Three thoughts, loosely related

(1) The Act or Instance of Moving
The word “Movement” is a noun. Its meaning may be defined in different ways, including:
“The act of moving in space; change of place or posture;” “An act of changing physical location or position or of having this changed;” “The act or an instance of moving; a change in place or position.”

Occupy is described as a movement, and perhaps this nomenclature is very apt. We remind the powers that be that we “have no demands.” We have no end in sight; no teleology underwrites our action. We won’t define our desired outcome, won’t be bound to any predetermined picture or clumsy, stubborn, naïve imagining of what a desirable world must look like. Tactically, if we do not know where we are going, those who seek to contain and constrain us cannot either. All told, our emphasis on immediacy and movement, literal movement, makes us potent and durable.

(2) Fission-fusion Society
“In primatology, a fission-fusion society is one in which the social group, e.g. bonobo collectives of 100-strong, sleep in one locality together, but forage in small groups going off in different directions during the day.”

We are still working out who we are and how we fit together. For every tent-dweller, donator of socks and blankets, or regular attendant of local General Assemblies there exists a difficult-to-quantify contingent of participants in this movement. These participants are thinking, talking, analyzing, sharing, sifting through video and news accounts, reading and digesting relevant written works, writing, observing, watching events unfold in a state of invested vigilance and waiting for their moment(s) for action.

Some of the less-visible but nevertheless engaged people in this movement feel guilty about the nature of their participation, worrying that they are too remote from “the real action,” or that they put forth too minor a contribution. Some feel impatience at being “cut off” from the apparatus of dialogue and consensus-building about direct actions or representative statements. Some feel invisible to the movement’s opponents, who seek to represent Occupy participation in the tiniest terms possible. Some are simply waiting to be interpellated, waiting for a call to action in which they see themselves, or hear their name called clearly.

(3) Ticker Tape
It is so pristinely ironic to consider both the provenance of ticker tape and its logical descendent, Twitter. Look at us now, following feeds with the posture of stockbrokers, poised and attentive, watching the events of the day spool out in a meaning-laden chain of cryptic notes. Hypervigilant, stockbrokers followed the data of the market and its daily vagaries with pressing but simple concerns: “Buy!” or “Sell!”

Our new model for media, in which the people investigate and report while the journalists collate press releases, is enabled by the digital ticker tape of events streaming by. How best to absorb and process this flood of data for which we are now stewards? Ultimately we cannot simply orient ourselves to this data with the question of “what is happening?” We must also spend some time with the question of “what do these events mean?”

(517)

Homing the World

Yesterday I spoke with a classmate about Occupy Davis. She talked about how, while she certainly didn’t hope it would come about, being raided by the cops would be the best thing for us: instantly there would be a few hundred students coming out of the woodwork in support. I said “I dunno…” and scrunched my shoulders inwards, generally uncomfortable with the idea that opposition would be an asset.

As if the world were taking up her side, the following night (Nov. 9th-10th) I was glued to the livestream of the Occupy Cal crackdown as around a hundred people magically changed into a few thousand. But what really happened? As mic checks flashed sporadically through the crown, someone quoted the 30,000 livestream viewers, and made a very revealing comment: “The whole world is watching! We are making history right now! (*Cheers*)”. So it’s simple, right? People want to be a part of history, not part of something relatively insignificant. I watched the livestream all night. The revolution might not be televised, but it wants to be.

We all long to regain a relationship to history. And if I were anywhere close to Berkeley, I would have gone there to support them. But the problem is thinking of history as that which only happens where the cops and the media are, only where the biggest of big crowds are. This concept of history as always-already public—isn’t this just another way of excising the role of the private and the domestic—women, children, and all those messy things that go on in the house—from the power of civil society? This is not only oppressive, but also limiting. Our major questions are not, on the whole, how to organize opposition, how to confront power, etc., but about how to go on eating and sleeping without reproducing our precarity and pain. We are already asking these questions with the fact of our occupations. (See this for more on public/private.)

Let me start again. The other day I was bicycling and happened to look into an open garage to see four walls covered in pegs, holding tools outlined in black paint. It reminded me of my grandfather’s basement, home to a succession of darkrooms, wet bars, lounges, and offices, all of which remained in odd corners and misplaced closets as a palimpsest of his life. Those long marks of use, accrued after decades of ownership: that is what a home is, and I haven’t lived in one for a long time.

When we home the world, we become like the rain, steadily and unstoppably transforming everything we touch. When this transformative action becomes revolutionary instead of reproducing the present, we get lasting economic change, our everyday practices change, the personal is the political, and history happens.

Does size matter? Crowd counts, representation, and bearing witness.

In the aftermath of the Port of Oakland shutdown, the question of “How big was it?” has come up again and again. The primary sentiment is irritation with media reports of police-provided numbers for the protest presence at the port. Those of us who were in attendance know that these numbers cannot account for the two waves of marchers who arrived at the Port between 4 and 6 pm, although we cannot determine whether these counts accurately reflect the numbers of picketers who remained as the action progressed.

Looking back on a history of activism in the U.S, I wonder when it became a matter of such importance to have big and accurate crowd count numbers reported in the press? What is driving how demoralized and panicky we feel when the press fails to reflect what we saw with our own eyes?