OCTOBER
ARIANA REINES, JACKIE WANG, LARA WEIBGEN
Occupy Wall Street was not a movement, much less a mass movement. For
us, Occupy Wall Street was a mass.
It was a mass for Troy Davis, murdered the same week Zuccotti Park was
occupied, but it was not only a mass for Troy Davis. It was a mass for every person
killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center ten years and six days before the
birth of Occupy, for every person who died or was killed in their name in
Afghanistan and Iraq. It was even a mass for Saddam Hussein, dying a million
ignoble deaths forever on YouTube—a complete horror notwithstanding his evil;
a complicated horror. And it was also a local mass: for the artists who made beauti-
ful dreams in the wreckage of Manhattan, for everyone who died of AIDS, every-
one crack killed, everyone meth kills, a mass for our friends dead of suicide and
drugs. It was a mass for all the dead New Yorks that have haunted us, the Harlems
and Alphabet Cities and Tribecas and even, dare we say it, the Williamsburgs and
Bushwicks of the mind. It was a mass for Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, Sean
Campana, and so many others killed by the NYPD, for the homeless whose social death
no rat-racer can totally ignore, for the shine of all the souls that have died to
become, perversely but truly, part of the luster of the city. The poet Filip
Marinovich said it first, and beautifully: Occupy Wall Street was a mass for the
dead. And yet—although it was grief and outrage that brought us to Zuccotti or
rather Liberty Park, it was so sweet to be there.
Cornel West said it and the People’s Mic echoed him: there was a sweet spirit
in that place. This is what Occupy meant to us: a prayer for the peace of the dead
and a prayer to lay to rest everything in this world that kills us, that kills all of us. UN
prayer for the soul of every person this culture has murdered, locked up, raped,
evicted, deported, enslaved, genocided, driven insane, brutalized, tortured,
harassed, humiliated, ignored, forgotten, and allowed to die. A prayer for dead
imaginations, for our own feeble relationship to reality, for the fact that so many
of us were sure, when we first saw the burning towers, the planes crashing into
them, that it was a movie. A prayer for the nights and days of the living dead of
America, for the undead, the socially dead, the zombified, and for the parts of
ourselves that still kneel to worship dead ideas, dead fuels, deadly state and mili-
tary and corporate power.
The spirit of Occupy was sweet when it was sad and nothing had been named
yet, when we came in our grief with our prayers and found thousands of others
grieving and praying too. We came for the spirit and the poetry. But as soon as we
tried to turn our mass into a movement, to give voice to what had brought us
together, we realized how different our sorrows were, and how hard it would be for
us to sustain the feeling that they were shared. For the sake of a forced and false
OCTOBER 142, Autunno 2012, pag. 54–58. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Occupy Wall Street protester. ottobre 1, 2011.
Photograph by Bob Lee.
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56
OCTOBER
image of unity, “the 99%,” we were asked to set aside the specificity of our wound-
edness, to see our traumas—relating not only to financial desperation, but also to
racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, and on
and on, all the violence and misery of this world—as part of a single overarching
traumatic condition called Capitalism. But wounds, like art, are an index of what
is irreducible about a life, and a theory of pain, no matter how sophisticated, can
never say what a wound really is, how it lives on the body, what it does to the mind
and the heart of the person on whom it lives. We came to Occupy because people
were gathering, because they seemed as sick of this murderous, carceral world as
we were, and because they seemed to want to change it; in short, because we want-
ed to find and build community. But the 99% was not a community; it was only an
idea of community, like America and New York—a fantasy of easy togetherness
that ignored the real and cruel differences it sought to contain. Many of us were
tired of seeing our lives reduced to one meaningless abstraction after another, E
as the hardships of organizing across rifts of experience and analysis became clear,
Occupy began to come apart at the seams.
What was Occupy—both the mass and the myth of a consolidated anticapi-
talist movement—is over. Some of us have gone back to sleep, but capitalism is
still in collapse; we don’t need to rewrite the hundred thousand manifestos that
have already eloquently clamored for or diagnosed its end. The question now is
not how to build an army to “fight capitalism,” but how best to use the gigantic
energies that have been and are being released—in many directions, all over the
mondo, and from deep within the belly of the planet—as the old order sputters and
lurches into its twilight.
