The Political Ontology of OWS

THE POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF DIS-ORDER

space-creation, movements and bodiesa political ethnography of OWS

REGULATING LINES

An inevitable element of ArchitectureThe necessity for order. The regulating line is a guarantee

against willfulness. It brings satisfaction to the understanding. The regulating line is a means to an end; it is not a recipe.Its choice and the modalities of expression given to it are an

integral part of architectural creation. –Le Corbusier1

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the spaceover which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as means of

communication in service of striated space. It is a vital concernof every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control

migrations, and, more generally, to establish a zone of rightsover an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the

ecumenon.—Gilles Deleuze2

A TREATISE ON WRITING:

In writing I attempt to find resonances between themes within the fields ofpolitics, philosophy, social choreography, and geography.

The reader should sit with each theme—unpack each impression, each aphorism.

1 Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. BN Publishing, 2008. 3.2 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 385-386.

We don’t think with precise logos, with structured and ordered thought. Wethink rhizomatically—linking themes that don’t obviously connect except by

lines-of-flight. We create connective-tissue only after the fact.

My endeavors to write are therefore connected to this: the brain is arhizomatic network of seemingly unhinged thoughts and bodily behavior.

Thus, writing needn’t be read linearly. It can be read in-parallel motions,out of order, looking for abstract interconnections.

In my thesis I write against the order of things: the police and cartographicforces that order bodies and space. I desire to reflect this impulse in myform as a thinker and writer. I am trying to find the resonances betweenprojects in politics, philosophy, and geography, and therefore I can only

justly place in-parallel my findings. Linearizing it would be undermining thestrength in the smoothness of thought.

INTRO

Politics is dis-order.

The American Empire is on the decline.

Politics is radically excluded.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a singularity among a multiplicity of

alternatives that embody political, economic, philosophical, and

topological critiques of neoliberalism. The value of examining

OWS is to explore its political ontology: what structures it has

and what formal human relations it troubles in its radical

openness and indeterminacy.

The stakes are incredibly high for today’s political movements:

late-stage Capitalism has dismantled the world economic-political

structure in irreparable ways, rising threats of a major

ecological crisis loom, and neoliberal State apparati have

instituted the most repressive restrictions on civil rights,

employing unchecked police-force that increasingly has the power

to reduce rights-bearing citizens to homo sacer, to bare life.3

However, the American Empire is on the decline.

Neoliberalism hides less and less every day.

3 (((Signaling the contemporary Capitalist model that includes increased abstraction of finance Capital, the breakdown of international boundaries by globalization, and the greatest disposability of labor.)))

While a long genealogy of social movements exists, OWS is unique

within the contemporary American context. OWS focuses on space in

a way that expands the very concept to include not just physical

space, but also political space, economic space, psychogeographic

space, safe(r) space, and idea space, etc. OWS is responsible for

a broad breaking-down of privatized, commodified and regimented

territories—by liberating both physical and ideological space.

This deterritorializing force, coupled with a radical political

framework, allows OWS to entirely reconstruct the valuation of

life, the ways that bodies interact, the way movement(s) occur(s)

in space, the etho-politio-economic relations, and the essence of

how being-in-common occurs.4

This paper sets out to trace the restrictive police-force that

orders/organizes bodies and keeps private space private in

Zuccotti (fences/ barricades/ walls), and see these forces in

4 (((Although exceeding the breath of this paper, many issues have arisen out of the questions of bodies and oppression. A strong critique exists for the exclusivity of OWS and much activism-at-large, for it being more a venue for self-forgiving whites and not establishing of cross-racial solidarity. My point in addressing this issue isn’t to marginalize this question, but to acknowledge that any short analysis would remain tokenizing, and that out of respect, the issue of brownness needs to be charted in full.)))

contrast to the opening/ dis-order/ indeterminacy of OWS. The

freedom of movement in space makes the 'commons' happen, and is

an incredibly rare event—a clear example of 'politics’ in the

contemporary US.5

OWS reminds us of what is at stake when we speak of politics,

socially and ontologically—our fundamental understanding of

humanness.

* *

*

On September 17th, 2011, a rag-tag collection of approximately

2000 bodies assembled in then-named, “Zuccotti Park,” located in

New York City’s Financial District. Protesters hammered through a

week-long process of learning how to use consensus for collective

decision-making and how to occupy space. Within days Zuccotti

Park transformed into Liberty Square, harmonizing with, but not

re-creating that Spring’s protests in Tahrir Square, Cairo, and

5 (((Again, politics is not Statism, nor is it found in the election booth— politics is dis-order, it is resistance to policing and repression.)))

allowing for a radical resignification, redefinition and

reenchantment of space.6 It was by this point that Occupy Wall

Street (OWS) had truly begun. Many of the New York Occupiers

focused their attention to space: to redefining and reclaiming

public space.

Drawing upon the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Erin Manning,

Jacques Rancière, Jean Luc-Nancy and many others enables us to

explore in depth the political and ontological impact of the

creation of space that has destratified and deterritorialized by

the unmeasurable shifting of movement-through.

It is deeply generative to understand OWS’s political ontology,

its essential political qualities. OWS’s political ontology thus

is located in its radical indeterminacy—its essential and

political openness to be moved, to be creative and creative in-

relation, and to allow for singular sharing (out) to occur as

part of a larger network of bodies and desire. All of these

formulations oppose OWS with the State and police-force.

6 (((Its important to keep in mind the major difference between OWS and Egypt,on the scale of mass protest and actualized police violence.)))

OWS exists in limbo. OWS is not reactive to the existing

legislative structure, and instead, creates a new political

project that links public space to a critique of Capitalism and

the State in such a complex way that leaves OWS in a period of

becoming. This powerful unifying essence is its very

indeterminacy: the fact that anyone can interpret what OWS is,

can have their own OWS, and can share (out) within it. Radically

linearized spacio-socially are the forces of the State: hard-

borders, territories, and hierarchies. This linearity is space-

restrictive—commons-destructive—apolitical. Therefore, in

opposition to OWS is becoming-solidified, becoming-recognizable.

