mitchell, w. j. t. - image, space, revolution (the arts of occupation) (2012)

Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of OccupationAuthor(s): W. J. T. MitchellSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Autumn 2012), pp. 8-32Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668048 .Accessed: 20/07/2013 14:32

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Image, Space, Revolution: The Artsof Occupation

W. J. T. Mitchell

In the fall of 2011 I received a letter from the SupremeCouncil of Culturein Egypt inviting me to speak on the global Occupy movement at a cele-bration of the first anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution. The invitation(indefinitely postponed because of the still-uncertain fate of that revolu-tion) stipulated that I should reflect on the role of images andmedia in the25th January Revolution and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.1 Thefollowing paper is my response to that invitation.

OccupatioIs there a dominant global imagecall it aworld picturethat links the

Occupy movement to the Arab Spring? Or (to narrow the question quitedrastically) is there any single image that captures and perhaps even mo-tivated the widely noticed synergy and infectious mimicry between TahrirSquare and Zuccotti Park? One would first have to register the dramaticdifferences between the two sites and situations. The Arab Spring was aseries ofmore or less hard revolutions of the classic form, involving variousdegrees of violence and demands for regime change; in the US, OccupyWall Street continued a soft revolution that began with the election ofBarack Obama, whose 2012 State of the Union address echoed many of itsdemands. But there is also a curious mirroring between the hard and softrevolutions that characterize this globalmoment. The hard revolutions ofthe Arab Spring, which ask for not much more than democracy, civilliberties, and a decent Keynesian economy, turn out to be the inspira-

1. Supreme Council of Culture, email message to author, 2011.

Critical Inquiry 39 (Autumn 2012)

2012 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/12/3901-0006$10.00. All rights reserved.

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tion for an American imitation that takes on the very center of Amer-ican capitalismnot the state, but the system that is widely perceived tohave corrupted the state and the whole political process. While moderateand restrained in its tactics (nonviolent occupation of public spaces), Oc-cupy Wall Street was radical in its demands and (some would say) evenmore radical in its refusal at the outset to be pinned down to any specificdemands. And this is something it had in common with Tahrir Square,with its conspicuous insistence on an antiiconic, nonsovereign image rep-ertoire. Tahrir Squaremay have opened a Facebook account, but it refusedto have a representative face come forward as the avatar of the revolution.Thiswas partly tactical, of course, for if the police had been in possession ofsuch a face, they would have quickly arrested and tortured the body con-nected to it. But itwas also a key ideological feature of theOccupymovement,which insisted on an iconography of nonsovereignty and anonymity, re-nouncing the face and figure of the charismatic leader in favor of the face inand of the crowd, the assembled masses. When faces did emerge, they werethose of anonymous individuals or indefinitely repeatable masks, such asthe grinning visage of Guy Fawkes, a singularly awkward and inappropri-ate icon of a nonviolent revolution.2

This is why the iconic moments, the images that promise to becomemonuments, of the global revolution of 2011 are not those of face but ofspace; not figures, but the negative space or ground against which a figureappears. The figure that circulates globally, that embraces both TahrirSquare and Zuccotti Park, and has perhaps been overlooked because it ishiding in plain sight, is the figure of occupation itself. But occupation andthe Occupy movement have no definite form or figure other than thedialectical poles of the mass and the individual, the assembled crowd andthe lone, anonymous figure of resistance. And occupation, it should benoted, is not only a visual and physical presence in a space but a discursive

2. Fawkes is the legendary leader of a Catholic resistance movement that attempted to blowup the Houses of Parliament in 1605. He was transformed into a positive secular hero by the1980s graphic novel V for Vendetta, which was adapted for a film of the same title by theWachowski brothers in 2006.

W . J . T . M I T CH E L L is professor of English and art history at the Universityof Chicago and has been editor of Critical Inquiry since 1978. He is the author ofIconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1987), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal andVisual Representation (1995), and What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves ofImages (2006), a loosely linked trilogy on media, visual culture, and imagetheory. His most recent books are Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 911 to thePresent (2011) and Seeing through Race (2012).

Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2012 9


and rhetorical operation. It is directly linked to the trope of occupatio, thetactic of anticipating an adversarys arguments by preempting them, tak-ing the initiative in a space where one knows in advance that there will beresistance and counterarguments.3 In the context of the rhetoric of publicspace, occupatio is, as the original meaning of the word reveals, the seizureof an empty place, one that is supposed to be res nullius, not owned byanyone, not private property. It is a demand in its own right, a demand forpresence, an insistence on being heard, before any specific political de-mands are made; a demand that the public be allowed to gather and re-main in a public space. But the demand of occupatio is made in the fullknowledge that public space is, in fact, pre-occupied by the state and thepolice, that its pacified and democratic character, apparently open to all, issustained by the ever-present possibility of violent eviction.4 Occupatiothus aims, not just at taking possession of an empty space in an argument,but of provoking a response and framing it in advance.

Equally important to the positive meaning of occupatio as the seizure ofempty space is its negative role in the production of an empty space that is,paradoxically, a space of fullness and plenitude. This version of occupatio istypically characterized as a refusal to say something while at the same timesaying it. It can be based in the inadequacy of the speaker or the insuffi-ciency of the medium itself, as in William Wordsworths declaration thatI cannot paint / What then I was, followed by an outpouring of descrip-tion.5 Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy literalizes in graphic form thetrope of occupatio in his confession of an inability to describe the magnif-icent beauty of theWidowWadman. Sterne follows this confession with ablank page that he invites the reader to fill in.

The Occupy movement is a dramatic performance of the rhetoric ofoccupatio. It refuses to describe or define in any detail the world that itwants to create, while showing this world in its actual presence as a nascentcommunity. It renounces the demand that it make specific, practical de-mands, while opening a space in which innumerable demands can be ar-ticulated. And it does so, not so much as a declaration of inadequacy (we

3. H. A. Kelly traces the trope to Quintilian, who regarded it as a rhetorical figure bywhich an opponents objections are anticipated and answered and to the Greek paraleipsis, afigure 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 Philology74 [Feb. 1977]: 31115).

