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  • Premediation and the Virtual Occupation of Wall Street
  • Richard Grusin (bio)

Nearly two weeks into the occupation of Wall Street I had suggested in an initial analysis1 that no matter how the occupation turned out it was already successful insofar as it had premediated the occupation of Wall Street and other occupations across the world.2 In particular I argued that "Insofar as premediation generates potential or virtual futures as a way to mobilize individual and collective affect in the present ... #occupywallstreet opens up paths to potential futures in which the occupation of Wall Street (or the political occupation of other sites) is actualized." As the occupation approaches the two month mark, I want to develop this claim further to argue that it is precisely its virtuality, its resistance to making specific demands or adopting a platform, that makes #occupywallstreet successful and that will keep it growing and thriving.

The virtuality of the movement is evident in its very name, which calls for the occupation of Wall Street even while not occupying Wall Street per se. The occupation of Zuccotti Park is near Wall Street, but Wall Street—as stock exchange, city street, or geographical place—is not physically occupied. It is, however, virtually occupied, as Times Square has been, as Chicago or Los Angeles or the London Stock Exchange have been, and so forth. While some veterans of earlier protest movements have argued that occupation involves going inside buildings and taking possession—as Wisconsin protesters did in the State Capitol—it is the potentiality of these occupations, I would argue, their premediation of greater and more numerous and powerful potential occupations in the future, that vitalizes the Occupy movement and marks its continued success.

The virtuality of the Occupy movement is evident as well in the widespread feeling that the movement should not at this point make explicit demands, for doing so would prematurely and unnecessarily constrain or limit the movement's gathering strength. Despite increasingly vocal appeals by many politicians, intellectuals, and members of the chattering class of the mainstream political media for the Occupy movement to develop a list of specific demands, there is an even broader consensus that such demands would be premature. In a brief video interview Wallace Shawn gives voice to the widely shared belief that the movement is in the preliminary stage.3 Judith Butler plays off of this belief in her recent speech at Washington Square Park about demanding the impossible, which is another way to refuse actualizing or realizing any particular demands, but rather of encouraging the proliferation of informed, half-formed, nascent or potential exams.4

I have argued elsewhere that premediation works by mobilizing affect in the present. Premediation deploys multiple modes of mediation and remediation in shaping the affectivity of the public, in preparing people for some field of possible future actions, in producing a mood or structure of feeling that makes possible certain kinds of actions, thoughts, speech, affectivities, feelings, or moods, mediations that might not have seemed possible before or that might have fallen flat or died on the vine or not produced echoes and reverberations in the public or media sphere.

As an event of premediation, #occupywallstreet is working to change the mood or collective affective tone in the media, in public discourse, in social networks, and in the political sphere so that talking about amnesty for college or mortgage debt or demanding increased taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations or thinking about restructuring property relations and economic becomes not only permissible, but indeed begins to appear as common sense or received wisdom. For example, on the NBC Nightly News on October 27, Brian Williams reported on a 300+ point rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average not with the customary celebratory affect the mainstream media usually invoke for such news, but with a question about whether this gain in the price of securities would have any effect on the American people.5 Similarly in less than two months Occupy Wall Street has changed the public mood in such a way that Obama has been emboldened to issue executive orders improving (albeit minimally) conditions for struggling homeowners6 and students with outstanding college...

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