Occupy: three inquiries in disobedience

Abstract

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland, Taussig writes in the opening essay, and now you can't leave or do without it. Following Taussig's artful blend of participatory ethnography poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter - by rejecting the very discourse strategy of politics - Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of images across mass social media looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011's revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism the polemics of the moment - an occupation itself. Each Trios book addresses a pressing theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.