A key threat that looms over OWS is stratification. Understood by

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, “The

function of deterritorialization is the movement by which “one”

leaves the territory”7 Deterritorialization is the movement that

cuts through territory, that breaks down existing urban spaces

and relations. It destratifies borders, destabilizes hierarchy

7 Ibid., 504.

and, dis-organizes order. Deterritorialization is space-creative

—allowing for the birth of new ideas, new worlds, new politics.

OWS is exactly this deterritorializing force required to

challenge the logic of police-force and Late-Capitalism.8

OWS’s operations have greatly re-organized the Political

Community’s relationship to public and private space. Those

occupiers have psychogeographically and semiotically transformed

space from Liberty Square to Zuccotti Park. Functions such as

police-force and barricades hierarchize and limit movement,

whereas the more open-ended and multitudinous political-movements

of a full time occupation, with tents and stands, all change and

morph space and its use. All of these factors: bodies, geography,

and space all change in relation with one-another and are highly

interconnected.

Crucial in OWS is the expression of radical excess: excess to

Capitalism’s restrictive organization and efficient flows.

Excessive is the creative potentiality channeled toward multiple

8 (((Later in this paper we will deal in greater depth the idea of OWS as deterritorializing.)))

ends: art, economy, and most essentiality, to a new political-

being—a new horizontality—a new democracy of consensus. It is

here that this ideological rhizome grows, into small farming

communities and megacities that would otherwise not have General

Assemblies or occupied space.9

Political and ethical life explored by radicals, of which OWS is

one network, troubles the very essence of what it means to be

human. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, what is essential to true

political and ethical life is adherence to being-in-common, the

project of recognizing the fundamental similarities that occur in

human life. This project requires an understanding of sharing

(out)—the space for us to all express our ideas and beliefs. We

find in OWS congruence—the many becoming one.10

THE STAKES

9 (((According to Deleuze, a rhizome is a decentralized, non-hierarchical, horizontal network (of roots, bodies, or concepts) that runs counter to a linear and arboresque relationality.)))10 (((Again, further on in this paper, we will address in far greater depth Jean-Luc Nancy’s notions of sharing (out) and congruence.)))

Capital’s axiom is all encompassing: the axiom of Capital is the

force that dominates all forms: all ‘so-called politics,’

advertising, ideology, human-rights projects, etc. These forms

all subversively, invisibly, and roguishly contribute to nothing

else but the end of goal of Capitalism, toward promoting the

expansion of consumption.

The stakes of today’s social paradigm are that EVERYTHING IS IN

PLACE TO EXCLUDE POLITICS: from the desiring-producing machines

that interpellate us as good consumers, to the police-force that

keeps a society moving morally, to the machinations of biopower

that keep us voting and producing, and finally, to the mediated

spectacles that distract us from whats real—from what’s

politics.11

11 (((What’s unbearable is that people who self-ascribe as “very Liberal” on their virtual presentations of self can offer vivid critiques of Capitalism, suggest to us that the solution is to consume more green products, to buy locally, as though this world can remain exactly the same as long as we consume differently, that hybrid-car ads can rest next to Chanel ads... We know were fucked when a US radical publisher, semiotext(e) can publish and sell a book for $15.00, The Coming Insurrection, which was both written and banned in France for its connection to “The Invisible Committee” and the “Tarnac Nine,” anti-Capitalist groups identified as a “Terrorist organization by both French and US officials.)))

The Neoliberal paradigm is the most subversive force in history.

Capitalisms axiom literally has no limit, is it itself a limit, the

limit. All concepts and ways of being are coextensive with

Capitalism—live within it. Police-force is in place to smother

the threat of politics, which is the only true threat to

Capitalism: the threat that keeps Western ideology out of

religious Muslim States (for example): values—living-in-adherence

—prefigurative politics.The stakes of re-claiming public space—

reclaiming the commons, are massive. To create space outside of

the all-encompassing axiom of Capital is to create politics.

HISTO

In some senses, OWS began on Sept. 17th 2011. What began as a

public-private park in lower Manhattan has gained an entirely new

topology—a new organization with a new set of functions. OWS

began as a tentative occupation of a ‘privately owned public

space’ in NYC’s Financial District.12 Over the course of 2 short

12 (((Zuccotti Park is owned by Brookfield properties, directed by Diana L. Taylor, former NYS Superintendent of Banks, and partnered to Mayor Michael

weeks, OWS had completely transformed from a tentative encampment

to a full-time occupation, with a major dining-operation, at

least twenty working groups, each with daily meetings and info-

boards/tables, and eventually tents. The occupiers of Liberty

Square resignified space, transforming the park into a highly

politicized zone, becoming a hub and model for the other

occupations that would begin that Fall.

In some sense, OWS began long before September 17th. In July

2011, a call was put out by the activist-oriented magazine

Adbusters to occupy Wall Street, an action that would symbolically

attack Finance Capitalisms’s stranglehold on global resources and

that would resonate with the other recent anti-State and anti-

Capitalist protests around the globe.

My participation in OWS goes back to September 17th, where I

attended the first OWS GA as a skeptical-yet-intellectually-

radical grad student—ready to camp for the first few days, but

unsure as to what I was participating in and its efficacy. I

Bloomberg.)))

quickly learned what it takes to be an activist: I started to

understand consensus processes and gained organizing skills. I

helped to set up the Direct Action Working Group, which

facilitates marches, events, and foster OWS’s more tactically

radical protesters.13 Around the same time I was beaten by the

NYPD and arrested on several occasions for being in the wrong

place at the wrong time, or, more accurately, for even

considering to express my beliefs—for trying to find consistency

between my acts and thoughts, which galvanized my (and many

others’) radical stance against the NYPD and other forces of

order and oppression. We were looking to live ethics.

