{"id":2798,"date":"2018-01-05T16:11:09","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T21:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/?p=2798"},"modified":"2018-01-05T16:23:57","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T21:23:57","slug":"reinhold-martin-occupy-thoreau-obedience-and-disobedience-from-walden-to-wall-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/reinhold-martin-occupy-thoreau-obedience-and-disobedience-from-walden-to-wall-street\/","title":{"rendered":"Reinhold Martin | Occupy Thoreau: Obedience and Disobedience from Walden to Wall Street"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Reinhold Martin\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe were born into a world of ghosts and illusions that have haunted our minds our entire lives.\u201d So begins the anonymously authored \u201cCommuniqu\u00e9 1,\u201d which opens the inaugural issue of the journal Tidal<\/em> in a tone that Guy Debord would have recognized, with a nod to Marx and Engels.[i]<\/a> Tidal<\/em>, which was subtitled \u201cOccupy Theory, Occupy Strategy,\u201d first appeared in December 2011, shortly after the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan was forcibly cleared by police. By definition the short-lived journal, which was edited by Natasha Bhagat Singh, Amin Husain, Babak Karmi, Laura Gottesdiener, and Isham Christie, did not formally represent the many, disparate voices assembled at Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. Still, the group that called itself \u201cOccupy Theory\u201d did bring to the transnational Occupy movement fragments of, in their words, \u201cradical thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of these fragments were written by the occupiers, with the notable exception of entries by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (on the general strike, reprinted in issue #2), and by Judith Butler (on precarity, with a longer follow-up, also in issue #2). I\u2019ll refer briefly to these two texts only because they allow me to open a channel that connects with a tradition lying just outside their frame, that may help us think through what we can call the \u201cspatial disobedience\u201d\u2014but also, the spatial obedience\u2014that constituted the occupation itself.<\/p>\n

Summarizing early-twentieth century theories of the general strike, from Du Bois to Luxemburg to Sorel, Spivak notes in passing that tradition\u2019s affinities with the American concept of \u201ccivil disobedience,\u201d which was first formulated by Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century and later adapted by Mohandas K. Gandhi (among others) as \u201cnon-cooperation.\u201d Following the mass uprisings of the 1960s, Hannah Arendt had offered detailed reflections on this concept and its usage, so when Butler uses Arendtian terminology, saying that the bodies assembled in New York and elsewhere without making specific demands were first \u201cexercising a right to appear,\u201d we can see how \u201cdisobedience\u201d and \u201cappearance\u201d go hand in hand.[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n

But appearances can deceive. Returning to that first \u201ccommuniqu\u00e9\u201d and to the mass-mediated \u201cworld of ghosts and illusions\u201d into which its authors were born, we read the following extraordinary lines:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual. That is what we seek to occupy. We seek to rediscover and reclaim that world. Many believe we have come to Wall Street to transact some kind of business with its denizens, to strike a deal. But we have not come to negotiate. We have come to confront the darkness at its source, here, where the Big Apple [New York] sucks in more of the sap from the national tree than it needs or deserves, as if spliced from some Edenic forebear. Serpent-sized worms feast within, engorged on swollen fruit. Here, the world is chewed and digested into bits as tiny and fluid as the electrons that traders use to bring nations and homeowners to their knees.\u201d[iii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, occupation was also a form of withdrawal, an exodus from the capitalist spectacle into a fugitive actuality located, paradoxically, in its midst. Occupy Wall Street thereby bore at least a family resemblance to Thoreau\u2019s self-imposed withdrawal to Walden Pond, albeit in inverted form. As a homeowning naturalist, Thoreau would have recognized the image of a \u201cnational tree\u201d of homeowners sucked dry by serpent-sized worms. Taking pains to remind readers of his own frugality, he noted that the small cabin he built for himself there, about a mile and a half outside of Concord, Massachusetts and about twenty miles west of Boston, cost him a mere $28.12 1\/2.[iv]<\/a> In this, Thoreau was only enacting his friend and Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson\u2019s doctrine of self-reliance, a cornerstone of liberal individualism. One difference from Zuccotti\u2019s occupiers being that in Thoreau\u2019s experience, modernity\u2019s illusions and its material excesses were concentrated not on Wall Street (which did not yet exist), but on Concord\u2019s Main Street.<\/p>\n

