![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
Since making its presence felt in September 2011, the Occupy movement has drawn upon aesthetic-affective techniques and cooperative structures developed in socially engaged art practices from the mid-twentieth century onwards—such as Joseph Beuys' notion of “social sculpture”—as resources for producing new social compositions. These practices extend the concept of art into a social plastic form that reshapes and re-forms our subjectivities, the way we communicate, our social structures and by extension, the world we inhabit. At the same time, before the mass evictions of Occupy took place across North America, the movement placed a heavy emphasis on visibility and space. Its short-term strategies and successes were largely owed to the seizing of a particularly opportune moment in a highly visible space that provided a symbolic frame for “Occupy Wall Street as event.” This paper explores the possibility that the eviction of Occupy from its encampments was not the disaster bemoaned by many of its participants—or the failure celebrated by its detractors—but a renewed opportunity for social composition.
Notes
[1] This article draws from a paper presented at the 2012 NCA conference in Orlando, FL.
[2] Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 41.
[3] Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for Field Character,” in Art Into Society, Society Into Art, ed. and trans. Caroline Tisdall (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974), 48.
[4] Joseph Beuys and ed. Volker Harlan, What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys (Forest Row, UK: Clairview Books, Temple Lodge, 2004), 9.
[5] Drawing upon Italian autonomist theory and analyses of the changing conditions of labor from the 1970s onward—of capital in its cognitive phase—a method called “compositionism” was developed to shift analysis from the conditions of labor to the subjectivity of the worker and furthermore, to understand the composition of the new class of workers (knowledge, cultural, affectual) and their relationship to the capitalist system. This critically shifted the focus from forces of domination that enforce and categorize work to forces of resistance that resist (or refuse) work and categorization. This shift was productive of—gave agency to—new subjectivities and social forms (via techniques of self-organization, self-production, self-valorization, etc.). For more on compositional analysis see: Hedi El Kholti, Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007); Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).
[6] For the most part, outside the discursive fields of art, politics and aesthetics—and the academic disciplines that explore the intersections of these fields—discussions of Occupy tend to focus more on the movement's absence of a clear narrative (vis-à-vis its lack of demands) and its loose multiplicity as on the one hand, crypto-anarchist grandstanding, and on the other as a potent new model of protest. Analyses of Occupy also tend to focus on the movement contextually, as criticism of Wall Street as a representational entity or as critical reaction to the economic crisis.
[7] See Alan W. Moore, “A Brief Genealogy of Social Sculpture,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, http://www.joaap.org/webonly/moore.htm.
[8] Social sculpture is a theory, method and energetic form conceived by Beuys to describe a body of work that includes such pieces as his “Organization for Direct Democracy by Referendum,” “7000 Oaks,” “Honey Pump in the Workplace” and “Free International University” as well his ideas about the social processes underlying them. His aim was to extend the concept of art into a social plastic form that reshapes and re-forms our thoughts, the way we communicate, our legal and economic issues and the world we inhabit. Beuys maintained the idea that art is the starting point from which all work—on society as well as on ourselves—ensues. In a speech delivered in 1985, one year before his death, Beuys said: “Together we will develop the social concept of art as a newborn child of the old disciplines. … Social art, social sculpture, which sets itself the task of apprehending more than just physical material. The slogan ‘everyone is an artist’… refers to re-shaping of the social body in which every single person both can and must participate so that we can bring about that transformation as quickly as possible.” [From “Talking about One's Own Country: Germany” (1985 speech at München Kammerspiele), in In Memoriam Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, trans. Timothy Nevill (Bonn: Inter NationesBonn, 1986), 38–39.]
[9] A striking black-and-white Adbusters poster advertising the original protest features a female dancer in attitude derrière atop the Wall Street bull sculpture (aka Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull, 1989) in the foreground, with a thick cloud of tear gas obscuring the bloc of rioters—and riot cops in pursuit?—emerging from the background. The text on the poster is minimal: in red all-capital letters in the top center of the poster are the words “What is our demand?” (with no answer provided); stacked in the bottom center in white all-capital letters are simply the hashtag, the date and directions to “bring tent.”
