Although Occupy Wall Street may no longer appear in news headlines, the international movement provides a rich curriculum on space and protest that are worthy of contemplation in social studies classrooms and research. This paper looks historically at how location and free speech became linked and informed one another during the 20th century in the US. It then looks critically at three sites of Occupy in the US that reflect the contested public representations of occupation. The (...) investigation of these critical incidents enables a discussion of how Occupy expands prior discussion of the linkage between space and protest while indicating how political, economic, and technological shifts change this relationship in the 21st century. (shrink)

This article traces the various forms and roles of intellectuals and intellectualism in the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in Zuccotti Park in New York in 2011 while simultaneously serving as an introduction to the movement. It shows how the movement was formed by a range of intellectual ideas, both in terms of the political questions it posed and the tactics it employed. It also shows how Occupy affected the intellectual and political climate insofar as it (...) became a phenomenon that everyone with an interest in public debate had to take a stand on. The article argues that Occupy, with its experiment in alternative social and democratic structures, was an exercise in a form of organic and collective intelligence that attempted to guide American society in a more democratic and equal direction. By way of conclusion, the article discusses the aftermath of the protest camp and the effects of the movement. (shrink)

A dispatch from Zuccotti Park about what being there was like, about the signs I liked (and those I didn't), and about Occupy's importance.

The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and its corollaries, Occupy Sandy and Occupy Debt, have been largely understood as secular movements. In spite of this, religious actors not only participated, but in some cases played an integral role within the movement, lending material support, organizing expertise, and public statements of support. We rely on interviews with faith leaders in New York and Oakland, and engage in an analysis of print and online media to explore (...) the role of religious actors and groups in Occupy Wall Street. Religious participants were often long-time veterans of progressive political struggles and drew inspiration from their faith traditions. Nonetheless, religious commitments were secondary to political objectives shared by themselves and their secular counterparts. Religious leaders believed they offered symbolic authority to the movement and highlighted this in their engagement in the hope of giving it greater moral weight. Current discussions on postsecularism and public religions are considered. (shrink)

This study examines the 3.5 m+ English-language original tweets that occurred during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. Starting from previous research, we analyze how character terms such as “the banker,” “politician,” “the teaparty,” “GOP,” and “the corporation,” as well as concept terms such as “ethics,” “fairness,” “morals,” “justice,” and “democracy” were used by individual participants to respond to the Occupy Wall Street events. These character and concept terms not only allowed individuals to take (...) an ethical stance but also accumulated into a citizen’s narrative about social accountability. The analysis illustrates how the centrality of the different concepts and characters in the conversation changed over time as well as how the concepts ethics, morals, fairness, justice, and democracy participated within the conversation, helping to amplify the ethical attributes of different characters. These findings contribute to our understanding of how demands for social accountability are articulated and change over time. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse was concerned with many of the same issues that confront the Occupy Wall Street movement today. Change the militant “students” in the 1960s to the militant “occupiers” today, and his views on their philosophical bases and strategies for change remain similar. Militant protest is reacting to an aggressive, profit-driven system, reducing its subservient population to consumption-fixated one-dimensionality. The ideology-motivated militants cannot by themselves change things all at once, yet the ideological/psychological elements can lead the material (...) bases of the struggle to produce radical change in one area at a time, suggesting an agenda akin to the “long march through the institutions” of the 1960s. (shrink)

This paper will explore how John Dewey’s and Gilles Deleuze’s mutual emphasis upon affect and rhythm can illuminate under-appreciated political consequences of Occupy Wall Street. It suggests what I call the sensed “rhythms of resistance” that are produced when activists move through the micro-geography of the encampment and play an important role in the collective becoming and critical dereification many highlight as resulting from their participation in the movement. My argument not only complexifies contemporary interpretations of these (...) two figures, but also raises provocative questions concerning new approaches to critical-democratic practice in the neoliberal era. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Kairopolitics: The Politics of Realtime -- 2. Thought-Time: Immediacy and Live Theory -- 3. Control-Time: Immediacy and Constant Capitalism -- 4. Conclusion: Defense-Time: Immediacy and Realtime Resistance.

My remarks at Dec 2011 APA panel, "Occupy Philosophy!".

