Encountering Occupy London: Boundary Making and the Territoriality of Urban Activism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Occupying Power: Strategies for Change in Occupy London
Waves of Social Movement Mobilizations in the Twenty-first Century: Challenges to the Neo-liberal World Order and Democracy, 2015
Abstract: Occupy London came to life on October 15th, 2011, part of a global day of occupations, and represents one of the longest standing protest camps from the Occupy movement. Many have commented on the autonomist and anarchist practices that underlie Occupy, such as consensus decision-making, suggesting that the movement rejects strategies of taking power through the state and is instead focused on building autonomy and alternative forms of power. Drawing on our empirical research, including ethnography, interviews and discourse analysis, this chapter explores in more detail the different ways in which the movement sought to ‘Occupy’ power, by focusing on two sets of practices within our case study in London. Firstly, we explore the ways in which Occupy London engaged with the state, through participating in the legal action taken against the camp and through the issuing of demands, examining the tensions of working with and against the state’s legal-institutional apparatuses. Secondly, we shift our attention to the myriad ways Occupy London constituted itself beyond the state, creating its own territoriality and set of institutions. This opens up another set of tensions between those who see horizontal forms of organising as a process for creating an anti-power, and those who see horizontality as a means of institutionalising new forms of constituent power. By exploring these strategies for change, we bring together debates from within the Occupy movement with more longstanding theoretical debates about the nature of power and radical social change.
Spatial dialectics and the geography of social movements: the case of Occupy London
This paper develops spatial dialectics as an analytical method capable of exposing and explaining the contradictions, dilemmas and tensions that cut through the spatialities of social movements. Despite scholarly recognition of internal divides in movements such as Occupy, there is greater need to conceptualise the inherently contradictory nature of social movements, in particular by reflecting on the role of spatiality. Building on recent work on multiple spatialities of activism, the paper shifts attention to contradiction as a key factor in spatial mobilisation, further arguing that the recent turn to assemblage thought is ill equipped for such a task. Dialectics is introduced via Bertell Ollman's influential account of its ontological and epistemological bases, before turning to Edward Soja's reading of Henri Lefebvre to incorporate spatiality. Spatial dialectics disrupts the linearity of thesis–antithesis–synthesis, placing contradictions not only within the historical unfolding of relations but also within co-dependent yet antagonistic moments of space, through Lefebvre's 'trialetic' of perceived, conceived and lived space. Building on 'militant research', which combined a seven-month ethnography, 43 in-depth interviews and analyses of representations of space, spatial dialectics is put to work through the analysis of three specific contradictions in Occupy London's spatial strategies: a global movement that became tied to the physical space of occupation; a prefigurative space engulfed by internal hierarchies; and a grassroots territorial strategy that was subsumed into logics of dominant territorial institutions. In each case, Occupy London's spatial strategies are explained in the context of unfolding contradictions in conceived, perceived and lived spaces and the subsequent dilemmas and shifts in spatial strategy this led to. In conclusion, the paper highlights broader lessons for social movements' spatial praxis generated through the analysis of Occupy London.
Embedding and Deterritorialising Occupation: Territories of Rupture in Occupy London
The occupation camp was the defining practice and place of Occupy London, as it was across the wider Occupy and squares movements of 2011. This was an expression of the expansive command to 'Occupy Everywhere!' that circulated in the early movement, where occupation was not merely an instrumental 'tactic', but 'a desired state of being' (Gitlin 2013); it was always imperative that concrete sites be transcended, and the logic of Occupy deterritorialised across geographical and social space. Nevertheless, the very doing of occupation also tended toward the reification of that territory organised like that, such that the occupation camp became both the centre and horizon of the instantiating movement. This was a fundamental tension both during the occupation phase of heightened visibility, as well as in the period of abeyance and breakdown that followed. This paper, based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with Occupy London, considers the problem of occupation as it emerges through the tension between these two tendencies: deterritorialisation and embedding. It employs a Deleuzian conceptual language to develop a picture of the turbulence of occupation. The paper offers an account of participants' recurring (and pursued) desire to transcend the fixity of the tented encampment outside St. Paul's Cathedral, and of the ways in which the camp – as both territory and form – came to be considered the necessary centre of Occupy, as a consequence of accumulated experience, the development of identities, and the need to find 'common ground' in an often fragmented movement. The paper addresses, though not exhaustively, the question of what this unfolding tension reveals about the limitations and potential of Occupy's discourse and practice.
