CHAPTER 1

I'M SO ANGRY I MADE A SIGN

Michael Taussig

A NOTE ON FORM

I have inserted the signs in Zuccotti Park as set-apart quotationsin the center of the page. And sometimes I have also insertedquotes from texts by philosophers, poets, and other peopleworth listening to. They, too, look like signs. I don't think youwill confuse them, but it's better if you do.

A NOTE ON STRATEGY

Nietzsche says somewhere that a historian has to create a textequal to what is being written about. This would seem especiallycompelling when it comes to Occupy Wall Street.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche has a paragraph, "To DestroyOnly as Creators," which I take to mean a demand not for "positivecritique," but that we be aware of how description andanalysis of an event is a culture-creating activity, and write accordingly.

Coming back to this text of mine six months after it waswritten is like visiting a strange and fabulous land. I imagine itwill be the same for you.

Wall St is everywheretherefore we have to occupy everywhere

11:00 P.M., OCTOBER 13, 2011

On my way downtown to Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park,New York City. Flustered and excited. E-mails coming in fromYesenia, and from Michelle and Alex in my sorcery and magicclass at Columbia. They should be writing their weekly assignmentsfor school. They are so far behind. But this is the nightthe mayor will attack. I stop by the bagel store to tell this to myMexican friend who serves behind the counter. He is countingmoney and is preoccupied. He has never heard of OWS and hetries to look interested. My canvas bag is stuffed with sleepingbags for Saa and myself. Long wait for the #1 train. Unbearable.Alex says rumors of police closing in at midnight. Danny Alonso,also in my sorcery class, once compared visiting ZuccottiPark—which he did all the time from day one—to the excitementof going to the movies and getting into the trance of thatother reality. You get hooked, he later wrote. "I would be hypnotizedand turned into someone else." In fact, many selves. Adrumming self. A facilitator self. A hunting and gathering selfroaming Manhattan for tarpaulins and food from dumpstersto bring the tribe, listening to stories "and healing from peoplewho had come from all over to share in this moment." Many ofthese people had lost their jobs.

Lost my job but found an occupation

You break through the screen, like Alice in Wonderland. Andnow you can't leave or do without it. Everything else seems fakeand boring. So how do you write about it? In such circumstancesof dissolving norms, effervescent atmosphere, invention andreinvention, what happens to the ethnographer's magic—asMalinowski called it—and that old standby of "participant observation?"

And is the magic strong enough?

Am I clear here? I don't think so, and I think this is the problemof writing surprise and writing strangeness, surely the dilemmaand sine qua non of ethnography? As soon as you writesurprise—or, rather, attempt to write it—it is as if the surprisehas been made digestible so it is no longer surprising, no longerstrange. To "occupy ethnography" is to get around that somehow,to seize on the means and manner of representation asestranged. An exuberant style is not enough. That is why I somuch like the zombie-style bodies and faces of the sign holderswho populate Zuccotti Park, graven images outside time.

Welcome to Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. Irecall Paris, May 1968: people said they lived in that zone formonths, didn't sleep, didn't need to. Out of nowhere a communityforms, fueled by the unforeseen chance to fight back.Decades drift away. Decades of Fox News and Goldman Sachs.Decades of gutting what was left of the social contract. Decadesin which kids came to think being a banker was sexy. When thathappens, you know it's all over—or about to explode, as onceagain history throws a curveball. Once in a lifetime, the unpredictableoccurs and reality gets redefined.

The most striking sign I have seen at Zuccotti Park over threemonths was a life-size painting of a man's striped tie on a whitebackground. The tie was knotted to form a circle at the top likea hangman's noose. Wordless. Next to it was a sign with blotchypatches of white over some of the letters:

They piss on us and callit trickle down

America wakes up from the American Dream. "I've beenwaiting for this all my life," says Craig, who stayed with me overnightfrom California with naught but a backpack on his way toZuccotti Park.

I awoke in a sweatfrom the American Dream

"At night we lie all together on the concrete," writes Alex,"a few sleeping, the rest talking in low voices, or reading nextto the street lights, or cursing the constant sirens that we arecertain the NYPD sends around the park at night just to keep uspoorly rested and easily dominated, or looking through the thincanopy of leaves between the dark towers and the sky. The firstmorning we all agreed that we felt as if those buildings wouldfall in on us.

"Dear WB," she goes on, "maybe OWS is something likethat awakening that is between sleep and consciousness. Weare emerging from slumber but we are disoriented, stupored,caught between the dream logic of capitalism and the newlyforming world."

