Occupy DC: Utopia: Red Ink: What the Movement Really Means and Where It Needs to Go

[IN MEDIA RES]

I suppose like many of us who complain about the present condition of things, I never could imagine an alternative to Late Capitalism. Sure, I've found my own way to forge a truce between me and late capitalist society, yet I've never felt great about it.

Since New York's Mayor Bloomberg's midnight raid on the OccupyWallStreet's Zuccotti Encampment, many have suggested that the movement decamp across the country. They say the encampments have become counter productive and that the time has come to develop a message.[1]

Such criticism that says the movement doesn't need physical space yet needs a positive[2] message, however, misses the movement's point. In fact, the movement's message, it seems to me, seems to not aim to impose a demand but to something quite radical to the American mind. It aims to simply point across the street to the international bank and say, "Not that." Living in such negative space seems to be the movement's genius.[3]



The Occupy movement seemingly has, of course, everyone talking and taking sides. Most of those on the political Right like Newt Gringrich naively dismiss the movement envisionin it as a return to their vision of the 60s Left. Indeed, recently Gingrich opined that "All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything," which "is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country." Ultimately, he instructs those comprising the movement to "Go get a job after you take a bath." On the other hand, however, many on the Left, as Bill Clinton suggested at the Movement's inception, argue that the Occupiers need to develop a message, move into active space, become, philosophically speaking, positivists. Other positivist sympathizers, such as Salon's Todd Gitlin, in his "Liberty Park can be anywhere," suggest that the Occupiers "go home": "Occupiers: It's time to go home. You captured the attention of America and you make some good points. Now, organize into a cogent movement and continue to engage people on a grander scale. Your occupation is now becoming counter to your platforms." Others still warn against fetishizing a particular space.[3]

However, I find the Occupied Space still very important to the movement because it is a visual marker that movement still exists and that clean, well-organized space has become a visual counter to the "Get a shower / Get a job" crowd while serving as a gathering place for community and discussion. What is more, it has become a Utopian space that threatens those--like Gingrich and the rest of the 'Get a Job Crowd'--afraid of an Other, a status-quo apart from that in which they now live.

That the movement engenders such visceral, if predictable, reaction from the Right further proves to me precisely why the movement should reject such calls from the sympathetic Left to remove the tents and progress the movement in other ways. The tents--as Michael Bloomberg's raid suggests--have become an ecosystem apart from the world that surrounds it. And we need to hear Gingrich spout his non-sense again and again because it not only very much contrasts with the facts on the ground but also constantly reminds us of their own ignorance. For example, yelling "get a job" to those who can't jobs in the worst economy anyone alive has ever lived through and telling homeless people, which comprise up to 50 percent of fifty percent of the OccupyDC population, to get a shower positively shouts from the rooftops that the Right is still out of touch with events on the ground.

In fact, it's precisely that the Occupation forces such reactions that proves the movement's worth. It's mere presence, and its ability "grasp its critical negativitity" so disturbs those whom it scares it forces its critical opponents to live critical positivity. In other words, it forces those whom it scares to shout, "Get a job after you get a shower." In Jameson's words, the physical space allows the movement's non-message "to discredit and demystify the claims [. . .] of its opposite number [. . .] its function [therefore] lies not in itself, but in its capabilityt radically to negate its alternative" (175). In other words,

In fact, walking through the park as recently as November 12th presented the opportunity to sit and read in perfect peace; in other words, as I read on the bench, I found myself surrounded by community, a formal space which generated discussion and genuine human interaction. I had more conversation with strangers in the couple of hours I was at McPherson Square than I have the rest of the six months I have lived in DC.


In the Introduction to his tome on Utopia, Archaelogies of the Future: The Desire for Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Frederic Jameson debunks this claim that the left wants to tear down Capitalism. Jameson writes that in fact no one can even envision what a not-capitalist system would look like: "What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency [Late Capitlism] is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and the that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available" (xii). In other words, until Occupy (perhaps), Late Capitalism was inexorably dismanteling the modern social compact, and, the Left's political class was helping it along. I suggest, therefore, that Occupy's tents create a Utopian space realizes "a system radically different from this one" (Jameson xii). As Jameson notes, at least since Reagan, the nation's political elite (with the help of the media) has been
"tirelessly undoing all the social gains made since the inception of the soicalist and communist movements, repealing all the welfare measures, the safety net, the right to unionization, industrial and exological regulatory laws, offering to privatize pensions and indeed to dismantle whatever stands in the way of the free market all over the world" (xii). In fact, the so-called Tea Party's risible influence on the 2011 budget negotions has brought the destruction of the "social gains" not only to the forefront but as the only solution to the nation's economic problems.

