Occupy as Form: Blake Stimson

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the working session “Occupy as Form” on February 10, 2012. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Blake Stimson, Professor of Art History and Cinema and Technocultural Studies Program at UC Davis.

Keyword: Institutionality

 

Anticipating the philosophical motor of the Occupy movement some fifteen years ago, Alain Badiou offered the following assessment of our long-habituated tendency to overvalorize cultural difference:

What is the real unifying factor behind this attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subsets, this invocation of language in order to extol communitarian particularisms (which, besides language, always ultimately refer back to race, religion, or gender)? It is, evidently, monetary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms.

Subsets exist, of course, and difference can challenge, enrich and enlighten, but such particularisms on their own should never be confused with liberty or justice or morality or truth or beauty. By doing so we unwittingly fold ourselves into the false universality of the marketplace and thereby consummate our own oppression and that of others.

The form of occupation is the opposite of this unfreedom. It is, in other words, the form of the whole rather than the part or the form of the set rather than that of the subset. As the OWS slogan has it, it is the form of the 99%, the form of the public, the form of what used to be called the proletariat, and before that the third estate, and before that the kingdom of God. This is why Badiou’s critique of multiculturalism was given in a resurrection of Saint Paul as “a new militant figure,” a figure “to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century,” a figure to supersede the old and ineffective “party militant” and its newer, softer remake in this or that communitarian form.

It is no coincidence, thus, that it is Wall Street being occupied and no coincidence that it is being done so largely without vanguardism of any sort. The form of occupation is the form of the whole occupying the form of the part, the form of human self-realization occupying the commodity form. In short, it is a reversal of the anti-Pauline travesty bemoaned by Badiou:

The name “culture” comes to obliterate that of “art.” The word “technology” obliterates the word “science.” The word “management” obliterates the word “politics.” The word “sexuality” obliterates love.

In other words, occupation is subjectivization rather than commodification. It is the process of coming into desire, into political being, into science, into art, by reaching inwards for—as the title of one recent book has it—“the consent of the networked.” The market has always rendered desire transient, instrumentalized via the objectivization of oneself and others, small, tidy, and pathetic. Occupation returns that same desire to its rightful institutionality, to the enduring and transcendental fullness of its form as a world-creating force.