OWS as a New Front in the Semiotic War

Is the Occupy Wall Street movement to be swept aside into the dustbin of history or is it to become part of our collective consciousness, a first parry in a battle to reaffirm democracy and the common good? What is interesting about the movement to me is one of the major critiques levied against it – its lack of a coherent message. This puts it squarely within the realm of the postmodern problemic: the inability to find solidarity in our diversity. And yet OWS attempted to do just that by speaking as a collective of individuals united under the banner of the 99%. In this sense it was an oppositional movement against the 1%, signaled by the phrase often chopped off of its epithet as the “Occupy” movement. Wall Street became the signifier for that 1% that was being opposed, a floating signifier of discontent at the lack of voice and power given to the odd conglomeration of others. In this sense, it is an attempt, in many ways, to reenact the battles of old, settled on the question of class over the various lines of demarcation that have splintered the left and dispersed the middle and working class as largely external to the broader cultural wars.

OWS thus returns us to the critical theory perspective of placing class at the fulcrum of leftist politics, aligning the various elements of what is often labeled identity politics under the banner of a collective, comprised solely as a vast majority aligned in its oppositional stance. Is this the multitude of Hardt and Negri? If it is a new dispositif to struggle toward the production of new subjectivities, then the answer is a resounding yes. But does this simultaneously reaffirm the central problem of our moment – the inability to articulate the unspeakable shared resistance to the capitalist construction of subjectivity? Can we align as a 99% against the 1% that wields increasing power over our lives? Who is the 1% and does the affirmation of their stance as an other demand a material instantiation or stand in symbolically for a group that often expands well beyond that 1% to the cultural intermediaries, new managerial class, technocrats and others that support the system in uncomfortable alignment with the power elites?

The Occupy movement gave voice to the central paradox in any movement for social change today: an unwillingness or inability to find the common goal that could unite people in struggle toward an end. If the end is itself open, does that in fact offer a way out of the paradox? In other words, is OWS an incantation to change from the bottom up where the project is not predefined but emerges within the performance of opposition to power writ large? The fascinating nature of the critique then becomes its openness to possibility without preset parameters, to attempt to unite without the necessity of the utopian projects that reaped so much death and destruction in the wake of World War II. Whether in fascism or state-sponsored communism, the problem emerges from both sides of the equation and hearkens back to the critique of Lenin and Lukacs and their belief in the vanguard party as the spark of revolution. An anti-elist, bottom up revolution almost demands incoherence as a strategy that invites diversity toward unity in fighting a collective enemy. It coheres divergent interests into a shared goal of forging a new world for the many. It finds a common enemy and attempts to escape the problem of cooptation, by refusing the liberal push toward increased opportunity within the system of exploitation, domination and control. In other words, its radical openness, critiqued by a media and political system that relies on concreteness, affirms its political power and subversive potential. Lyotard argued that radical critique was impossible as long as it was articulated within the discourses it was trying to overcome. A new language and rationality is necessary to escape the trap Foucault and Marcuse argue exists in the prison house of language and the instrumental rationality that make that opposition a central feature of reaffirming the very system being critiqued. Radical democracy demands a new vocabulary of opposition, a negative dialectic, imminent critique and the ability to remain open to change as inherently good.

2008 seemed to provide an opening to fundamentally question the prevailing logic of neoliberalism and its central arguments for market liberation, deregulation, small government and the dismantling of the social safety net. By aligning an open 99% percent against the repressive 1%, it asks us to think beyond meritocracy to a world that serves the needs of the many over the few. But going beyond classic liberalism, utilitarianism and even socialism, it asks us how we can create a society that serves the collective needs of the vast majority of society. This is actually an argument that transcends democracy itself – founded on the needs of the many over the few. The problem of democracy has always been the balance between majority rule and pluralism. A 99% that all have a voice in decision-making have the conceptual power to overcome this aporia, to contemplate new forms of sovereignty and to displace foundational questions brought up by thinkers like Benhabib, Butler and Laclau and Mouffe with a more collectivist mentality. The practicality of such a political project may seem suspect, and would certainly need to formalize mechanisms of decision-making and legitimation over time, but as an attempt to overcome the limitations of democratic debate and engagement today it certain provides a possible outside to the semiotic war of meaning that has stifled the left for far too long. So let the 99% unite in solidarity in their diversity and stave off the destruction the 1% seem so intent on pursuing!