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OCTOBER

ROSALYN DEUTSCHE

I am grateful to Occupy for injecting the scandal of extreme economic
inequality into what is commonly referred to as “public political discourse”—that
of the media and of representative democracy. But Occupy is not a representa-
tionist practice. Stattdessen, in the words of Isabell Lorey, it performs “an exodus
from the dominant political-economic order . . . in order to expand and newly
invent the place of the public.”1 I therefore also welcome Occupy as a new relation-
ship to the polit ical, one that doesn’t fit comfort ably within tradit ional
frameworks of protest and so, according to McKenzie Wark, may be a bit confusing
for left intellectuals.2 Our first task, Dann, is not to insist that it formulate practical
demands or, as Claude Lefort once wrote, “to invent” but to recognize and inter-
pret what is taking place before our eyes.3

Spatial theory is a useful interpretive tool. Wark argues that #OWS has an alle-
gorical dimension: insofar as “Wall Street” is less significant as a physical space than as
a signifier of the power of financial institutions—Wall Street is everywhere!—#OWS
occupied an abstraction.4 In its initial phase, Jedoch, #OWS also occupied Zuccotti
Park, a site whose physicality was important precisely because, like Wall Street, it is
larger than itself: it stands for the power of the state and private enterprise in the
organization and control of the city, especially of public spaces. Zuccotti Park is a par-
ticular kind of public space—the “privately owned public space” that was allowed by
New York’s 1961 Zoning Resolution. Built in 1968, the park was part of a deal
between the developers of the One Liberty skyscraper (then the United States Steel
tower) and the Department of City Planning, an agreement that granted the develop-
ers permission to add nine stories (303,000 square feet) to the tower in return for the
creation of 26,000 feet of park space.5 Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, as New York’s
spatio-economic redevelopment escalated, forming part of the global restructuring
of capitalism, the city devised other ways for property owners to circumvent restric-

McKenzie Wark, “How to Occupy an Abstraction,” October 3, 2011, versobooks.com/blogs/728-

Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy,

1.
Isabell Lorey, “Non-representationist, Presentist Democracy,” lecture given at the “Autonomy
Project Symposium,” October 7–9, 2011, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (short version); reprinted in
eipcp.net/transversal/1011.
2.
mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street; accessed October 12, 2011.
3.
Democracy, Totalitarianism, MIT Press, 1986, P. 262.
Wark.
4.
5.
Nancy Scola, “Owners of the Park at the Center of the Occupy Wall Street Protests Are Losing
Pat ience, but What Can They Do?,” October 4, 2011, capit alnewyork.com/art icle/cul-
ture/2011/10/3608746/owners-park-center-occupy-wall-street-protests-are-losing-patience; zugegriffen
Oktober 5, 2011. Scola’s reporting is based on research into city records conducted by Gregory
Smithsimon under the Freedom of Information Act.

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Questionnaire: Deutsche

tions.6 At the same time, it intensified a rhetoric that celebrated redevelopment’s
provision of public space in order to secure consent to authoritarian policies: exclu-
sionary urban design, privatization, evictions, attacks on rights. Zuccotti Park is an
early example.

Claiming the park for the right of assembly, #OWS contested the public
character of official public spaces. It was, Dann, not simply a conflict taking place
in space; it exposed the conflicts that produce space—the subterranean violence
that exploded into visibility when the state acting in conjunction with real estate
unveiled its repressive power and evicted the occupiers. Earlier, Brookfield Office
Properties, the park’s current owners, had stated that while people have a right to
peacefully protest, “enough is enough”; the park is meant for “passive uses.”7
Invoking objectively dictated uses of space, pronouncements like this could, als
Laurence Tribe has written in another context, “leave would-be speakers with a
right to speak, but nowhere to exercise that right.”8

When #OWS seized the park for an active use—critical speech—it not only
contested an existing public space but also produced a public space, in the sense of a
democratic public sphere. It thus performed both of the functions that Vito Acconci
has assigned to public art: “to make or break a public space.”9 Judith Butler argues
that mass demonstrations, zu, have a dual relationship to public space: “As much as
we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public
Rede, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materi-
ality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that
material environment.” Collective actions depend on the prior existence of streets
and squares, but they also “collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate
and organize the architecture.”10 This statement suggests that a city is not a frame-
work into which users are inserted but an environment produced by the practices of
Benutzer. Asking how the city is endowed with meaning—how it speaks—Raymond
Ledrut writes that the city of today speaks to its inhabitants of the powers that surpass
ihnen; it may signify good organization, the suppression of disorder, comfort, or con-
venience, but about social struggle it is remarkably silent: “Of historical action, and of
the city as the place of an historical action . . . there is no trace.”11 An apt description of
Zuccotti Park and today’s urban public spaces. Until Occupy spoke the city.

Scola, “Owners of the Park.”
Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Choices (Cambridge, Harvard, 1985), P. 189.
Vito Acconci, Making Public: The Writing and Reading of Public Space (The Hague, Uitgever,

6.
For a detailed discussion of redevelopment and its legitimating rhetoric, see my “Uneven
Development: Public Art in New York City” and “Agoraphobia” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics
(Cambridge, MA.: MIT, 1996).
7.
8.
9.
1993), P. 16.
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” lecture in Venice, September 7,
10.
2011, as part of the series “The State of Things,” organized by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway
(OCA); reprinted in eipcp.net/transversal/1011. Butler is referring to the Tahrir Square demonstrations.
11.
Raymond Ledrut, “Speech and the Silence of the City,” in M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph.
Lagopoulos, Hrsg., The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics (New York: Columbia, 1986), S.
114–134; first published, in French, in Espaces et Sociétés, 1973, 9: S. 3–14, emphasis in the original.

ROSALYN DEUTSCHE teaches modern and contemporary art history at Barnard College.