In actuality OWS’s roots are even deeper, drawing upon an entire

genealogy of radical grassroots movement-building, anarchist-

(de)-organizing, and NYC’s history of squatting, housing rights—

which all mark moments of politics that deal with habitations and

habitualizations of space. The Occupy Movement gains much of its

structure from recent global protests of power, all of which

13 (((I also met a group of die-hard full-time activist, many of whom came to OWS with anarchist philosophy, who became my OWS friend-base: my new family. As a intellectual anti-Statist and anti-Capitalist, it was easy to find my allegiance to anarchism's call to action.)))

revolve around the issue of space. From the radical Indignados

Movement, where the ongoing protests of banks and the government

turned many Spanish cities into semi-permanent protest

encampments, to similar tent cities in Israel, to more militant

reclamations of public space occurring in the Arab Spring (such

as Tahrir Square), space has become the central question: the

very political ontology of these movements.14

Possibly the most significant moment in OWS’s history since its

genesis is the eviction of Zuccotti Park by the NYPD on November

15th, “#N15.” Two days before the two-month anniversary, a

national sting-operation aimed at ending the Occupy Movement,

facilitated by the Department of Homeland Security, marked the

end of the physical occupation of space in most cities across the

US. No more tents, no more full time occupiers. Well before the

eviction, the movement had already begun drift into squats,

apartments, and off-site meetings, which was furthered by the

14 (((OWS has a strong genealogy, and isn’t singular in its creation of space,or in its political indeterminacy. The point and urgency of thinking through the ways that movement produces space is because we desperately need politicalprojects to break with the harsh and nearly-invisible ordering, stratification, and territorialization of society, necessitated by Neoliberalism.)))

events of #N15. Occasional large events still fill Liberty

Square, but it now stands as a largely symbolic space—actual work

of OWS occurs whether or not there is a a full-time physical

site.15

What we understand from the Occupy Movement is that the use and

conceptualization of space is a both a political and

philosophical question. Mass movements of the politically and

economically disenfranchised are motivated by feelings of a lack

of resources and a lack of access to the political stage.16

People often feel like ‘their voice isn’t heard’ in politics,

which is to say that the highly oppressive political structures

haven’t yet recognized these people as speech-bearing, logos-

wielding individuals.17 History is witness to the fact that

rioting, looting, and property destruction are not meaningless

violent outbursts, but totally legitimized forms of resisting

oppression and expressing a politics.18

15 (((At of the writing of this paper, OWS is still in full force, going on eight months.)))16 (((Obviously, not all activists and occupiers are disenfranchised.)))17 (((Logos here signifies the rational and ordered mind.)))18 Piven, Francis Fox and Richard Cloward. Poor Peoples Movements: Why they Succeeded,How They Fail. New York: Vintage, 1978.

S1. PRIVATELY OWNED PUBLIC SPACE

Zuccotti Park is officially considered a “privately owned public

space,” (POPS) which is a zoning code with a particularly

troubling valence. According to the NYC Department of City

Planning:

A Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) is an amenityprovided, constructed and maintained by a propertyowner/developer for public use in exchange for additionalfloor area. The 1961 Zoning Resolution inaugurated theincentive zoning program in New York City. The programencouraged private developers to provide spaces for thepublic within or outside their buildings by allowing themgreater density in certain high-density districts. 19

Springing up to help abet corporations at risk of being fined for

constructing in excess to legal-agreements, POPS become legal

grey-zones without considerable past-casework, and put the

legality of OWS’s encampment of Zuccotti Park in limbo. At least

two questions remain: does Brookfield Properties, the owners of

Zuccotti Park, get to decide whether occupiers should be kicked

out, and, if so, when and how? And, what legal ground does the

NYPD have to evacuate a POPS?

19 NYC Dept. of City Planning.

There is extreme performative-force behind calling Zuccotti a

‘privately owned public space.’ What a POPS signifies is that

public space can now be taken over by private business, by

private interests, allowing businesses to create and enforce any

regulation they desire. Most significantly, since a POPS is still

a public space—a space for the people—for demos, this public can

be denied access to space at the drop of the hat. The demos

includes the masses, the homeless, the disabled, the poor—the

people for whom there is nothing else except the commons. When

the commons is restricted, which is increasingly the case in NYC,

the poorest, most marginalized, and most nomadic of the masses

are dis-placed. This happens all too much in POPS, and the

eviction(s) of Zuccotti Park is just one example.

The performativity of a POPS is thus dependent on legal weight—

discursive weight. A POPS’ violent discursive force actualizes

the privatization of space. A ‘privately owned public space’ is,

in fact, not unique to NYC, but emblematic of the very conditions

of Late-stage Capitalism. The commons, as public space, is the

space where politics occurs—the space where movement is free to

move itself is privatized, striated, commodified, ordered and

oriented towards Capitalist ends. Privately owned public space is

space that has been reterritorialized—taken from the demos, the

people. In place of the people, only the police remain, restrict

movement, manage bodies. Police-force operates in private space

to squelch politics. Thus the commons is lost when public space

becomes privatized.

POLITIC

S2. THE EXCEPTIONALITY OF THE NYPD

Thinking of the political stakes of OWS is enhanced by a

historically and juridically-minded perspective. Turning to

Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of Sovereignty and the State

helps to digest the ways that legal and juridical slippages

produce a State of Exception (SoE), and how that reflects the

exceptionality of the power of the NYPD. According to Agamben in

State of Exception, a SoE:

Constitutes a ‘point of imbalance between public law and political fact...the State of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in

contemporary politics. The State of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept.20

SoEs are moments of slippage between law, legal protections of

individuals, and the political facts of life. Force doesn't

always correspond to law, certain bodies are removed of their

citizen status. This slippage is violent: the force of law

becomes the force over life: biopower. A SoE is apolitical: it

dissolves civic and political institutions. Agamben hauntingly

uncovers how sovereign power is unchecked by legal restraint.