As the aftershocks of the latest economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the powerful markets that brought on the crash. Yet, as François Morin explains in _A World Without Wall Street?_, this is the very step that needs to be taken as quickly as possible to avoid a perpetual future of dehumanizing (...) working conditions, devastated ecosystems, and the submission of public policies to private interests. In this insightful and radical take on global finance, Morin recommends nothing less than a revolutionary reconstruction of the international monetary system. More, he recommends that the laws of societies be reformed so that the power of management may be shared among all of the actors involved in production, not concentrated in the hands of the few. This shift, argues Morin, will transform the monetary system into a common good for all of humanity, rich or poor. With Wall Street at the center of the very power structure that needs to be dismantled, Morin takes broad aim at the purely speculative financial games and arcane instruments by which the global economy and its citizens are held captive. In this very timely and provocative book, Morin bravely offers a way forward—instead of simply triaging a hemorrhaging system, he persuasively asks us to consider a subversive reinvention. (shrink)

As the aftershocks of the latest economic meltdown reverberate throughout the world, and people organize to physically occupy the major financial centers of the West, few experts and even fewer governments have dared to consider a world without the powerful markets that brought on the crash. Yet, as François Morin explains in A World Without Wall Street?, this is the very step that needs to be taken as quickly as possible to avoid a perpetual future of dehumanizing (...) working conditions, devastated ecosystems, and the submission of public policies to private interests. In this insightful and radical take on global finance, Morin recommends nothing less than a revolutionary reconstruction of the international monetary system. More, he recommends that the laws of societies be reformed so that the power of management may be shared among all of the actors involved in production, not concentrated in the hands of the few. This shift, argues Morin, will transform the monetary system into a common good for all of humanity, rich or poor. With Wall Street at the center of the very power structure that needs to be dismantled, Morin takes broad aim at the purely speculative financial games and arcane instruments by which the global economy and its citizens are held captive. In this very timely and provocative book, Morin bravely offers a way forward—instead of simply triaging a hemorrhaging system, he persuasively asks us to consider a subversive reinvention. (shrink)

The “Occupy Wall Street!” movement has stimulated a long listing of other candidates for radical “occupation.” In this paper, I suggest the occupation of liberalism itself. I argue for a constructive engagement of radicals with liberalism in order to retrieve it for a radical egalitarian agenda. My premise is that the foundational values of liberalism have a radical potential that has not historically been realized, given the way the dominant varieties of liberalism have developed. Ten reasons standardly (...) given as to why such a retrieval cannot be carried out are examined and shown to be fallacious. (shrink)

The “Occupy Wall Street!” movement has stimulated a long listing of other candidates for radical “occupation.” In this paper, I suggest the occupation of liberalism itself. I argue for a constructive engagement of radicals with liberalism in order to retrieve it for a radical egalitarian agenda. My premise is that the foundational values of liberalism have a radical potential that has not historically been realized, given the way the dominant varieties of liberalism have developed. Ten reasons standardly (...) given as to why such a retrieval cannot be carried out are examined and shown to be fallacious. (shrink)

In this article, I intend to propose an ethical model for digital solidarity. On the one hand, it emphasises the importance of adopting a solidarity model to escape the logic of surveillance capitalism and the race for profits typical of the digital giants’ business model. On the other, it is intended to point out that a model of solidarity embodied in the digital network may instead offer a more universalistic alternative to the types of solidarity that have often imposed themselves (...) in our contemporary political landscape, namely solidarity limited to groups in opposition to others. In order to show what economic and political characteristics this model should respect, two case studies will be examined, namely Wikipedia and Occupy Wall Street. (shrink)

