The

Occupation
perspectives on the takeover of a building
or, why do student organizers bother to get out of bed in the morning?

1
 ANTI-DEMOCRATIC REFLECTIONS ON
THE RECENT NEW SCHOOL OCCUPATION
2

A CASE STUDY OF OCCUPATION AS NON-EVENT

10

SEVEN POINTS ON OCCUPATION

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ANTI-DEMOCRATIC REFLECTIONS ON
THE RECENT NEW SCHOOL OCCUPATION

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We are of course disappointed with the occupation’s end: a shameful
side-door exit in the middle of the night and an even more shameful
declaration of “victory” on a measly slip of paper listing “demands met.”
To us, that which has been heralded as “victory” is in every way the death
of the occupation – representative both of the loss of our space itself as
well as our capitulation to the liberal forces that sought to destroy the
occupation from the beginning.

Nevertheless, we had held our ground for 32 hours against police and
security attacks and flagrantly broke laws while cops confusedly looked
on; most importantly, we proved that occupations are possible in New
York City, the fucking death metropolis center of capital’s hate. This was a
precedent that we hope will inspire others to escalate their actions in the
occupations we hope to see in the near future.

It is toward these future occupations that we look as we put together

this list of lessons and thoughts on the December 2008 New School
occupation, in the certainty that what began at the New School is
not over, despite the return of most participants to their private lives
and despite the pathetic and misleading declarations of victory.
Occupation is a means without an end - a practice that we can
constantly renew and expand.

And, as always,
the event belongs to those who fight,
not to those who want to control it.

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HATRED OF DEMOCRACY 1. When enforced
as a strict practice in
a very large group,
Democracy is above all else the biggest and
consensus has a
most successful lie of our time (and we’re feeling tendency to reduce
the same way about consensus, too1). The idea decision-making
of democratically debating every day those who outcomes to the
are against the occupation on the establishment, lowest common
renewal, and expansion of the occupation is denominator, as the
most mediocre or least
absurd - as if there is ever anything but antagonism
contentious decisions
between us. At every step, the occupation was
are usually the only
brought into being in non-compliance with ones everyone can
democratic order, an order that was forced on us agree upon. Often
precisely by those who opposed the occupation this watering down
itself – because it was too disorganized, it was of actions or plans is
the result of attempts
too illegal, it was too soon…
to appease a small
minority who would
From the beginning, many of the figureheads and otherwise block the
bureaucrats-in-training of the Radical Student action entirely, meaning
Union [RSU] and Students for a Democratic that their will eventually
Society [SDS] were against the occupation dominates the group
because it did not fit into their picture of the decision anyway. In
general, large-group
“long-term struggle.” First, they did not support
consensus slowly
its immediate establishment and many disagreed erodes participants’
with the tactic entirely. During meetings, they will to act, grinding
spoke endlessly of their self-righteous feelings them down into
about why the time was wrong or why it failed exhaustion and apathy
to fit into the long-term vision of the “student and often forestalling
spontaneous or
movement,” causing the postponement of the
controversial action.
occupation and sleepless nights for many. Next,
after deciding to join us in the cafeteria once
they realized things were happening with or
without their consent, they were chomping at
the bit to quietly end the occupation after the
first night - upon the opening of the business
day (of all the insults!). Thankfully, the wildly
liberal logic underlying this notion was quickly
revealed in all its hilarity and we continued on
into the next morning.

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Later in the evening, many of these same “leaders” sought again and
again to issue “official decrees” against the strategic move to control the
building’s exit points, which allowed us to determine who entered the
occupation, not security and the police. Finally, they orchestrated another
“official” vote on the question of whether or not to forcibly open the fire
exits allowing the crowds outside in to join us – the official line, they
declared, was opposed. “Too risky, we’re just not ready” - it might upset
the administration, their negotiators, the cops, even...

To detail this list is not to get petty – it is to be clear about exactly what
happened during the occupation and how it was done. The fact is that
every highpoint and expansion of the occupation took place despite
these attempts at management. The occupation itself, as well as its
intensification through aggressive fortification, its continuation past the
first night, the forcing open of the fire exits and the joining of the crowds
outside with us inside: one could trace a map of the occupation’s
strongest and most joyful moments by simply imagining the opposite
of the bureaucrats’ tyrannically democratic party line (every high point
on this map would of course need to be immediately followed by the
bureaucrats’ recuperation of the success in a letter, a declaration, a
meeting or a pat on the back).

