Critical Themes 2012: Occupy The Media or Occupy As Medium?
Not An Alternative joins Jodi Dean, Marco Deseriis, and Jack Bratich as presenters in the Opening Panel at the Critical Themes in Media Studies 2012 conference at The New School.
Occupy the Media or Occupy as Medium?
This panel asks the simple question of whether the variety of media invented and adopted by Occupy Wall Street should be seen as extensions of the movement or whether the movement can be seen as a medium in its own right. It does so by approaching this problem from three different perspectives: Occupy as a meme, meme-generator, operation, and platform; Occupy as a collective practice through which bodies affect and amplify each other by acting together; and Occupy as a movement that concerns the struggle for symbolic power and against symbolic domination in the urban space.
Occupy as Meme: Socially Mediated Spectatorship, Jokes, and Affective Contagion
Presenter: Jack Z. Bratich
This presentation examines Occupy Wall Street as meme, meme-generator, operation and platform. From the initial call by Adbusters to Pepper Spray Cop to the press roundup of 2011’s top examples, OWS has been infused with meme-making. I explore OWS as itself a meme around a number of dimensions: Paolo Virno’s analysis of jokes as public action via repetition and difference; Michel Foucault’s assessment of Kant’s notion of revolutionary “enthusiasm” by spectators (now merged with participants); and the move from online to offline action via what Anna Gibbs calls “affective contagion.” Ultimately, I argue that OWS has mutated from meme to something like a platform or image-board (like 4chan) as well as to one recent result from platforms: an Operation and its collective actor (e.g. Anonymous).
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