We don’t know whether we’ll live to see the other world, the beautiful world,
the dreamed-of world, but we know that the only reason we’ve dedicated ourselves
to art is because we’ve been dreaming of it, dreaming and dreaming our whole
lives. And now for the first time it feels possible to dream in a way braver than art,
more hopeful than art, bigger than art, more radical than art, more beautiful
than all our castles in the sky. It feels possible at least to try. So trying is what we’re
doing. Trying to dream more hopefully, bravely, and concretely, which means trying
to find ways of making that aren’t just dreaming anymore. Writing, yes, but also
talking to one another in new ways; and doing with our bodies the things we write
and talk about believing in. Making community. Making plans. Making spaces of
witnessing, intimate and embodied witnessing, spaces outside spectation, Dove
we can bear witness to the irreducibly different ways in which this great pain
named Capital wounds us. Making room within ourselves for different kinds of
pain, allowing the pain of others to enter and change us, learning to struggle
against their pain while at the same time rooting ourselves in the power of know-
ing the source of the struggle within us. Making, trying to make, practicing, trying to
practice, beginning, trying to begin a politics of embodied encounter and collec-
tive struggle animated by love.
Capital makes a spectacle of suffering in order to normalize it, but its insis-
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Questionnaire: Reines, Wang, Weibgen
57
tence on the beauty and purity of martyrs crushed by an inexorable machine—a
formulation derived from our Judeo-Christian inheritance—is a climate of mind
that privileges death over life. We refuse this. Our belief in the normality and even
the glory of misery—our urge to live fast and die young, like all beautiful radi-
cals—is what has allowed us to reconcile ourselves to the existence of war and pris-
ons and police and the limitation of our little joy to the little spaces where joy has
felt possible: art and friendships. In this world ruled by Capital and structured by
violence, we are not meant to feel joy. We’re meant to be miserable, self-loathing,
competitivo, suicidal, and above all resigned, or else stupefied by the shallow plea-
sures of television, the sinkhole of the Internet, or the deeper but melancholy or
cynical and contained pleasures of art. So joy itself is a kind of resistance—as
many great revolutionaries, from Emma Goldman to Audre Lorde, have known.
This is why we need to dance and write poetry and make art and live our lives as
magically as we can, while at the same time recognizing that our little joy is a little
miracle flaming in a pit of violence and deprivation, and that the kernels of sweet-
ness we’ve felt and known will never flower until we set ourselves and everyone
else free. So we have to radiate. We have to be a vitality that gives and gives by
allowing ourselves to break open and breaking others open so that this world can
be broken open too. Now that we’ve seen the horizon, we no longer have the
right to flame out in the excesses of our own brilliance and misery, to die of drug
overdoses, or even to lean into the pantheon of noble martyrs cut down by evil sys-
tems. Cointelpro targeted the “messianic figures” of Black Power for assassination,
exile, and smear campaigns. This time we all have to be our own messiahs, E
one another’s; what we need is not the leaderlessness of Occupy, but an infinitude
of leaders. From now on, the only possible beauty, the only possible joy, is in the
struggle to liberate and empower ourselves and one another—materially, psycho-
logically, permanently. From Fanon we learn that it is not visionaries who make
revolutions, but the process of revolt that makes visionaries; and that conscious-
ness develops in the course of struggle, when people start to feel that they are tak-
ing back their lives. Mainly we want to be encouraging. This is why we got together
to write this. We are trying to be here for you, and here for each other, with our
parole. We are trying to be here for you, and here for each other, with our bodies.
Whoever you are, wherever you may find yourself.
ARIANA REINES initiated the Opening of the Mouth, a laboratory for worship and dissent.
LARA WEIBGEN is a writer, organizer, art historian, and artist living in Brooklyn.
JACKIE WANG is a queer poet based out of an adobe house in the desert.
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May Day demonstration in Union
Square, New York City. May 1, 2012.
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