Six Moments of Occupy:
Transvaluations of the Symbolic

Humanities Center Faculty Fellows Symposium
Wayne State University, 23 March 2018

[excerpt from the introduction] Occupy was, and continues to be, an event; we speak of “the event of Occupy” much as we refer to the “event of 9/11.” To begin with, the concept of “revolution” in Occupy—as distinct from other specific moments such as Tahrir Square or anti-austerity Greece—oscillates between “radical particularity” of material conditions (such that every local instance of Occupy, from Zucotti Park to to Oakland to Paris to Moscow, could be seen to have substantially different strategies and goals) and a utopian horizon that must be preserved as an abstract totality: “We are the 99%.” Revolution becomes a demonstration of possibility as much as an act of resistance or overturning of the old order, combined with a horizon of revolutionary impossibility as essential to its contingent unfolding. It has not been sufficiently noted that a shift in the register of politics as event from Occupy in 2011 to the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama effectively ended the active phase of the movement; since then, Occupy has persisted as a political imaginary in one form or another that has been both absorbed into later political movements like the Bernie Sanders campaign and continued at the level of theory. The result of the 2016 election, however, threw into relief aspects of Occupy as a contingent revolutionary politics that it scarcely imagined. First would be the emergence of what everyone has assumed is a “populism” in the election of Donald Trump, eliciting comparisons with other forms of populist imaginary, from the Tea Party to the Sanders campaign. Occupy may be considered a populism as well in its construction of community through the “us/them” binary of the “the 99%/1%.” This is an unsettling thought, as the politics of early Occupy focused on the radical particularity of the local and the spontaneous, seeing its agency in terms of a material transvaluation of all values of social relation under neoliberal capitalism. Second would be the distorted “turn to language” that takes the form of a continuous barrage of Fake News, effectively rendering positive counter-claims as mere versions of the same media feed. Moving from what I will describe as the “aesthetic materialism” of early Occupy, as politics and poetics, toward the rise of rogue populism and its perversion of public language makes its revolutionary claims seem ineffective and overwhelmed, while it points out the contingent nature of a wide range of populist formations, especially after 2008. [The presentation continued with a reading of David Buuck, Noise in the Face Of, and a conclusion that reflected on the poetics of “The Catastrophe.”]