What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" II [Draft/BETA][Preface]

Updated on Friday, May 25, 2012 at 12:18PM by admin

[Video link to US Military propaganda exercise sent by Jez]

What Is the Soul of Occupy?
By Paul McLean

II

Robert Henri: Snow in New York, 1902
Source: Artcyclopedia; photograph by Michael Weinberg  

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Do some great work, Son! Don't try to paint *good landscapes*. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting landscape looks to you - your pleasure in the thing. Wit.

There are lots of people who can make sweet colors, nice tones, nice shapes of landscape, all done in nice broad and intelligent-looking brushwork.
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- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

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America is one of the few countries where May Day, the International Workers' Day, is not even a holiday – ironically enough, considering the fact the date was chosen to commemorate events that occurred in Chicago, during the struggle for the 8-hour day in 1886. During the cold war, the idea of unions signing on to a statement like this would have been inconceivable: in the 1960s, unionized workers were known to physically attack Wall Street protestors in the name of patriotic anti-communism. But the collapse of state socialism has made new alliances possible, and, in making common cause with occupiers, and the immigrant groups that first turned May Day into a national day of action in 2006, working-class organizations are also beginning to return to their roots—up to and including, the ideas and visions of the Haymarket martyrs themselves.

[Later, in May, in Chicago]

The words might be diplomatically chosen, but there's no mistaking what tradition is being invoked here. In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America's greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.
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- David Graeber, "Occupy's Liberation from Liberalism; the real meaning of May Day"

BACK IN TIME

there's such a feeling in my room
it's like i'm in another calendar year

the future seems dreadful
it's obvious to all
the times have changed no more
we are certain to fall

the future seems worthless
society to blame
the price is out of reach
american con-game

there's such a pattern of thought here
it's like i'm just another rock 'n roll fool

i want to go back in time
i want to go back in time

the future seems dismal
for us in mid-thirties
the general opinion
never escapes gerdes

there's such a feeling in my room
it's like i'm in another part of the crowd

the future r.stevie
may well give up the fight
i want to go back in time
i want to go back in time

the future seems dreadful
it's obvious to me
the times have changed no moore
we can certainly see

there's such a lack of emotion
it's like i'm justanotherrock'nrollfool

the future seems dreadful

©1986 r.stevie moore

[PREFACE]: ...Pondering the soul of Occupy, considering art and spirit, reflecting on the "American Spring."

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What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-2, 4+5 & Endnotes]

Updated on Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 05:25AM by admin

3 continues

Bruce Sterling at the European Graduate School, 2010; Photo ©Hendrick Speck & Paul McLean

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An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering.

I see some daylight in the general cultural situation. I was happy about the [SXSW] New Aesthetic panel, because it revealed things I had never seen. It was exciting because it touched something new, true and real.

Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are (left to right) Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev and Joseph Stalin.

The arts and sciences are, clearly, almost equally bewildered by their hardware now. The antique culture-rift of C. P. Snow doesn’t make much sense five decades later — not when sciences and the fine arts are getting identical public beatings from Lysenkoist know-nothings. Those abject talking-heads, abandoning charge of their machine-crazed economy.… Come home, artists and scientists; all is forgiven!
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- Bruce Sterling, "An Essay on the New Aesthetic" ( http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/ )

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The Zuccotti Park occupation was a dismal failure. The functioning of Wall Street was not disrupted. Occupy Wall Street never occupied Wall Street. Even Zuccotti Park was “occupied” only with the consent of the mayor of New York City, and it was cleared out the moment he withdrew that consent. In the end, no autonomous space was reclaimed. The effort to remake society by multiplying and weaving together autonomous spaces is back to Square One. Even worse, precious little progress was made during the occupation in articulating and working out what the movement is for, or how to solve the serious social and economic problems we now confront.

In light of these failures, it would be a grave mistake to try to glide unreflectively into a “Phase II” of Occupy Wall Street. It is time to think seriously about what went wrong and why it went wrong, in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Above all, I am concerned here to make clear the difference between “prefigurative politics” in the proper sense of the term and what Graeber uses the term “direct action” to mean: “acting as if you were already free” (see below). In the proper sense of the term, “prefigurative politics” refers to practices that foreshadow and anticipate a different world, a world that does not exist. “Direct action” in Graeber’s sense refers to practices that make believe that this different world already exists in embryo within the existing one. The latter notion is the one that was tested at Zuccotti Park and that failed the test.

pre•fig•u•ra•tion n.
1. The act of representing, suggesting, or imagining in advance.
2. Something that prefigures; a foreshadowing.

make–be•lieve adj.
Imaginary, pretended.
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- "The Make-Believe World of David Graeber: Reflections on the Ideology Underlying the Failed Occupation of Zuccotti Park" by Andrew Kliman

Augmented Reality documentation by Mark Skwarek (arOccupyMayDay)

[NOTE]: As I see it, the project of facilitating a new model for artistic enterprise and the phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street can be subjected to a useful mash-up, for considering purpose, application and utility, among other things. The flaws in ideologies that influenced significantly the formation of OWS are worth looking into, and the wave of "What next for Occupy?" exercises are accomplishing this, which is what must first be acknowledged. The first semi-formal evaluation phase of OWS has commenced, almost spontaneously, post-May Day, a direct action that clarifies one of the quandaries faced by Occupy: in the United States, a call for prefigurative direct action emerging from alien cultural envisioning toward manifestation "in the long term" is a doomed proposition.

