Radical rhetoric: Performing politics at Occupy

Millette, Holly-Gale (2014) Radical rhetoric: Performing politics at Occupy. Radical Americas Conference: the Aesthetics and Epistemologies of Crisis Panel, Institute of the Americas, University College London, London, United Kingdom. 16 - 18 Jun 2014. (Submitted)

Abstract

I would like to consider the Occupy Movement (Occupy Wall Street) and whether harnessing word (argument) and action (occupation) – on its own – can constitute a transformative performance. In this, I am not seeking to replace the Aristotelian idea of performance, nor its transformative aspect. However, I do not believe that it is entirely appropriate to confine the mimetic acts of Occupy’s discourse to an Aristotelian dialectic. My thinking is that the instigation of discourse was the performance, and that it was a performance of resistance.

The ‘efficacy debate’ is a central issue for practitioners and scholars of political performance. I shall not question the truth of such claims, as I do believe that to be a performance the event must transform – in some way – its audience. I could justify the efficacy of Occupy, as Kershaw does, as delivering a politics to an audience unaccustomed to it but then I do not believe this is how Occupy constitutes itself or behaves. And I question the ability for the performance of protest to affect any kind of political change. This paper argues that Occupy was not, strictly speaking, ‘a performance of politics’. Rather, its politics emerged out of its performance of rhetorical devices and strategies that put the weaker argument on display. I will speak of Occupy as cultural material and I will address its creative activity in performance, its knowledge transfer, and its transformative process enacted on the process of maintaining the social.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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