Because the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupying the Time of Precarity

Abstract

While much of Occupy's political power is rooted in its spatial tactic, the movement's temporal realities are also key to understanding its complexities. This talk considers those realities, specifically turning to the night: a time when the spatial practice of occupying and the temporality of precarity find each other in a strange embrace. In the dark, new and unheard of demands emerge for the first time. At night, the fault lines of the movement rupture to the surface in new ways. It is also at night that those outside the camps, from the police, journalists, and the public, fix their gaze upon Occupy. Night also reflects the lived experience of precarity that Occupy and other activists and theorists have long mobilized against. This paper considers what new strategies of resistance loom in the realm of time.

Keywords:

• Night
• Occupy
• Time
• Temporal
• Precarity
• Public Space

Thank you to Grover Wehman who inspired this paper after a few conversations about Occupy in 2011 and 2012. Thank you to Erika Biddle-Stavrakos, Jack Bratich, Lawrence Grossberg, Sara Martel, Jeremy Packer, Alvaro Reyes and members of Occupy Toronto's General Assembly for the invitations, feedback, and comments on this paper. A version of this was presented as a keynote address for Intersections: Occupations hosted by the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York/Ryerson University in Toronto in April 2012. Another version of this was presented in the Geography Colloquium at UNC-Chapel Hill in February 2013.

Thank you to Grover Wehman who inspired this paper after a few conversations about Occupy in 2011 and 2012. Thank you to Erika Biddle-Stavrakos, Jack Bratich, Lawrence Grossberg, Sara Martel, Jeremy Packer, Alvaro Reyes and members of Occupy Toronto's General Assembly for the invitations, feedback, and comments on this paper. A version of this was presented as a keynote address for Intersections: Occupations hosted by the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at York/Ryerson University in Toronto in April 2012. Another version of this was presented in the Geography Colloquium at UNC-Chapel Hill in February 2013.

Notes

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[2] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009), 184.

[3] As discussed in Duncan Gallie and Serge Paugam, “Social Precarity and Social Integration,” A Report For the European Commission Directorate-General Employment Eurobarometer (56.1 October 2002).

[4] Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a ‘Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception,” Theory Culture Society 25 (2005): 51.

[5] Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics,” Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4, issue 3 (2009): i–xiii.

[6] Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression [from Medieval to Modern] (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 9.

[7] Hanna Roberts, “Stinking up Wall Street: Protesters accused of living in filth as shocking pictures show one demonstrator defecating on a police car,” Daily Mail UK, 9 October 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2046586/Occupy-Wall-Street-Shocking-photos-protester-defecating-POLICE-CAR.html (accessed 12 April 2012).

[8] Ann Coulter, “This is What a Mob Looks Like” (5 October 2011), http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2011-10-05.html (accessed 12 April 2012).

[9] Candace M. Giove, “Post Reporter Spends an in ‘Tents’ Night Amid Anarchy in Zuccotti Park,” New York Post 6 November 2011, http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/my_in_tents_night_amid_anarchy_of_ush5s5NscUZincUN0tF0yO (accessed 12 April 2012).

[10] Zach Gorelick, “Sex, Drugs, and Occupy Nighttime,” Daily Caller 9 April 2012, http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/04/sex-drugs-and-occupy-nighttime-in-charlotte/ (accessed 12 April 2012).

[11] Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness, and Cultural Work” Theory, Culture & Society 25, issues 7–8 (2008): 1–30.

[12] Laura Fantone “Precarious Changes: Gender and Generational Politics in Contemporary Italy,” Feminist Review 87 (2007): 5–20.

[13] Hardt and Negri have argued in Commonwealth that a central aspect of precarity is that it imposes a new regime of time and that precarity could be considered a special kind of poverty, a temporal poverty in which workers are deprived of control of their time (146). As I argue above, I am interested here in an intersectional understanding of the temporal.

[14] Perry Chiaramonte, “Occupy Protest Plagued by Reports of Sex Attacs, Violent Crime,” foxnews.com 9 November 2011, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/09/rash-sex-attacks-and-violent-crime-breaks-out-at-occupy-protests/ (accessed 21 April 2012).

[15] Christopher Robbins “Occupy's New ‘Sleepful Protest’ Sits At Neighborhood Nexus Gothamist (14 April 2012), http://gothamist.com/2012/04/14/occupys_new_sleepful_protest_sits_a.php (accessed 21 April 2012).

[16] Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: UP. 1996), 126.

[17] Jason Adams, “Occupy Time” online, 2013, http://critinq.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/occupy-time/ (accessed 12 July 2013).

[18] Tony Perucci, “What the Fuck is That? The Poetics of Ruptural Performance,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, issue 3 (2009): 5.

[19] Perucci, 11.