A Defense of Occupy Wall Street's Lack of Agenda

Something I've heard a lot about, since Occupy Wall Street formalized in the streets about a month ago, is its weakness due to its not having clear objectives.  This blog is to argue that this 'weakness' is in fact its greatest strength.  We should not desire that the movement have clear demands. 

A week ago, I listened to an interview with the organizer for Occupy Humboldt State University.  For weeks, tents have been stationed outside the classroom I teach in, and a sign reads "Join the 99%".  The organizer, a veteran in his early thirties and student at HSU, argued that Occupy Wall Street is not putting out demands because it's not about that.  Such demands might weaken the movement by alienating people.  The idea of the movement is to include - to bring people into dialogue and thoughtful critique, to generate ideas for resisting corporatocracy.  Since leading the movement on HSU's campus, he said a multitude of young people have approached him, unaware of the reach corporate America has and the injustices prevalent on Wall Street.  The Occupy movement constituted a space for them to meet and talk and criticize and develop a more thoughtful and informed opinion.  This has been the movement's greatest strength - it literally appeals to 99% of Americans because it isn't Democrat or Republican.  It is not Communist.  It is not labeled aside from generating critique of our socio-politico-economic situation.

There are important theoretical justifications for Occupy Wall Street's not having a defined objective.  According to Alain Badiou, "It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent."  This is to say, for too long liberals have busied themselves with the hard work of taking action within a structure they'd like to re-think.  This has led to the closing off of a truly radical break.  It has also made their liberal actions tolerable and non-threatening to the State.  To take a stance on corporate personhood, for instance, usually involves signing petitions and writing letters to Congress.  A whole plan, modeled on similar campaigns, can be googled and carried out.  The State (the Supreme Court, the Congress, the President, the CEO's) already knows that there are inherent contradictions and injustices in corporate personhood: such injustices are recognized as existent.  The campaign to right those wrongs from within the system, keeps the system in tact.  It prevents a true rupture or radical break from the framework that made corporate personhood possible in the first place.  Even if corporate personhood were to be made illegal, this would be a minor victory, for the political framework has not been altered, and corporations will gain their power in other ways.

Zizek argues that we must become "aggressively passive".  That is, if we focus too much on actions and give up a theoretical critique of our situation, we will be "passively aggressive."  Our aggression will amount to no fundamental change.  If we were to retreat and do nothing, focusing our energies on theory and knowledge, the time will more likely become ripe for serious change.  It's strange to refer to the Occupy Wall Street movement as one that is passive because people are getting arrested and beaten, but this movement is fundamentally about passivity.  It gets its strength from its non-violent nature, and it's demand to set up a public space for people to come in and talk, learn, argue, criticize, become challenged and to challenge, to theorize, and to imagine.  It is doing the work that true progressives desire - a forum for radical change.

The time is not ripe for an agenda.  First, consciousness must be raised.