In any case, the bottom-line is that we do not have to wait for

democratic consensus to act; in fact, the occupation happened
because we did not wait.

DEMANDS

Demands are incredibly stupid: they say nothing about what we really
want, of the transformation we really need. Making demands means two
things: first, it means that we define ourselves in relation to the given
order of things and in dialogue with those in positions of control. As if
the university, administrative and police apparatuses are the hothouses
in which human life flowers and grows, making demands means that
we define within these contexts our choices, life projects and success.
Second, it means viewing occupation as nothing but a means to an end,
when, really, the thing to be avoided most is precisely any such end, any

6
return to the dismal ‘normality’ of capitalist life. As 2. That’s joy like
for us, we’ve realized that we discovered our fate Bonanno said it:
the realization of
there in occupying, where we experienced joy;2
ourselves in the
that the ends are contained in the means; that we
negation of capitalist
have to attach ourselves to those practices that logic and labor. “Its
fill us with joy and a spirit of being ourselves. attack is overcoming
the commodity hal-
So we understand occupation as a means lucination, machinery,
without end, a form of action that perpetuates vengeance, the leader;
the party, quantity. Its
other forms of action without an end in sight.
struggle is breaking
It is pure means, a gesture incapable of being down the logic of
reduced to a moment in or tactic of the ‘much- profit, the architecture
more-long-term-struggle.’ If we don’t rethink the of the market, the
relation between means and ends, then programming of life,
we have learned nothing. the last document
in the last archive.
Its violent explosion
is overturning the
EAT PIE IN THE SKY WHEN order of dependent,
YOU DIE MOTHERFUCKER the nomenclature of
positive and nega-
“Build the PARTY! I mean, movement! Yes, tive, the code of the
commodity illusion.”
towards the consolidation of power into the
(“Armed Joy,” 1977)
MOVEMENT! Anything for the MOVEMENT!
Only the MOVEMENT can act! All praise the
glorious MOVEMENT!”

During an occupation, aspiring politicians and

self-appointed representatives of “the movement”
will attempt to break our will by calling endless
turgid meetings every 15 minutes which, as was
exactly the case in the New School occupation,
will consistently attempt to destroy every shred
of momentum we build. Anytime things were
exciting in the cafeteria, be sure that a meeting
was called immediately to recuperate that energy
into the party-like machine of the bureaucrats.

Those who have detached themselves from the

notion of the “right moment” know that we are
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always already ready, and that “long-term struggle” is a myth used to
negate any desires for action that are not directed from core pathetically
inept “leaders.” Their long-term struggle functions the same rhetorically
as “real communism” did to the workers movement: an ever-receding
future horizon, used only to justify exploitation in the present.

The truth is that figuring things out with your friends or in an assembly
is a “meeting” that’s miles away from these bureaucratic movement
meetings that rely on a model for “revolutionary organization” that mirrors
directly the logic of capital. Fortunately, movements, as they know them,
are dead; future struggles will grind their gravestones into rocks for the
battles to come.

INTERIOR DECORATING

When we occupy a space, we must immediately make it ours. We should

inhabit it and turn it to our own ends, because an occupied space is
not that of work or protest, nor is it anything like the isolated spaces
to which we’ve grown so accustomed; it is autonomous, collective and
open for our own use. What makes this space different from all others,
all the commodified, mediated, surveilled spaces of the city? - this is the
primary question to ask when we take a space.

We put up banners, laid out sleeping bags and projected videos on the
walls, staying up late through the nights talking to new and old friends.
Remember the ridiculous fun we had supporting each other at the
barricades and when we linked with the wild crowds from outside in that
huge burst of energy? When we forcibly grabbed our comrades back
from the arms of the cops? We have to immediately populate our spaces
with all of this but so much more. At the New School we allowed the
forces of management and meetings to dominate the space from the
beginning – this was one of our biggest mistakes. Never again a Ministry
on Culture, never another soul-crushing meeting to reinstate management
just as we’ve shrugged it off: occupying should be an opportunity at last,
however fleeting, to take a breath and figure out what it means to live
together outside of capital’s logic.