4. For a meditation on the place of violence in public spaces, see W. J. T. Mitchell, TheViolence of Public Art: Do the Right Thing, in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. Mitchell (Chicago,1992), pp. 2948.

5. WilliamWordsworth, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Selected Poems,ed. Stephen Gill (New York, 2004), p. 63.

10 W. J. T. Mitchell / Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation


are unable to say what we want) as a principle of refusal and deliberatedeferral (this is not the time to utter policy statements, but to make amore fundamental framing statement with the simple fact of our presencehere). This strategic refusal is displayed in a number of familiar tactics:the silent vigil performed, for instance, by the Buddhist contingents thatsometimes accompanyOccupy; thewearing of gags or tape over themouthto visibly perform the suppression of free speech and assembly; the miccheck tactic, which both amplifies speech and exposes its curtailment bypolice forces that prohibit the use of amplification. These tactics are linkedto the overall strategy of refusing to designate representatives or spokes-persons and, more generally, to the insistence on staging a politics of rad-ical equality and nonsovereignty. The aim, in other words, is not to seizepower but to manifest the latent power of refusal and to create the foun-dational space of the political as such, whatHannahArendt calls the spaceof appearance6 that is created when people assemble to speak and acttogether as equals. This space is foundational because it is prior to politicsin the usual sense, constituting a potentially revolutionary and constitutivesite of assembly, speech, and action.

The trope of occupation, then, involves a paradoxical temporal and rhe-torical dimension: it speaks by refusing (for now) to speak; it declares byrefusing to declare; it endures and prolongs a silence and a temporaryholding action that will inevitably be succeeded by more speech and ac-tion. The Occupy movement, and the figure of occupatio, is thus theverbal-visual image that unites the revolutionary movements from theArab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. OWS was inspired, not by the ArabSprings objective of overturning dictatorships and establishing demo-cratic regimes, but by its strategic deployment of the rhetoric of space andthe tactics of occupation.

It should be clear, then, why it was that the Occupy movement wentviral globally, and not any of the specific demands about the removal ofdictators, the assertion of democracy, or the overturning of capitalism.Occupy was capable of reconcilingor at least providing a common placeforinnumerable contradictions. In Tahrir Square the Muslim Brother-hood camped next to Coptic Christians, radical fundamentalists, secularliberals, andMarxist revolutionaries. Right-wingZionist settlers joined theanti-Zionist ultraorthodox along with secular Jews on Rothschild Boule-vard in Tel Aviv, and Tea Partiers showed up at Occupy rallies across theUS. The veryword, occupy, performed a kind of homeopathicmagic on thediscourse of globalization and, indeed, on discourse as such. As an imper-

6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; New York, 1959), p. 178.



ative (you occupy) it constituted a universal address to any conceivableaddressee; it interpellated or hailed (to recall Louis Althussers formula-tion) thewholeworld and every potential subject of address. As a transitiveverb that takes an object (Wall Street, the world), it could expand andcontract its direct objects from highly specific places (Tahrir Square, WallStreet) to the entire world. Occupy would ultimately seize even abstract,conceptual objects as well: Time, Theory, the Disciplines, the Arts, theImagination, the Media, the US. A poster with the words Occupy Every-thing spelled out the unlimited scope of this figure, illustrating it with apie chart that was ninety-nine percent black, with a tiny wedge of whitesignifying the one percent that actually occupies most of the worldswealth. At the same time, the word occupy was mutating out of its verbalfunction into a noun and an adjective, as if it was occupying language itself.There was the Occupy movement, which made it into an adjective modify-ing movement, or the simple act of slipping it into the position of thesubject of a sentence in place of the nominative occupation: Occupy hascome to Oakland.

Aside from its unlimited grammatical flexibility, Occupy performed anuncanny repetition and parodic mimesis of a preexisting condition,namely, the occupation of the world by a global system that has oppressedand impoverished the vast majority of the worlds population and de-graded the environment at the same time. The clearest symptom of theuncanny reversal in themeaning of the word occupation has been its trans-formation from its principal meaning in the preceding historical epoch, asa label for military conquest and neocolonialismthe invasion and occu-pation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the propping up of authoritarian regimesacross the Middle East, and the half-century occupation of Palestinianlands by the state of Israel. For years, when one heard the word occupation,ones first thought was likely to be the imposition of martial law on aresistant population, the proliferation of dictatorships in the name of re-sistance to communism (or fundamentalism, or terrorism), and in theformer Soviet bloc, the fostering of freedom and democracy (for marketsand speculative capital, not for human beings). But, suddenly, the wordoccupation took on a new meaning: the reclaiming of public space bymasses of disenfranchised people, the peaceful, nonviolent seizure ofplaces in an effort to provide a new beginning, a foundational space forjustice, democracy, and equality.7

The world was waiting for just such a counteroccupation. It was not

7. See Arendt on the revolution as new beginning (Arendt, On Revolution [1963; NewYork, 2006], p. 11).



enough to call for a demonstration, a parade, or a temporary gathering.The difference between demonstration and occupation, and the arts spe-cific to each, is significant. The sit-ins of the American civil rights move-ment were gestures of occupation, declarations that the racial segregationof public spaceswould no longer be tolerated.Occupation is, in addition toits spatial connotations, an art of duration and endurance, manifesting theparadoxical synthesis of social movement and mobilization with immobil-ity, the refusal to move. It is a movement whose central declaration is, asthe classic protest song puts it, We Shall Not BeMoved. It presumes thelong campaign, the revolution as a lengthy process, and (as Ariella Azoulayhas argued)8 a new language that keeps renewing itself. The revolution isnot an event that is over and donewith, reducible to a date on the calendar.As one notable poster put it, I lost my job but found an occupation.Occupy is less a singular, datable event than a historical process punctu-ated by momentsprolonged situations filled with ephemeral and mo-mentary occasions as well as momentous turning points and tippingpoints. It is therefore signaled, not just by the massive gathering of people,but by the tiny moments, the seemingly insignificant catalytic events: aTunisian fruit vendor immolating himself; a lone activist camping in Par-liament Square for ten years.9

Image, Space, Revolution

Action and speech create a space between the participants which canfind its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the spaceof appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely the space whereI appear to others as others appear to me. . . .

