Visual Media And Culture Of Occupy

On 15th October 2011, hundreds of anti-capitalist protestors assembled into a spectacular carnivalesque procession towards Paternoster Square; the heartland of London’s banking district. Beginning with Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’, this book examines Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral in relation to media spectacle. Initially focusing on arrival narratives, it asks the question: were the 15th October 2011 anti-capitalist protestors ‘hailed’ into becoming the subjects of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral? Based on extensive ethnographic interviews and photographic data, this book demonstrates the complex ways in which Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral ‘interpolated’ (Ashcroft 2001) and subverted media spectacle. Kairos exemplifies the longue durée of the art and ethics of Occupy. The bifarious dimensions of kairos emphasise an ethics of care and devotion alongside the indeterminate possibilities of the aleatory encounter. Formulated within Marxist aleatory materialism, this book explores the momentous reality of Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral. Instantiated within an extraordinary conjuncture of conflict between capital and labour, Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral manifested formidable expressions of resistance to the disembodied ‘space of flows’; ‘timeless times’; and the ‘real virtualities’ of transnational capitalist accumulation. Empirical case studies are used to engage with the extraordinary strategies that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral politically cultivated to address: (i) the future of print news media, The Occupied Times of London; (ii) disjunctures and disruptions within the locality of the ‘space of place’ amidst the harsh reality of neoliberal austerity measures; (iii) the harnessing of multi-modal information communication technologies as part of an imperative to unite the ‘space of place’ with an international environmental citizenship; (iv) critically mobilising market analogues and promotional media integral to the neoliberal market reform of public sector healthcare provision and, in so doing, occupying a radical riposte to the entrepreneurial self and marketized morals of neoliberalism’s homo economicus consumer citizen. In these and many other examples, this book argues that Occupy LSX St Paul’s Cathedral exemplifies the possibilities of kairos as a condition and consequence of the politics, visual media and culture of new social movements.

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. “You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument. Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

Adsensory sign technology, which depicts the human body as both object and subject of inscriptive advertising technologies, is integral to a western capitalist insurantial financialisation of health and wellbeing. Developing further the theme of adsensory technologies of the sign, in conjunction with Daniel Bell’s theory of the codification of knowledge as an axial feature of the structuring of post-industrial society, this book explores gentrification in heterotopic post-industrial urban spaces. It brings together case studies from the City of Bath’s decommissioned Bath Press print works; London’s Trafalgar Square busking community and its dialectics of audio-sensory gentrification; and London’s Brick Lane and its gentrification of street art. These studies illustrate, empirically, the extent to which advertising adsensory technologies have become integral to the gentrification of post-industrial urban spaces. Several of the case studies engage critically with the empirical observation that, in the post-industrial urban ecology of inner-city regeneration, adsensory technologies extend avariciously into the infrastructure of neoliberal, managerialist gentrification. In addition, the book explores the forms of capital accumulation which are emerging from the integration of adsensory technology into the gentrification of post-industrial urban spaces, and examines a new form of capital accumulation in inner-city gentrification, predicated on the (de)generative integrity of adsensory financialisation.

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

This SAGE Handbook brings together cutting edge social scientific research and theoretical insight into the emerging contours of digital society. Chapters explore the relationship between digitisation, social organisation and social transformation at both the macro and micro level, making this a valuable resource for postgraduate students and academics conducting research across the social sciences. The topics covered are impressively far-ranging and timely, including machine learning, social media, surveillance, misinformation, digital labour, and beyond. This innovative Handbook perfectly captures the state of the art of a field which is rapidly gaining cross-disciplinary interest and global importance, and establishes a thematic framework for future teaching and research. Part 1: Theorising Digital Societies Part 2: Researching Digital Societies Part 3: Sociotechnical Systems and Disruptive Technologies in Action Part 4: Digital Society and New Social Dilemmas Part 5: Governance and Regulation Part 6: Digital Futures

This is the first comprehensive volume to explore and engage with current trends in Geographies of Media research. It reviews how conceptualizations of mediated geographies have evolved. Followed by an examination of diverse media contexts and locales, the book illustrates key issues through the integration of theoretical and empirical case studies, and reflects on the future challenges and opportunities faced by scholars in this field. The contributions by an international team of experts in the field, address theoretical perspectives on mediated geographies, methodological challenges and opportunities posed by geographies of media, the role and significance of different media forms and organizations in relation to socio-spatial relations, the dynamism of media in local-global relations, and in-depth case studies of mediated locales. Given the theoretical and methodological diversity of this book, it will provide an important reference for geographers and other interdisciplinary scholars working in cultural and media studies, researchers in environmental studies, sociology, visual anthropology, new technologies, and political science, who seek to understand and explore the interconnections of media, space and place through the examples of specific practices and settings.

Protestors across the world use aesthetics in order to communicate their ideas and ensure their voices are heard. This book looks at protest aesthetics, which we consider to be the visual and performative elements of protest, such as images, symbols, graffiti, art, as well as the choreography of protest actions in public spaces. Through the use of social media, protestors have been able to create an alternative space for people to engage with politics that is more inclusive and participatory than traditional politics. This volume focuses on the role of visual culture in a highly mediated environment and draws on case studies from Europe, Thailand, South Africa, USA, Argentina, and the Middle East in order to demonstrate how protestors use aesthetics to communicate their demands and ideas. It examines how digital media is harnessed by protestors and argues that all protest aesthetics are performative and communicative.

This book is an urgent and compelling account of the Occupy movements: from the M15 movement in Spain, to the wave of Occupations flooding across cities in American, Europe and Australia, to the harsh reality of evictions as corporations and governments attempted to reassert exclusive control over public space. Across a vast range of international examples over twenty authors analyse, explain and helps us understand the movement. These movements were a novel and noisy intervention into the recent capitalist crisis in developed economies, developing an exceptionally broad identity through a call to arms addressed to ‘the 99%’, and emphasizing the importance of public space in the creation and maintenance of opposition. The novelties of these movements, along with their radical positioning and the urgency of their claims all demand analysis. This book investigates the crucial questions of how and why this form of action spread so rapidly and so widely, how the inclusive discourse of ‘the 99%’ matched up to the reality of the practice. It is vital to understand not just the choice of tactics and the vitality of protest camps in public spaces, but also how the myriad of challenges and problems were negotiated. This book was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.