Hegemony How-To. Jonathan Smucker

      Immediately following Occupy Wall Street’s inauguration, its opponents mounted a public relations offensive to negatively brand the burgeoning movement. They attempted to individuate, caricaturize, and otherize the visible actors—the occupiers—in order to inoculate more Americans against identifying with a larger unification—the 99%—and keep them from joining or aligning with the movement. We had to counter this attempt by projecting ourselves as symbolic of a larger unification. Occupy Wall Street served as a powerful floating signifier of a newly imagined unification, and so its opponents predictably sought to nail down the signifier; to fill its positive ambiguous contents with negative stereotypes about an otherized Occupy Proper (i.e., stinky counter-cultural types who drummed all night and defecated on neighbors’ doorsteps).

      When Mayor Bloomberg attempted to “clean Zuccotti Park” on October 14, 2011, he was making the first move in what became a ceaseless character assassination campaign. Bloomberg’s talk of “cleaning” was an attempt to frame occupiers as dirty and to use sanitation as a ruse to evict us from Zuccotti Park for seemingly non-political reasons. However, in a jujitsu move, we used the mayor’s ploy to catalyze the broadest visible political support the movement had seen to date. Recognizing Bloomberg’s cleaning attempt for the threat of eviction it was, local and national allied organizations called upon their members to flood the park. By six o’clock on the morning of the attempted cleaning/eviction, the crowd had swelled to several thousand. By 6:30am the deputy mayor had announced that the “cleanup” was off. The whole episode served as free publicity for a rally at Times Square that had already been planned for the next day (as part of a Global Day of Action). There, tens of thousands of New Yorkers joined together for one of Occupy Wall Street’s largest public actions.

      Bloomberg and other opponents sought to portray the movement as a particular kind of person doing a particular thing (e.g., “dirty hippies”), rather than a popular response to a common crisis. To counter this strategy, movement organizers sought to bring more kinds of people, visibly engaged in more kinds of things, into the movement. We sought to make and portray the nascent movement as more than a protest, more than an occupation, more than any particular tactic, and more than any one particular type of person. Within its first few months, the movement did indeed become far broader than those who were able to participate in physical occupation. Occupy Wall Street included people like Elora and Monte in rural West Virginia who sent hand-knit hats to occupiers at Zuccotti. It was 69-year-old retired Iowa public school teacher Judy Lonning who attended weekly Saturday marches in Des Moines. It was Nellie Bailey, who helped to organize the Occupy Harlem Mobilization. It was Michael Ellick and other religious leaders who brought Occupy Faith to their congregations. It was Selena Coppa and Joe Carter, who marched in formation to the New York Stock Exchange with 40 fellow “Veterans of the 99%.” The boundaries of Occupy Wall Street were intentionally expanded and blurred. Occupy was everyone who took some kind of action to confront the democratic and economic crises initially named by a few hundred defiant occupiers in New York City’s financial district.

      Thus, the needed expansion that Occupy was criticized for lacking was not entirely absent—not even close. But it is certainly the case that not enough of Occupy’s core was oriented toward the task of scaling up these fits and starts.

      Occupy fashion

      Those of us who worked intentionally to make Occupy Wall Street represent a broader unification had to navigate more than just our opponents’ efforts to otherize the movement; we also had to navigate the movement’s own internal tendencies toward self-­enclosure. I have referred to Occupy Proper, which until now has been my own private moniker for the tendency amongst a core of participants to own, protect, and clearly delineate Occupy’s boundaries. This tendency wrapped itself in ideological rationales, especially the imperative to keep “liberal reformists” from co-­opting the radical movement. My intent here is not to dismiss wariness of the possibility of such cooption outright, but instead to assert that, regardless of the merit of such rationales, another force drove this wariness as well: the force of individuation itself.

      To apprehend how this force or pattern played out in Occupy Wall Street, let us momentarily suspend judgment about Occupy’s ideological content and look at the movement through a lens of fashion. Many of the movement’s core participants signaled belonging in the new group by simultaneously signaling difference, defection, disobedience, or rebellion from aspects of the status quo. It may be useful to consider such signaling behaviors as analogous, at least, to how fashion functions. Fashion’s usefulness as a lens is evidenced by the fact that such signaling often manifested most visibly in the literal form of fashion—i.e., clothing, styles, and other external adornment—which any casual visitor to Zuccotti Park could corroborate.

      It is hardly novel for political expression and fashion to blend together. Georg Simmel spoke of an “increased power of fashion” that “has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical convictions, and even over the moral foundations of life.”47 One might object that Occupy Wall Street was attempting to do the opposite of what fashion does; that fashion gravitates toward that which is considered elegant or refined, in constant imitation of the upper strata of society, while Occupy was oriented in the opposite direction.48 Occupy’s oppositional orientation may have, indeed, changed the content and kinds of expressions of fashion, but it does not negate that the same essential form or pattern of fashion was at work. Simmel’s description of “club-haters organiz[ing] themselves into a club” is apt:

      …it becomes evident that the same combination which extreme obedience to fashion acquires can be won also by opposition to it… If obedience to fashion consists in imitation of such an example, conscious neglect of fashion represents similar imitation, but under an inverse sign… Indeed, it occasionally happens that it becomes fashionable in whole bodies of a large class to depart altogether from the standards set by fashion. This constitutes a most curious social-psychological complication, in which the tendency towards individual conspicuousness primarily rests content with a mere inversion of the social imitation and secondly draws in strength from approximation to a similarly characterized narrower circle.49