The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are to-gether in the manner of speech and action, and therefore pre-datesand precedes all formal constitution of the public realm. . . . Unlikethe spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive theactuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappearsnot only with the dispersal of men . . . but with the disappearance orarrest of the activities themselves.10

Against the background of occupied spaces such as Tahrir Square andZuccotti Park, what particular images emerge as the iconic figures? Insofar

8. See Ariella Azoulay, The Language of RevolutionTidings from the East, trans. TalHaran, criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/the_language_of_revolution_azoulay

9. In the person of Brian Haw, whose record-setting occupation will be the subject of thefinal section of this essay.

10. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 17879.



as these events involved an intent to occupy rather than to merely demon-strate and go home, one might single out the image of the tent and theencampment, the sign that these were not temporary or transitory gather-ings like the typical political rally butmanifestations of a long term resolve.Along with tents, of course, came all the practical signs of dwelling and afunctioning village. In tiny Zuccotti Park, as in Tahrir Square, medicalfacilities, food services, libraries, clothing dispensaries, and communica-tion centers sprang up. A wedding was celebrated, and a baby was born inTahrir Square. These scenes were in someways a positivemirroring of thatother form of the encampment that has become so ubiquitous on theworld stage, the shanty towns and improvised refugee camps that springup wherever a population finds itself displaced, homeless, or thrust into astate of emergency. In the wake of the Arab Spring, one even found tentcities springing up all over Israel, from fashionable Rothschild Boulevardin Tel Aviv to mixed Jewish-Arab areas south of Jaffa.11 Occasionally thenegative and positive forms of the campmerge, as inOslo in 201112, wherePalestinian refugees took sanctuary in a vacant lot next to St. JacobsChurch and lived there through the bitter Norwegian winter as a visiblepublic protest.

The encampments and gatherings of Occupy, however, quickly becamethe background or negative space against which a bewildering variety ofverbal and visual images could be staged. So a further question arises:What positive and specific images will remain as the enduring icons of theglobal revolution of 2011? What monuments will commemorate the seriesof democratic insurgencies that swept the world from the self-immolationof a fruit vendor in Tunisia to the occupation of Tahrir Square to OccupyWall Street?

The massive outpouring of creativity during this year of crisis, the mil-lions of images conveyed in banners, slogans, videos, photographs, post-ers, costumes, and performances would seem to render a comprehensive,much less systematic, account impossible. The rapidity and vast archivalcapacities of digital media render this material hyperaccessible to search-ing and retrieval, while at the same time it threatens to drown the re-searcher under a tsunami of material.12

11. See Harriet Sherwood, Tel Avivs Tent City Protesters Dig in to Demand SocialJustice, The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/04/tel-aviv-tent-city-protesters. See also Azoulay, The Language of Revolution.

12. See Mick Taussig, Im so Angry I Made a Sign, Critical Inquiry 39 (Fall 2012): 5688.,his ethnographic account as a witness/participant in an overnight campout in Zuccotti Park.See also Barry Schwabsky, Signs of Protest: Occupys Guerilla Semiotics, The Nation, 14 Dec.2011, www.thenation.com/article/165144/signs-protest-occupys-guerilla-semiotics#



One can glimpse at the outset, however, a certain dialectic betweenimages of triumphal defiance and joy, on the one hand, and images ofabjection, humiliation, and police violence on the other. Positive iconssuch as the Adbusters Ballerina dancing on theWall Street Bull, the face ofthe revolutionary idea embodied in the mask of Guy Fawkes, a wedding inTahrir Square, or simply the assembled masses united in festivals of dem-ocratic exuberancewill no doubt survive. But equally important will be thejournalistic photos and videos capturing the outrageous violence againstnonviolent demonstrators: the cavalry assault on Tahrir Square, the pepper-spraying of nonviolent protestors in Oakland, Berkeley, and Zuccotti Park.One might take the Ballerina (fig. 1) and the Woman with the Blue Brassiere(fig. 2) as emblematic of the fundamental polarities of theOccupymovement:its positive aim of taking back public space for the people and its negative aimof exposing the systematic violence that has been concealed under the veil ofpublic safety, stability, and security. The fact that both these iconic

F I GUR E 1 .



images are centrally focused on women is no accident, for the whole tacticof nonviolence has an inherently feminine and feminist connotation, astriking contrast to the macho violence it elicits. (This is a tradition thatgoes back to Lysistrata and the restraint of male violence by women.) TheBallerina does not try to kill the bull; she turns him into a support for herperformance. TheWoman in theBlueBrassiere does not fight back but com-pels the police to play their part in the tableau of active nonviolence. LikeMartin Luther King, Jr. confronting the fire hoses and police dogs of BullConnor inBirmingham,Alabama, theBallerinaandtheWomanwith theBlueBrassiere are performance artists. One is virtual, imaginary, and spectral, afigure that defies gravity and material constraints, most vividly in her ho-lographic reincarnation byOccupyCinema.org, dancing atop the realWallStreet Bull after the actual Occupy encampment had been evicted. Theother is all too actual, real, and bodily, not just a symbol, but a flesh-and-blood human being who becomes virtual and goes viral, returning withina few days to haunt the real space of Tahrir Square as the banner of theEgyptian womens movement (fig. 3).13

While these images (and many others) will remain iconic of the globalOccupymovement, however, I do not think theywill be themonuments of

13. I am informed by correspondents that a blue brassiere has become the hottest fashionitem in Cairo boutiques.

F I GUR E 2 .



the revolution of 2011. Images can only come alive against a background.Every figure requires a ground, a landscape, or an environment in whichit can appear and move. For the truly enduring monuments to revolu-tion, I think we must follow the lead of Jules Michelets famous analysisof the French Revolution and his declaration that empty space and thespecific place where the major events of the revolution occurred is itstrue monument.

