In a sense then, Occupy Wall Street provided the mirror for a new unification to recognize itself as a “community” with shared interests, as a revived public. At the center of that reflection of a broader community, there was the core, which we might call Occupy Proper: those who were most active, explicitly as part of OWS, and who therefore felt intense ownership and identification with the named group. Occupy Proper operated as a symbol and the signifier of the very existence of the larger unification, the newly re-imagined community. The imagined community, however, was far larger than Occupy Proper.46 Its projection included, in a sense, all of America—even the “one percent,” insofar as Occupy’s signature slogan, “We are the 99%!” was a new class-conscious framing of the whole national public, including the class antagonism within it.
However, Occupy Proper also saw itself distinctly individuated in the mirror. And it sometimes mistook itself and its bounds for the whole community of concern, rather than seeing itself as a symbol and special agent in the service of a much larger social unification. This smaller individuated core, in this narrower reading of the mirror, was comprised of those who physically occupied and participated in the occupations’ recognized upkeep and projects. If the boundaries of such a core were to become too clearly delineated, it would lose its ability to activate and influence the direction of a larger movement. To go in this self-enclosing direction, its growth trajectory would have to rely only on bringing more people into the core itself, through inspiration, self-selection, and replication (i.e., occupying more public parks). More and more individuals would join Occupy—and assimilate into its distinctive subculture—until it somehow reached a critical mass. Many occupiers implicitly believed this to be the path to scaled growth. America could join Occupy Proper, but only entirely on the latter’s own terms.
The problem with this smaller reading of the mirror is that as soon as the symbol circumscribes itself as a neatly bounded object unto itself, it ceases to be the signifier of a larger unification. It loses its magical properties and its symbolic power. It shrinks and is distorted into an other. As an other, it loses its power to name and catalyze the larger unification. The social fragments that were in the process of becoming an ascendant political unification instead become inoculated against the initial catalyzing agent, Occupy Proper (i.e., those dirty hippies in the park who won’t stop drumming). The mirror that the nascent unification caught a glimpse of itself in becomes a picture of a stranger.
The moment the newly framed unification caught a glimpse of itself in the mirror was the same moment that constituted Occupy Wall Street’s initial success. At this moment, the core of the embryonic movement faced its first test of maturity. For a fleeting moment—perhaps two months—it seemed as if sun, moon, and stars orbited around the movement and its intervention. Incredible attention focused on the individuals who occupied—i.e., Occupy Proper. Paradoxically, to succeed politically, we had to use the attention directed at us to shift attention to a broader public, i.e., to our new and prescient articulation of unification: a public-as-protagonist in an unfolding epoch. We had to avoid staring too much at our own narrow reflection in the mirror—the trap of narcissism—and becoming unwitting accomplices to our opponents’ playbook one-two punch: first, to brand us as special (i.e., as a particular; an other) and then as especially malignant, thereby hindering our ability to catalyze a larger force, by inoculating enough of the public against us.
The movement’s active core had to remain in the story, but as a popular symbol of the values and aspirations of many different sorts of people. Like a guest at a party who suddenly finds herself at the center of everyone’s attention and praise, a nascent movement has to resist talking on and on about herself or allowing the conversation to stay focused on her personally. Her presence may be captivating and novel at first, but soon the other guests will grow bored. Instead, she uses her soapbox to strategically draw attention to other situations, stories, and symbols; situations, stories, and symbols that draw additional scrutiny to her opponents and to the crises she has eloquently named. She speaks not about herself but directly to the identification her audience feels with her cause. She invites that grain of awakening identification to grow. She invites her audience to become the historical actor, the protagonist. She seeks to invent new flashpoints, new moments, featuring new (aligned) actors stepping into history. She lowers the bar for entry and builds many on-ramps. If she is very good, her audience will have taken its first step forward without even realizing, in order to lean in to hear her.
Otherization
Immediately following Occupy Wall Street’s inauguration, its opponents mounted a public relations offensive to negatively brand the burgeoning movement. They attempted to individuate, caricaturize, and otherize the visible actors—the occupiers—in order to inoculate more Americans against identifying with a larger unification—the 99%—and keep them from joining or aligning with the movement. We had to counter this attempt by projecting ourselves as symbolic of a larger unification. Occupy Wall Street served as a powerful floating signifier of a newly imagined unification, and so its opponents predictably sought to nail down the signifier; to fill its positive ambiguous contents with negative stereotypes about an otherized Occupy Proper (i.e., stinky counter-cultural types who drummed all night and defecated on neighbors’ doorsteps).
When Mayor Bloomberg attempted to “clean Zuccotti Park” on October 14, 2011, he was making the first move in what became a ceaseless character assassination campaign. Bloomberg’s talk of “cleaning” was an attempt to frame occupiers as dirty and to use sanitation as a ruse to evict us from Zuccotti Park for seemingly non-political reasons. However, in a jujitsu move, we used the mayor’s ploy to catalyze the broadest visible political support the movement had seen to date. Recognizing Bloomberg’s cleaning attempt for the threat of eviction it was, local and national allied organizations called upon their members to flood the park. By six o’clock on the morning of the attempted cleaning/eviction, the crowd had swelled to several thousand. By 6:30am the deputy mayor had announced that the “cleanup” was off. The whole episode served as free publicity for a rally at Times Square that had already been planned for the next day (as part of a Global Day of Action). There, tens of thousands of New Yorkers joined together for one of Occupy Wall Street’s largest public actions.
Bloomberg and other opponents sought to portray the movement as a particular kind of person doing a particular thing (e.g., “dirty hippies”), rather than a popular response to a common crisis. To counter this strategy, movement organizers sought to bring more kinds of people, visibly engaged in more kinds of things, into the movement. We sought to make and portray the nascent movement as more than a protest, more than an occupation, more than any particular tactic, and more than any one particular type of person. Within its first few months, the movement did indeed become far broader than those who were able to participate in physical occupation. Occupy Wall Street included people like Elora and Monte in rural West Virginia who sent hand-knit hats to occupiers at Zuccotti. It was 69-year-old retired Iowa public school teacher Judy Lonning who attended weekly Saturday marches in Des Moines. It was Nellie Bailey, who helped to organize the Occupy Harlem Mobilization. It was Michael Ellick and other religious leaders who brought Occupy Faith to their congregations. It was Selena Coppa and Joe Carter, who marched in formation to the New York Stock Exchange with 40 fellow “Veterans of the 99%.” The boundaries of Occupy Wall Street were intentionally expanded and blurred. Occupy was everyone who took some kind of action to confront the democratic and economic crises initially named by a few hundred defiant occupiers in New York City’s financial district.
Thus, the needed expansion that Occupy was criticized for lacking was not entirely absent—not even close. But it is certainly the case that not enough of Occupy’s core was oriented toward the task of scaling up these fits and starts.
Occupy fashion
Those of us who worked intentionally to make Occupy Wall Street represent a broader