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MULTIPLICATION, EXPANSION

People had been standing outside supporting us all day long, but a
support rally that had been called for late Thursday night drew a crowd of
200-300. This included a Greek solidarity street party that had begun in
Tompkins Square Park, leaving a path of festive destruction in its wake,
which pushed the situation to a critical mass. Unable to enter the building
due to a complete police and security lockdown, and provoked by the
arrival of new police trucks and reinforcements, people outside the New
School angrily spilled into to the streets, totally blocking 5th avenue and
moving north against traffic, forcing cars to back up, and knocking down
police barricades. Meanwhile, inside the occupation, as mentioned earlier,
a small group of people rejected a fear-induced “consensus” decision
to refrain from “contentious” activity and forced open a fire door to a
raucous, jubilant crowd on the street to enter and join us inside. Running
through the halls, dodging security guards and cops, breaking windows
and hopping barricades, around 75 of our friends joined us inside and
raised the stakes of the occupation once more. As this was happening,
our comrades outside flung tomatoes at Bob Kerrey and chased the one-
legged scumbag down the streets.

Those who opposed making this convergence possible called us

“Custeristic.” Though we’d prefer another comparison, really, in the
more abstract and intended sense, we’re flattered: the whole thing was
pure adventuristic joy. Creating multiple situations inside and out will
effectively strengthen and expand an occupation, especially when they
converge either on one point, as it happened at the New School, or when
they multiply the fronts of battle (for example, if the occupations had
expanded to include other buildings, or turned into strikes or blockades
elsewhere).

“ADVENTURISM” GETS THE GOODS

The Bob Kerrey Issue was merely a pretense for us to take this action. For
some the immediate generalization was to other New School issues, the
broader reality of the neoliberalization of the university, and to capitalism
most of all. We don’t know what this opened up for others involved in

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the occupation, but for us the generalization was immediate, thorough
and deliberate: Kerrey’s highly public crisis of legitimacy gave us the
opportunity finally to go on strike from all the myriad forms of production
we live every day and to give ourselves over to occupation.

What we hope to have shown with our brief but successful occupation
is that such action is possible in New York City – we just need to make
it happen. Always look for controversy or conflict that can be pushed
forward or spaces that can be opened up. Opportunities like this present
themselves constantly: we need to watch for them and be prepared.

IN THE FUTURE

In the future, we are going to see the effects of the economic “crisis”
intensify; we are already seeing cuts in education budgets, mass layoffs
and city services slashed. We should intervene in these moments, but we
must remember that we are not asking for a little less or a little bit nicer
exploitation, and we are not interested in giving them suggestions on how
to solve their crisis, because the truth is that we have been living the crisis
all of our lives and what we want is, finally, to bring it to its fullest climax.

So when another student occupation takes place, we ought to remember

some of the silliest demands we heard at the New School, some of the
embarrassing posters like “Let Students Have a Say”, and think about
how we position ourselves: are we giving the administration suggestions
for ways to make us happier, more docile consumers again, or are we
using these moments of intensified crisis to insist on our antagonism, to
disrupt the whole arrangement altogether?

See you in the Spring!

with love,
everyone’s favorite autonomous faction in non-cooperation
january 2009

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A CASE STUDY OF OCCUPATION AS NON-EVENT

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While there are many narratives currently in circulation which remain
self-congratulatory and frantically attempt to persuade others that the
turbulence surrounding the December 2008 New School University
occupation “has only just begun,” those who rejoice in its victory largely
do so at the expense of a reflection that might reveal the occupation’s
more subtle articulations. Such accounts inadvertently obscure the notion
that to be victorious is precisely to end the occupation; that is, within
such logic, occupation emerges as a mere means for the satisfaction of
particular student demands. And while the demands professed during the
occupation always remained quite malleable, it is this logic, dominated by
the hegemony of the commodity form, which accords to the occupation
a deficiency of quality and aptitude.