Taking Space: Moments of Rupture and Everyday Life in Occupy London
Taking space has been a common feature of recent social movements worldwide, and was a defining act of the Occupy movement. This article examines the taking of two spaces by Occupy London in October 2011, and argues that there was a tension between taking space as a moment of rupture, lived space-times of intensity that provide an opening to new possibilities, and everyday life, the routines and rhythms through which social life is reproduced. My argument builds on the work of Lefebvre, bringing together his conceptualisation of "moments" and everyday life, and his radical theory of the production of space. I argue that examining the tensions over taking space provides a useful angle to explore some of the challenges faced by the Occupy movement, such as an unequal division of labour on camp, and may help in negotiating them. Resumen: La toma de espacios ha sido una característica común de los movimientos sociales recientes en el mundo, y fue un acto definitivo del movimiento Occupy. Este artículo investiga la toma de dos espacios por Occupy London en Octubre del 2011, y sostiene que hubo una tensión entre la toma del espacio como un momento de ruptura, espacios-tiempos vivos de intensidad que dan una apertura a nuevas posibilidades, y la vida cotidiana, las rutinas y ritmos por los cuales la vida social se reproduce. Mi argumento amplia el trabajo de Lefebvre, combinando su conceptualización de "momentos" y la vida cotidiana, y su teoría radical de la producción del espacio. Sostengo que el estudiar las tensiones de la toma del espacio crea un útil punto de vista para la investigación de algunos de los desafíos que el movimiento Occupy enfrenta, tales como la división de trabajo desigual en los campamentos, y que, por ende, puede ayudar a negociarlos.
This chapter contribution will explore the way in which protesters’ physical occupation of city spaces has unfolded over time. It will begin by focusing on the way in which those who perceive themselves to have been excluded from the process of democracy demonstrate their lack of place within the wider community by occupying shared public spaces. It will go on to examine the way in which these dynamics have been enacted by protesters through the formation of picket lines during trade union disputes, the creation of a permanent picket outside South African Embassies during anti-apartheid campaigns, and the occupation of city squares during more recent demonstrations against the austerity measures. In doing so, it will trace an important series of interconnected shifts in protest culture. The factory gate picket line was an expression of bottom-up class-based resistance predicated on the withdrawal of labour. In contrast, protests against apartheid were not bound together by collective experience. They were mobilised by an identity politics that transcended shared community boundaries. Moreover, their call to action was based upon a refusal to participate in the labour of consumption rather production. This stretching out of the relationship between identity, place and politics has been further extended by anti-austerity protesters. Anti-austerity protests draw on a network of disembodied social identities and networks rather than community-based ties. Furthermore, their simultaneous occupation of city spaces implicated in the nebulous and intangible dynamics of neo-liberalism attempts to construct a sense of collective identity beyond the production/consumption binary of global capital. This analysis will illuminate the way in which protest sites and demonstrative forms are intimately connected, and contribute to the theorisation of politics from below.
Drawing upon an ethnography of recent Congolese diasporic protests in central London, this article pays attention to the traversal histories of ‘race’ and the postcolonial dynamics that precede the emergence of a contemporary diasporic ‘right to the city’ movement. The authors critically engage with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ as a way of explaining how the urban is not only the site but also, increasingly, a stake in urban protests. In doing so the authors relocate urban centrality – its meaning, symbolic power and heuristic status in protests – in a context where activists’ claims are not restricted to one city or, simply, the political present. Rather, protestors talk about making geopolitical connections between local and global scales and contemporary and historical injustices. Drawing upon Simone’s notion of ‘black urbanism’, the authors claim to enrich Lefebvre’s original formulation by unpacking the complex performative dimensions of protest as they intersect with race and, more specifically, blackness and postcolonialism. It is concluded that activists’ experience is fundamentally ambivalent; they are at once enchanted and disenchanted with protest in central London.