Occupy All the Dispositifs: Memes, Media Ecologies, and Emergent Bodies Politic
2013; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14791420.2013.827351
ISSN1479-4233
Autores Tópico(s)Political theory and Gramsci
ResumoAbstractThis article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispositifs of subjectivation from the perspective of resistance. In addition to examining the accumulation of mediated subjective apparatuses, I propose we think of OWS as an ecology, one that engenders an antagonistic response by a militarized biopolitical state subject (itself an accumulation). I end with some preliminary thoughts on OWS' recomposition after the state's decompositional dispositifs.Keywords: Occupymemesmedia ecologysocial movementsmedia activismautonomismpolicesubjectivation Notes[1] Know your meme, "KYM Review: Memes of 2011," http://knowyourmeme.com/blog/meme-review/best-memes-of-2011 (accessed January 25, 2012).[2] To say that OWS originated with Adbusters immediately invites scorn, accusations of easy origin stories, and an insufficient account of all the conditions that helped shape the phenomenon. However, what interests me here is what we can definitively say: the name #OccupyWallStreet came from that call, in addition to the date and command ("bring tent").[3] Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear, "Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production," in A New Literacies Sampler, ed. Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 199–228.[4] Patrick Davison, "The Language of Internet Memes," in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 120–35.[5] Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 73.[6] Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 73, 129.[7] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 74.[8] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 73.[9] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 129. Virno makes a hasty transition from the formal to the contextual here, or the aesthetic to the political by locating an inherently subversive dimension to jokes. He curiously does not address jokes that confirm and reproduce belief-systems of a community (e.g., sexist and racist jokes). A more nuanced classification of jokes, and their political articulation, is needed. But this does not undermine the potential for the joke structure to have an "insurrectionist" quality. Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 82.[10] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 129. Virno makes a hasty transition from the formal to the contextual here, or the aesthetic to the political by locating an inherently subversive dimension to jokes. He curiously does not address jokes that confirm and reproduce belief-systems of a community (e.g., sexist and racist jokes). A more nuanced classification of jokes, and their political articulation, is needed. But this does not undermine the potential for the joke structure to have an "insurrectionist" quality. Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 149.[11] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 129. Virno makes a hasty transition from the formal to the contextual here, or the aesthetic to the political by locating an inherently subversive dimension to jokes. He curiously does not address jokes that confirm and reproduce belief-systems of a community (e.g., sexist and racist jokes). A more nuanced classification of jokes, and their political articulation, is needed. But this does not undermine the potential for the joke structure to have an "insurrectionist" quality. Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 129. I would call them ambivalent or nonaligned rather than neutral.[12] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 129. Virno makes a hasty transition from the formal to the contextual here, or the aesthetic to the political by locating an inherently subversive dimension to jokes. He curiously does not address jokes that confirm and reproduce belief-systems of a community (e.g., sexist and racist jokes). A more nuanced classification of jokes, and their political articulation, is needed. But this does not undermine the potential for the joke structure to have an "insurrectionist" quality. Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 145.[13] Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 129. Virno makes a hasty transition from the formal to the contextual here, or the aesthetic to the political by locating an inherently subversive dimension to jokes. He curiously does not address jokes that confirm and reproduce belief-systems of a community (e.g., sexist and racist jokes). A more nuanced classification of jokes, and their political articulation, is needed. But this does not undermine the potential for the joke structure to have an "insurrectionist" quality. Sigmund Freud cited in Virno traces such a structure through Wittgenstein's analysis of applying rules to particular cases: jokes are thus a linguistic game that exhibits "the transformability of all linguistic games." Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 83. See also Michel Foucault, writing that Kant is interested in "how Revolution becomes spectacle, how it is received by spectators who do not participate in it but who watch it, who attend the show and, for better or worse, let themselves be dragged along by it." in "What is Enlightenment?" In Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 303–20.[14] Virno, Multitude, 83–84.[15] On Anonymous subjectivity, see Gabriella Coleman, "Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action," The New Everyday, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-lulz-collective-action (accessed May 1, 2011); Marco De Seriis, "Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms and Multiple-Use Names as Minor Processes of Subjectivation," Subjectivity 5, no. 2 (2012): 140–60; and Harry Halpin, "The Philosophy of Anonymous: Ontological politics without identity," Radical Philosophy 176 (2012): 19–28.[16] Antonio Negri, Politics of Subversion (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), 129.[17] Antonio Negri, Politics of Subversion (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), 128–30.[18] Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics (Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e), 2008): 35–39. While apparatuses are often equated with state administration, Negri, drawing on Foucault and Deleuze, contends that within biopolitics there is an irreducible ambiguity in those very apparatuses, motored by a "desire for life." Antonio Negri, Politics of Subversion (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), 37.