"Dear WB." How blessed is that? She is writing code, ofcourse—direct from the state of emergency. She is searching thezone of the dialectical image that Walter Benjamin envisaged asemerging from the dream sleep of capitalism that reactivatedmythic powers. Just as one swims in the surreal zone of semisleepas harbinger of revolution, so does the epoch. Does thenew security state understand and believe this too, along withWalter? Why else would they walk silently through the park atnight, filming the sleepers?

you must be asleep to experiencethe American Dream

Salomeya put it a little differently. She has a theory, as usual.Working out of the sense of the body and magic she findsin Malinowski's discussions of clan and sub-clan solidarity andsorcery, she discerns a form of human bonding relevant to OWSthat she calls "erotic materialism." It is a brilliant rereading ofclassical anthropology applied as much to Zuccotti Park as toaforesaid dream sleep mythology. (Now she tells me she suffersfrom being too abstract, but there's little she can do about it.)

But the lines get blurred. Solidarity gets tested. As time goesby, it is said that undercover police roam the park disguised asprotesters. (Question: What does a protester look like?) It is saidthat homeless people are being directed by the police and sheltersto go to Zuccotti Park in the hope that they will dilute andfactionalize the occupation. The ideals of the radical hipstersfrom Brooklyn with their web-savvy culture are being testedlike never before by these homeless men who seem uninterestedin what the hipsters stand for, yet the whole point of OWSis homelessness. As time goes by—horror of horrors!—somethinglike property and real estate interests surface. Someonequips that there is an Upper East Side section of tents in the park,and one hears muttering of gentrification, as if this utopic spaceis reproducing what it is against.

We just bought real estatein your mind

It is said that there are rapes and stealing, and there certainlyis stealing. Craig got all his stuff swiped after he left for half anhour to wash up in the bathroom of Trinity Church.

I can hire one half of theworking classto kill the otherJay Gould

I walk out of the subway at Fulton Street into the canyonsof Wall Street, Fritz Lang's Metropolis of soaring towers holdingup a black sky heavy with rain clouds, workers in cages likemoles—no speech (1927), only cryptic subtitles and madly gesticulatingfigures with pasty white expressionist faces caught infrozen grimace. Police cars and vans are everywhere around thepark and secreted in back alleys.

Down on the ground it is a war zone crackling with expectancy.But overhead, Freedom Tower, sheathed in mirrors, dwarfseverything, glistening with blue light. What did Benjamin sayin "This Space for Rent" in One Way Street, that other OWS publishedas the fuse was being lit in Europe, in 1928, one year afterMetropolis:

What, in the end, makes advertisementssuperior to criticism? Not what themoving red neon says—but the fierypool reflecting it in the asphalt

You take a deep breath when you get there, and you can'tbreathe again until you leave. It is devastatingly spectacular andinhuman: the architecture of what Marx called M-M', meaningmoney making money, meaning finance capital, of which creditdefault swaps are the ultimate expression of the moneylendersChrist drove from the temple.

Is this what occupation of the park means—a moral movementagainst the exploitation of people not only by the moneylenders,but by the apparently neutral means of money doingit all on its own, meaning M-M'? Does the occupation occupythe magical energy of this fetish, and from this abundant sourcedraw its energy?

Wall Street is forbiddingly allegorical. Fritz Lang providesa frightening topography of heaven and hell, of our Metropolis.But, closer to home, so did Diego Rivera in 1931, during theGreat Depression, with his painting Fondos Congelados (FrozenAssets), showing the serene temples of Manhattan as an archaelogicalstratum atop a dimly lit subterranean morgue withcorpses laid out in rows, supervised by a lonely guard. Perhapsthey are not corpses, you say to yourself, but merely sleepingbodies. These are the "frozen assets": the unemployed laid outlike corpses in prisonlike dwellings, bringing to mind the notionof capital as "congealed labor." It is a terrible picture. Youcould hear a pin drop.

But now, miraculously, with the occupation in full swing, thepicture had come alive as the architecture of M-M' lost its grip.We looked at each other eye-to-eye in those days, never quiteknowing what the next enchanted moment would bring. Wewere bigger than the buildings, and instead of being physicallycompressed and mentally scripted, like the poor bastards in theoffices all around us, we lived moment by moment, sparks flyingfrom a knife grinder's wheel.