Outside of law are those conditions that mark the current US

apolitical military State climate and echo the USA Patriot Act—

the stripping of civil rights. The unchecked use of the notion of

a War on Terror has enabled and amplified Ex-president George

Bush’s roguish exceptionalities of power at home and abroad. The

US’s SoE has enabled entirely unfounded modes of warfare and has

erased the legal status of the individual.

20 Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: UChicago Press, 2005. 1-4.

SoE defines NYC’s current police State: the NYPD exists in an

exceptional position, almost entirely invulnerable to meaningful

scrutiny and checks of power. Within the NYPD there is fierce

repression of dissidence and a heavy emphasis on loyalty. Besides

media spectacle, the only significant check on police power are

class-action lawsuits, which are very slow, and complaints

against individual officers, which, like a court martial, almost

always are reviewed by a board of the officer's peers: other

police officers, who are very unlikely to strip a friend of his

or her job. Through the passage of the National Defense

Authorization Act of 2012, the NYPD is now legally-protected in

detaining US Citizens indefinitely without a warrant. If martial

law implies the reduction or negation of legal frameworks that

entangle martial force, then NYC has been in Martial Law at least

since 9/11/2001.

S3. STRUCTURE

OWS’s political structure is formally anarchic,

horizontal/diagonal, rhizomatic, and employs consensus-based

direct-democratic practices to come to collective decisions.21

Decentralized networks of bodies, political-organisms, and social

collaboration shape the way that individuals and the collective,

singularities and the multiplicity interact. This rhizomatic

network extends out to other organs that preexist OWS, like Labor

Unions, (Im)migrant groups, homeless organizations, etc—this

structure allows for a fair amount of autonomy.22

S4: RADICAL LIFE / SHARING (OUT) / BEING-IN-

COMMON

OWS sustains and is sustained by radical life: squatting,

dumpster-diving, freeganism, community-gardens, permaculture, and

mutual aid. These practices promote a sense of “Dual Power.” As a

model, Dual Power suggests that while the goal of anarchist

21 (((The theory of the rhizome will be explained in full later in this paper.)))22 (((OWS is organized around a larger General Assembly (GA) that allocates funds and consents on proposals, and is the most inclusive, and possibly most dysfunctional body in OWS. The GA is designed for people to be able to walk off the street and participate, but offers no system of accountability, and isoften stalled. In response, smaller break-out groups formulated: ideological and identity-based caucuses, working groups (WG’s) and affinity groups (AG’s).Most occupiers participate in one or more WG’s, like Direct Action (DA), whichhave a large amount of freedom in decision making. AG’s are the most autonomously-structured bodies, usually small circles of friends who participate in direct action in and around larger events, like marches.)))

organizing is to block the flows of Capital and to tear down the

State, that what also needs to be proven is that viable

alternatives to Capitalism and the State exist within networks of

people, within a group willing to be radically accountable of the

resources they produce and consume, to take care of each-other,

and to share ideas and life in the commons.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas of “Being-in-Common” and “Sharing (Out)”

elucidate the philosophical depth of an experience of extreme

congruence, communal life, and inclusivity that OWS and other

radical social organizations attempt to adhere to. To start, we

should see ‘being-in-common’ suggesting an understanding of life

that is shared and experienced by all. Far more experientially

rich than a Marxist/ Statist idea of Communism, being-in-common

relates to an ontological position—a way of being fundamental to

humans. Nancy says in his essay on “The Compearance,”

We compear: we come together (in)to the world. It is not that there is a simultaneous arrival of several distinct units...but that there is not a coming (in)to the world thatis not radically common; it is even the “common” itself. To come into the world is to be-in-common.23

23 Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Compearance: From the Existence of, “Communism” to the Community of “Existence.” Political Theory Vol. 20. No 3. Trans. Tracy B. Strong. Sage Publications, Inc, 1992. 373-4.

What is shared is our common co-existence. The most fundamental

condition of life is common-experience. Nancy wants to avoid

seeing common as banal, but instead as the one saving grace of

humanity. Communism isn't a political option, but an ‘ontological

condition,’ one that understands that ‘being’—the essence and

experience of humanness—is in common.24

Many political philosophers argue that politics isn’t located in

voting: in our form of democracy. Following this logic, Nancy

thinks that the political can only be reached by understanding

how it could exist outside the State and within community, and

within the commons.

OWS is able to channel this sense of being-in-common through its

inclusivity and open structure. The notion of in-common is

exceptional for the people of NYC, who so often avoid their very

ontological condition—who, on the train, ignore each-other and

try to sustain their (seemingly) rock-hard interiorities. This

makes New Yorkers less likely to take care of one another and

24 Ibid., 390.

share space. Again, OWS activates the political by exploring new

commonness and by forcing humans to recognize their ontological

position of being-in-common.