Further, as will be argued below, to perceive occupation as an approach

towards ends outside or even alien and hostile to itself, is to regard
occupation as property, and it is such a process whereby the New School
University occupation becomes transformed into non-event, as it is diffused
and reduced away from the augmentation of potentialities. The New School
occupation as event however, recognized as an indefinite occurrence, or
happening, through its intensified interruption of non-events, or the banality
of “student life,” continually expanded possibilities as a becoming which
indistinctly sought the destruction of petrified capacity.

In order to adequately, or at least more interestingly, illustrate the points

outlined above within the historical context of a social reproduction
system of hierarchical power relations expressed, in this case, through
the commodity form as the university, it is accommodating to first begin
with an assessment of the occupation as constituted by two distinctive
dialectical forces, each with their own set of agents, constituencies,
programs, supporters, and above all, mercurial belief systems.

The first of such forces can be characterized as one of generalization,

particularly as the dissolution of social identities distinctly possessed
by students. Through such a process, whereby a particularized social
distinction, with its own unique set of attributes, behaviors, and even
adversaries, decomposes, the enemy eventually becomes not something
which we stand opposed to, but rather a general milieu which we stand
hostile within. This tendency had as its trajectory the expansion of initial
discontentment out of the realm of the graduate faculty, expanding on to
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the various grievances held university-wide, and finally shifting towards
a rejection of the university specifically as an institution of capital, thus
demonstrating a number of commonalities, by temporality rather than
political affiliation, with the various other practical critiques currently
underway, such as the revolt in Greece, Italy’s “Anomalous Wave,” and
other attacks against capital and state throughout Europe.

Such developments can be characterized by the participation of other

university students from NYU, CUNY, Rutgers, and most importantly
non-students during the occupation. This progression can further be
witnessed by the statements released from Paris to Mexico City, to
Barcelona and onto Athens, just to name a few, all expressing solidarity
with those that barricaded themselves within the New School building.
Also to be noted as an indication for the generalizing propensity of
the New School University occupation was the 50 person march from
Tompkins Square Park to the barricaded building, destroying property
and blockading streets along the way, while expressing cohesion with
Greece by denouncing police as well as the hostile force of economy as
it is manifested within the city of New York.

The second of such forces can be characterized as one of fragmentation.

This tendency had as its trajectory the rationalization, management, and
eventual domestication of the New School occupation, isolating and
neutralizing it as the expression of a “student movement” with its own
formulaic and dull methods of recruitment, including, but certainly not
limited to, that of the pitiable martyr pamphleteer and other specialized
tactics of the “student campaign.” Through its process of regimentation, a
cohesion emerges and separation is perfected through a unified isolation.
As a force which tends to necessitate its own representation in order to
effectively manage such potential moments of intensity, its concretization
was personified as the NYPD, the on-campus private security forces, the
university administration, the university student senate, as well as various
distinctly leftist student organizations, in particular the Radical Student
Union (RSU) and Students For a Democratic Society (SDS) affiliates.

As a recuperating force which normally seeks to circumscribe and pervert

the unrest to a distinctly “student issue,” these latter elements adhere to
the rationality of fragmentation, in which the victory of occupation emerges
specifically through its termination. These student organizations initiated
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such efforts quite early, specifically by seeking an end to the occupation
before it even began. This sentiment, as to what the capacities and
trajectories of student unrest should or should not constitute, manifested
itself through a series of conversations leading up to the occupation,
particularly during the faculty’s vote of no confidence in president
Kerrey, and emerging most significantly at a meeting the night before the
occupation would commence, on Tuesday December 17th.

During this meeting, all were subject to various contentions against

occupation as improper and unseasonal, essentially frail without the
necessary protocol demanded by student activism. Such reasoning,
as the usual demonstration of collective absence, effectively diffused
all enthusiasm and momentum; a leftist logic summarized on a dishrag
of bureaucratization. Here it should be noted, as it will undoubtedly
be proclaimed from the student organizations themselves, that such
contentions during the meeting were not against occupation per se, but
rather in support of a mutilated form of occupation which actively in pursuit
of its own defeat. As a result of this debate, occupation was deferred until
the following day, despite additional disagreements from the RSU and SDS
affiliates that the potency of occupation resided in its abstraction, rather than
in the seduction of its immediacy. Those who opposed the occupation at
this moment stood de facto on the other side of the barricades, constituting
a fragmenting force, and it is an objective embarrassment that cordiality
and “democratic process” was maintained at this juncture. In the face of
efforts and proposals set up to dismantle the occupation, the justifiable
recourse is to abolish them by all means necessary.