Yet it is not only the invincible universality of capitalism which is at issue: What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other scoio-economic system is conveivable, let alone practically available. (xii)

After all, labeling a Democrat a "Socialist," not even having to use "Commmunist" has been the Republicans' favorite attack for years. By doing so, the American Right has cut anything less than the cutting of taxes as socialist attack. Therefore, Jameson suggests that

The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a represetnational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social esitence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet. (xii)

In other words, the news that the National Park Service may shut down the OccupationDC's encampment at McPherson Square should trouble us.

The following pictures hearten me; they show what's possible.

I once couldn't conceive that such a protest could occur, much less make an impact.

The fact that some of these "kids" are just "kids" makes this all the more impressive.

I love, too, how it's all so homemade, so analogue.

Joe the Greeter said probably a quarter of the folks in the park are homeless.

I'd like for the entire DC homeless population to occupy each and every Circle in DC.

ADORNO ENJOYMENT (172)

"He told, for instance, an old Eastern Bloc joke (borrowed from the introduction to 2002′s Welcome to the Desert of the Real) about a dissident who’s about to be sent to a work camp in Siberia. Since he knows his letters will be censored, he tells his friends he’ll write to them using a simple code: Blue ink for the truth, red ink for lies. His first letter arrives, and it’s a glowing report of life in the camp—a lovely apartment, great food, beautiful women. Then he concludes, “The only thing we can’t get is red ink.”

[1] Bill Clinton tells David Letterman that OWS needs "at some point to making some specific suggestions."

[2] Another footnote.

"The consolidation of the emergent world market -- for this is really what is at stake in so-called globalization -- can eventually be expected to allow new forms of political agency to develop. In the meantime, to adapt Mrs Thatcher's famous dictum, there is no alternative to Utopia, and late capitalism seems to have no natural enemies (the religous fundamentalisms which resist American or Western imperialisms having by no means endorsed anti-capitalist positions)" (Jameson).

Salon on what next?http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/liberty_park_can_be_anywhere/

http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/ows-at-the-crossroads/?hp

"If, however, the members of Occupy Wall Street want to do something beyond merely call attention to inequality, they must find a way to organize into a political force, much like the early Tea Party followers did.

The Tea Partiers recognized that in order to influence the political process they needed to raise money and back candidates. I have no illusions about how steep a hill that is to climb for Occupy Wall Street. They are unlikely to find the same kind of backers within the establishment that the Tea Party did. And the flood of corporate donations unleashed by a reckless Supreme Court makes it hard to be heard at campaign time."

The End of Utopia: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/archives/2011/11/the_end_of_utopia_in_zuccotti_park.html

Op-Ed: http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/nycs-mayor-bloomberg-confronts-occupy-wall-street/?scp=3&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse

History of Occupy: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/who-is-occupy-wall-street.html?scp=5&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse

Long Piece on Occupy: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-protest-reaches-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=1&sq=mayor%20meets%20occupy%20representatives&st=cse&scp=4

About the Meeting with the Mayor: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=868283&single=1&f=21



























a

On what I knew must be one of the last days of warm weather, I decided to grab a book and head down to McPherson Square, grab a bench, and read amongst the tents at OccupyDc. As I was walking down P Street, having just left my flat, in DC's Logan Circle heading towards 14th where I would hang a right toward K Street, I heard a recognizable voice coming from the patio at Logan Tavern, a nice casual restaurant. I turned to notice David Axlerod, the man perhaps most singly responsible for getting electing the current president of the United States, sitting with someone I guessed was his son. Seven minutes from where he was sitting, OccupyDC had set up camp.

It was such a beautiful blue sky indeed, and DC never gets any q

uieter than it was this day. I got incredibly lucky recording this moment in time,

with the kid leaning out his taxi cab window yelling at the encampment. Perfect.

The camp, of

course, was silent from across the street. Once inside the camp, however, only conversations could be heard. Conversations about politics, conversations about what Occupy means to this guy or that one over there. Conversations from passersby wondering if this is what they think it is and others who just wanted to overhear what everyone was else was saying about this thing they may have just stumpled upon.

Conversations.

And interviews, of course, and broadcasts and discussions and conversations and conversations about what and where and why and how and what it all might mean to him or to her or to you or to them.

Energy and activity from something happening or being done and people of various interests wanting to be a part of it in one or another. A part of this conversation.

What I most noticed was activity. Here's several more pictures I took before I ensconsed myself on the bench.