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.