Real Politics in Occupy: Transcending the Rules of the Day

Abstract

This paper analyses the Occupy movement in order to explore the mode of its participants' engagement with radical change. It also sketches the framework of real politics within which they were acting. It is a politics that accepts the constitutive lack of the political sphere, irreducibility of social antagonisms and alterity. First, by utilising Lacan and Derrida's theoretical constructions, the article examines ways in which Occupy aimed to transcend the ‘rules of the day’. It then describes the challenges of non-hierarchical organising and radical inclusion that the movement faced. Subsequently, I briefly analyse 2 aporias that were endured in Occupy: between the ideal and non-ideal as well as between unity and singularity. These aporias did not mark a stalemate that paralysed the movement but pointed to the limits that had to be negotiated by Occupy's participants. Occupy demonstrated that, in reality, direct democracy does not work like an ideal of a self-transparent and completely non-alienated form of decision-making; this is perhaps the most important lesson that has to be borne in mind when considering the question of whether it is inevitable that the lacks in the system and in subjects continually re-emerge, and when asking what this can mean for the potential of universalising direct democracy and the future of radical activism. This paper draws on ‘militant ethnographic’ and participatory action research within Occupy in Dublin and semi-structured interviews with participants from Ireland and the USA.     

‘The outraged young’: young Europeans,civic engagement and the new media in a time of crisis

Public involvement in traditional political institutions has declined significantly over the past few decades, leading to what some have seen as a crisis in citizenship. This trend is most striking amongst young people, who have become increasingly alienated from mainstream electoral politics in Europe. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence to show that younger citizens are not apathetic about ‘politics’ – they have their own views and engage in democracy in a wide variety of ways that seem relevant to their everyday lives. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, young Europeans have borne the brunt of austerity in public spending: from spiralling youth unemployment, to cuts in youth services, to increased university tuition fees. In this context, the rise and proliferation of youth protest in Europe is hardly surprising. Indeed, youth activism has become a major feature of the European political landscape: from mass demonstrations of the ‘outraged young’ against political corruption and youth unemployment, to the Occupy movement against the excesses of global capitalism, to the emergence of new political parties. This article examines the role that the new media has played in the development of these protest movements across the continent. It argues that ‘digitally networked action’ has enabled a ‘quickening’ of youth participation – an intensification of political participation amongst young, highly educated citizens in search of a mouthpiece for their ‘indignation’.     

Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics

The crises of representative democracy and of state-based politics have been declared many times and ‘participation’ is often advocated as a remedy for the shortcomings of both. While the literature has extensively discussed representative practices in relation to territorial states, we argue in this article that more attention should be paid to the question of representation within transnational social movements striving for a politics that transcends current territorially bounded representative democracy. Analysing the World Social Forum and West African participatory trade policy-making, we find that as transnational social movements aiming at democratic goals deepen their interactions, they can face demanding questions such as: who or what has a right to be made present in a given political process and how is this established? We claim that avoiding the question of representation in transnational non-state-centred politics leaves power too many places to hide.     

WIKIPEDIA

The decentralized participatory architecture of the Internet challenges traditional knowledge authorities and hierarchies. Questions arise about whether lay inclusion helps to ‘democratize’ knowledge formation or if existing hierarchies are re-enacted online. This article focuses on Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia's talk pages are conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed. Using grounded theory, this article examines the entry for the September 11 attacks and its related talk pages in the German Wikipedia. Numerous alternative interpretations (labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’) that fundamentally contradict the account of established knowledge authorities regarding this event have emerged. On the talk pages, these views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the role of experts and lay participants in the process of knowledge construction on Wikipedia. The study asks how the parties negotiate ‘what actually happened’ and which knowledges should be represented in the Wikipedia entry. The conflicting points of view overload the discursive capacity of the contributors. The community reacts by marginalizing opposing knowledge and protecting or immunizing the article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert authorities. Therefore, in this case, lay participation did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies.     

