{"id":498,"date":"2011-11-19T13:11:26","date_gmt":"2011-11-19T13:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terrywassall.org\/blogs\/notes\/?p=498"},"modified":"2011-11-19T13:11:26","modified_gmt":"2011-11-19T13:11:26","slug":"occupations-as-human-mic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/2011\/11\/19\/occupations-as-human-mic\/","title":{"rendered":"Occupations as human mic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Process is politics at Occupy Wall Street – Salon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I have recently become aware of the so-called ‘human microphone’, a tactic adopted by the Wall Street occupiers when their use of megaphones was banned. A great description of how this works can be found on the excellent Literary Kicks blog Occupy Wall Street: How the People’s Mic Works<\/a>. I think the human mic is a\u00a0powerful\u00a0metaphor for the growing number of occupations spreading around the world, about 2000 I think at the last count. One of the complaints about the occupations that is becoming increasingly common is that there are no clear objectives or set of alternative policies. This is entirely unreasonable. Who these days can claim (truthfully\u00a0\u00a0and realistically) to have clear objectives or a well thought out and realistic strategy for getting there? \u00a0Our government, the US government, the EC Commissioners? The only clear and thought-out strategy there is any evidence for at the moment seems to be Goldman Sachs’ strategy, by a combination of recruiting\u00a0influential\u00a0politicians\u00a0as advisers and consultants and taking over governments’ economic policies via their (unelected) \u00a0place men and alumni ‘technocrats’. (See What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe<\/a> for an account of the Goldman Sachs Project).<\/p>\n

For a number of years now there has been much hand wringing and\u00a0regret\u00a0about the atrophy of civil society and the demise of public spaces for open and democratic discussion. The pervading acceptance that the current system is the least bad and that there is no alternative (TINA) – the basis of the argument that we are now in a ‘post political’ era – leads to and legitimates\u00a0the\u00a0conclusion that all that remains to be done is the find the most efficient and managerialist methods of\u00a0administrating capitalism and consumer society. Life’s shit and the best we can do is to make it a bit less smelly for the docile and deserving. The importance of the\u00a0occupations, at this stage of the game at least, is to open up and\u00a0re-politicise\u00a0spaces in civil society, to develop both a negative\u00a0critique\u00a0and exposure of the lies, corruption, injustice, \u00a0hypocrisy\u00a0and\u00a0inhumanity, to make visible the human face and experience of those that suffer as the ‘collateral damage’ of the system, and (although I am\u00a0rather\u00a0ambivalent\u00a0about some aspects of this) to smoke out and make visible to all the links between corporate power, political complicity and the state\u00a0ideological\u00a0and material\u00a0apparatuses\u00a0of repression. \u00a0At the same time, and more positively, the occupations are\u00a0fantastic\u00a0experiments\u00a0and demonstrations of citizens ‘doing\u00a0it for\u00a0themselves’ –\u00a0providing\u00a0tentative intimations of different sorts of\u00a0non-hierarchical and\u00a0consensual\u00a0organisation, of alternative values and forms of sociality and conviviality. It is through networks of city occupations, alternative educational spaces like the Social Science Centre<\/a> in Lincoln and the Space Projec<\/a>t in Leeds, through\u00a0initiatives\u00a0like the Really Open University<\/a>, and more recently Tent City University<\/a> and the Bank of Ideas<\/a>\u00a0(to name but a few) that the\u00a0critiques, ideas and values are\u00a0transmitted\u00a0and amplified \u00a0into and throughout the public domain through\u00a0mainstream, citizen\u00a0and social media, coalescing\u00a0into an ever widening and deepening public awareness and debate about the state we are in, and the systems of interest, power and irresponsibility that \u00a0got us here. Where we are denied the ‘megaphone’ of meaningful and effective\u00a0representation\u00a0in our defective, subservient and co-opted political system the human microphone of the new and growing radical and\u00a0critical\u00a0spaces is becoming a formidable weapon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have recently become aware of the so-called ‘human microphone’, a tactic adopted by the Wall Street occupiers when their use of megaphones was banned. A great description of how this works can be found on the excellent Literary Kicks blog Occupy Wall Street: How the People’s Mic Works. I think the human mic is … Continue reading “Occupations as human mic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,4,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism","category-general","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}