Also fruitful for our conceptualization of OWS is Nancy’s notion

of sharing (out):

The share of what is without value—the share of the sharing (out) of the incalculable, which is thus, strictly speaking,unshareable—exceeds politics. The element in which the incalculable can be shared (out) goes by the name of love, friendship, or thought, knowledge or emotion, but not politics—in any case, not democratic politics... It is precisely the expectation of a political sharing (out) of the incalculable that leads to disappointment with democracy. 25

What we can garner from Nancy is that in a democracy too much

onus is placed on whether we all experience an equal share (of

goods/ideas). Hatred for democracy stems from never being able to

take what one wants or give what one has, but instead having to

arithmetically divide-up goods and ideology. Nancy seeks a State

that has a separate place for politics (organization) and for

public/ ideological sharing (out). Sharing (out) is incalculable,

qualitative, unmeasurable by arithmetic, and relative to

25 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Truth of Democracy. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brualt and Micael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 17.

individuals. What’s shared out has no absolute value and can only

be experienced on an individual level. Politics should respect

this separate place for sharing (out).26

OWS is a site where an incredible amount of sharing (out) is

experienced. Different than a town gall meeting, a General

Assembly (GA) in OWS, at least in theory, is not run by

individuals who have hierarchical authority over the attendees. A

GA is more open, and allows each member to create topics of

conversation and to vote. A GA is designed to allow every

individual to share (out) their ideas and sense for where the

movement is heading, and what kinds of proposals would help the

occupation along. In the park space was created for autonomous

and group religious-practice, drug-use, performances, teach-ins,

workshops and rituals—further ways that (a group of) individuals

can share (out) what is excessive-to-politics—values—into the

collective.

26 (((Nancy also argues that any State needs two forces to operate, a functional political order, one that organizes bodies and channels the national spirit, and the other force—the civic, theological order that allows for ideology, for individual sharing (outs) of beliefs and resources.)))

S5: RANCIÈRE POLITICS AND POLICE-FORCE

Jacques Rancière’s complicated theorization of the relationship

between politics and police-force helps us to place these two

occurrences in juxtaposition. For Rancière, politics occurs,

“Because, or when, the natural order of the shepard kings, the

warlords, or property owners is interrupted by a freedom that

crosses up and makes real the ultimate equality on which any

social order rests.”27 Politics is a rare event we see in the

moments that break from order, from law, and from ownership.

Politics returns to the ideological premise of democracy/ the

State—a measure of incalculable and (in)equality, or space—just

like that which Nancy speaks of.

Rancière defines the police as, “Essentially, the law, generally

implicitly, that defines a parties share or lack of it....the

police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the

allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of

saying.”28 Police is the ordering force. Rancière uses police in

27 Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 16. 28 Ibid., 29.

a way that underlines to understand a larger juridico-logical

practice that State apparati deploy to restrict, manage, and

manipulate bodies, and to control movement (social and

individual). He positions police-force against politics. Again,

politics is:

Whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration. Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a places’ destination...political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of police order. 29

Politics is the break from rigid order, from rigid organization

of bodies and parts. Political activity changes relations between

populations, movement, and space—politics opens space.

Since the event that triggered total sovereign exceptionality,

9/11, NYC has been completely dominated by a space-restrictive,

rigid police-force, touting anti-terrorist rhetoric and wielding

exceptionality from power, this police-ordering keeps NYC’s flows

of Capital un-breached. OWS radically opens up politics by

tearing open new space(s), redistributing the sensible, impeding

29 Ibid., 29-30.

flows in the street, and challenging the hard logics which

restrict public (use of) space. OWS challenges the privatization

of space on an onto-political level.

S6: DELEUZE—RHIZOMES, DETERRITORIALIZATION,

RETERRITORIALIZATION

Understanding Deleuzian concepts like the rhizome,

deterritorialization and reterritorialization is crucial to

shaping a rich, ontological notion of how politics and movement

oppose, configure, and are re-configured police order and State.

To begin, the rhizome, is a complex relation of forces, bodies,

ideas, language, and time. With interlocutor Felix Guattari, in A

Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze suggests that, “The rhizome itself

assumes very diverse forms...Any point of a rhizome can be

connected to any other thing, and must be.”30 A rhizome is a

series of interconnected parts with no particular proscribed

form.31 Understood rhizomatically, OWS becomes a network of

30 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 7.31 (((Rhizomes both structured by relations of force that attempt to organize and stratify (laws, rules) and also as the movements that undermine this very

bodies, organizations, and political-economic forces that

challenges hierarchical and arboresque organization. Its parts

operate with a high amount of autonomy; however, they contain

some abstract, but crucial lines of orientation. OWS draws

together a rhizome of rhizomes—an actual rhizome in Liberty

Square, a virtual rhizome of ideas, of internet

interconnectedness, and the many Occupy Movement rhizomes that

populate the whole world.

Deterritorialization is the movement away from structure, logic,

situated social codes, and striation. Reterritorialization is the

process that reinscribes these structures—it stratifies,

solidifies, and returns-from-chaos the unhinging movement of

deterritorialization. These two processes cannot be understood,

nor do they take place, without each-other.32

Furthering a complex analysis notion of the political are the war

machine and the State apparatus, which can be understood as

operating by way of the dual processes of deterritorialization

attempt at organization.))) 32 Ibid., 10.

and reterritorialization. For Deleuze and Guattari, the forces of

the State and law are the forces of empires, structure, clear

identify, defined borders and territories. The war machine

assembles a nomadic band external to the State apparatus’s

territory and law.

The forces of nomadism, of the war machine, and of

deterritorialization are always politicized—operating outside of

the State by traversing borders, breaking laws, and also by

undermining the very meaning that holds up State’s territory and

law. It is here we can locate OWS’s politics, as outside of

politics-at-large, but in the moments that break with order. The

State and law are forces that attempt to reterritorialize this

lost ground— this lost sense. OWS is war-machine—a nomadic band

that fights rigidity, order, political-economic logics, the

State, and police-force. A key goal of OWS is to remain non-

vertical, non-arboresque, but instead open and horizontal.

(((In the following section, we will examine more thoroughly how Deleuze and Guattari’s

concepts of de/reterritorialization, war-machine, and striation/ smooth space enrich a

political analysis of OWS and the NYPD)))

S7: OWS POLITICALLY + ONTOLOGICALLY OPPOSED NYPD

To think how OWS deterritorializes and reterritorializes is to

think of its very political ontology. The destratification,

desegmentation, and smoothing of rigid logics destabilizes the

way we consider politics in the world. No longer are we supposed

to find empowerment in participating in representative democracy—

no longer are we accountable to participate in that system. What

most mass-protests elucidate is that politics happens in the

street. What happens in the street is discursive—when the means

to other politically efficacious action is cut off, riots become

discourse.