Thoreau lived in semi-isolation on Walden Pond for two years, two months, and two days, from 1845 to 1847. About halfway through this carefully planned performance\u2014of disappearance as appearance, we could say\u2014which was punctuated by a steady stream of visitors and regular trips to town, he spent one night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay the Massachusetts poll tax. Thoreau unambiguously opposed slavery in the American South, as he did the 1846-1848 war with Mexico. As part of the so-called Compromise of 1850, white residents of northern states were compelled legally to obey the Fugitive Slave Act and betray former slaves and their descendants living in their midst. Like many other northern abolitionists, Thoreau fiercely denounced this legislation, of which he later wrote that \u201cits natural habitat is in the dirt.\u201d[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thoreau\u2019s night in jail and the circumstances in which it occurred gave rise to the essay that became known as \u201cCivil Disobedience,\u201d a public address that went largely unread when first published in 1849 under the title \u201cResistance to Civil Government,\u201d and only began to achieve notoriety after its posthumous republication, in 1866, under its present title. Thoreau\u2019s most recent biographer, Laura Dassow Walls, shows how the essay\u2019s original title pits the example of the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose self-described \u201cresistance\u201d against his master led ultimately to his freedom, against the dogma promulgated at Harvard (where Thoreau studied) and accepted by the New England elite, of dutiful \u201csubmission\u201d to civil government wherein, as Walls puts it, \u201cthe ultimate social good was a smooth-running social machine.\u201d[vi]<\/a> Thoreau\u2019s own act of resistance, and hence of disobedience, thus centered on the non-payment of the poll tax, which he regarded as especially unjust since payment both acquiesced to conditional citizenship (only those who paid could vote) and materially supported a government whose recognition of slavery he deeply opposed. Though a solitary act, it only made sense as an injunction to his fellow citizens to, as he put it, \u201cLet every man make known what kind of government would command his respect.\u201d For, as Thoreau explained, \u201cI cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my<\/em> government which is the slave\u2019s<\/em> government also.\u201d[vii]<\/a><\/p>\n

By demanding that his government end slavery, Thoreau\u2019s withdrawal of consent through non-payment of the tax thus differed from the Occupy movement\u2019s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a governing political-economic order by withholding specific demands. Far from being a distant or isolated matter, however, slavery was at the time what we could call a universal question in the United States, not because it applied directly to everyone everywhere, but because, as Thoreau argued, every citizen, North and South, was implicated in it, whether they were morally opposed to the institution or not. The quotidian obedience, or passive consent, of the governed with respect to slavery was automatically universalized since \u201cThe mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly but as machines, with their bodies.\u201d Civil disobedience aimed at this mechanization of consent. As Thoreau put it, \u201cif [the injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.\u201d[viii]<\/a><\/p>\n

It is not entirely accidental that in 1964, Mario Savio, a young philosophy student at Berkeley, inaugurated a mass occupation of Sproul Hall with similar language, when he famously urged his fellow participants in the Free Speech Movement to recognize that \u201cThere\u2019s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can\u2019t take part; you can\u2019t even passively take part. And you\u2019ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you\u2019ve got to make it stop.\u201d[ix]<\/a> The Occupy Theory group updated this rage against the machine for a postindustrial society, when they argued in their \u201ccommuniqu\u00e9\u201d that \u201cTelevision, one of the chief culprits of our spiritual vacuum, has revealed that the central action of our time involves rending together experiential units: families, atoms, meanings, psyches. Advertising campaigns have become the central art of our generation.\u201d[x]<\/a> The social machine, in other words, makes connections; it universalizes particulars. For Thoreau, the machinery of slavery coupled with a civil society that profited from it; for Savio and his fellow students schooled in the tactics of the civil rights movement, the \u201cmultiversity\u201d joined techno-science with the military-industrial complex; for Occupy, finance capital joined with the mass media and digital technologies to enable the expropriation of the \u201c99%\u201d by the \u201c1%.\u201d<\/p>\n