Clouds are therefore a fine metaphor for intermediary and automatic beings… Trees too are clouds: only, they are slower at occupying space. In the new landscape of media archaeology—especially variantology, which insists on ramified rather than convergent developments—media, too, appear to be imperceptibly changing from stable trees into metastable clouds. If we accelerate that motion, then the whole McLuhan-Kittler-Parikka media forest of semi-separate specimens starts to look like a self-rearranging ballet—a murmuration across species. At a certain historical rate, in other (...) words, problems of media ontology and phylogenesis tend to turn into animated sequences in which individual or individuated media.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Occupy Religion:Theology of the Multitude and Interreligious DialogueJoerg RiegerOne of the big questions for the present is how to bring the different liberation movements together. The different liberation theologies, as is well known, have addressed various forms of oppression along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other factors. What is it that brings us together without erasing our differences? This question has important implications for (...) interreligious dialogue, as we shall see.In our book Occupy Religion Kwok Pui-lan and I use the term “multitude” to reflect on unity and difference.1 This term, made prominent by political scientists and philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,2 has deep roots in our theological traditions. Several decades ago, Korean Minjung theology noted the prominence of the notion of the multitude (this is how the term minjung can be translated into English) in the Bible. In the Gospels, the so-called ochlos (the Greek term for the masses or the common people) does not describe only the ones who are the recipients of Jesus’ transformative ministry; the ochlos also describes the participants in it and the agents of change. In addition, our Latin American colleagues have highlighted the importance of Greek term laos in the biblical traditions, which is also used to designate the common people rather than the elites.There is a distinct difference between the Greek notions of democracy and laocracy or ochlocracy. Democracy describes the rule of the demos, which is constituted by the elite citizens of a city-state. Lower-class citizens, women, and slaves are not part of this rule. Laocracy and ochlocracy, on the other hand, describe the rule of the common people, including the proverbial “least of these” of which Jesus speaks frequently. These common people include all those who have been and are being marginalized on the basis of their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. In the ministry of Jesus, which is informed by the ministry of Moses, Miriam, Hannah, and the prophets, the common people are organized and become agents. God values their diverse contributions to life. In the world of laocracy and ochlocracy, there are different ways of being productive in the community, and all of them are acknowledged and needed. As Hardt and Negri remind us, the multitude is not the uniform entity of what has often [End Page 167] been called “the people” in various nationalisms or fascisms. Neither is the multitude the undifferentiated mass or the mob.3What brings the various liberation movements together, therefore, is not uniformity or a request to surrender difference. What brings us together is “deep solidarity,” the recognition that we are all in the same boat under the conditions of global capitalism.4 This insight is related to the topic of class, which has consistently been pushed underground in the United States but which has recently reemerged in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The now-familiar notion of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is a reminder that the majority of people are benefitting less and less from the neoliberal market economy. This includes even members of the middle class, as they have seen their retirement accounts dwindle, their job security take ever-more severe hits, their benefits erode, and their political power fade. Furthermore, the aspects of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity are closely linked to class, as they all increase the disadvantages of people in the neoliberal market economy, thus boosting the reality of deep solidarity. Deep solidarity ties together members of the 99 percent across the lines of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, and it thrives on difference, as they can now work together and make use of their various opportunities and gifts.Deep solidarity differs from conventional ideas of solidarity, which were often based on the idea that those who are privileged place themselves on the side of those without privilege. While it is still possible for members of the 1 percent to place themselves on the side of the 99 percent, the majority of us are now part of the 99 percent, and thus belong to classes that have something to gain from liberation. Class struggle, as... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper situates the discourse of the Occupy movement within the context of radical political philosophy. Our analysis takes place on two levels. First, we conduct an empirical analysis of the ‘official’ publications of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London. Operationalising core concepts from the framing perspective within social movement theory, we provide a descriptive-comparative analysis of the ‘collective action frames’ of OWS and OL. Second, we consider the extent to which radical political philosophy speaks (...) to the discourse of Occupy. Our empirical analysis reveals that both movements share diagnostic frames, but there were notable differences in terms of prognostic framing. The philosophical discussion suggests that there are alignments between anarchist, post-anarchist and post-Marxist ideologies at the level of both identity and strategy. Indeed, the absence of totalising anti-capitalist or anti-statist positions in Occupy suggests that – particularly with Occupy London – alignments are perhaps not so distant from typically social democratic demands. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article considers Michel Foucault's theories of ethical speech and militant life in the context of Occupy Wall Street's encampments in Zuccotti Park. Focusing on the encampments and the production and circulation of resources to meet bodily needs, the article concludes that occupation was a self-inflicted form of precarity as well as an extension of an already existing vulnerability, a living that is at once a form of social death. I read the occupations as a mode (...) of militant life, which is to say, that which enacts precarity while at the same time transforming it into the object of radical speech. (shrink)