Enabling children’s deliberation in deliberative systems: schools as a mediating space

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in conceptualising schools beyond their educational functions, as sites and agents of democracy. Yet this interest is often underpinned by a narrow conception of democracy, focusing solely on schools’ public and social aspects. To capture the democratic potential of schools more fully, this article suggests adopting a deliberative systems approach, which conceptualises democracy as differentiated yet linked sites of democratic communications and views schools as one such site. Using this approach as a broader framework and drawing on the fieldwork conducted in two Japanese schools, this article identifies the condition under which schools can become a meaningful part of deliberative systems. It reveals that schools contribute to deliberative systems when they serve as a bridge between children’s everyday practices and deliberative actions in the public space. In light of the findings, this article suggests conceptualising schools as a ‘mediating space’.     

Deliberative democracy in the real world,the contribution of the capability approach

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Amartya Sen’s writings, this article presents the capability approach to democracy and shows its relevance for the sociological reflection and research on democratic processes conceived as ways to convert individual preferences into collective norms or decisions. Two moments are key in this respect: the formation of individual preferences and their translation into collective norms in the course of public debates. The initial sections present Sen’s conception of democracy, particularly emphasizing its articulation with the notions of ‘positional objectivity’ and ‘conversion’. Then, this conception is compared with two other mechanisms that may be used to coordinate individual decisions or preferences, namely the market and idealistic views on deliberative democracy. The article emphasizes how the capability approach departs from these two conceptions with regard to the two key concepts of capacity to aspire and capability for voice. The final section shows how Sen’s notion of democracy may open up a new field for research, namely the sociological investigation of the informational (or knowledge) basis of democracy.     

It’s not cricket: examining political discussion in nonpolitical online space

Scholars of digital democracy share enthusiasm about the potential the Internet provides for democratic communication among citizens. Many applaud the prospect of an expanded, digital, public sphere; others are more cautious about whether the Internet may foster deliberative democracy. We attempt to provide a third alternative view by (1) focusing on everyday political talk in nonpolitical online forums and (2) expanding research beyond a singular deliberative model to attend to multiple frameworks for democratic discussion online. In this paper, we examine online political discussion of six globally prominent political issues in two transnational cricket forums. Our findings suggest that deliberative discussion coexists with liberal individualist and communitarian forms of communication in online sports forums. We discuss the implications of our findings for the future of mediated political discussion research.     

Gendered and classed activist identity in the Russian oppositional youth movement

This article examines how activist identity is constructed in the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona. The research is based on fieldwork among youth activists in Moscow and St Petersburg. The author analyses how activist identity is classed and gendered, as well as its relations to the Russian civic field. The article suggests, first, that the activist identity is marked by an affiliation with the intelligentsia: activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and articulate their activities through the intelligentsia's ‘markers’, such as intelligence, discussion skills and education. Secondly, activists follow a dissidents' cultural model, by emphasizing the importance of non‐conformism and traditional dissident values, and draw parallels between the contemporary government and the totalitarian Soviet state. Thirdly, this traditional intellectual dissident identity is associated with cosmopolitanism through the movement's international connections and appropriation of the forms of action of global social movements. Sometimes the activist practices and aspirations conflict with the group's ideals. Furthermore, the activist identity is gendered and embodied in the right activist ‘look’, which is defined by masculinity. Regardless of the movement's liberal ideals in regards to democracy, questions of gender and sexuality are not discussed, and activists do not question traditional understandings of gendered divisions of labour.     