Even if Zuccotti was barren in winter as I wrote this, rarelydid a day pass without mention in the media of OWS or the hugegap between the rich and the rest. The day I passed Zuccotti Parkin mid-January, the mothers of girls in private schools of theUpper East Side, like Spence and Brearley, were reported in theNew York Times as bemoaning the fact that, for the first timeever, their daughters had not gotten into Yale on early admission.Was that because of anger at the 1 percent? they wondered.That same day I passed a hole-in-the-wall restaurant uptownon Amsterdam Avenue and 102nd Street called Busters of NewYork. On a blackboard outside was displayed its menu:

Wrap: "Occupy the Dream"

Down the street from Zuccotti Park, the Museum of theAmerican Indian. Right by the park, an African slave burialground. How extraordinary! And right here in Zuccotti Park,many black protesters. But amid the hustle and bustle of thestreets, does anyone notice that the center of the world's money—whatmakes this city so "global"—rests on top of skeletonsof African slaves and ghosts of Indians, no doubt shaking wampumand featherwork. It is all so arty now, like Julie Mehretu'sgorgeous five-million-dollar, eighty-foot-long mural adorningthe glass-walled lobby of the new Goldman Sachs building alongthe Hudson, not so far away. They so want art, the 1 percent.Man does not live by bread alone. And art is a great—many saythe greatest—investment in these troubled times. Three daysbefore the occupation is forcibly ended by the baton-wieldingNYPD, art shows its power:

As Stocks FallArt Surges at a $315 Million Sale

Despite (or perhaps because of) the stock market's nearly400 point plunge on Wednesday, collectors on Wednesday nightraced to put their available cash–and lots of it—into art

(New York Times, November 10, 2011)

But try to be a young artist impassioned by art—somethingyou could die for—if you don't have a trust fund and your parentsaren't rich with connections in the art world. I dare you.The humiliation. The slime. The eating away of self-confidence.Do anything, anything at all, to survive. The heart-rendingquestions: What is art? Why that, and not this?

A little further uptown, where prostitutes practiced their artand hoary truckers got laid, where the smell of rancid fat fromthe meat packing district used to be, now you have the lovely"high line" of swaying grasses along the abandoned railwaytracks, the capstone of gentrification from which you can peerdown into boutique stores and forget that Manhattan has becomeunlivable for most people. What are all those smart peopletalking about in those chic restaurants? "Ultimately what ZuccottiPark is all about," Reinhold tells me (and he should know,urban planner that he is), "is real estate." What he means is thatthe occupation is testing the limits of monetarized space. Sowhat we have is

real estatefinance capitalartand now OWS (another form of art)

Man does not live by bread alone. They so need art, the 1 percent.But so does OWS. This is not only a struggle about incomedisparity and corporate control of democracy. It is about thepractice of art, too, including the art of being alive.

History congeals, then dissolves; and somehow art alwaysends up being art. When some OWS-inspired people droppeda banner inside the Museum of Modern Art in support of theart handlers locked out of Sotheby's, MOMA people quickly appropriatedthe banner as art.

History congeals, then dissolves. The chiseled stone of theolder Wall Street buildings gives way to mirrored buildingsfighting free of history on postmodern wings. Money helps.Night and day, the crescendo of jackhammers obliterates timeitself. Cranes lace the sky, adding new constellations. "All thatis solid melts into air." The Communist Manifesto. Marshall Berman,"the bourgeoisie has a vested interest in destruction." Butone day it will go too far. Marx and the Wobblies, giving birth tothe new society in the womb of the old. Dreams of the classlesssociety. Tomb and womb. Space of death. Indians with the ghostdance. Starting up again. "Fellow slave" is how the Wobblies addressedeach other. Fellow slave. A sign on the pavement:

Nobody is more hopelessly enslaved thanthose who believe they are free

I look in heaps of garbage for plastic bags to cover us if wetry to get some sleep. Huge white plastic bags outside Starbuckslook usable. Homeless woman asleep in a doorway, wrapped ina enormous black plastic bag. Right idea. Slight drizzle. Warm.Get to the park. A crazy-looking guy walks by with a sign:

We are the futureWe are going to win

He is dragging a white dog. He is ready to fight, but his forkedfingers mean peace. Some people are ripping open plastic bags.The "human microphone," which everyone spells as "mic check"but is pronounced "mike check," is in full swing, explaining civildisobedience and what to do when arrested. I hook up with mystudents and with Saa. Magic markers are passed around, forwriting the telephone number of the Lawyers' Guild on one'sskin. Rain is getting heavier. We are being encouraged to cleanthe park, which seems absurd to me, because that validates themayor's excuse for dealing with protesters, as vermin that needextermination ... time and again, the unclean, the disorderly,the un-uniformed, the un-uniform. And let's not forget theworst, the anarchists, as much vilified by the police as by Marxand Engels.

We all knowwhere the real dirt is

"It has to be cleaned up," the "chief executive" (note the nomenclature)of the management company overseeing the parkis reported as saying. The billionaire mayor's girlfriend is onthe board of the company that owns the park, and the mayor(according to the New York Times, October 15, 2011) "is a mayorobsessed with the cleanliness of the city's public spaces." Laterwe hear that the management company is way behind in payingits taxes to the city. There are brooms and soap galore, and hereI am with a broom, side-by-side with a merry fellow in a SantaClaus outfit leading the crew. A woman starts up a mic check.

(Continues...)