Background:Collaboration between physicians and nurses is key to improving patient care. We know very little about collaboration and interdisciplinary practice in African healthcare settings.Research question/aim:The purpose of this study was to explore the ethical challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration in clinical practice and education in Botswana Participants and research context: This qualitative descriptive study was conducted with 39 participants (20 physicians and 19 nurses) who participated in semi-structured interviews at public hospitals purposely selected to represent the three levels of hospitals in (...) Botswana (referral, district, and primary).Ethical considerations:Following Institutional Review Board Approval at the University of Pennsylvania and the Ministry of Health in Botswana, participants’ written informed consent was obtained.Findings:Respondents’ ages ranged from 23 to 60 years, and their duration of work experience ranged from 0.5 to 32 years. Major qualitative themes that emerged from the data centered on the nature of the work environment, values regarding nurse–doctor collaboration, the nature of such collaboration, resources available for supporting collaboration and the smooth flow of work, and participants’ views about how their work experiences could be improved.Discussion:Participants expressed concerns that their work environment compromised their ability to provide high-quality and safe care to their patients. The physician staffing structure was described as consisting of a few specialists at the top, a vacuum in the middle that should be occupied by senior doctors, and junior doctors at the bottom—and not a sufficient number of nursing staff.Conclusion:Collaboration between physicians and nurses is critical to optimizing patients’ health outcomes. This is true not only in the United States but also in developing countries, such as Botswana, where health care professionals reported that their ethical challenges arose from resource shortages, differing professional attitudes, and a stressful work environment. (shrink)

If journalism is the first draft of history, these three essays might be described as a stab at a second draft. It is an attempt by three scholars from different disciplines, with sharply contrasting methodologies, to provide an account of the protest movements of 2011, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. We deploy the perspectives of ethnography, political thought, and iconology in an effort to produce a multidimensional picture of this momentous year of revolutions, uprisings, (...) mass demonstrations, and—most centrally—the occupations of public space by protest movements. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

This article examines the topic of protest mapping during the rise of Occupy Wall Street in the United States in 2011–2012. It focuses on various practices of protest mapping, including a con­sideration of how space (public, urban, or of the protest camp) is represented in the visual sources discussed. It also addresses the qualitative difference between protest mapping and other mapping practices, as well as the categorization of protest mapping terms. Using the method of source analysis and (...) online research, the article adopts, as its key concept for studying protest as a multi-threaded phenomenon, the notion of détournement. This concept was first described in 1957 by Gil Wolman and Guy Debord, and from the early 1960s was used as a creative method and also a revolutionary strategy by the avant-garde artistic group, the Situationist International. The categories of stasis, dynamism, and spatiality will also be important points of reference. (shrink)

Literature in feminist ethics and care ethics has emphasized the value of the emotions for resisting injustice, particularly anger, on the basis of their motivational force, epistemic insight, and normative content. I point to flaws in this approach and introduce an Aristotelian account of anti-corporate anger that establishes normative conditions for which to (1) evaluate the justifiability of the target of negative emotions and (2) evaluate the justifiability of the expression of negative emotions. I look to this account as the (...) basis for defending a corporate culture account of corporate moral personhood. In closing I consider the Occupy Wall Street movement for further insights into the complex nature of anti-corporate anger and corporate moral personhood. (shrink)

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of political as opposed to civil disobedience that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that has dominated our collective imagination in this country since before the cold war. Civil disobedience accepts the legitimacy of the political structure and of our political institutions but resists the moral authority of the resulting laws. It is “civil” in its disobedience—civil in the etymological sense of taking place (...) within a shared political community, within the classical Latin framework of civilitas, within an art of civil government. Civil disobedience accepts the verdict and condemnation that the civilly disobedient bring upon themselves. It respects the legal norm at the very moment of resistance and places itself under the sanction of that norm. If it resists the legal sanction that it itself entails, it is, in effect, no longer truly civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.” Civil disobedience does not aim to displace the law-making institutions or the structure of legal governance but rather to challenge the governing laws by demonstrating their injustice.Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed. It rejects the idea of honoring or expressing the “highest respect for law.” It refuses to willingly accept the sanctions meted out by the legal and political system. It challenges the conventional way that political governance takes place, that laws are enforced. It turns its back on the political institutions and actors who govern us all. It resists the structure of partisan politics, the traditional demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and, beyond that, the very ideologies that have dominated the postwar period. (shrink)