From connective to collective action: internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia

Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled ‘connective action network’ has transitioned over time to a more traditional ‘collective action network’ [Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 47]. Specifically, the article scrutinizes the trajectory of the Russian protests ‘For Fair Elections.’ This wave of street protests erupted after the allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections of December 2011 and continued into 2013. As is argued, the protests were initially organized as an ‘organizationally enabled connective action network.’ However, after eight months of street protests, Russian activists reorganized the network into a more centralized, more formalized ‘organizationally brokered collective action network.’ In order to implement this transition, they deployed ‘Internet elections’ as a cardinally new digital tactic of collective action. Between 20 and 22 October 2012, more than 80,000 activists voted online in order to create a new leadership body for the entire protest movement, the ‘Coordination Council of the Opposition.’ As the study has found, activists implemented this transition because, within the specific Russian socio-political context, enduring engagement and stable networks appeared crucial to the movement’s long-term success. With regard to achieving these goals, the more formalized collective action network appeared superior to the connective action form.     

‘Reaching in’? The potential for e-petitions in local government in the United Kingdom

This article considers the extent to which petitions and e-petitions might allow citizens to ‘reach in’ to local authorities in the United Kingdom. It examines how e-petitions sit against wider debates about the use of technology and digital democracy and the extent to which petitions systems might align with traditional approaches to representative democracy. It highlights that, as with many other participative initiatives, digital or otherwise, there are a variety of issues and risks associated with e-petitions, including those associated with broad socio-economic factors, and others that are more specifically related to the use of e-petitions. However, drawing on existing examples of e-petitions systems in the United Kingdom, it suggests that, designed well, they may have potential value, not simply in terms of enabling ‘voice’ and participation, but also in helping educate and inform petitioners about local democracy and decision-making.     

Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave

Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and communicate it to all their Internet peers. In this article, I explore protest avatars as forms of identification of protest movements in a digital era. I argue that protest avatars can be described as ‘memetic signifiers’ because (a) they are marked by a vagueness and inclusivity that distinguishes them from traditional protest symbols and (b) lend themselves to be used as memes for viral diffusion on social networks. In adopting these icons, participants experience a collective fusion in an online crowd, whose gathering is manifested in the very ‘masking’ of participants behind protest avatars. These forms of collective identification, while powerful in the short term, can however prove quite volatile, with Internet users often discarding avatars with relative ease, raising the question whether they can provide durable foundational elements of contemporary social movements.     

Social movements and biopolitical states: A study of humanitarian aid in Cape Town 2008

In May of 2008, a wave of xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa resulting in the displacement of thousands of ‘refugees’ who ended up in government-established ‘safety camps’. Due to the lack of an adequate response by government and the United Nations, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African AIDS activist organisation, began providing relief to the displaced population. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the ‘biopolitical technologies’ used by the TAC in their response to this crisis. We argue that the TAC's approach to providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Cape Town drew on both the organisation's own archive and repertoire of activist techniques and practices and the biopolitical toolkit deployed by international agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The outcome of this cross-fertilisation, we argue, was a hybrid assemblage of tactics and techniques that did not conform to the characterisation of humanitarian aid as simply another kind of bureaucratic antipolitics. The case study draws attention to the ways in which the TAC sought to ‘empower’ refugees and non-nationals as well as pressure and leverage the South African state into responding to the crisis, and thereby fulfil its pastoral role as ‘the watchful shepherd’ and the protector of human life.     

Group formation,styles, and grammars of commonality in local activism

This article argues that in order to analyse democracy as a pattern constantly processed in a given society, it is useful to look at activist groups’ agenda setting and recruitment principles, group bonds and boundaries, and how these actions direct and influence ways of creating the common. Based on an ethnographic study on bicycle activism in Helsinki, Finland, it describes a local critical mass movement that was successful in promoting a bicycle friendly and sustainable city, yet dissolved due to lack of people involved, and the bicycle demonstrations stopped at a moment of high public interest. This empirical puzzle is addressed by combining three theoretical perspectives: Kathleen Blee’s work on path dependencies in nascent activist groups; Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman’s work on group styles, and Laurent Thévenot’s work on the grammars of commonality. These theoretical tools help understand the sense of what is deemed possible, desirable and feasible in activist groups, and the consequences thereof to social movement ‘success’ and ‘failure’. The article claims that everyday practices and interaction are crucial in understanding the ‘democratic effects’ of social movements. It concludes that following specific processes of politicization and their conditionings in activist groups provides keys to understanding contextual differences in democracies without resorting to methodological nationalism or to exaggerated global isomorphism, and thus may contribute to figuring out how to succeed global action plans over wicked, pressing problems like global warming.     