It is within this context, strangled by the integrative forces of a “student

movement,” that occupation, as a means to an end rather than an
advancement of a series of widening possibilities, becomes the property
of its representatives. It is they who are the deserved experts in such
matters, proficient in deciding the most practical and calculable ends for
which occupation is employed. For occupation to exist as property, it
must first and foremost be reduced to its quantitative value. Beginning
from the initial meetings, in which occupation was opposed through
disfigurement, the RSU brought the denial of the qualitative to an
unprecedented sophistication, reducing participants to their statistics
over their potentialities; the ultimate degradation of the gesture to its
result or product. From here, the experimentation with social relations
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during occupation becomes replaced by the dead weight of things, to the
resolution of the commodity form.

Indeed, to regard occupation as property is to identify the profound core

of the commodity as a form, rather than an empirical object. This form
reflects a social relation in which the mediation between objects eclipses
relations between living beings. Such is the case then that with the
universalization of the commodity form into all realms of human activity,
its partialized criticisms also become subject to its logic. Through its
intensified and instrumental rationality, its standardized motions become
hegemonic and find new playgrounds within all social life. Life experience
as general, becomes subservient to the rationality and reified will of the
commodity. It is such that occupation, as a mere tactic designed to
terminate upon the satisfaction of student demands, which stand as
generally hostile towards the generalization of hostility, reflects an era of
competitive forms of meaninglessness.

Through the universal structuring principle that possesses the ability to

penetrate society in all its aspects and remold it in its own image, there
arises a rational systemization of all statutes regulating life. It is here that
occupation becomes solely a statistically viable concept, belonging to only
those who adopt the identity of student; exclusion through inclusion; an
inner exile abrasive towards generalization, permitting only very particular
possibilities as an essential non-event, that is, conscious and temporally
comfortable with its own limitations.

It is at this point that it would be beneficial to focus on a series of moments

during the New School occupation which suitably illustrate the collisions
between the forces of generalization and fragmentation; most importantly
as such forces cannot definitively be reduced to their agents.

The first of such instances emerged immediately when the RSU assumed
the role of governing body once the cafeteria area was secured. In the
leftist tradition of flattening impetus, the RSU began coordinating tedious
meetings and appointing committees for tasks which until then had been
either self-managed, such as organizing food and bathroom accessibility,
or simply unnecessary, such as a committee for “culture,” which entailed
the management of “stuff to do,” in order to occupy the time - no doubt the
morbid residue of an ideology of leisure. One of course was fully entitled to
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contribute to any of these decision-making processes, although it became
abundantly transparent that to do so would amount to participation
in collective delirium. Throughout the occupation, these meetings
attempted to pacify all initiative by establishing a theatrical separation
between the word and the act; an effort to isolate form from content.
Here one encountered the fetishization of consensus, or of equitable
decision making. This ideological tendency, dominant among those
who have abandoned an adequate understanding of hierarchical power
and confined such power to an ahistorical abstraction, encompassed a
fragmenting force as it attempted, throughout the occupation, to dilute
and adulterate, in the interest of a reified “democracy,” the impulses of
occupation as an event, or the happenings of beings.

Indeed, as has been illustrated elsewhere, all of the pivotal, invigorating,

and monumental moments of the New School occupation manifested
themselves as autonomous actions against the will of the sovereignty. The
myth of the general assembly decomposed under the resignation to wait
for the exhausting endorsement of those inclined to define our capacities.
Even the initiation of the occupation itself did so as an opposition
towards democratic regulation and procedure, with the disapproval of
power represented through the RSU. To place oneself at the mercy of
the ideology of democracy, as well as compliment social inertia, is to
regard collective will as simply the sum of solitary bourgeois individuals,
rather than the result of complex proceedings of dialectically reciprocal
influences. The principal question must not focus on the maximization
of procedures by which the will of all the participants are calculated, but
instead analyze the relation between the processes of debate and the
aspirations of the action, an inquiry that cannot be detached from the
nature of occupation itself.