Occupy Wall Street, Indignés, Nuit Debout - plus que jamais la question est posée de définir la vie que nous souhaitons choisir et vivre. Une vie vécue est inséparable de ses formes, de ses modalités, de ses régimes, de ses gestes, de ses façons, de ses allures... qui sont déjà des idées. Le monde, tel que nous le partageons et lui donnons sens, ne se découpe pas seulement en individus, en classes ou en groupes, mais aussi en (...) "styles", qui sont autant de phrasés du vivre, animé de formes attirantes ou repoussantes, habitables ou inhabitables, c'est-à-dire de formes qualifiées : des formes qui comptent, investies de valeurs et de raisons d'y tenir, de s'y tenir, et aussi bien de les combattre. C'est sur ce plan des formes de la vie que se formulent aujourd'hui beaucoup de nos attentes, de nos revendications, et surtout de nos jugements. C'est toujours d'elles que l'on débat, et avec elles ce sont des idées complètes du vivre que l'on défend ou que l'on accuse. Une forme de vie ne s'éprouve que sous l'espèce de l'engagement, là où toute existence, personnelle ou collective, risque son idée. Vouloir défendre sa forme de vie, sans tapage, en la vivant, mais aussi savoir en douter et en exiger de tout autres, voilà à quoi l'histoire la plus contemporaine redonne de la gravité. Bien au-delà du champ de l'art, Marielle Macé propose la construction critique d'une véritable stylistique de l'existence. Cela suppose de s'intéresser sans préjugé à tout ce qu'engagent les variations formelles de la vie sur elle-même - styles, manières, façons - et de ne pas traiter forcément de vies éclatantes, triomphantes, d'apparences prisées ou de corps élégants. Ce n'est pas seulement la littérature mais bien toutes les sciences humaines qui, pour comprendre le monde immédiat, sous nos yeux, doivent s'y rendre vraiment attentives. (shrink)

Wall Street and Main Street have become opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in (...) the rituals of Wall Street. Metaphors can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)

Wall Street and Main Street have become opposing icons in narratives of boom and bust that endeavor to account for the financial meltdown in fall 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. In many such narratives, Wall Street denizens are said to have brought on the economic collapse in which ordinary Main Streeters became collateral damage. Economic analysis and political advocacy are carried on in a metaphorics which implicates the fate of Main Street in (...) the rituals of Wall Street. Metaphors can enlighten and mislead, and likely these do both. The present effort aims to go behind the metaphors in order to understand the worlds of Wall Street and Main Street mobilizing the conceptual resources of Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)

Endurantists have recently faced a mereological puzzle in various forms. Here I argue that, instead of presenting a genuine worry, the puzzle actually reveals a common misunderstanding about the endurantist ontology. Furthermore, through this discussion of the alleged problem and the misunderstanding which motivates it, I reveal metaphysical commitments the endurantist has that may not be widely recognized. For instance, she is committed to interesting and perhaps controversial views about shape and location. I highlight these commitments and what they mean (...) for the endurantist. (shrink)

For courses in Business Ethics A fresh approach to the assumptions that underlie business practices Two recent events — the 2008 economic meltdown and the ongoing concentration of the nation's wealth in the hands of a very small percentage of the population — have led many people to question a number of basic assumptions about business, corporations, and the workings of contemporary free-market capitalism in a global economy. Written as a dialogue between Socrates and a hypothetical contemporary CEO,Socrates Comes to (...) Wall Street leads students to think critically about perspectives and practices that are taken as “givens” in most American business schools and corporations. Employing this original and provocative approach, author Thomas White seeks to encourage the next generation of business leaders to be more astute about the implications of their actions, and to act more prudently and more fairly than we have seen in the recent past. (shrink)

