Escaping the Spatial Imaginary, or, Politics as an Occupation

Abstract

This article examines the persistence of spatial metaphors in modern political thought, from the “public sphere” that has defined liberal and republican thinking for the past few centuries to the high-profile “occupations” that have animated political action of the past few years. The article argues that these metaphors reflect a “spatial imaginary” that corresponds to an ideal of politics as the forcible control of space, and then explores the possibility of a “temporal imaginary” more compatible with the imagination and aspiration required of progressive politics. The article explores how the dual meaning of the term “occupation” – the filling of space and the filling of time – reflects the dialectic of time and space, and considers what happens when a spatial imaginary overshadows the temporal dimension of politics. Ultimately, the article argues that a spatial imaginary tends to inform an idea of politics as a functional use of force, while a temporal imaginary forwards a greater appreciation for history, civic work, and creativity.

Acknowledgments

I started writing this paper while listening to a talk by Jodi Dean; I thank her for the initial provocation and for some helpful conversations that followed. For insightful comments on earlier versions of the argument, I also thank Danna Agmon Paul Apostolidis, Ali Aslam, Nick Copeland, François Debrix, Sascha Engel, Elizabeth Mazzolini, Paul Passavant, Sarah Sharma, Amy Shuster, Anthony Szczurek, Zac Zimmer, and the editors and two anonymous reviewers for NPS.

Notes

¹ Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzelini, Occupy Language (Brooklyn, NY: Zucotti Park Press, 2012); Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, #Occupy the Bible (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013); www.occupyeverything.org.

² This is true in the popular press as well as more specialized scholarship. See Marina Sitrin’s “Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements,” Dissent (Spring 2012), available at: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements; or Malcolm Gladwell’s “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted” (The New Yorker, October 4, 2010), which precedes OWS but centers on the need for “hierarchical organization” and was discussed at length in its wake, available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell.

³ The one remaining definition is an archaic rhetorical term. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v., “occupation,” available online at: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/130181.

⁴ Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 77–128.

⁵ Ibid., 77.

⁶ Ibid., 78, emphases modified. By including the term “successfully,” Weber here gestures to the inextricability of time and space. By placing the term in parentheses, however, he also clearly indicates that he takes space to have ultimately priority over time.

⁷ Ibid., 83.

⁸ See Ivan Ascher, ““We Are All Occasional Politicians”: For A New Weberian Conception of Politics,” Constellations 20:1 (2013), pp. 138–149; or Arthur Gunlicks, “Max Weber’s Typology of Politicians: A Reexamination,” Journal of Politics 40:2 (May 1978), pp. 498–509.

⁹ Weber, “Politics,” p. 128.

¹⁰ Ibid., 128.

¹¹ Ibid., 121.

¹² Ibid., 120. Just as including the term “successfully” in his definition of the state troubles the distinction between time and space, including the word “legitimate” (not in parentheses) points to the inextricability of ethics and politics.

¹³ David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 234, 238.

¹⁴ Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 283–285.

¹⁵ Michael Shapiro, “Time, Disjuncture, and Democratic Citizenship,” in Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly (eds), Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 233–244.

¹⁶ Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

¹⁷ Weber, “Politics,” p. 127.

¹⁸ Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York, NY: Columbia University Press 1998), pp. 30, 35–45.

¹⁹ It is also worth noting that while the Panopticon is a technology of spatial organization and visibility, Foucault discusses four disciplinary techniques in Discipline and Punish. Two of these (the art of distributions and the composition of forces) are explicitly and necessarily spatial, but the other two (control of activity and organization of geneses) focus on regulating time. Panoptic society, in other words, could just as easily be characterized temporally.

²⁰ “Every social good or set of goods constitutes, as it were, a distributive sphere within which only certain criteria and arrangements are appropriate. Money is inappropriate in the sphere of ecclesiastical office; it is an intrusion from another sphere” [Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983), p. 10].

²¹ See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 76 and passim.

²² The contemporary practice of caucusing better mimics the civic engagement promised by these meetings. A caucus is not a place, however, and so is difficult to represent in the terms of the spatial imaginary.

²³ Feminists have effectively challenged the public–private split by noting how so many so-called private issues (like access to reproductive care) are negotiated in public venues (like the Supreme Court), and how ideologically restricting issues to a private sphere often perpetuates the oppression of women. My point is not to question this, but to note that even in such renderings, the terms “public” and “private” do not refer to spaces (like the household or the Capitol) but to judgments about the legitimate concerns of a state. The “zones of privacy” that underwrite Roe v. Wade, after all, are not specifically the household or the body, but rather a series of issues such as marriage, procreation, and contraception.

