Forum Post: Thoughts on the non-movement

What is Occupy Wall Street?

This is the question on many peoples’ minds. Let’s try to answer it.

At first glance, we are inclined to label Occupy Wall Street “a movement.” If we were to elaborate, we might call it “a movement for social and economic change.”

This is already problematic, and I’m going to tell you why.

As a good English student, I believe that the best place to begin is with the language itself: “Occupy Wall Street.” As an imperative statement, the implied subject of the sentence is (you). “Wall street” functions as the object of the sentence, the place which (you) are instructed to occupy.

Which brings us to the verb: “occupy”. In modern parlance, “to occupy” carries a rather menacing connotation. We think of the German occupation of France, or the US occupation of Iraq.

Why, as a non-violent “movement”, would its founders designate it according to such ominous terminology?

The answer is that this is not a movement, at all: it is a cessation of movement. Although the word “occupy” has basically been interned, the word actually expresses the bare minimum of action required to fulfill the function of a verb. It’s meaning is closer to the verbs “exist” or “inhabit”, then to verbs like “seize”, or “control” or “subjugate”.

The truth is that the question, “What are they [the occupants] doing?” is already flawed. It is precisely what they are not doing that constitutes the force of their non-movement.

We see that, historically, this cessation of movement is characteristic of every successful non-violent “movement”. Ghandi would not eat. Rosa Parks would not sit at the back of the bus. The workers would not work.

We see that we do not even have the language to express something as contradictory and subversive as the phenomenon to which we are bearing witness.

Slavoj Zizek visited Occupy Wall Street and delivered the following anecdote:

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink, then everything I write is true. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

The truth is that everything we are––our thoughts, our concepts, our culture, our values, even our language––is all in blue. The struggle to rejuvenate the word “occupy” presents a microcosm of the struggle to rethink our entire system. Until we stop moving, until we cease performing the ritualistic practices that tattoo our so-called solutions in blue ink, we will never be afforded the opportunity to write in red; we will never be able to start a dialogue about what is not OK with the world we live in. The first steps in a new direction are necessarily proceeded by our unwillingness to travel any further down the path we are on.