OWS is deterritorialized, but also reterritorialized—what occurs

when occupations and GAs are set up in towns across the US is the

establishment of a new mode of political organization. By

formulating something concrete, like a direct democracy,

occupations are no longer indeterminate, in-becoming, but become

solid political structures.

Capitalism is deterritorialized by OWS. Those participants of

radical life become examples of the ways that economic

noncompliance works: squatting, dumpster diving, food-autonomy,

growing food, and not having a (wage slave) job are some examples

of how Capitalism is deterritorialized by radical life. Some

structures, such as mutual aid, are built upon the premise of

“Dual Power,” which is to say that anarchist organizing shouldn’t

just attempt to ‘smash the State’ and ‘end Capitalism,’ but also

offer positive and horizontal rhizomatic-networks of aid: free

stores, soup kitchens and organizations like Food not Bombs are

examples of existing nodes of mutual-aid. These examples are

more-or-less structural, and have therefore reterritorialized an

anti-Capitalist economic formation.

Deterritorialized are laws—the need to have regimented and

oppressive legal-juridical frameworks is called into question.

The arrest of 600 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge, with is

massive-global-media-event reverberation, has clogged the jails,

the courts, and makes the entire police-legal infrastructure look

outmoded, unproductive, and abusive.

OWS is very much opposed to the formulations of police-force:

riot squads and barricades are some of the forces that OWS

resists most, both structurally and ontologically. On the other

hand, non-permitted marches that move into the street at will,

flash mobs, creative actions, black-bloc tactics, and riots all

are blockages to the flows of Capital and communication.

Returning to Rancière, we are able to see these moments of urban

resistance, of destratification and deterritorialization as the

moments of politics—the real break from State orderings.

Political, not because it is reactive-against electoral politics,

but political in its open, creative, indetermination—the highest

fear of police-force is indeterminacy, open-structures, and

potentiality. The fear is thus that the forces of the State

apparatuses: police, law, media, and elections might

reterritorialize ground won (deterritorialized) by OWS. Allowing

OWS to become-party is among the most damning reformist and

reterritorializing prospects. Reterritorialization also occurs by

way of microfascisms, small forces of order that attempt to

destroy potentiality within OWS. Leaders popping up in a

“leaderless revolution” would become (or perhaps is already) a

site of lost indeterminacy.

Sovereignty itself becomes deterritorialized by radical

movements. Deterritorialized is not simply sovereign power, but

the very legitimacy and necessity of vertical sovereignty—

arboresque relations of knowledge and power. What we see with

OWS, therefore, is that positive organization (the good kind of

re-organization/reterritorialization) can exist within the

negative spaces deterritorialization carves out: political-space,

economic-space, idea-space, etc. Space-from—liberty is needed

first to allow for the space-to-be-creative: of commons, of new

political-economic formulations, and new political ontologies.

(((Later in this paper we will address later the various ways in which spaces are

specifically opened up by OWS, showing how forces of deterritorialization are space-

creative forces, that reconfigure ways that bodies are assembled, and therefore, how

they resist statist bodily habituations and manipulation via biopower.)))

MOVEMENT

Understanding movement is key to understanding how social-

movements like OWS operate, how bodies and space are (co)created,

and what a politics-in-becoming looks like. According to Deleuze,

movements are creative—they constitute the moments of pure

becoming, of pure change, and rarely occur. Deleuze draws his

notion of movement from Henri Bergson who understands it to be an

experience of time-space that is qualitative and immeasurable.

Here movement already aligns it with the indeterminate nature of

OWS, that opens space, that is space-creative.

S8. MANNING, RELATIONALITY, POLITICS OF BECOMING

Deleuzian theorist Erin Manning, in her recent text Relationscapes,

helps us to understand the deeper political resonances between

movement and the space it creates. Manning says, “The dynamic

form of a movement is its incipient potentiality,” arguing that

movement is always in-becoming, assembling the not-yet—

potentiality.33 Becoming occurs only in-relation—(re)constitutive

of the more-than-one that is a body. Relational movement implies

that there are always at least two bodies (including humans,

space, etc.). About the ontology and force of movement, Manning

continues:

Movement is one with the world, not body/world, but body-worlding. We move not to populate space, not to extend it orto embody it, but to create it...space is a duration with a difference. The difference is my body-worlding, always more than one...This coming-together proposes a combination of form forces.34

Manning understands how movement creates the world, always as a

relation between bodies and world/space. This creation is

conditioned by objects that are in-becoming. Movement is a

measure of whats unmeasurable, only qualifiable, and exists as a

33 Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009. 6. 34 Ibid., 13.

coming-together or congruence. Space is created in this

relationality.

Can’t we see space as literally and metaphorically reconstituted,

as always in-becoming? The potential of movement to create space

can also be linked to OWS, which exists as a set of relations of

bodies. Individual desires, collective strategies, spatial-

topological sites and virtual arenas all change in relation to

one another. This kind of movement can’t be mapped.

There are many OWSs. Each is world-creative for an individual-

group, tying into Manning’s theory of concrescence, which is,

“Literally, growing together... concrescence can be a political

moment: the interval we are dancing is always more than the

qualified ‘we.”35Acknowledgment of concrescence, of the many-

becoming-one, requires an openness to destabilization that is

ontologically-political. Like being-in-common, embracing

concrescence forces us to remain radically open to otherness. OWS

is a multitude of voices united not under a common goal, but

35 Ibid., 22.

under common orientations, under an ability and readiness to be-

in-common—to be moved in relation.

