Category: Politics

#Occupy the Goddamn Batman

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxG4g62rnd8]

A few days ago, Keith Olbermann discussed the injustice of NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s response to #OWS. Among the more humorous of his remarks was this:

Who else but a publicity addict like Bloomberg could have enabled the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge and yet, two months later, frozen 20 square miles of New York City in gridlock traffic over two days, so somebody could film another GODDAMNED BATMAN movie on the 59th Street Bridge? Leading to the inescapable conclusion that — if you want to tie up a little traffic during a protest for equality and freedom from corporate domination on a bridge in New York City — you will be arrested. But — if you want to tie up all of the traffic during a goddamned movie shoot for the financial benefit of corporate domination — the city of New York will embrace you and give you tax breaks.

Now fans of Batman will recognize here more than just a tirade against GODDAMNED BATMAN movies; there’s also an allusion — perhaps a fannish, loving allusion — to words uttered by Batman himself: “I’m the goddamn Batman!” (panel 1, page 10, All Star Batman and Robin the Wonder Boy, issue 2)

This has since become a widespread Internet meme (see the Know Your Meme site for some background), as displayed in images like this:

So while Olbermann was making a serious point in his commentary on Bloomberg and GODDAMNED BATMAN movies, he was also invoking this line of humorous appropriation — or OCCUPATION — and bringing it into connection with #OWS. We might read this, then, as a call for the occupation of Batman — or, more accurately, for the politicization of the occupation represented by the “goddamn Batman” meme.

Almost as if in response, what is appropriately being called a “Bat-signal” for #OWS (created by Mark Read) was projected yesterday on the Verizon Building during the #N17 march on the Brooklyn Bridge (see the video above). (The story behind Read’s projection is quite interesting, so check out the interview with him at BoingBoing.) And while I haven’t seen anyone explicitly connecting Olbermann’s comments, the “goddamn Batman” meme, and this so-called “Bat-signal,” I think there’s something to be said for doing so, and good (i.e. strategically sound) reason for actively taking up these connections as part of the viral imagery of the #Occupy movement. #OWS itself is about reclaiming, rewriting, about techniques familiar from the medium of comics — about retcon and the proliferation of alternate universes, as these words from the Bat-signal for the 99% demonstrate:

99% / MIC CHECK! / LOOK AROUND / YOU ARE A PART / OF A GLOBAL UPRISING / WE ARE A CRY / FROM THE HEART / OF THE WORLD / WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE / ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE /…

#OCCUPY THE GODDAMN BATMAN!

Mic Check (verb, transitive)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHRdiklTlU]

The human microphone, born out of prohibitions against protestors’ use of technical means of amplification, has been transformed from a simple medium to a message in its own right. And as the Occupy movement (or idea, tendency, effort, etc.) has gone viral, so too has the human microphone, moving from the street to the auditorium, where it serves as a (non-neutral) means for dissenting audiences to speak back. Here, we see Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (above) and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (below) getting “mic checked” by Occupy supporters.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i-nCqINfAI]

Judith Butler at #OccupyWallStreet

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpoOdz1AKQ]

I came here to lend my support to you today, to offer my solidarity, for this unprecedented display of democracy and popular will. People have asked, ‘So what are the demands? What are the demands all these people are making?’ Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused—or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And impossible demands, they say, are just not practical.

If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed then yes, we demand the impossible.

But it is true that there are no demands that you can submit to arbitration here because we are not just demanding economic justice and social equality, we are assembling in public, we are coming together as bodies in alliance, in the street and in the square. We’re standing here together making democracy, enacting the phrase ‘We the people!’

(Text from Verso’s blog: here)

Also, see here for John Protevi’s fascinating take on Butler’s speech in the context of an earlier talk she gave in Venice and the embodied, affective dynamics of the so-called “human microphone,” which we’ve now seen Butler, Zizek, Michael Moore, and others utilizing at Occupy Wall Street.

RT #OccupyWallStreet or: Social Media against Cute Cat Pictures

In case you’ve missed it in the news (and it was easy to do so for the first two weeks), a number of more or less loosely organized protesters have come together under the title #OccupyWallStreet – the Twitter hashtag that many believe is artificially being prevented from becoming a so-called “trending topic” on the social media site – and set up camp near Wall Street to demonstrate against the disproportionate concentration of wealth, the role of the financial sector in propagating poverty, and the protection of the wealthy few’s interests at the expense of the poor. People like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky have come out in support of the occupiers, and lots of academics have expressed their sympathies as well.

News media ignored the topic at first – even after video of unprovoked brutality on the part of the police went online – but after 700+ people were arrested for blocking the Brooklyn Bridge, Occupy Wall Street has turned up in the mainstream media as well. The phenomenon is complex, and it’s still developing, so it’s hard to say what will  happen next. But this is certainly something that should be of interest to media researchers of all stripes. I don’t wish to suggest any particular parallels, but the role of social media in Egypt and North Africa and the use of Blackberries in the London riots, for example, have sensitized us to the role of alternative media in social action. Currently, there are efforts underway on Twitter to popularize a larger “movement” (though movement is probably the wrong word, as McKenzie Wark points out): #OccupyAmerica.

#OccupyWallStreet and its viral offspring constitute, as Wark claims in an article on Verso Books’ blog, a “media event.” I highly recommend reading the full text of Wark’s essay, but I want to quote a few of the more directly media-related bits here nonetheless.

The occupation extends out into the intangible world of the vector, but not in the same way as Wall Street. The cop who was stupid enough to pepper-spray some women who were already cordoned off behind orange mesh was quickly identified by hackers, and all his information appeared on the internet for all to see. The incident on the Brooklyn bridge where the police let people onto the roadway and then arrested them for being on the roadway is on the internet from multiple angles. The occupation is also an occupation of the social media vector.

The so-called mainstream media doesn’t quite know how to deal with this. The formalities of how ‘news’ is now made is so baroque that news outlets descended to weird debates about whether the occupation is ‘news.’ It doesn’t have top tier publicists. It didn’t issue free samples. It doesn’t buy advertising space. It started without any celebrity spokesmodels. So how can it be news? The occupation exposed the poverty of reporting in America. And that in itself is news.

The abstraction that is the occupation is then a double one, an occupation of a place, somewhere near the actual Wall Street; and the occupation of the social media vector, with slogans, images, videos, stories. “Keep on forwarding!” might not be a bad slogan for it. Not to mention keep on creating the actual language for a politics in the space of social media. The companies that own those social media vectors will still collect a rent from all we say and do—not much can be done about that—but at least the space can be occupied by something other than cute cat pictures.

[…]

By now what we have here is what I would call a weird global media event. It is an event in that nobody knows what will happen next. It is a media event in that it’s fate is tied to the occupation of the double space of Zucotti square and the media at the same time. It is a global media event at least since the NYPD arrested people on the Brooklyn Bridge and handed the occupation great free publicity. (Thanks guys!) And it is a weird global media event in that it has unprecedented elements that set it outside the staple stories of now boredom, dissent, utopia and all that other stuff is usually managed and assuaged.

In diesem Sinne: RT & keep forwarding!