Sign of the Times

10-14-2011

The first installment of a two part blog post about Occupy Wall Street by Hannah Arendt Center Associate Fellow, Kieran Bonner.

“Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain an answer to the question asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’ This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity between speech and revelation is much closer that that between action and revelation, just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer than that between speech and beginning, although many, and even most acts, are performed in the manner of speech.” (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)

I went down to check out the Occupy Wall Street Protest on the Saturday of Columbus Day weekend. I was surprised by how small the group was, the casual and diverse activities being engaged in, and the relatively open way one could move through the square. As a child of the sixties, the similarities between the relaxed and ‘do your own thing’ atmosphere of many demonstrations back then and the diverse activities going on in Zuccotti park were apparent to me. I was also struck by the interest in cardboard sign politics, or as is posted on the occupywallst.com, ‘sign language.’ The criteria for participation seemed to be the possession of a grievance that points in some way to the top 1% of the socio-economic elite, a marker and a piece of cardboard. Aesthetics seemed secondary to having a sign that visitors could read and the media could pick up on. There was a note of reflexivity in the relaxed melee with one cardboard sign reading: “This is a sign.”

The protesters are being compared to the Tea Party in their challenge to the elites, as well as to the ‘Arab Spring’ movement in terms of its use and reliance on social media. There is truth here, for all of these different movements espouse is the need for a better democracy.

Hannah Arendt advocated a conception of democracy invented by the ancient Greeks, in which humans could come together for the sole purpose of speaking and acting with each other - without being driven by needs, and without being mediated by things. Provocatively, the true essence and purpose of politics was neither security nor justice, but rather the opportunity for unique human identity to appear in a shared and common world:

“Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behaviour, if [humans] were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model,.. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”

So we should ask: who are the OWS protesters? How do they appear in the world? There can be no simple answer. Above all, however, the protesters have acted and begun something new. Their deed is not a brute violent deed that seeks to terrorize. It is a peaceful protest and the activists in all their diversity are explicitly encouraged to speak their concerns. Yet, the fact that they seem more interested in the deed itself (the occupation) than in words speaks to Arendt’s nuanced distinction that the emphasis is more on beginning than in revelation.

There are complaints about their lack of specific demands. Many on the right and left say, “What do you want to change”? And the replies are varied, vague or suspiciously utopian. In a sense, this initiative highlights what Arendt says about the affinity of action with new beginnings.

Their most persistent refrain in response to ‘who are you’ is, “We are the 99%.” What does this answer reveal? Clearly this slogan has identified a grievance that the struggling poor and middle class can identify with.

Others have defended the protesters. An otherwise critical New York Times editorial last weekend argues that specific demands are “the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies.” The editorial quickly summarizes what action is needed to respond to the situation OWS is protesting. “There are plenty of policy goals to address the grievances of the protesters – including lasting foreclosure relief, a financial transactions tax, greater legal protections for workers rights, and more progressive taxation.” (Link to NYT piece)

Many in the political center and left of center can easily agree with this response to the OWS act. On Tuesday night at a ProPublica talk at the Tenement Museum, Eliot Spitzer more or less said the same – the protesters are doing what protesters do and it is up to the politicians to develop policy. While this is a response to which I am very sympathetic, I am also aware that it buries or renders superfluous the fundamental question “who are you?’ That is, it treats the act of occupation as solely about the economic crisis. Does such a response, sensible as it is, not risk undermining the action OWS began?

It is crucial to bear in mind two essential elements of action that Arendt draws our attention to and that humans need to come to terms with: irreversibility and unpredictability. It is of the essence of an act, she tells us, that once it is begun it cannot be reversed. It also cannot be fully controlled. Just as the OWS initiative was not predicted, neither can the response to the initiative be predicted. The experience of irreversibility and unpredictability (a lived reality for most contemporary parents) is the experience of human limitation: of what we cannot undo and what we cannot control. The OWS action is a beginning and many note that it is not clear where this beginning will go. It is precisely the response to the action that will determine whether it is a beginning that is a true establishment, like the Founding Fathers actions in the 1770s, or one that will suffer the fate of most human initiatives and fade into oblivion in the midst of time.

 

 -Kieran Bonner