²⁴ Terrell Carver and Jernej Pikalo (eds), Political Language and Metaphor: Interpreting and Changing the World (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1–12.

²⁵ Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 8–15.

²⁶ Ibid., 10.

²⁷ Taylor, Social Imaginaries, p. 69.

²⁸ Ibid., 85, 86.

²⁹ Ibid., 86.

³⁰ Ibid., 101.

³¹ Arendt, On Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage, 1963) p. 21.

³² Ibid., 26.

³³ Ibid., 113. This claim, and this phrasing, is also evident through The Human Condition: Unlike the “realm of the polis, … the sphere of freedom,” the social was not restricted to a specific domain and could permeate the walls of the household – it did not “hold sacred the boundaries surrounding [private] property” [Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 29–30].

³⁴ Arendt, On Revolution, p. 256. Arendt seems to use various spatial terms interchangeably; in the German translation of The Human Condition (which she oversaw), “The Public Realm” is rendered “Der öffentliche Raum” (“realm”) while “The Private Realm” is “Der private Bereich” (“space”). Thanks to Amy Shuster for bringing this to my attention.

³⁵ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). The phrasing is more stark in his distillation, “The Public Sphere,” in Steven Seidman (ed.), Jürgen Habermas on Society and Politics: A Reader (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 321–326. See also his “Discourse Ethics” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhart and Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 43–115.

³⁶ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 17.

³⁷ Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh: University Press, 2007), 5.

³⁸ Ibid., 158.

³⁹ Steven White puts the dilemma in convenient terms: “One either follows post-structuralism down a trail that persistently shies away from important political questions, or one finds some way of domesticating it and forcing it onto more familiar conceptual ground” [Political Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 17].

⁴⁰ Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Maps,” in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 348–9. See also Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 44.

⁴¹ Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” in Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 36, 39.

⁴² John Seery, “Castles in the Air: An Essay on Political Foundations,” Political Theory 27:4 (August 1999), pp. 460–490.

⁴³ Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” pp. 39, 41, 42.

⁴⁴ Seery, “Castles in the Air,” pp. 485, 482, 485, 484.

⁴⁵ Weber, “Politics,” p. 128.

⁴⁶ See Marina Sitrin, “One No, Many Yesses,” in Astra Taylor et al. (eds), Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (New York: NY: Verso, 2011), pp. 7–11.

⁴⁷ See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Political Field, The Social Science Field, and the Journalistic Field,” in Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (eds), Bourdieu and The Journalistic Field (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 29–47.

⁴⁸ An attempt to re-occupy the park a month later was similarly and violently resisted by the police. See Colin Moynihan and Elizabeth Harris, “Surging Back Into Zucotti Park, Protestors are Cleared,” The New York Times, City Room blog (Dec 31, 2011), available online at: https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/protesters-surge-back-into-zuccotti-park/.

⁴⁹ Dean, “Claiming Division, Naming a Wrong,” Theory & Event 14:4 (2011), available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/459208.

⁵⁰ Dean, The Communist Horizon (New York, NY: Verso, 2012), p. 238.

⁵¹ Dean, Crowds and Party (New York, NY: Verso, 2015), pp. 25, 125, 141.

⁵² Reviewing The Communist Horizon in this journal, Bradley MacDonald’s primary critique was that the book lacked attention to history [New Political Science 35:2 (June 2013), p. 321].

⁵³ I take the term “speed theory” from Sarah Sharma, In The Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 5. Sharma identifies the key figures as Paul Virilio, Zygmunt Bauman, and Carlo Petrini.

⁵⁴ William Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, ND: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 9. For work bearing Connolly’s influence, see Paulina Ochoa Espejo, The Time of Popular Sovereignty (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011); and Simon Glezos, The Politics of Speed (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).

⁵⁵ Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, xviii; and “What Time Is It?” Theory & Event 1:1 (1997), available at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32440. See also David McIvor, “The Conscience of a Fugitive: Sheldon Wolin and the Prospects for Radical Democracy,” New Political Science 38:3 (2016), p. 419.

⁵⁶ Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 31.

⁵⁷ Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy, pp. 32–33.

⁵⁸ Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” in Lewis Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (eds), Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 290–293.

⁵⁹ Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, pp. 45, 283–284.

⁶⁰ Nichole Marie Shippen, Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2014).

⁶¹ Ibid., 54.

⁶² Ibid., 174.

⁶³ Dean, Crowds and Party, p. 158.

⁶⁴ Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 175.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 207.

⁶⁶ Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of the Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 127–8; see also pp. 26–27.

⁶⁷ Seery, “Castles in the Air,” p. 483.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 485.

⁶⁹ From: https://occupywallstreet.net/learn.

⁷⁰ Sharma, In the Meantime. Wolin makes a similar point in “What Time Is It?”.