The Champ deMars! This is the only monument that the Revolutionhas left. The Empire has its Column, and engrosses almost exclusively thearch of Triumph; royalty has its Louvre, its Hospital of Invalids; the feu-dal church of the twelfth century is still enthroned at Notre Dame: nay,the very Romans have their Imperial Ruins, the Thermae of the Caesars!

And the Revolution has for her monument: empty space.14

The Champ de Mars, originally a military parade ground, became the siteof both the celebrations and the catastrophes of the revolution, beginningwith the first Bastille Day on 14 July 1790, followed a year later by theNational Guards massacre of citizens who had gathered to sign a petitiondemanding the removal of the king. It was also the site of the first attemptsto monumentalize the revolution, including Pierre-Antoine DemachysFestival of the Supreme Being in 1794, featuring an artificial mountain with

14. Jules Michelet, History of the French Revolution, trans. Charles Cocks, ed. GordonWright (Chicago, 1967), p. 4.

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a Tree of Liberty. It was also the place where the first mayor of Paris wasguillotined.

For Michelet, however, none of these images or events remains as theiconicmonument to the FrenchRevolution.Michelet insists that the onlymonument is the empty space of theChampdeMars. I want to proposethat a similar logic is atwork in the revolutions of 2011. The scores of plazas,squares, and open urban spaces around the world, from Tahrir Square toZuccotti Park, are themselves the appropriate monuments to the Occupymovement. Despite the many differences in history and specific architec-tural design, a thing these places have in common is their emptiness, theirfunction as what Martin Heidegger called a clearing, an opening in thedense fabric of the city, and thus a place of gathering. Their emptiness is aregister of their historical character (what Hannah Arendt called thespace of appearance) where shared political speech and action occur andcan just as quickly vanish into a ghostly memory with the disappearanceor arrest of the activities themselves.

The other thing that unites them is the temporality of contagion, theway in which the empty spaces of public gathering became a kind of globalcommons, thanks to the contemporary phenomenon of cyberspace and itslinkage to themassmedia. The empty space of contemporary revolution isthus really a threefold space comprised of (1) bodily immediacy, site spec-ificity, and intimate proximity, epitomized by the mic check or peoplesmicrophone that recalls Jean-Jacques Rousseaus famous declaration thatthe foundational scene of democracy is the assembled mass addressed bythe sound of the human voice; (2) the extended social spacemade possibleby socialmedia such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, email, and so on; and(3) the amplification and reproduction of both the immediate and sociallymediated spaces by mass broadcast media. What is done in Tahrir Squareis thus echoed in Madison, Wisconsin, Zuccotti Park, all over the Arabworld, and beyond. And, indeed, the great Enlightenment revolutions in-volved precisely the same structure of mediation, despite the vast differ-ences in their technical bases. The French Revolution was not only aprocess of assembling themasses in real spaces such as the Champ deMarsbut was also a virtual, mediated process. As William Hazlitt noted, therevolution was a remote but inevitable result of the invention of the art ofprinting, and Thomas Carlyle summed up the revolutionary era as theAge of Paper.15Corresponding societies and postal services provided the

15. William Hazlitt, The Life of Napoleon, in The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols.(London, 1931), 13:38, and Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (1837; New York,1906), 1:119.



structural equivalent of contemporary social media, and the unlicensedprinting of pamphlets and broadside declarations occupied the new emptyspaces of print culture.16

Of course, nothing guarantees that these negative, empty spaces,whether actual or virtual, will remain democratic, much less revolutionarysites; theChampdeMarswas amilitary parade ground and the placewherethe French Revolution degenerated into an orgy of violence. The milita-rized response to the various occupations of public space in the US wascoordinated in teleconferences with the mayors of at least eighteen Amer-ican cities.17 The commons is not an empty space that is simply free for thetaking but a battleground where the possibility of democracy and revolu-tionary change is contested.

We need to further interrogate the notions of the monumental imageand of empty space. Our usual picture of the monument is of a statue orobelisk erected in empty space. One of the first impulses of the Egyptianrevolution was to erect an obelisk in Tahrir Square engraved with thenames of the martyrs. Like the Styrofoam Goddess of Liberty in Tianan-men Square, thismonument was short-lived (fig. 4).18ButMichelet pushesus in just the opposite direction, suggesting that the monument is not thefigure, but the ground, not the statue or obelisk, but the empty spacewithout the statue.Why?What exactly do wemean by empty space, andhow does it become monumentalized?

The first thing to reiterate is that empty space is not necessarily a mon-ument to democratic revolution. It may as easily serve as a monument tototalitarianism, whether it is ornamented by the statue of a dictator or not.The urban renewal of Paris by Baron von Haussmann in the nineteenthcentury was famously a strategy of state control and clearing, openinglong, wide boulevards such as the Champs Elysees that would offer fewopportunities for the erection of revolutionary barricades and serve asunobstructed firing ranges for artillery to suppress popular uprisings. RedSquare inMoscow andTiananmen Square in Beijing have served as staginggrounds for both popular protest and spectacles of absolutism. The fa-

16. For a comparative study of Benjamin Franklins leakage of inflammatorycorrespondence between the Crown and the American colonial administrators and thephenomenon of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, see Russ Castronovo, State Secrets: BenFranklin and WikiLeaks, Critical Inquiry (forthcoming).

17. 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

18. 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/



mous image of the lone individual confronting a column of tanks in Ti-ananmen Square captures this duality perfectly.