It was that exact detachment, or fragmentation, of the nature and potentiality

of the occupation that culminated in another moment which warrants
mention. During the first night and centralized in the New School cafeteria,
the occupation approached the recognition that the cafeteria workers
would soon arrive in the early morning to begin their shift. This not only
immediately reinvigorated the opportunity for more deliberation amongst
the student organizations, but more importantly revealed the significance
of occupation as a mere means, with desired ends incompatible with the
miseries of non-students. The suggestion that the cafeteria workers should
16
be permitted inside to work during business hours literally suggests the
diminishment of occupation to the ineffectual and “symbolic” confines
of hobby, whereupon the disruption of normal university functions and
mechanisms (i.e. the nature of occupation) becomes suspended in favor of
sympathetic “public” relations. Indeed, as a foundational symptom of the
student activist, subservience to media representation and of maintaining
“credibility” by digesting the language of commodity as immediately
communicable messages, remained dominant impediments throughout
the occupation, most importantly as they hindered the occupation as
an opportunity to experiment with traditional social roles and relations.
Indeed, absent was the question of what ways could the experience
of food been communized instead of maintained as an alienated form
of labor, but rather preferred and reduced to the duality of occupation
(im)proper. Instead, one bore witness to archaic and inept arguments
such as: “Christmas is approaching and we dare not take food out of
the mouths of ‘the workers’!” Unfortunately, it was subsequently learned
that the union contract of the cafeteria workers stipulated a restriction for
crossing “picket lines” so that the cafeteria remained closed. Such was the
case then, that the precautionary measures of securing imported locks in
order to prevent the opening of commodity flow in the cafeteria, had it been
attempted by holiday Samaritans, never produced the conflict it desired.

The fragmentation of the New School occupation found conspicuous

expression through the general reluctance of many to attempt advances
against police and security. This detraction of possibility, whether
deriving from a genuine fear of repression, or a shame of a desirously
irregular appetite, was most clearly articulated during the final evening
in which an aggregation of supporters outside of the building, both
student and not, communicated a significant longing for participation.
With the numbers inside the occupation slightly reduced compared
to the afternoon hours, it seemed only natural to attempt a break in
the police line in order to allow a portion of the 300 plus outside to
enter the building. As usual, an assembly was convened despite the
urgency of the matter, and it was chaotically and yet “officially” decided
that such an attempt to open an unguarded fire door in order provide
access presented too much of a hazard given the increasing number
of police and the risk of jeopardizing the ongoing negotiations with the
administration. Regardless of this resolution, the autonomous direct
action of a few proceeded without the consent of the majority to the
17
ultimate success and triumph against the police and security forces,
resulting in jubilation and exhilaration amongst reunited comrades,
which has been documented, in all of its romanticism, elsewhere.

Further, it was in the aftermath of such ambitious and rousing endeavors

as the one described above, which went against the preferences of those
who sought the occupation’s limitations as non-events, that those initially
hesitant expressed immediate elation and gratefulness in the fact that the
autonomous actions took place, but more importantly, that they were swept
up in it. Asserted impotence and attempted fragmentation deteriorated
against an innocent taste for direct action as many confronted police with
successful de-arrests and other reconfigured power relations. Such a
result from the production of events, inscribes significant implication into
the practice of daring and audacity; into the joy which was located in the
horrifying gestures that broke social consensus through autonomy, rather
than exclusion and regimentation.

It was in moments described above, that what might have been previously
characterized as impossible or “unrealistic,” achieved the possible, while
continually disclosing new territories of operation, new playgrounds for
the occupation. For example, the demand that president Kerrey resign
remained consistent throughout the occupation. However, if one were to
gauge the probability of his resignation during the initial and preliminary
moments of the occupation, in which the demand was regarded as
principally and arguably “symbolic” or unattainable, compared to its final
hours in which Kerry stared vacant and terrified at his enraged interlopers
from beyond the barricades, the chances of his resignation acquired a
renewed historical element which took on an entirely different significance,
departing from the merely abstract, into a prospect within arms reach.
Thus, what was possible throughout the occupation was constantly in
fluctuation, and so the RSU’s insistence that “we gained as much as we
could”, reveals a deficiency in the engagement of occupation, specifically
as the reproduction of non-events.

