Occupy Response

At once a prosaic verb and a proper noun, an ethical injunction and a sociological entity, a mobile trope and a site-specific tactic, Occupy lacks a unified meaning. Or, to put it more affirmatively, Occupy involves a surplus of meaning and cannot be reduced to one thing. The word itself is of course marked by ongoing legacies of colonial violence, calling to mind the forceful domestication of alien territories, the enclosure of common wealth, and the eviction or subjugation of native inhabitants. Yet the word has been indelibly inscribed with a new history involving the emancipatory reclamation or reinhabitation of those spaces colonized by Wall Street, which is to say the entirety of the planet and its life-support systems. From the warming of the climate, to the foreclosure of homes, to the militarization of streets, to the subjective internalization of market-based morality, Wall Street is Everywhere. Thus, “Occupy Everywhere, Occupy Everything,” as student activists in the UC system declared in the years preceding the advent of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) camp in September 2011. Occupy has inaugurated a radical “spatial politics” in the sense of the term passed down to us from Rosalyn Deutsche, where the contestations of physical spaces, media spaces, and psychic spaces are understood to be inseparable.1 Occupy is at once familiar and strange, proximate and distant, embodied and virtual. Occupy is uncanny. As Talib Agape Fuegoverde put it last spring in the buildup to the historic reclamation of May Day in the United States by an alliance of unions, immigrant-justice groups, and OWS: “Occupy is an apparatus of defamiliarization and dissemination that enables spaces and objects, words and concepts, histories and memories to leave home and take flight into the future. Occupy enables us to revisit the past, but with a distance and a twist.”2 Occupy is especially uncanny from the perspective of art critics invested in tracing the legacies of the avant-garde in contemporary practice.3 Occupy is an arguably proto-revolutionary phenomenon that emerges in part out of the very artistico-political milieu of the sort that has concerned critics at October and elsewhere in recent years in discussions of relational aesthetics, interventionism, neo-Situationism, tactical media, experimental geography, the pedagogical turn, and more. While the