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What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-1, Intermezzo]

By Paul McLean

[Video by Liza Bear]

[Narrative]:

New York City, May 1 2012-- Occupy Guitarmy musicians, led by Tom Morello, play Willie Nile's "One Guitar" before marchikng down Fifth Avenue to Union Square as part of May Day 2012. Filmed by Liza Béar, Squaring Off, Mobile Broadcast News. @owsmusicgroup@nothingofficial

[Morello/Guitarmy photo by Theodore Hamm]

3

I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance. - "The movement as an end-in-itself?" An interview with David Graeber by Ross Wolfe http://platypus1917.org/2012/01/31/interview-with-david-graeber/

Planning for May 1 in New York began in January in a fourth-floor workspace at 16 Beaver St., about two blocks from Wall Street, [Marisa] Holmes said. The date serves as an international labor day, commemorating a deadly 1886 clash between police and workers in Chicago's Haymarket Square. - "Banks cooperate to track Occupy protesters" by Max Abelson for Bloomberg [posted at SF Gate, and elsewhere] - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/26/BUTK1O9L88.DTL

The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the "enemy", are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved. - Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Étienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Save the Greeks from their Saviors! February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Drew S. Burk and Anastazia Golemi. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-their-saviors/

If so, for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam. - "The Sadness of Post-Workerism..." by David Graeber

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Ethnic Groups of Madagascar

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David Graeber in his essay on Post-Workerism develops an argument about art in the section titled "the art world as a form of politics" that every artist associating herself with OWS should read, since Graeber is a self-described "author" and creator of central facets of it, or even the movement itself, if I understood him correctly at a talk I attended at NYU's Hemispheric Institute recently. Graeber's view of art is grim verging on toxic, but also thin as black ice in Madagascar, the island that he made his anthropological bones on, so to speak, and which is always going to be mentioned whenever Graeber talks or writes, it seems.

Madagascar.

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What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.2]

By Paul McLean

2

MEPHISTOPHOLES: Now we are already again at the end of our wits, where the understanding of you men runs wild. Why didst thou enter into fellowship with us, if thou canst not carry it out? Wilt fly, and art not secure against dizziness? Did we thrust ourselves upon thee. or thou thyself upon us?

FAUST: Gnash not thus thy devouring teeth at me! It fills me with horrible disgust. Mighty, glorious Spirit, who hast vouchsafed to me Thine apparition, who knowest my heart and soul, why fetter me to the felon-comrade, who feeds on mischief and gluts himself with ruin? - FAUST, A Tragedy, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to dilute the protest. - "Occupy Wall Street: What Is To Be Done... Next?" by Slavoj Žižek 

Žižek, "The Elvis of Cultural Theory," has again weighed in on Occupy, now, and Adbusters celebrates, perceiving the text as a ratification of its alarms. May Day protests are fast approaching, and the mustering of forces against Occupy's foes is in full bloom. I'm really looking forward to the Guitarmy, myself. Who knows what will happen? The organizational problem seems to be defining who are the opposition, and the overarching question is who will answer the call for a general strike. The whole set-up smacks of Faust. The flaws in the stances of both Adbusters and Žižek typify the old Left that both the magazine and the colorful thinker fear.

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What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.1]

[Photos of Magic Mountain & Novad actions courtesy Jez Bold]

What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA]
By Paul McLean

Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual.  This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.  An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him.  Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.  A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.  Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman.  He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.  Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.  I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.  Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them.  It belongs to the sphere of action.  But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. - Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man"

As a matter of fact, setting aside strictly academic art, artists never fall entirely prey to aesthetic co-optation. Though they may abdicate their immediate experience for the sake of beautiful appearances, all artists (and anyone who tries to live is an artist) are driven by the desire to increase their tribute of dreams to the objective world of others. In this sense they entrust the thing they create with the mission of completing their personal fulfilment within their social group. And in this sense creativity is revolutionary in its essence. - from "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" by Raoul Vaneigem (a new translation from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012

It is the "fact" of the physicality of artworks, their necessary existence as objects with their apparent constancy, that in fact highlights the "inconstant," volatile, and transformative event at the core of art. - Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art

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What is the Soul of Occupy?

Adbusters, the Canadian anti-Capitalist magazine that by accounts issued the call for action which sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement in September of 2011, on April 12th 2012 [1] released another provocative proclamation on its blog,* titled "Battle for the Soul of Occupy." The text was illustrated with a black, red and white banner graphic depicting the ubiquitous Occupy clenched fist and the text "#DEFENDOCCUPY." The call-to-arms was issued by Culture Jammers HQ and encouraged Occupiers to "Jump, jump, jump over the dead body of the old left!" and warned of co-optation of the movement by MoveOn, The Nation magazine and ice cream producers Ben & Jerry, whose influence threatened, in Adbuster's estimate, to "turn our struggle into a '99% Spring' reelection campaign for President Obama."

I don't know about you, reader, but Adbusters' situating Ben & Jerry in a "cabal of old world thinkers who have blunted the possibility of revolution for decades" seems to me a stretch, and certainly doesn't incite any Robespierresque post-Occupy-revolutionary fervor. I sat next to Ben of Ben & Jerry at an organizational meeting for Mark Read's Illuminator, which B & J's ice cream fortune helped bankroll, and Ben Cohen in my view is not a blunter of revolution. He's a food businessman made good, retired, with cash in the bank, who's making an effort to support Occupy strategically, not steal its "Soul." If anything, the conundrum posed to such individuals who are sympathetic to the movement by the movement's schizophrenic response to efforts by "outsiders" to align with OWS is worth examining. [2, 3]

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