So empty space is, unsurprisingly, a radically ambiguous and polyvalentform of what Henri Lefebvre called the production of social space.19 Inurban environments it is the space between the buildings, that is, thestreets, parks, and plazas that provide the setting for parades and encamp-ments, public gatherings to celebrate or protest the state. It is important tosee that not all empty spaces are empty in the same way. Some are emptiedor cleared by neglect and abandonmentthe vacant lots and houses thataccompany economic hard timesor by police violence against crowds,mobs, assemblies, and encampments. Tahrir Square under the Mubarakregimewas not a popular gathering place; in fact, it had been fenced off for

19. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1971;Oxford, 1991).

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many years with the excuse that it was a construction site for a plannedunderground parking garage. As Nasser Rabbat notes, Tahrir Square . . .is a densely layered territory in which the modern meets the Mamluk,Haussmannian vistasmeet cold-war brutalism, and networked pathsmeetthe open agora.20

Empty space could thus be a sign of defeat, of a revolution suppressed,defeated, or betrayed, a revolution that left nothing behind, that changednothing, that has come to nothing. Or one that is taken over by a monu-ment to a living sovereign and a totalitarian regime, the nearest thing wehave to an idol in contemporary culture. The figure of the tyrant, the DearLeader, the Chairman, the Fuhrer, or the Leviathan takes dominion overthe empty space of the public square, the plaza, park, or agora and pretendsto incorporate within itself the assembled collectivity as a personificationof the people and popular will. The empty space then is haunted, popu-lated by spirits that refuse to rest, collective and individual memories, aperception that leads toward an opposite reading of the empty space, atransformation of it into a sign of potentiality, possibility, and plenitude,a democracy not yet realized, with the empty public space awaiting a newfestival and renewed occupationa new space of appearance.

Recent leftist political theory has compulsively returned to the image ofempty space as the foundational figure of democracy itself. The Jefferso-nian idea of democracy as perpetual revolution is coupled with the ideathat formal democracy, in the form of election cycles, requires that theplace of sovereignty and power remain empty in principle (but certainlynot in practice). The important thing is the office, not the flesh-and-bloodoccupant, the laws, not the men that enforce them. Slavoj ieks critiqueof formal democracy, for instance, accuses it of a kind of liberal fundamen-talism that systematically erases and ignores the underlying violence ofcapitalism. Insofar as we play the democratic game of leaving the place ofpower empty, of accepting the gap between this place and our occupyingit, writes iek, are wedemocratsall not . . . faithful to castration.21

iek himself is quite faithful to this metaphor. He goes on to argue thatliberalswith their ideologies of tolerance, inclusion, multiculturalism,and faith in the democratic processdo not have [the] balls to try theimpossible, which would be of course to overturn the global system ofcapitalism that it reinforces and sustains.22 He expresses a guarded admi-

20. Nassar Rabbat, Circling the Square, Artforum 49 (Apr. 2011): 182.21. Quoted in Jodi Dean, iek against Democracy, Law, Culture, and the Humanities 1

(June 2005): 157.22. Slavoj iek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London, 2008), p. 177. iek

distinguishes between Hitler and Stalin in an elaboration of the castration metaphor. Hitler



ration for the intransigence of the Republican Party, noting that it is onlyright-wing populism which today displays the authentic political passionof accepting the struggle, of openly admitting that, precisely insofar as oneclaims to speak from a universal standpoint, one does not aim to pleaseeverybody, but is ready to introduce a division of Us versus Them.23 Foriek, the only true basis of politics is the claim to universality coupledwith a political practice that divides rather than unites, renouncing anynotion of compromise or negotiation as a liberal ruse that simply preservesthe unchallenged hegemony of capital. One sees here the convergence ofKarl Roves basic political philosophy with Leninism and the revolution-ary authenticity of the Tea Party.

iek also dismissed the festive aspect of Occupy Wall Street as a dis-traction from the serious business of revolution. Dont fall in love withyourselves, with the nice timewe are having here. Carnivals come cheap.24

I remember hearing this same homily preached in the sixties. I thought itwas amistake then and still do. I want to insist on the need for exuberance,creativity, and pleasure in the revolutionary process. EmmaGoldman cap-tured the point perfectly when she declared that she did not want to be partof any revolution that banned dancing. Or, I would add, drumming.25

The Arts of Occupation

The remarks on art, space and their interplay remain questions, evenif they are uttered in the form of assertions. These remarks are limitedto the graphic arts, and within these to sculpture. Sculptured struc-tures are bodies. Their matter, consisting of different materials, is var-iously formed. The forming of it happens by demarcation as settingup an inclosing and excluding border. Herewith, space comes into

only seems to have balls: all his actions were fundamentally reactions: he acted so that nothingwould 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 violencecaused suffering beyond comprehension, but the real problem was that the violence wasmotivated by blind rage and panic (as opposed, one presumes, to cold, clear-eyedcalculation) and wound up devouring itself in purges of high party echelons (pp. 177, 177,178).

23. Quoted in Jodi Dean, iek against Democracy, p. 173.24. iek, Slavoj iek at Occupy Wall Street: We Are Not Dreamers, We Are the

Awakening from a DreamWhich 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

25. See Mark Greifs very thoughtful essay, Drumming in Circles, Occupy! Scenes fromOccupied America (New York, 2011), pp. 5562.



play. Becoming occupied by the sculptured structure, space receivesits special character as closed, breached and empty volume. A familiarstate of affairs, yet puzzling.26

Which leads me to a final set of reflections on the role of images andmedia in the revolutionary events of 2011 and the question of aesthetics.What role did the arts play in Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park and thespaces between and beyond the Atlantic Ocean? I want to restrict thesereflections to the visual arts, even though it is clear that song, especially rapmusic and dancing, probably played a crucial role inmaintaining the spir-its of the crowds gathered by and into the physical spaces of occupation bythe media. At the same time, I would like to expand beyond the works ofart that were produced during this year to consider in a more general wayhow public space is becoming occupied, as Heidegger puts it, by thesculptured structure, with sculpture considered in the expanded field ofcountermonumentality, installation, site specificity, and performance.27