Manning then directly acknowledges the political nature of

movements:

When articulation becomes collective, a politics is made palpable whereby what is produced is the potential for divergent series of movements. This is a virtual politics, apolitics of the not-yet. These are not politics of the body,but of the many becoming one...These are politics of that many-bodied State of transition that is the collective.36

The very nature of politics, according to Manning and Deleuze, is

its capacity to move, to be creative of spaces, to be open and

indeterminate. The only real potentially to have a politics that

opposes the State and police-force is by way of movement, of

prefigurative politics, politics of becoming. This politics is

world-creative, it sets new rules by which life is valued and

action is judged. OWS again operates as a collective articulation

that exists, and can only exist, as a multiplicity of sharing-

outs of politics and ideas—a multiplicity of spaces, and a

multiplicity of politics prefigured: ethics and radical life.

36 Ibid., 27.

S9. POLITICAL MOVEMENT(S)

How can we think of the movement of political movements? How does

the cutting-through/ recombination relate to movement-in-space?

Political movement is thus micropolitical. What concerns

micropolitics are the becoming-becomings, sites of

deterritorialization, moments of preacceleration...

Political movement creates space. Space is created by new

relationalities, new gestures, concrescence of bodies—political

excesses expand the political space

CONCLUSION OF MVMNT SECTION:

Movement is creative. Movement is becoming space-time—reordering

particles, bodies, actants, and relationality in an experience of

space-time. Political movement is creative of spaces with

political ontological formulations. Movement is creative just

like “real” Politics, the kind that political philosophers have

been attempting to define for eons. Rancière comes close in

understanding the political to be the breaks in ordering of

society. Politics is outside of representative politics. It’s

that which radicalizes and redefines our notion of what politics

is. True politics is space-creative.

SPACE

S10. STRIATION, SMOOTHNESS, POLICESpace-creation is crucial to prefigurative political projects

that aim to incorporate radical politics into a life, into an

ethics. Useful to help locate these micropolitical fights are

Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizations of space in A Thousand

Plateaus, which view striation and smoothness as onto-political

metaphors. About space, they argue:

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as means of communication in service of striated space. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities, or commerce, money or Capital, etc... That is why Paul Virilio’s thesis is important, when he shows that, ‘the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, management of the public ways,” and that “the gates of the city, its levies and duties are barriers, filters against the fluidity of masses, against the penetration power of migratory packs,” people, animals and goods...in this sense,

the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform.37

Space becomes striated, codified, and linearized by the State.

Lost are moments of pure smoothness: trans-boarder-migrations,

nomadism, etc. Instead, the State limits smooth flows of movement

to regulate the functions of efficient flow of Capital, which

requires a system of categorization, relativity, and certain

restrictions to be a system of exchange. Drawing in Virilio,

Deleuze and Guattari show how the polis, the police-force is the

force of management, of ordering space, bodies, and distributing

the sensible. Fluidity and movement are thus juxtaposed against

the polis. The polis is map-creative and world-creative.

THERE IS NO MORE STRIATED SPACE THAN THAT OF THE BARRICADED

OCCUPATION, THE KETTLED-GROUP, or any other form of police-force.

Police-force is what keeps space ordered and regimented, which

defines the regime of visibility, that establishes logos.

S11. EXCESS=RIOTS=DISCOURSE

A list of tactics employed by OWS is a choreography of protests:37 Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 385-386.

Riot: A tactic used while protesting. Technically, a riot can be anything from a mobile dance party to full on mass-looting. Rioting is the type of bodily behavior that makes wildly inefficient the smooth flows of Capital. Rioting is life-affirming, wherein intensive affect becomes extended into the world around it. Riots usually begin by moving marches into the streets, blocking vehicular traffic, throwing objects into the streets/ at cops, breaking windows... For those who are politically disenfranchised, rioting is political expression—it is discourse. Blockade: A specific riot tactic, blockading includes creations of barriers that prohibit civilian traffic and police from movingor catching up to a protest—creating blocks in Capital’s flow. This practice includes the removal of any objects, such as trash-cans, mail boxes, signs, construction material—followed by the balletic swirling of protesters’s bodies—an urban dance of wits—before they launch any and all objects into the streets, in frontof a garage, or any other important site to blockade. Extensive affective re-locations of order in space. Removing Barricades: The final tactic to be described here is theremoval of the harsh, metal police barricades used to imprison and trap bodies on marches or in Zuccotti Park. Creators of anxiety, dread, alienation, and other negative psychogeographic affects, barricades are what order and segregate bodies and movement. Removal of said barricades is a highly dramatic gesturethat liberates a space, is space-creative—world-creative.

Rioting, removing barricades, and blockading are viewed as purely

impulsive. While the incredible rush in-the-moment exists,

movements like blockading are tactically essential behaviors that

require considerable foresight and accountably. These mechanisms

are creative of new space—are empowering and highly political

gestures of destratifying dis-order.

If Rancièrian politics is that stuff which breaks from police

order, from the common distribution of the sensible, then it is

the breaking-down of striations of space, territorializations,

borders, and organization that combats, politically and

ontologically, the polis. Movement, the simultaneous breaking-down

and creation of space—deterritorialization and

reterritorialization—is the force that disrupts the otherwise

endless juridco-legal-political monopoly of violence employed by

the State, and by extension the NYPD. The violence of subtraction

from society becomes a well-needed injection of ethics and values

into the political.