Tant que l’art fera partie du luxe, c’est-à-dire tant qu’il organisera sa rareté par l’effet de sa spéculation intellectuelle, il vivra une croissance infinie. Pour cela, il ne faut pas qu’il y ait d’inflation, c’est-à-dire qu’il faut respecter un certain numerus clausus d’artistes et d’œuvres. Le Wall Street de nos désirs et nos désillusions, c’est justement l’organisation de cette inflation, c’est – dans la continuité de Beuys – affirmer que chacun d’entre nous est capable d’être un artiste. Nous (...) allons bombarder le réel qui nous est fait de tous les réels qui vivent logés en nous pour en faire Le Wall Street de nos désirs et de nos désillusions, une bourse de nos valeurs inscrites dans une symbolique, jouée à la hausse et à la baisse dans un jeu qui va faire monter votre désir et donc armer une révolution dans le sens des saisons. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the availability of financial bounties and anonymous reporting channels impact individuals’ general reporting intentions of questionable acts and whether the availability of financial bounties will prompt people to reveal their identities. The recent passage of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 creates a financial bounty for whistle-blowers. In addition, SOX requires companies to provide employees with an anonymous reporting channel option. It is unclear of (...) the effect of these provisions as they relate to whistle-blowing. Our results indicate that a financial bounty has the potential to increase participants’ propensity to report questionable acts and their willingness to reveal their identities when reporting, but the availability of an anonymous reporting channel does not affect participants’ propensity to report questionable acts. These findings could potentially help corporate management, government policy makers and accounting researchers to assess the effectiveness of their internal compliance programs and help determine if financial bounties in the private sector could encourage whistle-blowing. (shrink)

The concept of organizational stigma has received significant attention in recent years. The theoretical literature suggests that for a stigma to emerge over a category of organizations, a “critical mass” of actors sharing the same beliefs should be reached. Scholars have yet to empirically examine the techniques used to diffuse this negative judgment. This study is aimed at bridging this gap by investigating Goffman’s notion of “stigma-theory”: how do stigmatizing actors rationalize and emotionalize their beliefs to convince their audience? We (...) answer this question by studying the stigma over the finance industry since 2007. After the subprime crisis, a succession of events put the industry under greater scrutiny, and the behaviors and values observed within this field began to be publicly questioned. As an empirical strategy, we collected opinion articles and editorials that specifically targeted the finance industry. Building on rhetorical analysis and other mixed methods of media content analysis, we explain how the stigmatizing rhetoric targets the origins of deviant organizational behaviors in the finance industry, that is, the shareholder value maximization logic. We bridge the gap between rhetorical strategies applied to discredit organizations and ones used to delegitimize institutional logics by drawing a parallel between these two literatures. Taking an abductive approach, we argue that institutional contradiction between field and societal-level logics is sufficient, but not necessary to generate organizational stigma. (shrink)

If institutional heterogeneity tends overall to reduce survival chances, it may also persist and be harnessed to good use. This article investigates this ambivalence by looking at how institutional heterogeneity emerges, develops, and survives. An inductive study of the “Metropolitan Opera” archives suggests that what enables heterogeneity to survive and to withstand the pressure for homogenization is its inherent potential for “multivocality.” The analysis shows how institutional discrepancies were bridged over through an opportunistic, “multivocal” action pattern, whereby the organization maneuvered (...) between conflicting institutional demands, seeking to minimize dependence on any single constituency or evaluation principle. Maintaining discretionary options is essential in multi-dimensional space, where ambiguity makes optimization impractical. The trade-off in this action pattern includes remarkable adaptability and operational inefficiencies. (shrink)

From Cairo to Occupy Wall Street, from Istanbul Gezi Park to DANS protests in Sofia, in recent public sphere movements we have witnessed the emergence of a new wave of creative protest. The surge of creative forms of political action brings to the fore the question of democratic potential of creative political protest. This paper explores in what ways creative protest could deepen democracy. I argue that creative political protest nurtures democracy by generating a peaceful culture of (...) resistance and by providing a peaceful way of responding to politics of intolerance and polarization. (shrink)

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled America's ability to repay its debts abroad. Fear that the United States would abandon the gold standard sent the dollar plummeting on world markets. Without a central bank in the summer of 1914, (...) the United States resembled a headless financial giant. William McAdoo stepped in with courageous action, we read in Silber's gripping account. He shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. He smothered the country with emergency currency to prevent a replay of the bank runs that swept America in 1907. And he launched the United States as a world monetary power by honoring America's commitment to the gold standard. His actions provide a blueprint for crisis control that merits attention today. McAdoo's recipe emphasizes an exit strategy that allows policymakers to throttle a crisis while minimizing collateral damage. When Washington Shut Down Wall Street recreates the drama of America's battle for financial credibility. McAdoo's accomplishments place him alongside Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan as great American financial leaders. McAdoo, in fact, nursed the Federal Reserve into existence as the 1914 crisis waned and served as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. (shrink)

