YATES MCKEE - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

YATES MCKEE

At once a prosaic verb and a proper noun, an ethical injunction and a socio-
logical entity, a mobile trope and a site-specific tactic, Occupy lacks a unified
Senso. Or, to put it more affirmatively, Occupy involves a surplus of meaning
and cannot be reduced to one thing. The word itself is of course marked by ongo-
ing legacies of colonial violence, calling to mind the forceful domestication of
alien territories, the enclosure of common wealth, and the eviction or subjugation
of native inhabitants. Yet the word has been indelibly inscribed with a new history
involving the emancipatory reclamation or reinhabitation of those spaces colo-
nized by Wall Street, which is to say the entirety of the planet and its life-support
systems. From the warming of the climate, to the foreclosure of homes, to the mili-
tarization of streets, to the subjective internalization of market-based morality,
Wall Street is Everywhere. Così, “Occupy Everywhere, Occupy Everything,” as stu-
dent activists in the UC system declared in the years preceding the advent of the
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) camp in September 2011. Occupy has inaugurated a
radical “spatial politics” in the sense of the term passed down to us from Rosalyn
Deutsche, where the contestations of physical spaces, media spaces, and psychic
spaces are understood to be inseparable.1

Occupy is at once familiar and strange, proximate and distant, embodied
and virtual. Occupy is uncanny. As Talib Agape Fuegoverde put it last spring in the
buildup to the historic reclamation of May Day in the United States by an alliance
of unions, immigrant-justice groups, and OWS: “Occupy is an apparatus of defa-
miliarization and dissemination that enables spaces and objects, words and
concepts, histories and memories to leave home and take flight into the future.
Occupy enables us to revisit the past, but with a distance and a twist.”2

Occupy is especially uncanny from the perspective of art critics invested in trac-
ing the legacies of the avant-garde in contemporary practice.3 Occupy is an arguably
proto-revolutionary phenomenon that emerges in part out of the very artistico-politi-
cal milieu of the sort that has concerned critics at October and elsewhere in recent
years in discussions of relational aesthetics, interventionism, neo-Situationism, tacti-
cal media, experimental geography, the pedagogical turn, and more. While the

Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997).
1.
2.
Talib Agape Fuegoverde, “Occupy Criticism, Occupy Spring,” The Brooklyn Rail (Marzo 2012)
brooklynrail.org/2012/03/art/occupy-criticism-occupy-spring. On the historic reactivation of May
Day by OWS and its allies, see David Graeber, “Occupy’s Liberation from Liberalism: The Real
Meaning of May Day,” The Guardian (May 7, 2012) guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/
2012/may/07/occupy-liberation-from-liberalism.
3.
See Gregory Sholette, “Interventionism and the Historical Uncanny: O, Can There Be a
Revolutionary Art without a Revolution?” in Nato Thompson and Sholette, eds., The Interventionists: UN
User’s Guide to the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004).

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OCTOBER

original OWS encampment at Liberty Square would have been impossible without
immediate precedents in California, Egypt, Spain, Greece, Wisconsin, and beyond,
the local conditions of New York City—and especially the dialogical, intergenera-
tional space cultivated by 16 Beaver Group in lower Manhattan over the past
decade—was equally crucial to the genesis of the movement.

To highlight 16Beaver is not a matter of establishing any kind of definitive ori-
gin point for OWS, but rather of identifying a site-specific node in a long history of
efforts to devolve the specialized field of art into expanded networks of activist coun-
tercultural production—an aspiration shared in various ways by groups ranging from
the Situationists to the Diggers to Group Material to Gran Fury.

