I’d like to think that space is that of possibility, of radical imagination; there can be no other kind of space. Wandering is thus a mode of occupation, and occupation a mode of wandering, as to wander, to occupy, is already to render space strange. Both actions embody a refusal to concede to the predetermined mapping of space, but insist, rather, on mapping, that is, on creating space for one’s purposes only as one proceeds. Occupy Wall Street is, therefore, “less of a movement and more of a space. It is a space in which people who feel a similar frustration with the world as it is and as it has been, are coming together and thinking about ways to recreate this world.”[i]
To make space is indeed to estrange; yet to make space for someone or something is also to integrate, in effect to embrace. What, then, in keeping with this double bind, does it mean for the occupation to endeavor to create a safe space for its occupiers? A truly safe space must be marked out by shelter, against that sense of danger with which entering into public is fraught, that is, the imperilment of the inhabitability of our identifications. And, besides, against the fragility of human life that corresponds to the unpredictability of the effects of our actions upon each other. In other words, a truly safe space seems to go against what I understand to in fact be occupation, that is, not inhabitation. Perhaps it is that we can discriminate, here, between the desire to imagine such a safe space and the desire to realize it, just as we can discriminate between the utopian impulse and the utopian ideal . . . one must still and always be able to expose oneself to injury; this is a right.
The street exemplifies this double bind of estrangement and integration, the self-conflicted law of all organic life, which is that we must live by the intimacy that wounds us, that uses us up.
clareeileen
Inside Zucotti park amidst the echoes of the human microphone and the energy of the daily general assembly of the occupiers of wall street I spot a young man. He stands just near enough that I can make out the two file folder labels repurposed as nametags on his shirt. The first reads “Alex”. The second,“Internet Guy.” As if to illustrate this point, Alex is indeed engaged in rapid fire thumb movement on his smart phone, a device that has granted him dual identities amongst his fellow occupiers. He is Alex. He is the Internet Guy. Alex’s subjectivity is thus altered by, rather literally, the air around him. Without a land-line, the wi-fi enabled transform the street, pushing out on its boundaries, and are in that same moment themselves transformed.
In 99 Kevin Robins and Frank Webster drew a comparison in their book Times of Technoculture between the imagined virtual city and the highly regulated and segregated aims of the modernist urban planner Le Corbusier, who “did not want to be touched by what [he] perceived and abhorred as [the] confusion and turmoil” of urban life. The redistricting of lower Manhattan of late, barricades that transform walkways into rat mazes, echo Corbusier’s dream of the containable grid (of course Manhattan is already a grid but it has been repurposed – where it once maximized the mobility of day traders, it now aims to limit the access of protestors). Robins’ and Webster’s critique of pacified virtual space (“for what the new technological scheme nurtures at its heart is the social and political scheme of communitarianism” (243)) is particularly aimed William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which embodies for them, “the strange affinity between virtual futurism and communitarian nostalgia.” It seems the problem they had was with how easily the virtual is co-opted by a toothless brand of utopianism. No one bumps into anyone unless the need to; it lacks the vitality of the street necessary for political urgency.
Indeed, the Occupy Wall Street website does not get pepper-sprayed, but its Alexes might. I think, years after Webster and Robins registered these complaints—in the wake of wikileaks cat and mouse from server to server and in the age of increased corporatization of online space— we are exiting the phase of web-euphoria wherein we suppose the site could not be contained, that it exists so distinctly from the physical space that it takes on neither the street’s promise nor its physical limitations.
So that rambling is I suppose a question about virtual vs. physical space in the role of radical imagination. More specifically I think I was triggered by your consideration of spaces that are safe. If Alex (who was quite cute by the way) occupies both the street and the web, does his dual citizenship secure him some element of safety? If so, does that safety undermine his role as one in occupation?
Hi, Sarah. I really like your question and I wish I knew more about how the internet is theorized and talked about so I could place my answer in the context of that discussion. I’ll just have to throw out a few initial thoughts. I think, first, we need to distinguish between threats to the body and threats to the self, which are intricately bound up with each other but each is perhaps brought to the foreground depending on the platform. In this post, I focus mainly on the self within the body occupying a physical place, and there is a lot more that I would want to say there about publics. But I suppose that virtual space is also a kind of public, only one that is maybe more easily shifted around and remapped with more ease and frequency. My instinct isn’t to say that dual citizenship in the virtual and physical realms secures one an element of safety – you could just as easily say, it seems, that you are at risk in two places at once. My instinct is to say, then, that virtual space here might offer some kind of escape route, perhaps something similar to the sewers and back alleys that I talk about in my earlier posts. But escape routes don’t imply safety at all. You are running from a danger that you are still within, perhaps, in the sense that you are still a body back to which the traces you leave in virtual space can be traced. I also want to say that – and I’m not sure how people who study virtual space would respond to this – that virtual space begins with physical space. It is an extension of physical space, rather than separate space, even while being ahead of physical space at the same time, in the sense of the speed with which it can be remapped (like the matrix). All of this reminds me of an essay by Audre Lorde titled “Transforming Silence into Speech and Action,” where she talks about how the threat to one’s identifications, to one’s sense of self felt in the legitimacy of one’s speech, that comes with the act of speaking, is felt as a bodily threat, a threat to one’s very physical existence, one’s life. So, I guess I want to say that it all comes back to the body (I am a modernist after all). I don’t know if I answered your question, but these are just some of the things you got me thinking about.
Sarah, I found a book that may speak directly to your question – Don Mitchell’s The Right to the City!