adbusters' defense of the soul of occupy series have been added on the magazine's website.