If, as Butler and others have argued, New York\u2019s Zuccotti Park indeed became a \u201cspace of appearance\u201d when bodies assembled there and refused to leave or remain quiet, they remade the social machine to which that space belonged and the variously scaled and variously mediated public and counterpublic spheres that overlapped with it. This new machine, which included the space or stage itself, did not come prefabricated, off-the-shelf. It was, as Henri Lefebvre might have said, produced<\/em> out of the innumerable actions, large and small, of its occupants. And if the many individual, store-bought tents that populated the park bore faint echoes of Thoreau\u2019s little cabin, the implied individualism was, by and large, respectfully assimilated to the extraordinarily well-organized collective institutions on-site and off, including a library, kitchen, clinic, teach-ins, working groups, and the general assemblies. In this way the occupation temporarily replaced one polis with another. Still, to understand both its possibilities and its limits we must proceed a little further with Arendt, specifically on the question of civil disobedience.<\/p>\n

The context for Arendt\u2019s own article under that title was the American civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the student revolts of the late 1960s. There, she distinguished the civil disobedient from the conscientious objector, on whom most legal thought tended to focus. Where, Arendt argues, the conscientious objector can effectively act alone, the civil disobedient \u201cnever exists as a single individual; he can function and survive only as a member of a group.\u201d To this she adds the example drawn from legal theory of \u201cindirect disobedience,\u201d wherein disobedients break a particular law, such as a law of trespass, not because they consider that law especially unjust, but to protest, in a concerted group action, other laws, policies, or practices that they do consider unjust.[xi]<\/a> Civil disobedients are, in this strict sense, not individuals guided by moral conscience but \u201corganized minorities, bound together by common opinion, rather than by common interest\u201d who \u201ctake a stand against the government\u2019s policies even if they have reason to assume that these policies are backed by a majority.\u201d[xii]<\/a> In other words, civil disobedients necessarily form publics comparable to the voluntary associations that had captivated de Tocqueville in America a decade before Thoreau moved to Walden. An act of civil disobedience is therefore quintessentially a res publica<\/em>, a public thing, and hence a potential basis for constituting the federated democratic republics\u2014syndicates, workers\u2019 councils, soviets, associations\u2014that Arendt favored when pressed to exemplify her political thought.<\/p>\n

There are many ways in which Occupy Wall Street plausibly constituted one such republic within what we might call the larger Occupy federation. Were there time, I would have liked to connect this to Arendt\u2019s admiration for Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s \u201crepublican program\u201d for the revolution, which opposed the vanguard party with the axiom, quoted by Arendt, that \u201cgood organization does not precede action but is the product of it.\u201d[xiii]<\/a> For now, though, I want to conclude with some more specifics on Occupy Wall Street as a form of \u201cindirect disobedience\u201d in which the res publica<\/em> that formed there relied for its existence not only upon tactically broken laws, but upon a conspicuous, perhaps willful blind spot.<\/p>\n

My colleague Bernard Harcourt has persuasively suggested the term \u201cpolitical disobedience\u201d to describe the activities of the Occupy movement in general.[xiv]<\/a> As I\u2019ve mentioned, I suggest \u201cspatial disobedience\u201d to describe the tactic of occupation in particular, which operated in the indirect manner described by Arendt. When the tents started appearing in Zuccotti Park, they did so in violation of the city ordinances covering Privately Owned Public Spaces, or POPS, of which the park is one. This form of urban space is one of many symptoms of neoliberal development, wherein, in this case, the adjacent US Steel headquarters received a zoning credit for supplying the pseudo-public \u201camenity\u201d of a privately owned park, much as the JP Morgan Bank received a bonus for providing the privately owned pseudo-public atrium adjacent to its former headquarters on Wall Street, where many of the Occupy working groups met. The occupation did not target these provisions; in fact, it exploited them, in order to target the neoliberal order as such.<\/p>\n