[19] We could look here at the anthropological work on everyday resistance (e.g., James Scott, David Graeber), sociological work on separate subjective mechanisms regarding gender and race, postcapitalist possibilities (J.K. Gibson-Graham), and researchers working in and on activist media (John Downing, and numerous others including within this volume). However, not all would align themselves with this approach.[20] We could look here at the anthropological work on everyday resistance (e.g., James Scott, David Graeber), sociological work on separate subjective mechanisms regarding gender and race, postcapitalist possibilities (J.K. Gibson-Graham), and researchers working in and on activist media (John Downing, and numerous others including within this volume). However, not all would align themselves with this approach, 37.[21] We could look here at the anthropological work on everyday resistance (e.g., James Scott, David Graeber), sociological work on separate subjective mechanisms regarding gender and race, postcapitalist possibilities (J.K. Gibson-Graham), and researchers working in and on activist media (John Downing, and numerous others including within this volume). However, not all would align themselves with this approach, 35.[22] We could look here at the anthropological work on everyday resistance (e.g., James Scott, David Graeber), sociological work on separate subjective mechanisms regarding gender and race, postcapitalist possibilities (J.K. Gibson-Graham), and researchers working in and on activist media (John Downing, and numerous others including within this volume). However, not all would align themselves with this approach, 67. While at times Negri seems to use agencements/assemblages and dispositifs interchangeably, it would be important in any such genealogy to account for, as Deleuze notes with respect to Foucault, the passage from agencements (as exit and line of flight) to dispositifs (as apparatuses of capture). Gilles Deleuze, "Desire and Pleasure," in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1998): 183–92.[23] Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, 38[24] Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, 65. Economically, this trait defines laboring subjects, but we can expand it to something more like Species-Being (see Nick Dyer-Witheford, "Species-Being Resurgent," Constellations 11, no. 4 (2004): 476–9)[25] Negri, Porcelain Workshop, 98–103. On destituent power, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (Argo-Navis Press, 2012).[26] Negri, Porcelain Workshop, 65–67.[27] Antonio Negri, "Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude," Makeworlds, Paper #4, http://makeworlds.org/node/104 (accessed June 27, 2013).[28] See Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 29–35; Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005).; Michael Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: 'Media Ecology,' Political Subjectivation and Free Radios," The Fibreculture Journal: 17, http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-114-towards-an-archaeology-of-media-ecologies-%E2%80%98media-ecology%E2%80%99-political-subjectivation-and-free-radios/ (accessed December 15, 2011); Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996).[29] Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, In Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 9.[30] Guattari, In Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 8.[31] Guattari, In Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 10.[32] Guattari, In Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 11.[33] See the documentary "Free the Network" for a condensed account of the importance of the technical media infrastructure to the organizational form of OWS, and its subsequent dismantling by the NYPD. Another example of the significance of media to Occupy: At the Occupy National Gathering 2013 meeting, one of the 5 day-themes (the others being economic justice, environmental futures, war, local community building) is "Making and Supporting Free, Unfettered Media."[34] Lilian Radovac, "Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of Audition," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2013). doi:10.1080/14791420.2013.829636.Anna Feigenbaum, "Resistant Matters: Tents, Tear gas and the 'other media' of Occupy," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2013). doi:10.1080/14791420.2013.828383.[35] Beau Hodai, "Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street." Report published by Center for Media and Democracy/DBA Press, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Government_Surveillance_of_Occupy_Movement (accessed June 21, 2013).[36] See Jack Bratich, "Adventures in the Public Secret Sphere: Police Sovereign Networks and Communications Warfare." Cultural Studies < = > Critical Methodologies.[37] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 51–62.[38] Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception (London: Verso, 2000): 52.[39] One could also add other, less violent decompositional tactics, like counterradicalization. This could involve the liberal version of steering the movement towards institutional party resolutions (e.g., MoveOn's "99% Spring") or concurrent conservative NGO attempts at directing resistant impulses (e.g., KONY 2012).[40] Negri, Politics of Subversion, 130.[41] Aurelia Armstrong, "Some reflections on Deleuze's Spinoza," in Deleuze and philosophy, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson (London, UK: Routledge. 1997): 45.[42] Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 12, my emphasis.[43] Fernández-Savater, A. "How to organize a climate?" Making Worlds, http://makingworlds.wikispaces.com/How+to+Organize+a+Climate (accessed March 28, 2012).[44] Fernández-Savater, A. "How to organize a climate?" Making Worlds, http://makingworlds.wikispaces.com/How+to+Organize+a+Climate (accessed March 28, 2012).[45] Fernández-Savater, A. "How to organize a climate?" Making Worlds, http://makingworlds.wikispaces.com/How+to+Organize+a+Climate (accessed March 28, 2012).[46] In saying this, I am noting that OWS was one manifestation of a milieu comprised of a global cycle of struggles that preceded it (Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, Spain) and followed it (Egypt redux, Turkey, Brazil).[47] Guattari, "Préface: Des Millions et des Millions d'Alice en Puissance," in Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 12.[48] Virno, Multitude, 86.[49] Goddard, "Towards an Archaeology," 9.
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