I have been talking as if the occupation of public spaces by mass assem-blies is itself an artistic practice. But how seriously should we take thisclaim? Is it right to claim, for instance, that King was a performance artistin his masterful staging of marches, sit-ins, and mass rallies?28 Or is thisreally just a whimsical comparison, one that minimizes the serious politicalpurposes of the civil rights movement, in which the arts were merely a hand-maiden, an instrument or servant of the cause? Isnt the aestheticizing of pol-itics, asWalter Benjamin warned, the broad highway to fascism, as instancedby the films of Leni Riefenstahl and themass spectacles of Albert Speer, whilethe straight and narrow road to social progress and communism is the polit-icizing of art? The twentieth century, and modernist forms of public art,showed us the convergence of these alternatives in the Nuremberg rallies andthemass gatherings designed to celebrate state power andmilitarism in theSoviet Union andChina. This suggests tome that we need a better accountof the relation of aesthetics and politics than Benjamins fatal choice be-tween fascism and communism.29

Siegfried Kracauers reflections on the role of what he called massornament suggest that the viable third way is most certainly not to be

26. Martin Heidegger, Art and Space, trans. Charles H. Seibert, Man and World 6, no. 1(1973): 3.

27. See Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, October, no. 8 (Spring 1979):3044, and James E. Young, The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in GermanyToday, Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 26799.

28. I owe this thought to my friend and neighbor, Bill Ayers.29. I am inspired in this effort by Jacques Rancie`res fundamental reconceiving of the

relation of aesthetics and politics. See especially Rancie`re, The Distribution of the Sensible,The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabrielle Rockhill (New York, 2006), pp. 1219.



found in capitalism, which occupies public spaces with advertising (as inTimes Square) or privatizes the agora and the village square by transform-ing it into the space of the shopping mall. (It is okay, of course, for themasses to camp out in front of Walmart in order to grab the bargainsavailable to the first customers.) For Kracauer, the structure of the massornament epitomized by the geometric pattern dances of the Tiller Girlsreflects that of the entire contemporary situation in its reduction of thehuman body to a cog in an abstract machine known as capital.30 Yet Kra-cauer concedes that the aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental massmovements is legitimate because it actually reveals a truth about capital-ism, as did the Nuremberg rallies with respect to fascism: When signifi-cant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must makedo with what is left.31 The Occupy movement made do with an outpour-ing of spectacle and statement, viral words and images, faces and crowds.

But there is a further question for the arts more generally. How hasadventurous, progressive public art in our time produced significant re-flections on the spaces that it occupies? What might we learn, specifically,from the history of public sculpture in our time? Michael Norths 1990essay, The Public as Sculpture, offers an opening into this question.32

Written precisely at the peak of the postmodern turn in public art towardquestions of site specificity, performance, and public participation, andcoinciding with the end of the cold war and the events of TiananmenSquare,North provides an incisive account of the transformation of publicand politically engaged art that still resonates today.33

Departing from Rosalind Krausss observation that surprising thingshave come to be called sculpture in the late twentieth century,34 Northdocuments the genealogy of the twin metaphors of the public as sculptureand as architecture, the arts traditionally associated with the figure and theground, form and the space in which it is staged. In themost reductive andabstract form of the public literally manifested as both sculpture and ar-chitecture, a canonical example would be the obelisk of the Washington

30. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans.and ed. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 78.

31. Ibid., p. 79. See also Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Victor Gollancz (New York,1962), and Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: Study of the Popular Mind (1895; New York, 2009); andfor 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).

32. See Michael North, The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament,in Art and the Public Sphere, pp. 928; hereafter abbreviated P.

33. See Barry Schwabsky, Signs of Protest, for a discussion of the signs at OWS andMichael Taussig, Im so Angry I Made a Sign, on the statuesque character of the signbearers.

34. Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, p. 30.



Monument, regarded not [as] a monolith but [as] a composite of manyindividual blocks (P, p. 15) corresponding to the incorporation of in-dividual citizens into a totality: E PLURIBUS UNUM (quoted in P, p.15). The Washington Monument (uncannily similar to the obelisk, notonly in its form, but in its incorporation of individual names) is thus a kindof abstract version of Thomas Hobbess Leviathan, incorporating all indi-vidual citizens (reduced to identical blocks) into one gigantic form sym-bolizing the first occupier of the empty place of sovereignty. At the otherextreme would be the great empty space in which, as Eric Hobsbawmnoted, the emphasis shifted from statuary to spaces in which massedcrowds were to provide the aesthetic impact (P, p. 17). But the massesthat occupy these empty spaces are generally there to stage the miracle(sometimes a product of democracy, sometimes of violence) by which themany become one, and they are thus oriented around the central figure ofthe leader, the representative, the one who speaks for and to the many.

But other alternatives for public art exist. North focuses particularly onthe practices of Joseph Beuys, who rather than erecting monuments, . . .seriously intended to make the people into a monument, a social work ofart, one that would be constructed by each individual as a sculptor orarchitect of the social organism. The result, in Beuys view, was to be theTOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER (P, p.14). North expresses some measured skepticism about the totalizing char-acter of this program, suggesting that when Beuys called his work socialsculpture or social architecture, he perhaps should have trembled at thecomplexity of the historical and political background thus evoked (P, p.17), particularly in totalitarian deployments of the masses as ornament tothe sovereign. He points out that the statue of the Goddess of Liberty inTiananmen Square signified . . . the rebellion of the crowd against its ownservice as human sculpture in the square. The question facing artists likeBeuys is how to keep the communitarian hopes and the revolutionaryimplications of the metaphor of social sculpture alive when the autocraticpossibilities of this metaphor are so painfully realized (P, p. 17).