This tendency to regard occupation as property can also be seen in the

area of student demands. Operating within the framework of occupation
as property, to demand is to celebrate exchange value. This way, the
occupation becomes valued merely as a leverage within an instrumental
18
rationality whereupon once the demands are met, occupation is stripped
of its potentiality. Indeed, to demand is to define an existence and
a capacity through the mutilating terms of those in power; it means
conceding an advantage to the enemy. Such was indeed the case with
the final meager demands agreed upon by president Kerrey in the New
School occupation: increased delusion into the mediating powers of a
student senate integral in the fragmentation of generalized hostility, and
of course the basic fodder for enhanced student activist resumes. For an
occupation which is demonstrated as the possession of students, any
attempt at its generalization will splinter and fragment upon the rocks of
student activism, and its victory will always reside in its deeper integration
into the university as commodity.

As the commodity form generalizes into every aspect of life, so too must
our hostility against it generalize and transcend the non-event of a student
occupation as that which is distinctively owned by a “student movement;”
to multiply occupations, to dissolve their limitations as the production
of events, valuing struggle less for its pretext then for the moments it
allows us to live. It is the process of liberating space, the circulation of my
potentialities, which sets me free over any “liberated space,” or practice
that is subject to the deadening non-eventualization of the commodity
form. Such is the case that it was never the demands themselves which
were important during the 2008 New School occupation, but rather the
ability of them to modify, expand, and potentially dissipate against the
ever-receding possibility; which, through process, continues to bring
closer that as yet unachieved goal for every insurrection: to become
irreversible. And as long as the fragmenting forces within such events are
not directly confronted, occupations will continue to end with whimpers,
rather than segue and augment with bangs.

anonymous
january 2009

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20
SEVEN POINTS ON OCCUPATION

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1.
Occupation is the seizure and transformation of space. Whether as the
takeover of a building, roadway or vacant lot, it manifests itself as an
interruption, as the subversion of capitalist normality.

2.
An occupation is a physical materialization of our power unfettered by
legality or mere process. It is a practical demonstration of our ability to
take a space, hold it, and remake it in a way that we choose.

3.
An occupation is not just a means to an end, an “extreme” tactic, or
a high rung on the ladder of democratic dissent. Nor is it simply an
end in itself. It’s the communication of a will, the staging area for an
extension of paralysis, and the manifestation of what we want in the
here and now.

Nothing is produced and nothing is represented in occupation: in

this sense, it is fundamentally incompatible with the logic of capital.
Occupation compels us at the level of pure means, and it is only as such
- stripped of functionality, as a gesture - that it has the ability to cause a
rupture in the capitalist order of time.

4.
Rather than asserting that ‘another world is possible’ within the very
same framework of the world that is given, an occupation exists as a
conflictual fabric erupting in this order, within which new subjectivities
emerge and create themselves in situations of conflict.

5.
As a rupture the occupation is revelatory, uncovering true lines of
division and exposing commonalities. Solidarity is built, opening
unforeseen possibilities for communication and common action. On
the other hand, masks are pulled back, with bureaucrats and cops
exposing their aspirations to merely put the current catastrophe under
new management.

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6.
Stasis signals the defeat of an occupation; it must spread, and it must
deepen. It is dangerous to the reigning order in the connections that
can be built between it and other forms of subversion: sabotage,
autonomous self-organization, strikes, blockades, and the general illegal
practices of life in the metropolis. Between all of these, there is always
already communicability.

7.
The death of an occupation is prevented when it is pushed beyond
itself, when its interruption of the capitalist order is followed by a
relentless counter-movement that deepens the communicability of
our power and solidarities through the expansion and connection of
conflictual situations. Occupation resonates there, at the level of life
lived as power.

jenny and wayne

january 2009

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