Michael Sayeau 

Occupy!: Scenes From Occupied America; edited by Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen et al – review

A collection of essays from those involved in the Occupy movement is both analytical and full of vivid experience, writes Michael Sayeau
  
  

Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street protesters: unfortunately the writers only represent a small section of the 99%. Photograph: Keystone USA-Zuma/Rex Features Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features/KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

After the autumn of discontent comes, inevitably, the winter of writing it all up. An enormous amount of ink has been spilled – and even more HTML compiled – detailing the protest movements around the world last year. But while analytical pieces can dry the spontaneity and vitality out of such events, raw reportage can seem to recapitulate the pervasive critique of the movement – that it is yet another example of demand-less, unthinking "symbolic politics".

Occupy!, a collection of pieces commissioned by the New York journal n+1 during last year's events on Wall Street, manages admirably to bridge the gap between analysis and description. Around half the pieces take the form of diary-style reports recording the experience of the writer (or writers) as they encounter, engage with, discuss and consider the occupations. Arranged roughly chronologically, and expanding to record other American occupations as the movement spread across the country, they trace the experiences of what the editors call "participant-observers" in the events.

These blog-style pieces are interspersed with more substantive writings, which are the true strength of the collection. Some are transcripts of the speeches of visiting intellectual "celebrities", such as Slavoj Zižek and Judith Butler. But most interesting are those by lesser-known writers who bring us vivid historical analyses of various aspects of the occupations. Alex Vitale contextualises the images of police violence against protesters within the changes in policing tactics over the last few decades, most notably the "Broken Windows" theory so famously implemented by New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton. Mark Greif offers a short but analytically astute genealogy of the drumming circles that performed nearly non-stop at one end of Zuccotti Park – and drove many of the occupiers to a state of near madness

Best of all – and something notably missing from so much writing on this and parallel movements – is LA Kauffman's "The Theology of Consensus", which addresses what might be at once the least glamorous and most important aspect of the occupations: the consensus model of decision-making adopted at OWS and other occupations around the world.

Perhaps the most obvious criticism of this collection is that it comes from a rather rarefied slice of what protesters called "the 99%". The list of contributors at the back includes only two people who don't describe themselves as either a writer, artist, editor or academic: one of these is an "activist and organiser", the other a director of a human rights organisation.

But this, too, is emblematic of the Occupy movement as a whole. Its core constituency is overeducated but underpaid and underemployed, despite having ticked all the boxes of late-capitalist ascent. How to expand this movement beyond the justifiably resentful meritocrats is probably the most important question it faces.

 

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