Contentious connective action: a new kind of life-political association for problematizing how expert systems operate

Neoliberalism and populism both challenge the idea that democratic politics is of and by ‘the people.’ Neoliberalism suggests technocracy as the way ahead for nudging laypeople to do the right things. Populism appeals to the morality of an exceptional leader required for tumbling ‘the system’ and make the home of ‘We the People’ whole again. Both positions consider laypeople like clay to be formed in their own image. The logic of contentious connective action is a direct response to this political degradation of the layactor. Without laypeople being able chronically to problematize how things are done by expert systems, there can be no real democracy. Hence, it is about time we bring the lifeworld with its capable and knowledgeable laypeople back into the fold. Technological development has made it possible for the lifeworld to attain global and not just local significance. Its spontaneous activities in local time-space can now connect globally, enabling worldwide demonstrations in the name of ‘we the 99%.’     

Between deliberation and contestation: the convergence of struggles against austerity and its world in the Nuit Debout movement

ABSTRACT

Nuit debout represents one of the main mobilizations in France in recent years and the most important anti-austerity movement in the country since the financial crisis. Based on document analysis and fieldwork, this paper addresses the development of master frames within the context of free spaces. The introduction of the parliamentarian debate on the French Jobs Act can be understood as a suddenly imposed grievance that triggered the emergence in France of a movement against austerity and the perceived retrenchment of democratic life. This happened as the grievance was framed within the French left-wing movements through the adoption and adaptation of ideas coming from a movement cascade that started in 2008 in Iceland, peaked in 2011 in Spain, Greece and the US and continued in countries as Turkey in 2013. Moving from structure to action, the paper highlights how Nuit debout provided a platform for the convergence of previously disconnected mobilizations. In particular, the movement’s self-characterization as a ‘convergence of struggles’ and as a movement ‘against the Jobs Act and its world’ developed within free spaces in which contentious but also deliberative practices were accommodated.     

From Indymedia to Anonymous: rethinking action and identity in digital cultures

The period following the social mobilizations of 2011 has seen a renewed focus on the place of communication in collective action, linked to the increasing importance of digital communications. Framed in terms of personalized ‘connective action’ or the social morphology of networks, these analyses have criticized previously dominant models of ‘collective identity’, arguing that collective action needs to be understood as ‘digital networking’. These influential approaches have been significantly constructed as a response to models of communication and action evident in the rise of Independent Media Centres in the period following 1999. After considering the rise of the ‘digital networking’ paradigm linked to analyses of Indymedia, this article considers the emergence of the internet-based collaboration known as Anonymous, focusing on its origins on the 4chan manga site and its 2008 campaign against Scientology, and also considers the ‘I am the 99%’ microblog that emerged as part of the Occupy movement. The emergence of Anonymous highlights dimensions of digital culture such as the ephemeral, the importance of memes, an ethic of lulz, the mask and the grotesque. These forms of communication are discussed in the light of dominant attempts to shape digital space in terms of radical transparency, the knowable and the calculable. It is argued that these contrasting approaches may amount to opposing social models of an emerging information society, and that the analysis of contemporary conflicts and mobilizations needs to be alert to novel forms of communicative practice at work in digital cultures today.     

