Occupy Wall Street as a Palimpsest: Overview of a Dynamic Movement

Abstract

What is Occupy? A “liberal tea party,”¹ “a flash mobs of slackers,”² the “Populist Movement Reborn,”³ “a paper Tyrannosaurus”?⁴ Seldom defined, yet relentlessly analogized, haphazard commentary on the Occupy Movement has surpassed sophisticated analysis. This means that even basic questions—how the movement works, what it means to “belong” to it, who is an “Occupier,” and why it matters—remain inadequately answered. Many observers have reacted with exasperation and incomprehension when faced with the complexity of the Movement, dismissing it because it did not fit within their preexisting notions of what politics, protest, or social movements are supposed to do. One might expect the National Review to dismiss Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as “inchoate” and “incoherent,”⁵ but even the New York Times’ early coverage portrayed OWS as “pantomime progressivism,” an “intellectual vacuum” whose message was “virtually impossible to decipher.”⁶ But dismissing a social phenomenon as incomprehensible “is not so much an explanation … as a confession that one has been unable to explain it,” a breakdown in one’s analysis, not necessarily the society one observes.⁷

#Occupy Wall Street is: a place, a movement, a brand, a mod a family yo

#Occupy Wall Street is a riddle: it’s about the park(s). it’s not about the park(s). #OWS is the dance of the micro & the macro Occupy model.

—Two hand-drawn signs in Union Square Park, April 25, 2012