No work of art could, by itself, be expected to answer this question. Butthere have been a few attempts tomake do thatmight be useful in thinkingthrough the problem of public art and the occupation of public space inour time, particularly in terms of mediating the individual and the collec-tive. One artist who has reflected consistently on this dialectic is AntonyGormley. His The Brick Man, for instance, is a kind of literalizing of thepolitical and religious metaphor of the Leviathan or giant man who incor-porates multiplicity into a single body (fig. 5). If the human body is atemple on the one hand, and the community is a building on the other,



what could be more inevitable than the building of a body, a buildingshaped like a body. The constituent bricks are like cubic stones that Chris-tian emblematics imagined as the buildingmaterials of the church itself. AsGeorge Wither puts it:

Lord, let us into such like stones be squard:Then place us in Thy spirtal temple, so,That into one firm structure, we may grow35

He illustrates his point with a cubic form, which is both the role of Jesus ascornerstone and the individual believer as a cubic unit that finds its properplace within the structure of the church.

Gormleys The Brick Man functions, then, in a similar fashion to Kra-

35. George Wither, Emblem XX, The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for YoungerMembers of the English Church 29 (Jan.Jun. 1865): 173.

F I GUR E 5 . Antony Gormley, The Brick Man (1987).



cauers geometric array of female bodies in the cinema of mass ornament:it is legitimate in its inevitability and accuracy as an expression of thewholereligious discourse of sovereignty and collective unity. At the same time,Gormley has created works that separate the individual and the collectivein strikingways, producing, on the one hand, sentinels or witness figurescast from his own body that may appear anywhere: as lone figures on abeach; as watchers stationed atop office buildings; as homeless and dis-placed forms in nondescript urban spaces; as abject figures abasing them-selves before the massive facades of architectural monuments. Thesefigures can appear almost anywhere, in short, except in the monumentalposition of the statue on a pedestal in a public space. They occupy space, inother words, in a manner directly antithetical to that of the public monu-ment. Or, in the case of a work like Quantum Cloud, the tallest piece ofpublic sculpture in London, they deconstruct themselves, seeming to ex-plode like a cloud of structural beams that are flying apart. They alsodeconstruct the fundamental tension between themass and the individualin the public monument, epitomizing what I would call a singular anonym-ity. Each figure is cast from the artists individual body, but they are also du-plicated indefinitely in a homogeneous series, like three-dimensional sculptedphotographs or corpographs. In awork likeAnother Place, inwhich the figuresseem to be vanishing into a tidal plain, they evoke the solitary singularity of awork like Caspar David Friedrichs Monk by the Sea as well as a mass of iden-tical figures migrating toward an indefinite horizon.

When Gormley was invited by the Royal Society of the Arts to address atraditional monumental location for public sculpture such as the Fourth[empty] Plinth in Trafalgar Square, he did not fabricate any objects, butstaged a six-month-long performance in which anyone could apply tooccupyto stand, sit, or act atopthe plinth for one hour on a 24/7schedule.36 Actors, musicians, activists, strippers, poets, mystics, jugglers,scholars, cranks, and exhibitionists filled out the schedule with round-the-clock performances, occupying the place of the sovereignmonument withthe living bodies of individuals from every corner of the globe. (The plinthwas originally erected to support a never-installed equestrian statue ofWilliam IV.)

36. Gormleys piece, One and Other (2009), suggests both the individual and theanonymous collective. For an interesting companion piece in the Trafalgar Square series, seeYinka Shonibares wonderful ship in a bottle, which recreates a scale model of Lord Nelsonsflagship festooned with sails made fromWest African fabrics. If Gormley was engaged in ademocratization of the monumental site of sovereignty, Shonibare was attempting to bringhome the iconography of British imperialism to its proper site: Trafalgar Square, named afterNelsons greatest victory.



But perhaps the most profound sculptural meditation on the wholecluster of issues surrounding the occupation of public space, the massassembly, and the individual body is Gormleys Field, a mass gathering ofterra cotta figures, each of which is fabricated by a different individual.This work, which has now been installed in several locations around theglobe, involves the participation of specific communities (Mexican brick-layers, Chinese workers) whose members each mold a hand-held-size clayfigure thatwill be gathered into a single mass ornament. In a process verymuch like a childs first experience with modeling clay, they bring theirfigures to life by punching eyeholes in them. Gormley then fires the clayand assembles them in interior spaces. In the Guangzhou version of thiswork, two-hundred-thousand body surrogates of this sort were modeledfrom 125 tons of clay (fig. 6). They completely occupy the space in whichthey are installed,37 creating the impression of what Gaston Bachelardcalled an intimate immensity,38 a vast crowd of miniature humanoidfigures all facing the beholder. The viewer, Gormley notes, then medi-

37. Antony Gormley, Field, 19892003, www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/245

38. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 1994), p. 193.

F I GUR E 6 . Gormley, Asian Field (2003).



ates between the occupied and the unoccupied areas of a given building,so that the physical area occupied is put at the service of the imaginativespace of the witness.39

In the political and formal terms we have been exploring in relation tothe sculpture and the occupation of public space, Field absolutely re-nounces any hierarchical structure, presenting a spectacle of thousands ofminutely differentiated individual figures assembled in what looks like ahomogeneous crowd, a sea of humanity (or a field like the Champ deMars). The effect is to turn the tables on the spectator, making the be-holder the looked at, the object of the artworks gaze. In the face of aquarter-million faces looking at you, what do you feel? One answer is thatyou feel overwhelmed at the sublime immensity of themass gathering, likethe monk by the sea experiencing his own minute scale in the presence ofinfinitely empty space and the power of the multitude. But a momentsreflection switches the aspect utterly, and one experiences his or her ownbody in a Gulliverian scale, as relatively gigantic in proportion to the min-iature figures. And, beyond that, one senses a kind of expansiveness, as ifone were occupying the empty space of sovereignty at the critical ceremo-nial moment (an inauguration or coronation), preparing to address theassembled masses.

