What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-2, 4+5 & Endnotes]
Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 11:55PM
Updated on Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 05:25AM by
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Bruce Sterling at the European Graduate School, 2010; Photo ©Hendrick Speck & Paul McLean
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An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering.
I see some daylight in the general cultural situation. I was happy about the [SXSW] New Aesthetic panel, because it revealed things I had never seen. It was exciting because it touched something new, true and real.
Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are (left to right) Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev and Joseph Stalin.
The arts and sciences are, clearly, almost equally bewildered by their hardware now. The antique culture-rift of C. P. Snow doesn’t make much sense five decades later — not when sciences and the fine arts are getting identical public beatings from Lysenkoist know-nothings. Those abject talking-heads, abandoning charge of their machine-crazed economy.… Come home, artists and scientists; all is forgiven!
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- Bruce Sterling, "An Essay on the New Aesthetic" ( http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/ )
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The Zuccotti Park occupation was a dismal failure. The functioning of Wall Street was not disrupted. Occupy Wall Street never occupied Wall Street. Even Zuccotti Park was “occupied” only with the consent of the mayor of New York City, and it was cleared out the moment he withdrew that consent. In the end, no autonomous space was reclaimed. The effort to remake society by multiplying and weaving together autonomous spaces is back to Square One. Even worse, precious little progress was made during the occupation in articulating and working out what the movement is for, or how to solve the serious social and economic problems we now confront.
In light of these failures, it would be a grave mistake to try to glide unreflectively into a “Phase II” of Occupy Wall Street. It is time to think seriously about what went wrong and why it went wrong, in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Above all, I am concerned here to make clear the difference between “prefigurative politics” in the proper sense of the term and what Graeber uses the term “direct action” to mean: “acting as if you were already free” (see below). In the proper sense of the term, “prefigurative politics” refers to practices that foreshadow and anticipate a different world, a world that does not exist. “Direct action” in Graeber’s sense refers to practices that make believe that this different world already exists in embryo within the existing one. The latter notion is the one that was tested at Zuccotti Park and that failed the test.
pre•fig•u•ra•tion n.
1. The act of representing, suggesting, or imagining in advance.
2. Something that prefigures; a foreshadowing.
make–be•lieve adj.
Imaginary, pretended.
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- "The Make-Believe World of David Graeber: Reflections on the Ideology Underlying the Failed Occupation of Zuccotti Park" by Andrew Kliman
Augmented Reality documentation by Mark Skwarek (arOccupyMayDay)
[NOTE]: As I see it, the project of facilitating a new model for artistic enterprise and the phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street can be subjected to a useful mash-up, for considering purpose, application and utility, among other things. The flaws in ideologies that influenced significantly the formation of OWS are worth looking into, and the wave of "What next for Occupy?" exercises are accomplishing this, which is what must first be acknowledged. The first semi-formal evaluation phase of OWS has commenced, almost spontaneously, post-May Day, a direct action that clarifies one of the quandaries faced by Occupy: in the United States, a call for prefigurative direct action emerging from alien cultural envisioning toward manifestation "in the long term" is a doomed proposition.