Occupy Walden

Occupy Wall Street is the latest iteration of a metonymic/symbolic turn in the art of American politics that this essay traces back through environmentalism to locate a connection with Henry David Thoreau at Walden. Like the participants in the recent social movement, Thoreau illuminated the search for good work in difficult economic times through an extended performance of acts involving ephemeral occupation and its seeming opposite, vacation (and the related value oppositions of wildness/tameness and freedom/slavery). Without abandoning the values of the middle class, Thoreau and participants in the Occupy movement raise questions about the sustainability of satisfying occupation/vacation under the pressure of severe economic fluctuations and the subsequent lack of opportunity that accompany the shrinking of the middle class.