In Occupy groups, collective creativity abounds: signs, banners, screen-
prints, posters, stickers, stencils, projections, props, structures, puppets, costumes,
songs, chants, dances, exercises, hashtags, memes, photographs, videos, creative
direct actions, and every conceivable combination thereof—almost none of which
are oriented toward the museum-gallery art world. That said, Occupy has high-
lighted established artistic institutions as sites of corporate injustice, precarious
lavoro, and the self-legitimization of the 1%, while at the same time opening new
economies of collaboration, mutual aid, and solidarity among cultural workers.
Further, the affinities and resources of the actually existing art world and acade-
mia—especially progressive platforms like October or Creative Time—are also
recognized for their movement-building potential as well. Finalmente, Occupy cultural
practices often display varying degrees of self-conscious affinity with avant-garde
precedents in formal and semiotic terms. Consider the strands of neo-Dada ritual,
Yippie pranksterism, and SI spatial tactics evident in the Plus Brigades sessions
held at Judson Church during OWS Spring Training4; O, more recently, IL
Malevichian red square translated from Quebec student struggles into the wear-
able sign of the emerging Strike Debt movement.5

My own experience with Occupy has involved a relearning of what it means
to be a writer. Many Occupy writers have had to rethink the times and spaces, pro-
tocols and norms, platforms and audiences in relation to which they work.6 Much
of my writing for the past nine months has taken place collaboratively in email
threads, Facebook posts, and face-to-face meetings concerned with creating web-
sites, press releases, flyers, ask-letters, action plans, meeting notes, project
statements, video scripts, and mic checks. Questions of ideology, rhetoric, E
aesthetics of the sort academics are trained to consider are central to these forms
of writing, but in Occupy they are entwined with proactive organizing and strate-

On Plus Brigades, see Nathan Schneider, “Paint the Other Cheek,” The Nation (April 4, 2012)

4.
thenation.com/article/166820/paint-other-cheek.
On the generalization of the red square, see Yates McKee, “With September 17th Anniversary on
5.
the Hor izon, Debt Emerges as Connect ive Thread for OWS” ( Luglio 14, 2012) waging-
nonviolence.org/2012/07/with-september-17-anniversary-on-the-horizon-debt-emerges-as-connective-
thread-for-ows/#more-18089.
6.
Mirzoeff’s remarkable “durational writing” project nicholasmirzoeff.com/o2012.

On writing and Occupy, see Fuegoverde, “Occupy Criticism, Occupy Spring,” and Nicholas

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Questionnaire: McKee

gic public address in a way that often makes received academic discourse feel woe-
fully out of touch. The freely distributed magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy
Strategy—started by artists and featuring short, accessible texts by writers such as
Gayatri Spivak alongside statements from young organizers such as Sandra
Nurse—is a historically groundbreaking hybrid platform in that respect.

As of this writing, Tidal and other OWS media entities are gearing up for a
three-day convergence on New York City to mark the one-year anniversary of the
occupation of Liberty Square on September 17th. Rather than simply a commem-
orative ritual or one-off Day of Action, S17 is conceived as a launching pad for
focused anti-capitalist movement-building around the predatory debt system, aus-
terity, mass incarceration, climate crisis, and more. While some will attempt to
yoke the energies of S17 to the time frame of the electoral cycle and ultimately
the established mechanisms of the state, OWS will push back with its own sense of
time and process. Some have suggested that this might include allowing the
moniker Occupy itself to recede into the past as the movement phases into new
experiments with “communization.” In any event, it is unlikely that the physical
tactic of outdoor occupation first deployed on September 17, 2011, will or could
be replicated. But the horizontal spaces of education, empowerment, and radical
care created by that historic occupation remain open, which is what I believe will
give the trope of Occupy a historical longevity and unrivaled imaginative charge.
Artists and academics should continue to enter into these spaces, with an under-
standing that there remains much for us all to learn that cannot be acquired from
a book or an academic journal. There they will find an alien world from the future
in which nothing—including our own sense of professional identity—will ever
look or feel the same again.

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YATES MCKEE is an organizer with Strike Debt and co-editor of the magazine Tidal: Occupy
Theory, Occupy Strategy.
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