In the period since the 2008 Wall Street crash, little consensus has emerged on its causes or actions to prevent a recurrence. Our capability for rational decision making was overwhelmed. Viewing the entire financial system as a huge, richly interconnected organization suggests that its structure and associated management practices are suited for a far simpler environment. An organization that is large relative to its environment and sufficiently complex to require the coordination of specialized expertise cannot function by enabling (...) decision makers to respond only to local demands. The resulting inability to recognize critical interdependencies and the nature of their risk makes periodic catastrophic failure likely. Specifically, compartmentalization of information, influence, and reward creates a myopic decision environment in which individual decision makers are unlikely to make effective or ethical decisions. Useful criteria for evaluating solutions can be suggested by considering the interaction of two factors: limited human information processing capability and the effect of motivation on information processing. Taken together, they suggest that human information processing is both limited and opportunistic. We cannot process all information available and the information selected for processing narrows to that needed to achieve salient rewards. Because of this, the organization's reward practices and their effect on motivation are a critical variable. Large financial rewards contingent upon short term, local, simplistic measures inevitably narrow the focus of decision maker's attention to a small part of the system. In contrast, dominant intrinsic motivation is rooted in awareness of, and responsibility for, broader outcomes. Each type of motivation differs in its requirements for sharing of information, influence, and reward. These, in turn, determine the adaptability of the organization to complexity and change. While this has significant ethical implications, its logic rests on the limitations of human information processing and motivation. Aligning human motivation and information flow to the demands of a complex, turbulent financial environment is the challenge we must meet to prevent further cataclysms. (shrink)

In an educational landscape dominated by discourses and practices of learning, standardized testing, and the pressure to succeed, what space and time remain for studying? In this book, Tyson E. Lewis argues that studying is a distinctive educational experience with its own temporal, spatial, methodological, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions. Unlike learning, which presents the actualization of a student’s "potential" in recognizable and measurable forms, study emphasizes the experience of potentiality, freed from predetermined outcomes. Studying suspends and interrupts the conventional logic (...) of learning, opening up a new space and time for educational freedom to emerge. Drawing upon the work of Italian philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, Lewis provides a conceptually and poetically rich account of the interconnections between potentiality, freedom, and study. Through a mixture of educational critique, phenomenological description, and ontological analysis, Lewis redeems study as an invaluable and urgent educational experience that provides alternatives to the economization of education and the cooptation of potentiality in the name of efficiency. The resulting discussion uncovers multiple forms of study in a variety of unexpected places: from the political poetry of Adrienne Rich, to tinkering classrooms, to abandoned manifestos, and, finally, to Occupy Wall Street. By reconnecting education with potentiality this book provides an educational philosophy that undermines the logic of learning and assessment, and turns our attention to the interminable paradoxes of studying. The book will be key reading for scholars in the fields of educational philosophy, critical pedagogy, foundations of education, composition and rhetoric, and critical thinking and literacy studies. (shrink)

The way things are supposed to be : reputational theory and its demise -- Thriving the new way : with little or no reputation : the Goldman Sachs story -- The way things used to be : when reputation was critical to survival -- Individual reputation unhinged from the firm : hardly anybody goes down with the ship -- Proof in the pudding : Michael Milken, Junk Bonds, and the decline of Drexel and -- Nobody else -- The new, post-reputation (...) Wall Street : accounting firms -- The new, post-reputation Wall Street : law firms -- The new, post-reputation Wall Street : credit rating agencies -- The new, post-reputation Wall Street : stock exchanges -- The SEC and reputation -- The SEC : captured and quite happy about it -- Where we are and where we are headed : a conclusion of sorts -- Index. (shrink)

The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street offers a concise introduction to Jameson in jargon-free language and shows how his Marxist theories can be deployed to interpret Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed (...) 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. Beginning with a detailed account of Jameson's extensive writings on Marxist theory and how they have been deployed in the analysis of film writings, Clint Burnham then illustrates how Jameson's theory can help to make sense of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that shows in all its glory the excesses, lunacies, and inner workings of 1990s finance capitalism. As Jameson has influentially argued, films like The Wolf of Wall Street are both complicit in and critical of their historical subject: Scorsese's film is not about the richest stockbrokers, but the Long Island penny traders who made it big. As a narrative of American success, it is also a film about failure. Clint Burnham's reading of Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street is a book about a contemporary film, and contemporary events, and contemporary theory. (shrink)

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its (...) inherent tensions and contradictions. (shrink)