Yet, in order to maintain the fragile coalition that gathered around its res publica<\/em> of indirect disobedience, the occupation had to turn its back, quite literally, on another, related injustice. Zuccotti Park is, in fact, closer to Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center, than it is to Wall Street. Though the park itself slopes down from Broadway, away from Wall Street and toward Ground Zero, the encampment symbolically and spatially oriented itself uphill and to the southeast, toward Wall Street, the old center of finance capital, several blocks away. If anything, by the time of the occupation the symbolic \u201ccenter\u201d of finance had shifted to the other side of the World Trade Center site, which is flanked by the World Financial Center to the west and, just to the north, the relocated headquarters of Goldman Sachs, which was under construction at the time with the help of $115 million in public subsidies and $1.65 billion in tax-free bonds made available through post-9\/11 federal incentive programs.[xv]<\/a> Between the two Wall Streets, old and new, sits the \u201csacred ground\u201d of what was then a vast construction site, and is now a publicly subsidized real estate development dripping with the blood of thousands who were sacrificed in the post-9\/11 wars, with a soaring, neo-Gothic cathedral of shopping (\u201cThe Oculus\u201d) looming over the sunken memorial at its center.<\/p>\n

The World Trade Center memorial opened on September 11, 2011; the Zuccotti Park occupation began a week later, on September 17th. But, a few small demonstrations at the bank headquarters aside, there was not and could not have been an Occupy Ground Zero. That public site was, in a very real sense, sacrosanct. Organized disobedience there would have been regarded as terror or treason, and would have immediately risked a violent and possibly extralegal reaction. The wars that Ground Zero falsely underwrote could be opposed, and the many protests against them surely paved the way for Occupy, as did the Arab uprisings that previous spring. In her reflections on violence, Arendt cautioned against identifying political power, which always derives from the people (whether democratically or not), with physical force, which is always instrumental\u2014that is, technological\u2014in nature.[xvi]<\/a> But in Lower Manhattan, any such distinction was erased, not secured, when the raucously, radically disobedient Occupy Wall Street practiced a kind of spatial obedience<\/em> by respecting that \u201csacred ground\u201d in a manner that was reminiscent of the Kantian injunction to \u201cargue, but obey.\u201d Like sweat from an enslaved body, the oil from the 9\/11 wars ultimately flowed back to Wall Street. Yet, turning its back on the ferociously, violently nationalistic polity that had already assembled, phantom-like, around Ground Zero, Occupy\u2014perhaps of necessity\u2014ceded the space immediately adjacent to its little republic to a power that did not exist before the law, but beyond it.<\/p>\n

~~~<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> \u201cCommuniqu\u00e9 1,\u201d Tidal<\/em> 1 (December 2011): 3.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, \u201cGeneral Strike,\u201d and Judith Butler, \u201cFor and Against Precarity,\u201d Tidal<\/em> 1 (December 2011): 8-9, 12-13.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> Henry David Thoreau, \u201cWalden\u201d [1854], in Walden and Other Writings<\/em>, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 46.<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Henry David Thoreau, \u201cSlavery in Massachusetts\u201d [1854], in Walden and Other Writings<\/em>, 702.<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Walls, 251.<\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a> Henry David Thoreau, \u201cCivil Disobedience\u201d [1866], in Walden and Other Writings<\/em>, 668, 670.<\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a> Ibid., 669, 677.<\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a> Mario Savio, \u201c\u2019Bodies upon the Gears\u2019 Speech at FSM Rally, Sproul Hall Steps, 2 December 1964,\u201d in The Essential Mario Savio<\/em>, 188.<\/p>\n

[x]<\/a> \u201cCommuniqu\u00e9 1,\u201d 3.<\/p>\n

[xi]<\/a> Hannah Arendt, \u201cCivil Disobedience,\u201d in Crises of the Republic<\/em> (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1972), 56.<\/p>\n

[xii]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[xiii]<\/a> Ibid., 52.<\/p>\n

[xiv]<\/a> Bernard Harcourt, \u201cPolitical Disobedience,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 33-55.<\/p>\n

[xv]<\/a> Paul Goldberger, \u201cShadow Building: The House that Goldman Built,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em> (17 May 2010), online at https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2010\/05\/17\/shadow-building.<\/p>\n

[xvi]<\/a> Hannah Arendt, \u201cOn Violence,\u201d in Crises of the Republic<\/em>, 103-198.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Reinhold Martin\u00a0 \u201cWe were born into a world of ghosts and illusions that have haunted our minds our entire lives.\u201d So begins the anonymously authored \u201cCommuniqu\u00e9 1,\u201d which opens the inaugural issue of the journal Tidal in a tone that… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1874,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-7-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1874"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/uprising1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}