Abstract
The political commitments that arise out of the theological thinking developed in earlier chapters find their application in the event of Occupy Wall Street. The first part of the chapter details the events and conditions of late 2010 and the first half of 2011 that led up to the occupation of Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011. Included are the Arab Spring, the Wisconsin State House takeover, and the 15-M Movement in Spain. The next part examines Slavoj Žižek’s claim that Occupy is the Holy Spirit by using theology as a method to interpret the general structure and quality of Occupy Wall Street. Occupy’s modeling of social relations differently––specifically through anarchic modes of organization and participatory democracy. The third part examines Occupy Wall Street’s refusal to make concrete demands through a methodological transposition that attempts to think of Occupy as politically apophatic.
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Notes
- 1.
The timeline of the events leading up to Occupy Wall Street and the first two months of its encampment here described are largely taken from my own notes taken at the time and clarified by http://www.occupytogether.org/aboutoccupy/. I performed further fact checking and gained clarification by consulting Adbusters, NPR, Mother Jones, and Slate. See: “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET,” on the Adbusters website, July 13, 2011. https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html; Bill Chappell, “Occupy Wall Street: From A Blog Post To A Movement,” on the NPR website, October 20, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141530025/occupy-wall-street-from-a-blog-post-to-a-movement; James West, “365 Days of Occupy Wall Street—an Anniversary Timeline,” on Mother Jones’s website, September 17, 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/09/occupy-wall-street-anniversary-timeline; David Weigel and Lauren Hepler, “Everything You Need To Know About Occupy Wall Street Entry 3: A Timeline of the Movement, from February to Today,” on Slate.com, November 18, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/features/2011/occupy_wall_street/what_is_ows_a_complete_timeline.html.
- 2.
Adbusters, https://www.adbusters.org.
- 3.
Adbusters, “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET.” July 13, 2011. https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.html.
- 4.
Adbusters, “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET.”
- 5.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 62. In this passage, Robbins is summarizing and commenting upon Jacques Rancière’s work on radical democracy.
- 6.
Stephanie McMillan, The Beginning of the American Fall: A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 4–5.
- 7.
NYC General Assembly, “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.” September 29, 2011. http://www.nycga.net/resources/documents/declaration/.
- 8.
Stephanie McMillan, The Beginning of the American Fall: A Comics Journalist Inside the Occupy Wall Street Movement (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 79.
- 9.
See Nathan Schneider, “Occupy Wall Street: FAQ” on The Nation’s website. September 29, 2011. http://www.thenation.com/article/163719/occupy-wall-street-faq.
- 10.
NYC General Assembly, “Occupy Wall Street FAQ.” http://www.nycga.net/resources/faq/.
- 11.
Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), 86.
- 12.
Žižek, Year of Dreaming, 87.
- 13.
This is, of course, somewhat of an overstatement. There were plenty of proximal, small, achievable demands that were issued over the course of the occupation. But as Nathan Schneider explains, “When the time comes to fight and win something, demand it. Why not? But when there are just a few hundred people precariously holding to a park, still only beginning to organize, still starting, still trying to shake off the habits of powerlessness, what they can offer and offer one another matters so much more than what they might demand.” Nathan Schneider, Thank You Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (Berkeley, LA, and London: University of California Press, 2013), 59.
- 14.
Žižek, Year of Dreaming, 77.
- 15.
McMillan, 80.
- 16.
McMillan, 82.
- 17.
The manuscript of Žižek’s speech may be found at http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/736 which also contains links to videos of the event. The transcript of his speech as it was actually delivered may be found at http://criticallegalthinking.com/2011/10/11/zizek-in-wall-street-transcript/.
- 18.
Quoted in David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), 17.
- 19.
Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford Press, 2009), 184.
- 20.
Taubes, 93. Taubes is comparing Jaochim of Fiore and Hegel in their respective dialectical understandings of the relationship between spirit and history with this sentence.
- 21.
Adbusters. “Occupy Wall Street.” http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet.
- 22.
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press 1993), 36.
- 23.
Alex Pareene, “A New Declaration of Independence: 10 Ideas for Taking America Back from the 1%.” AlterNet.org. October 31, 2011. http://www.alternet.org/story/152912/a_new_declaration_of_independence%3A_10_ideas_for_taking_america_back_from_the_1?akid=7799.250815.H41J8b&rd=1&t=8.
- 24.
See “How income inequality hurts America,” by Steve Hargreaves, CNN Money, September 25, 2013, http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/25/news/economy/income-inequality/. See also PolitiFact Wisconsin, March 10, 2011, http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/.
- 25.
Graeme Wearden, “Oxfam: 85 Richest People as Wealthy as Poorest Half of the World,” The Guardian, January 20, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-richest-people-half-of-the-world.
- 26.
Žižek, Year of Dreaming, 77–78.
- 27.
Marla Daniels, the wife of police lieutenant Cedric Daniels on the HBO series, The Wire, put it slightly differently:
- Marla Daniels::
-
You can’t lose if you don’t play.
- Cedric Daniels::
-
I always heard it that you can’t win if you don’t play.
- M::
-
The department puts you on a case it doesn’t want. You’re given people that are useless or untrustworthy.
- C::
-
Correct.
- M::
-
If you push too hard and any shit hits the fan, you’ll be blamed for it.