[10] See http://16beavergroup.org/about/.
[11] At the time of the teach-in at 16 Beaver, Mattick had recently published Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (Reaktion Books, 2011).
[12] There were in fact numerous art projects involved with—or “aesthetic dimensions to”—OWS during fall 2011. There is rarely the strict division of art and activism that some critics seem to insist upon, thereby delimiting possibilities for both art and politics. For example, there were several projects integral to the structure of OWS (e.g., working groups devoted to organizing artistic/aesthetic projects and events, such as the OWS Arts and Culture Committee and the Arts and Labor subcommittee); autonomous interventionists (e.g., Not An Alternative, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra); insurrectionary factions (e.g., Take Artists Space). Discussing the various tactics used and the groups’ cohesions and clashes is beyond the scope of this paper. For more on the aesthetic dimensions of OWS, see Yates McKee, “The Arts of Occupation,” The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/article/165094/arts-occupation#axzz2Zmk3jK3r.
[13] Joseph Beuys quoted in Norman Rosenthal, “The Colloquium in Berlin April 26–27, 1974,” in Art Into Society, Society Into Art, 6.
[14] To this end, Beuys drew heavily from the philosophy and praxis of Austrian philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner, in particular his ideas around the Anthroposophical Society. Beuys' theory of social sculpture reflects the influence of Steiner in his insistence that creativity should be applied to all aspects of living. Building upon Steiner's concept of denkbilder [thought drawings], Beuys used chalkboards in makeshift learning sites to communicate to his audience the basic principles of social sculpture—freedom, direct democracy and sustainable economic forms.
[15] Documenta is an international exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany. For more information on Documenta 6, see http://artnews.org/documenta/?exi=18077&Documenta&Documenta_6.
[16] See Hannah Chadeayne Appel, “Dispatches from an Occupation: The People's Microphone,” Social Text, http://www.socialtextjournal.org/blog/2011/10/dispatches-from-an-occupation-the-peoples-microphone.php.
[17] For more on the people's mic and history of urban control through noise regulation, see Deseriis’ and Radovac's contributions to this issue.
[18] See Yates McKee, “Black Monday,” wagingonviolence.org/feature/ows-summer-disobedience-school-prepares-for-black-monday/.
[19] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 95.
[20] See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1985).
[21] See Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
[22] See Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 4.
[23] Sholette, “Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere: MAVN Conference, and the Battles Lost” (paper presented at Marxism and Visual Art Now Conference, University College London, 8–10 April 2002), http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/1946. More than ten years after this talk at MAVN, Sholette discusses Occupy's shadowy practices in an article about the cannibalizing of social practice art by the university, or the “pedagogical shift” that has occurred in art schools whereby increasingly, social practice art programs and specialists are springing up. Sholette largely valorizes Occupy for having, in his view, rendered the invisible visible “like a surge of long-silent dark matter spilling irrepressibly into the light.” However, his critique of the struggle with representational power as being overly fixated on space and visibility can equally be directed at OWS. [Sholette, “After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social,” e-flux, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/after-ows-social-practice-art-abstraction-and-the-limits-of-the-social/.]
[24] For more analyses on these new terms, see John Cunningham, “Clandestinity and Appearance,” in Mute Magazine 2.16 (2010): 74–87; Alexander R. Galloway, “Black Box, Black Bloc,” in Benjamin Noys, ed., Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique and Contemporary Struggles (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2011), 237–49; Tiqqun, “Theses on the Imaginary Party, ” http://bloom0101.org/ and “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” http://cybernet.jottit.com/; Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (New York: Semiotext(e), 2009). Tiqqun, for example, looks at practices of “becoming invisible” and disappearance in several of their texts. As they discuss in “Theses on the Imaginary Party,” within contemporary capitalism we are encouraged to use any means necessary to affirm subjectivization as a productive form. Becoming unlocatable by processes of disappearance, or refusing identity, are counter-strategies to such processes of subjectivization (the valorization of appearances). The goal of the Imaginary Party is not to take power but “of making domination fail everywhere, by durably making it impossible for its apparatuses to function” [Thesis 27].