In October, Bernard Harcourt argued that the then-nascent Occupy Wall Street movement represented a political paradigm shift, one that demanded a new vocabulary. The protests signaled the emergence of a form of what he called “political disobedience.” He described political disobedience as a fundamental rejection of the “political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War,” and contrasted it with civil disobedience:
Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
The movement exercises its political disobedience in part through its refusal to issue demands, Harcourt argued, and even well-meaning fellow travelers who attempted to steer Occupy toward articulate positions were “missing the point of the resistance.” Harcourt, chair of the political science department and professor of law at the University of Chicago, and author, most recently, of The Illusion of Free Markets, argued that protesters should continue to resist making explicit demands, because such demands would merely submit the movement to the partisan political sphere that Occupy is meant to resist. “Ultimately,” he wrote, “what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in,” and distilling themselves to a handful of demands would be conceding to the terms of the society that the Occupiers aim to leave behind.
This week Harcourt extended his analysis of the movement with a piece on Occupy’s grammar of political disobedience, suggesting that, if the new paradigm of political resistance calls for a new vocabulary, it also calls for an entirely new grammar:
The syntax that the critics and pundits are using no longer seems to work. Statements to the effect that Occupy Wall Street should get an agenda or, as the Wall Street Journal disdainfully remarked, should stop engaging in “days of feckless rage”, no longer fully make sense. It is as if these grammatical formulations cannot be “heard” properly given the leaderless paradigm of the new resistance movement. They sound like the inaudible noise in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus – or, perhaps more familiarly, the “mwa, mwa, mwa” that adults make in Charlie Brown cartoons.
For Harcourt part of what makes such statements inaudible is a spatial matter: they cannot be “heard” by the movement “unless the speaker is physically occupying an Occupy space.” Again, this applies as much to those who side with the movement as those who oppose: “You can't ‘occupy’ while sitting at your computer or publishing an editorial. You cannot ‘occupy’ at a distance from an Occupy site.”
But to occupy in a manner that allows you to speak in this new grammar requires more than just dropping by an Occupy site, but “occupying” it “in the sense of having a self-imagination that they are part of the resistance movement.” He continues:
What it takes to “occupy”, grammatically speaking, does not necessarily require a tent or sleeping bag, nor even a poster (though that surely helps), but a self-conception that one is protesting. Mere presence does not even suffice. The journalist on the beat, the visiting tourist, the police officer patrolling the park, or the politician claiming to be responsive to the protesters’ demand, none of these would be “occupying” unless they took the further step of conceiving of themselves as part of the resistance movement.
Even further, though, the voices in our society that are accustomed to making themselves heard—the politicians, pundits, columnists—are now inaudible to the movement because of what the Occupiers see as the failure of the society marshaled by those voices. The “experts” have created these problems, Harcourt argues, and have thus lost all claim to authority among those working to conceive of something new.
For Harcourt, this “new syntactic order” signals radical change to the traditional structure of social and political movements. For one thing, its mechanisms and procedures essentially forestall the emergence of charismatic leadership. The structure also allows for cooperation among people of varying “political persuasions,” which allows for previously unimaginable overlap between sometimes mutually exclusive ideas. It has led, he says, to something new:
There is a conversation going on in the United States that I have not heard before. It is the product, I believe, of this new paradigm of leaderless occupation. It is also the effect of a new syntax that is being deployed by an impressive group of well-educated and articulate young women and men expressing themselves in a new political grammar. Surely, there is a virtue in keeping contestation open.
Ultimately, he argues, this new vocabulary, this new grammar, and the space opened up by them have embedded within them the possibility that Occupy dares to imagine.
[You can hear Bernard Harcourt discuss his ideas on Occupy here.]