From mobilization to improvisation: the lessons from Taiwan’s 2014 sunflower movement§

The recent global eruption of large protests calls for a rethinking of the question of movement participation. The conventional model of movement as organized mobilization led by pre-existing organizations and top–down leadership clearly fails as an adequate portrait. As an alternative, horizontality with its emphasis on direct democracy, decentralized decision-making, and prefigurative politics (the rejection of instrumental view of participation) emerges in the global justice movement. This article explores an intermediate pattern of movement participation between these two extremes. Analyzing the protest occupation of Taiwan’s national legislature in 2014, the so-called Sunflower Movement, I theorize the mechanism of improvisation, defined as ‘strategic responses without prior planning,’ as a vital process that facilitates coordination in a large-scale protest. Improvisation involves decentralized decision-making, but it proceeds as a means to a clearly defined and consensual movement goal. The creative collaboration by dispersed, but experienced activists plays a critical yet often neglected role during contentious confrontations against the government. Improvisation is capable of orchestrating large-scale protests because movement leadership is oft constrained by the lack of real-time information and their command is more effective when it provides room for improvisation from below.     

Enclave deliberation and social movement mobilization: the DDays in Occupy Central

ABSTRACT

Scholars have called for a synergy between studies of deliberative democracy and social movements for their mutual enhancement. The existing literature generally applies the principle of deliberation to evaluate social movements, but few studies have examined the corresponding practice of deliberative democracy within a movement. The Occupy Central (OCLP) campaign in Hong Kong is a rare case in which the organizers incorporated Deliberation Days into a social movement; however, participant self-selection turned it into an instance of ‘enclave deliberation’. This paper studies the impact of enclave deliberation on social movements based on the case of the OCLP campaign and argues that enclave deliberation can be a powerful tool for mobilization, particularly for gaining public support and for recruiting core participants. However, the coherence and support of the movement can decline when enclave deliberation is used to make decisions for the general public, because enclave deliberation incorporates only a small spectrum of like-minded participants who might not seriously engage with opposing views. The findings of this study imply that enclave deliberation could facilitate mobilization, but it has its inherent limitations for decision-making in a movement. Given the selective nature of social movements, deliberation within social movements is likely to be enclave deliberation in most cases. This study thus has significant implications for the practice of deliberation in social movements in other contexts.     

Wiki-worthy: collective judgment of candidate notability

The use of socio-technical data to predict elections is a growing research area. We argue that election prediction research suffers from under-specified theoretical models that do not properly distinguish between ‘poll-like’ and ‘prediction market-like’ mechanisms understand findings. More specifically, we argue that, in systems with strong norms and reputational feedback mechanisms, individuals have market-like incentives to bias content creation toward candidates they expect will win. We provide evidence for the merits of this approach using the creation of Wikipedia pages for candidates in the 2010 US and UK national legislative elections. We find that Wikipedia editors are more likely to create Wikipedia pages for challengers who have a better chance of defeating their incumbent opponent and that the timing of these page creations coincides with periods when collective expectations for the candidate's success are relatively high.     

Using Social Network Analysis to Explore Social Movements: A Relational Approach

This paper uses a ‘relational’ approach to network analysis to demonstrate the linkages between different types of environmental organizations in London. A ‘relational’ approach was used to avoid problems associated with ‘positional’ approaches such as structural determinism, subjectively defined and misleadingly labelled blocks of ‘approximately’ equivalent actors, and reification of the action/issue basis of networks. The paper also explores definitions of social/environmental movements. Whilst broadly agreeing with Diani's consensual definition of a social movement, it argues that we need to be much more precise about the type and intensity of networking required; it must be more than informal or cursory, and should bind individuals and organizations into collaborative networks. Evidence from a survey of 149 environmental organizations and qualitative interviews with key campaigners suggests that whilst many organizations might share information, it is often stockpiled or ignored, hardly creating the kinds of network links that might lead to shared movement identity. The kinds of links that do bind movements are collaborative. In practice, in the environmental movement in London, conservationists tend neither to share information nor to engage in the collective action events of reformist or radical organizations, suggesting that conservationists should perhaps not be considered part of the movement.