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Stage One: Occupy Public Space.

Occupy Together, an outgrowth of Occupy Wall Street, has seen tens of thousands of people in cities all over the world reclaiming public spaces.

Stage Two: Occupy Unused Property.

Occupy Oakland, perhaps the most radical — and perhaps most effective — of the occupations has moved on to the logical “next stage,” and movements everywhere should take note.

This is not without precedent in this movement and those that inspired it. Last week in Madrid, a hotel was occupied and opened up to people evicted in foreclosures:

The abandoned Hotel Madrid, which was taken over by an unknown number of squatters on October 16 after a mass rally in the capital organized by the 15-M movement, opened its doors on Monday to the first person to take up the group’s stated strategy of “freeing up spaces for common use.”

 

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2 Responses to “Stage One: Occupy Public Space. What Next?”

  1. Alex Hardman

    Some of us are going straight to phase 4. Join us.

  2. Josh

    Ben,
    I see potentialities here.

    Could we say that the ‘first stage’ is a determinate negation – a subtraction? Badiou talks about the politics of subtraction as a point of autonomy as a negation of the dominant laws of the situation. By occupying space the revolutionary motors are providing a domain independent of – subtracted from – the power of the [fascist] State. Zizek notes that subtraction differs from the insurrection form of the party because it is not inherently destructive or militaristic, and in any case these party forms are a part of the hegemonic field (as its principle of contradiction). Subtraction goes further: it is politics at a distance, which is to say no longer forced into the conceptual distinctions of the hegemonic field, and no longer conscripted into a structured agenda [televised democracy, representation, etc.] fixed by the State.

    The potential for pluralistic-democratic communication happening ‘outside’ the bounds of the politics of representation generates autonomous positions that may be ‘sustained’ by seizing space. The first stage makes the cut across the field of ‘possibilities’, through negation and subtraction going beyond the possibilities provided by the system. The second stage establishes an outside to the mold of the dominant laws of the situation.

    Subtraction is not a zero sum: while it destroys the old, negativity does not by itself create anything new – there must be new affirmations, new creations. The second stage may affirm new coordinates. Zizek – “Subtraction is the ‘determinate negation’, in other words, instead of directly negating/destroying the ruling power [thereby] remaining within its field, it undermines this very field, opening up a new positive space.”

    Can the second stage undermine the coordinates of the system from which it subtracts itself, striking at the point of its ‘symptomal torsion?’ “Imagine the proverbial house of cards or a pile of wooden pieces which rely on one another in such a complex way that, if one single card or piece of wood is pulled out – subtracted – the whole edifice collapses: this is the true art of subtraction.”

    The way I see it the ‘symptomal torsion’ is the consumer-subjectivity and the relational aesthetics that accompany it – it commands how we see ourselves and how we see others. The consumer is an effect of the system of sign-objects and is the keystone to Neoliberal corporatist hegemony. Mobilize the second stage to create new commons, community relations, thereby laying out possibilities for new points of identification.

    p.s. keep doing what youre doing – thinking

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