Image, space, revolution: The arts of occupation

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 8-32

  Mitchell, W J T ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84868564537     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: 15397858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/668048     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. H. A. Kelly traces the trope to Quintilian, who regarded it as "a rhetorical figure by which an opponent's objections are anticipated and answered" and to the Greek paraleipsis, "a figure by which summary mention is made of a thing, in professing to omit it" (quoted in H. A. Kelly, "Occupatio as Negative Narration: A Mistake for Occultatio/ Praeteritio," Modern Philology 74 [Feb. 1977]: 311-15).
2. For a meditation on the place of violence in public spaces, see W. J. T. Mitchell, "The Violence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing," in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. Mitchell (Chicago, 1992), pp. 29-48.
3. William Wordsworth, "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (New York, 2004), p. 63.
4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; New York, 1959), p. 178.
5. See Arendt on the revolution as "new beginning" (Arendt, On Revolution [1963; New York, 2006], p. 11).
6. See Ariella Azoulay, "The Language of Revolution-Tidings from the East," trans. Tal Haran, criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/the-language-of- revolution-azoulay
7. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 178-79.
8. See Harriet Sherwood, "Tel Aviv's 'Tent City' Protesters Dig in to Demand Social Justice," The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2011/aug/04/tel-aviv-tent-city-protesters.
9. See also Azoulay, "The Language of Revolution."
10. See Mick Taussig, "I'm so Angry I Made a Sign," Critical Inquiry 39 (Fall 2012): 56-88.,
11. his ethnographic account as a witness/participant in an overnight campout in Zuccotti Park. See also Barry Schwabsky, "Signs of Protest: Occupy's Guerilla Semiotics," The Nation, 14 Dec. 2011, www.thenation.com/article/ 165144/signs-protest-occupys-guerilla-semiotics#
12. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks, ed. Gordon Wright (Chicago, 1967), p. 4.
13. William Hazlitt, The Life of Napoleon, in The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1931), 13:38,
14. and Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (1837; New York, 1906), 1:119.
15. For a comparative study of Benjamin Franklin's leakage of inflammatory correspondence between the Crown and the American colonial administrators and the phenomenon of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, see Russ Castronovo, "State Secrets: Ben Franklin and WikiLeaks," Critical Inquiry (forthcoming).
16. Naomi Wolf, "The Shocking Truth about the Crackdown on Occupy," The Guardian, 25 Nov. 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/ nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy
17. Thegift73, "A New Obelisk Is Being Raised in Tahrir Square," Techfleece, 25 Jan. 2012, techfleece.com/2012/01/25/a-new-obelisk-is-being- raised-in-tahrir-square/
18. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1971; Oxford, 1991).
19. Nassar Rabbat, "Circling the Square," Artforum 49 (Apr. 2011): 182.
20. Quoted in Jodi Dean, "Žižek against Democracy," Law, Culture, and the Humanities 1 (June 2005): 157.
21. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, 2008), p. 177. Žižek distinguishes between Hitler and Stalin in an elaboration of the castration metaphor. Hitler only seems to have balls: "all his actions were fundamentally reactions: he acted so that nothing would really change⋯ to prevent the communist threat of real change." Stalin, by contrast, was "truly daring," and did have balls. It was of course regrettable that his ruthless violence caused "suffering beyond comprehension," but the real problem was that the violence was motivated by "blind rage and panic" (as opposed, one presumes, to cold, clear-eyed calculation) and wound up devouring itself in purges of "high party echelons" (pp. 177, 177, 178).
22. Quoted in Jodi Dean, "Žižek against Democracy," p. 173.
23. Žižek, "Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: 'We Are Not Dreamers, We Are the Awakening from a Dream Which Is Turning into a Nightmare,'" 10 Oct. 2011, www.versobooks.com/blogs/736-slavoj- zizek-at-occupy-wall-street-we-are-not-dreamers-we-are-the-awakening-from-a- dream-which-is-turning-into-a-nightmare
24. See Mark Greif's very thoughtful essay, "Drumming in Circles," Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America (New York, 2011), pp. 55-62.
25. Martin Heidegger, "Art and Space," trans. Charles H. Seibert, Man and World 6, no. 1 (1973): 3.
26. See Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," October, no. 8 (Spring 1979): 30-44,
27. and James E. Young, "The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today," Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267-99.
28. I am inspired in this effort by Jacques Rancière's fundamental reconceiving of the relation of aesthetics and politics. See especially Rancière, "The Distribution of the Sensible," The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabrielle Rockhill (New York, 2006), pp. 12-19.
29. Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament," The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 78.
30. See also Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Victor Gollancz (New York, 1962),
31. and Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind (1895; New York, 2009);
32. and for a critique of the usual dismissal of crowd psychology as a form of madness and irrationality, see Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (New York, 2007).
33. See Michael North, "The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament," in Art and the Public Sphere, pp. 9-28; hereafter abbreviated "P."
34. See Barry Schwabsky, "Signs of Protest," for a discussion of the signs at OWS and Michael Taussig, "I'm so Angry I Made a Sign," on the statuesque character of the signbearers.
35. Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," p. 30.
36. George Wither, "Emblem XX," The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church 29 (Jan.-Jun. 1865): 173.
37. Gormley's piece, One and Other (2009), suggests both the individual and the anonymous collective. For an interesting companion piece in the Trafalgar Square series, see Yinka Shonibare's wonderful "ship in a bottle," which recreates a scale model of Lord Nelson's flagship festooned with sails made from West African fabrics. If Gormley was engaged in a democratization of the monumental site of sovereignty, Shonibare was attempting to bring home the iconography of British imperialism to its proper site: Trafalgar Square, named after Nelson's greatest victory.
38. Antony Gormley, "Field, 1989-2003," www.antonygormley.com/ sculpture/item-view/id/245
39. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 1994), p. 193.
40. Gormley, "Field, 1989-2003."
41. Quoted in Mark Hughes, "Brian Haw Loses Battle against Parliament Square Eviction," The Telegraph, 17 Mar. 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/royal-wedding/8388000/Brian-Haw-loses-battle-against-Parliament-Square- eviction.html
42. Adrian Searle, "Bears against Bombs," The Guardian, 15 Jan. 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/16/humanrights.politicsandthearts
43. Taussig, "I'm so Angry I Made a Sign," p. 75.
44. Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 2009), pp. 9, 16.