Movement, creation-of-space, is a radical political act, an

effort of ontological proportions that express and change the

very nature of humanness. This kind of movement cannot be mapped,

or prefigured. It occurs in real life, in accordance to the

actual patterns of bodies (the practices of everyday life,) and

does not appear in an abstract idealized notion of geography,

cartography, or choreography.38

OWS channels an excessive quality of movement—excessive of space—

it fills (filled) and overflows Zuccotti Park. Protesters are

forced to flow into the streets during marches and break through

police lines and barricades. This breaking-through is a line of

deterritorialization that occurs between protester bodies and

police space. Traversing dis-order allows for a re-organization

and reterritorialization of space. Physical space (park),

economic space (black markets and free-stores), political space

38 (((Fostering being-in-common allows for individual creations of space. A few days after a very violent police eviction on 3/17, wherein over 100 protesters were arrested, a space was created to allow for people to share (out) their stories of jail, and of being beaten.The affective mood was incredibly intense—a large scale (100 people) who were crying and holding ontoeach other with fervor—an experience of truly being-in-common, of sharing a common needs. This was an example of a space-creative function of being-in-common, of mutual aid and mutual support through struggle and breakdown.)))

(GA’s and direct democracy), and discursive space (new writings

and new concepts) are only some of the spaces opened up and

overlaid and overdetermined by OWS. This excess extends to the

excess of ideas, desires, intentions, and overdetermination. Here

we witness the radical concrescence of bodies, the coming-

together of the too-many: compearance and radical willingness to

be shared (out)-with.

EXCESS IS POLITICAL—political because it is movement—excess is

what breaks through police order, what breaks-through

territorialization, set and defined notions/uses of space. Being

is in excess. Excess is politically and ontologically opposed to

order. This excess is best understood by an ethnographic account:

POLITICAL MOMENT IN STREET

One of the first concrete feelings of the political I attempt to engage in this paper I experienced on a night march on 3/17/2012,on OWS’s six-month anniversary, which was celebrated by an attempt to re-occupy Zuccotti Park. All day the park was full of bodies, tents, and holdovers from the occupation like the Medic Station. By 10PM, hundreds of police in riot-gear loomed at the entrances of the park, like stormtroopers. Then they flooded in, beating and arresting as many people as possible. Some Direct

Action folks, myself included, had organized a rowdy night march to take the occupiers to a new park: Union Square, in an attempt to learn from the successful re-occupation attempts that flexibility is essential.

By the middle of March, our night marches had become tactically successful. We had been practicing de-arrests, confusing the police and quickly blockading the street with trash-cans. On 3/17, many of us wearing masks, “Blocked Up,” so the march could turn more riotous without there being clear evidence against a single protester. A bourgeoise boutique in SoHo had its window broken, which, along with battle cries of “A, Anti, Anti-Capitalista,” proved to be incredibly inspiring for the protesters. For hours we took the streets, snaked-around one-way blocks, had the police running, and blockaded the streets with everything we could find at every turn.

The moment that sticks out as the radical break—the opening up ofspace—of politics took place for no longer than a minute, and yet, any performer can tell you that a minute in real-time is a long time. Hastily cutting across two-lane traffic and turning upa block in the direction-of-traffic entirely demobilized the police, leaving their usually highly effective bike-motorcades immobilized. What this, along with a few arrests, bought us was time. The 5-6 blockaders turned into 40-50: people who had never participated in direct action, who were assuredly against violence, understood the moment—the efficacy of the action of blockading, and bought-in. Over the course of a minute, hundreds

of giant trash-bags, dumpsters, traffic cones and heavy construction material were lobbed in the street. With maybe 45 seconds remaining, the protesters began to sing and shout with glee, knowing that they were liberated: autonomous from the one and only threat they have to face in the city, the ordering, stratifying, and territorializing force of the NYPD.

Space was opened up: the street became a free-zone—a zone of politics. The commons was liberated for a brief point, and everyone felt this geographically-produced affect. It is this formof autonomy I am looking for in my search for the political.39

Barricades define space, but also define a body’s affective mood

and potentiality, relating to the way the entire group might be

affected. Humans are social animals: when Liberty Square was free

of barricades, up and running, it was a rather productive space:

various working groups were setting up tents/ tables, giving out

information, hosting meetings, served food, played music, and

39 (((Another key point is that out of the people who, on these marches, participate in blockading and more direct forms of action, are most often non-white.Thus, rioting in the streets symbolizes an effort on behalf of people who have less privilege, who feel disenfranchised by electoral politics, and need to take their frustration out in the streets, in rioting against the police and other markers of societal order(ing) and oppression.This is, and historically has always been, politics. Frances Fox Piven, in Poor Peoples’ Movements, understands that every act of political and economic resistance occurs after an understanding that the mechanisms that exist (elections and ‘the free market’) never benefit the poor, and that real politics only happensoutside of those paradigms.)))

danced. When these anti-Capitalist, (positive) productive and

affective flows were cut off by forces of the State, by

barricading space or invading, affect turned negative.

Being forced into barricade, kettles, and on the sidewalk keeps

forces bubbling up inside intensively, turning positive extensive

affect into negative intensive affect—turning in against

ourselves and each other. When the police kick protesters out,

the momentum often turns an occupation into a hard-core night

march, wherein the extensive affective moods are projected

outwardly onto cops, cops’s automobiles, and soon-to-be-broken

windows. Negative extensive affect is returned, but not

contained.

CONCLUSION

Movement cannot be placed onto a rigid map no less than equality

can be distributed equally. Movement can be navigated and

recorded, but we lose the essence of movement, the freedom of

movement to move toward freedom. As soon as we force onto it

measure, order, or any other geometric/ disciplinary mechanism,

movement is lost.

What is lost when movement is measured and when we attempt to

distribute equally is excess: the excess of bodies, of space, of

relationality—we lose the excess that marks real politics, the

ontological indeterminacy that OWS embodies. Instead, affirming

dis-order, affirming movement, and allowing the shift in

understanding are all paradigmatic for the formulation of

Rancièrian politics, and for the creation of the commons. When

the critique of our so called ‘democracy’ has gone on for two-

hundred years, and when NYPD force is a force of exceptionality,

the only possible paradigm shift, revolution, is necessitated.

What we need is politics.