Resistant Matters: Tents, Tear Gas and the “Other Media” of Occupy

Abstract

From tents to tear gas, objects and architectures of resistance speak to us across the transnational Occupy Movement. More than background scenery or mere props for action, these objects have their own stories to tell about how they mediate and communicate political struggle. Informed by the revitalisation of materialism and object-oriented analyses, this paper draws together affect theory, “post-ANT” scholarship and social movement studies to explore particular nonhuman elements of resistance as “other media.” Beyond those practices already seen to be part of the communications ecology of protest (alternative media, demonstrations, speeches, performative actions), I argue that other technological infrastructures and interfaces make and mediate political communication at sites of resistance in ways that are significant but often overlooked in existing scholarship.

Keywords:

• Occupy
• Protest Camp
• Materiality
• Media Archaeology

Notes

[1] Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy, Protest Camps (London: Zed, 2013) (italics in original).

[2] Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

[3] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1987. trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

[5] Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).

[6] Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1992).

[7] James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” in Communications as Culture (Winchester, MA: Unwin-Hyman, 1989), 201–30.

[8] Jonathan Sterne, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

[9] Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).

[10] Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

[11] Jussi Parrika, What is Media Archaeology (London: Polity Press, 2012).

[12] Hodder,

[13] Ruth Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

[14] Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Reader, ed. M. Gregg and G. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

[15] Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Reader, ed. M. Gregg and G. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

[16] Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

[17] For a discussion of converegence spaces, see Paul Routledge, “‘Our Resistance Will Be As Transnational As Capital’: Convergence Space and Strategy in Globalising Resistance.” GeoJournal 52, issue 1 (2000): 25–33. This point is elaborated in Feigenbaum et al.

[18] Documentations of these actions and developments can be found in Merrick, Battle for the Trees (Leeds, UK: Godhaven Ink, 1996) and Road Alert, Road Raging: Top Tips for Wrecking Road Building, 1997, http://www.eco-action.org/rr/ (accessed 24 May 2013).

[19] See, for example, Leah Leavrouw, Alternative and Activist Media (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2013). Also Wilma De Jong, Martin Shaw and Neil Stammers, Global Activism, Global Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

[20] For a good discussion of the people's mic, see Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement,” Social Movement Studies: Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest 11, issues 3–4 (2012): 375–85; and Marco De Seriis, this issue.

[21] For more, see Feigenbaum et al.

[22] Images of these tents can be found at http://notmytribe.com/2011/pic-occupydenver-introduces-the-protest-tent-828599.html.

[23] Brian McNair, An Introduction to Political Communication (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011).

[24] See F. Frenzel, “Politics in Motion,” PhD thesis, Leeds Metropolitan University Library, 2010. Also, Gregory Cowan, “Nomadology in Architecture Ephemerality, Movement and Collaboration,” MSc dissertation, University of Adelaide, 2002.

[25] A.J. Barker, “Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America.” Social Movement Studies 11, issues 3–4 (2012): 327–34.

[26] Feigenbaum et al. (2013).

[27] J. Filip, “Judge Lets Occupy Fort Myers Back into Park,” Court House News, 2011, http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/11/23/41704.htm (accessed 24 May 2013).

[28] Cowan.

[29] Occupy Alcatraz press release cited in Feigenbaum et al.

[30] B. Ehrenreich, “Throw them out with the trash: why homelessness is becoming an Occupy Wall Street issue.” TomDispatch [website], 23 October 2011, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175457/ (accessed 24 May 2013).

[31] See the account of the Bonus Army eviction in Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic (New York: Walker & Company, 2004), 169–83.

[32] J. Freedman, Old News: Resurrection City (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1970).

[33] See nopepperspray.org for an archive of trial materials.

[34] Mary Losure, Our Way or the Highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2002).

[35] Walker, Hunter. “A Postcard From Occupy Oakland,” 26 October 2011. Politicker http://politicker.com/2011/10/a-postcard-from-occupy-oakland/ (accessed 19 June 2013).

[36] For a discussion of these archiving practices, see Razac, Oliver. Barbed Wire, trans. J. Kneight (New York: New Press, 2002). Also Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

[37] “Tracking Tear Gas” http://occupiedmedia.us/2012/02/tracking-tear-gas/ (accessed 24 May 2013).

[38] Deleuze and Guattari; Ahmed.

[39] For a discussion of transnationalism and symbolic solidarity see Jenny Pickerill, K. Gillan and F. Webster. “Scales of Activism: New Media and Transnational Connections in Anti-War Movements,” in Transnational Protests and the Media, eds. S. Cottle and L. Lester (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2012). For a discussion of tear gas and solidarity, see Ian Alan Paul, “Resisting Tear Gas Together,” Jadaliyya.com, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12294/resisting-tear-gas-together (accessed 10 June 2013).

[40] Anna Feigenbaum, 2010. “Concrete Needs No Metaphor: Globalised Fences as Sites of Political Struggle,” Ephemera 10, issue 2 (2010), 119–33.