Occupy Solidarity

Sometimes clichés and platitudes are useful. So here're some: Ignorance is the plague. Xenophobia is the plague. Hatred of others is the plague. Greed is the plague. Eradicate the plague. Performances are — or at least can be — model utopian societies. Workshops are ways to destroy ignorance; rehearsals are ways to creatively relate to others not by submerging or ignoring differences, but by exploring differences as the group devises a generous common way forward. Performances can hold up to public view the outcome of such active research. Performance studies — and other "studies" as well — can provide the critical lenses necessary to understand how societies work (or fail) as individuals and groups embody and enact their personal and collective identities.

At this moment, as I write, the Occupy Wall Street movement is extremely active in New York's Zuccotti Park (felicitously located at the corner of Broadway and Liberty). Other "Occupy" sites — encampments often — have sprung up around the US and beyond. There are Occupy sites in so many places that I can only name a few: Atlanta, Baltimore, Albuquerque, Denver, Boston; and overseas, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tokyo, Brussels, Copenhagen, Moscow, Helsinki, Madrid... The Occupy London Stock Exchange is set up on the doorsteps of St. Paul's Cathedral. Up until now, with a few exceptions, the Occupy movement has been peaceful — the violence that has occurred has been the result of police intervention. In the Occupy movement, I and others hear loud and clear echoes of the great freedom and student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. There are also links — conceptual and strategic — to the Arab Spring uprisings, from Tunis to Cairo, largely peaceful, to the bloody encounters in Syria, Yemen, and Libya.

The driving slogan of the Occupy movement is "We are the 99%" — meaning that the people gathered belong to the vast majority who do not control the wealth of nations. In Zuccotti Park when I visited, the community comprised mostly younger (under 35) and well-educated people. There were seminars, speeches amplified by call-and-response instead of megaphones (to abide by New York's laws against unlicensed loudspeaker systems), drumming and dancing, art displays, petitions circulating, food being shared, and many other indications of creativity and goodwill. At the same time, the park was an isolate, surrounded by police and, I suppose, also infiltrated by undercover agents. The Occupiers were not so much marginalized as quarantined. Ordinary life went on outside of the park. And the long-term strategy of the authorities seemed to be, "Let them be for now; winter will take care of it. Like the leaves in the park's trees, they will finally be gone." In Oakland, by contrast, the police used tear gas. This kind of response, of course, only enrages the Occupiers and all who sympathize with them. Outside of the US, in Greece and elsewhere, rioting and incipient armed revolution is increasing in opposition to the new economic order being enforced by the 1% and their minions. The struggle has barely begun, again.

Yes, I have a utopian option. It involves detaching labor from work, and pay from labor; lifelong education and support — the creative use of the automation and digitization that is dissolving the industrial model of human production, profit, and wages. Such a utopian option is not around the corner, but neither is it as far away as you might imagine.

For all this — from the Occupy movement and Arab Spring to visions of a society where the vast majority of people are paid because they exist, engage in lifelong education, art-making, and other creative activities — I am inhabited by two contending sets of feelings, intuitions, attitudes, observations, and thoughts. On the one hand, I regard with satisfaction my extremely local world of performance studies. I celebrate its indices of success — the growing number of programs and departments globally, the quality and quantity of scholarship across a broad spectrum of subjects and methodologies, and the huge amount of artistic work it informs. On the other hand, when I am not dreaming of Occupy, I realize that in terms of economics, politics, the environment, human rights...