- C::
-
Correct.
- M::
-
If you don’t push hard enough, and there’s no arrest, you’ll be blamed for that, too.
- C::
-
Correct.
- M::
-
The game is rigged. But you cannot lose if you do not play.
From “The Detail,” The Wire, written by David Simon and directed by Clark Johnson (HBO, originally aired on June 9, 2002).
- 28.
Slavoj Žižek, “Occupy First. Demands Come Later.” The Guardian website, October 26, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton.
- 29.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 49. In that text, Scarry examines torture, the tortured person, their body, and the inexpressibility of pain. This particular quote is reference to the tortured person screaming out in pain.
- 30.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73.
- 31.
Douglas Rushkoff, “Think Occupy Wall St. Is a Phase? You Don’t Get It” on CNN opinions website, October 5, 2011. http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-wall-street/index.html.
- 32.
Rorty, 192.
- 33.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1961), 40. This was Levinas’s definition of religion. Though he’d likely be surprised at the prospect, Žižek seems to be in full agreement with Levinas here: Occupy was the Holy Spirit.
- 34.
Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. and with a commentary by John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 13.
- 35.
See New York City General Assembly’s Spokes Council Proposal, http://www.nycga.net/spokes-council/ for a detailed description of Occupy’s organization.
- 36.
The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, Volume III: Cham-Creeky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 760. Incidentally, another interpretation holds that we might think of consent in terms of harmony. When we consent, we sing together. This fits nicely with my transposition of concepts.
- 37.
The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, Volume IV: Creel-Duzepere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 29–32 and http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=critic and http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=crisis.
- 38.
Nathan Schneider, “Occupy Wall Street: FAQ” on The Nation’s website, September 29, 2011. http://www.thenation.com/article/163719/occupy-wall-street-faq.
- 39.
Agamben, 80.
- 40.
Žižek, “Occupy First.”
- 41.
Rawls argues that inequalities should be arranged such that they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society and that offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA and Oxford: Harvard University Press, 1971) 303.
- 42.
Žižek, “Occupy First.”
- 43.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, intro. Margaret Canovan (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958 and 1998), 247.
- 44.
Arendt, 247.
- 45.
Caputo and Derrida, 44.
- 46.
Caputo and Derrida, 107. Caputo further explains on 122–3, “Democracy calls for hospitality to the Other, but the Other is the shore we cannot reach, the One we do not know. Democracy–the old name that for now stands for something new, a porous, permeable, open-ended affirmation of the other–is the best name we have for what is to come. … Democracy is internally disturbed and continually haunted by the deepest demagogic corruption of democracy, by a crowd-pleasing, hate-mongering, reactionary politics that appeals to the basest and most violent instincts of the demos. Democracy is the name for what is to come, for the unforeseeable future, for the promise of the unforeseeable.”
- 47.
Certeau, 97–8.
- 48.
Jean-Luc Nancy. The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, foreword by Christopher Fynsk, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 30–31.
- 49.
Alan Jay Richard, “The Theo-politics of Radical Democracy: An Interview with Jeffrey W. Robbins (Part 2),” January 9, 2012. http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/?p=1488.
- 50.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 72.
- 51.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 73.
- 52.
Gianni Vattimo, “A Prayer for Silence,” After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 113.
- 53.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 74.
- 54.
Žižek wrote, “What should be resisted at this stage is any hasty translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete demands. The protests have created a vacuum––a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this space in a positive fashion,” The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, 82.
- 55.
McKenzie Wark, “How To Occupy an Abstraction,” from the Verso Books blog, October 3, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728-mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street-how-to-occupy-an-abstraction.
- 56.
Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton. Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966), 44.
- 57.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 360.
- 58.
Slavoj Žižek, “Dialectical Clarity Versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox” in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, co-authored with John Milbank, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009), 237. It is on this point that Hegel is more radical than Nietzsche. At the opening of “The Death of God” in chapter 32, I quoted Nietzsche’s famous aphorism of the madman to the effect that, “we have killed God” followed by Hegel’s assertion that, “God sacrifices himself.” These two thinkers seem to disagree as to whether the death of God is divine patricide or suicide. Altizer might very well say that it’s both. It might very well be that Mohammed Bouazizi self-immolation was a kind of death-of-God passion play––a spectacular suicide for the sake of the world in which the world is nevertheless complicit.
- 59.
I am indebted to my friend and colleague, the Reverend George Schmidt for this insight. Other, much more significant figures than I have not given Schmidt credit for his ideas in their published work. While I cannot undo that injustice, I can refuse to perpetuate it.
- 60.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2009), 71.
- 61.
Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 63.
- 62.
Al-Qushayri, Principles of Sufism, trans. B. R. von Schlegell (Oneonta, NY: Mizan Press, 1990), 49.
- 63.
Seligman, et al. 26.
- 64.
Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review. Issue 53: September/October 2008, 27.
- 65.
David Graeber, as quoted by Drake Bennett in “David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street,” October 26, 2011. http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/david-graeber-the-antileader-of-occupy-wall-street-10262011.html. Emphasis mine.
- 66.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 62.
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Miller, J.E. (2019). Occupy Wall Street. In: Resisting Theology, Furious Hope. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17391-3_6
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