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...