Gormleys playful detournements of public space and its relation toindividual and collective bodies do not exist in a vacuum, of course. AsNorth argues, in the last quarter century, inmoments punctuated by a hostof critical and antimonumental works of public art, from the VietnamVeteransMemorial to the Goddess of Liberty to Richard SerrasTilted Arc,artists have been experimenting with newways to occupy public space andto free that space from its obsession with monumental representations ofsovereignty and the exploitation of the masses as ornaments of statepower.

Gormleys work rarely engages the explicitly political tactics of the oc-cupation of public space as aspects of a protestmovement. For amarvelousreflection on the more directly political work of occupation, we mightconsider an installation by Mark Wallinger. Installed at Tate Britain in2007,Wallingers State Britain ismade up of his own assembled handmadereproductions of all the protest posters that had been displayed in an an-tiwar encampment that occupied Parliament Square from the beginningof Britains involvement in the economic sanctions on Iraq. This protestwas initiated by an activist named Brian Haw, who set up his camp in thesquare in June 2001 and remained there, surviving with the support of

39. Gormley, Field, 19892003.



other activists for ten years. Haw has engaged, as far as I know, in thelongest Occupy movement in the history of political protest. If there is aGuinness World Record for nonviolent political occupations, he musthold it.

Parliament, under the leadership of Tony Blair, found the constantpresence of Haws occupation annoying. It became especially problematicwhenHawwas joined by other artists and activists, expanding the encamp-ment and its panorama of protest posters across one whole side of thesquare. So Parliament passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Actof 2005, which authorized the police to prohibit any political demonstra-tions conducted without a permit within one kilometer of the Houses ofParliament. The act further specified that the police were authorized toprohibit, not only mass demonstrations, but demonstrations carried onby a person by himself. In other words, a person who wished to wear aT-shirt with an antiwar slogan or a slur against Toady Blair or his lackeysin Parliament would be required to give seven-days notice to the police ofhis or her intention to carry on a demonstration in the designated areawithin a kilometer of Parliament.

Armed with this ordinance, the police swept into Parliament Square inMay 2006 and removed most of the encampment, along with the posters.But they were not able to remove Haw. Since his occupation of the squarehad begun before the law was passed, he was grandfathered in as a legalexception, as long as hemaintained a continuous occupation of the publicspace. His occupation continued until (appropriately enough) the ArabSpring of 2011, when London Lord Mayor Boris Johnson brought a legalaction to have him removed. The British High Court ruled that Parlia-ment Square Gardens is not a suitable location for prolonged campingand ordered that he be removed before the royal wedding, which no doubtwould have been embarrassed by his continued presence.40

The images of Haws occupation, however, will be preserved as long asthere is an England. Mark Wallingers reenactment and reinstallation ofthe protest posters will be preserved in the archives (fig. 7). And whenreinstalled it will no doubt include the most salient feature of the originalsite-specific installation in Tate Britain. It turns out that the great hall atthe center of Tate Britain straddles the boundary line of one kilometermeasured out by Parliaments Serious Organized Crime and Police Act.This legal boundary, marked by a line of black tape on the floor of the

40. Quoted in Mark Hughes, Brian Haw Loses Battle against Parliament Square Eviction,The Telegraph, 17Mar. 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8388000/Brian-Haw-loses-battle-against-Parliament-Square-eviction.html



museums great hall, was crossed by Wallingers installation. It was an actof civil disobedience, but one that produced, in my view, a rather melan-choly affect, as if the simplest act of political protest or public demonstra-tion, let alone an aggressive but nonviolent occupation of public space, hasnow been removed to a safe and sanitized location, the sanctuary of aes-thetic space. It is as if the publics right to free assembly and speechafoundational principle of British liberty and of democracy everywherehas now been anesthesized or fossilized, consigning the fundamental free-doms to a state of suspended animation or to inert relics of a timewhen theringing of a liberty bell might have actually meant something.

Wallingers State Britain, as Adrian Searle noted at the time, was notsome isolated instance. The 40-metre-long wall of banners, placards,rickety, knocked-together information boards, handmade signs and satir-ical slogans not only included work by graffiti artist Banksy but remindsone of . . . the installations of Mike Kelley [and] the placards, swathes ofphotocopied material and detritus of Thomas Hirschorn, to which onecould add the performance pieces of Tania Bruguera, the installations ofHans Haacke, and the crowd-sourced artworks of Occupy Wall Street.41

Most of all, notesMichael Taussig, Iwas struck by the statuesque quality of

41. Adrian Searle, Bears against Bombs, The Guardian, 15 Jan. 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/16/humanrights.politicsandthearts

F I GUR E 7 . Installation photo of Mark Wallingers State Britain.



many of the people holding up their handmade signs, like centaurs, half per-son, half sign.42 The Occupy movement of 2011, from Tahrir Square to Zuc-cotti Park and beyond, has perhaps without knowing it employed the arts ofoccupation in all their manifestations. Phalanxes of posters, mass gatherings,lone individuals facing massive police lines, momentary performances andenduring tent cities, parades and encampments, festivals and confrontations,have all been united by an ethic of nonhierarchy and nonsovereignty, decon-structing both the sovereignty of the politician and that of the artist as well.

On the other hand, there is Michelets haunting image of empty spaceitself as the truestmonument to revolution. Could this be because somanyrevolutions leave nothing behind? That in some fundamental sense theycannot be realized perfectly and are often terrible failures, as the long ArabWinter of revolutionary military dictatorships shows us?43 The notablesuccess of the American Revolution, according to Arendt, was in its rapidmovement toward a constitutive moment, the laying of foundations, theframing of a constitution, the production of an architectural structure, andthe reproduction of a living document. The state, as Eric Slauter hasshown, was to be constructed as a work of artprincipally the art ofarchitecture, not the sculptural figure of the sovereign body politic.44 Ofcourse the phallic image of the state would soon follow and merge witharchitecture. It is to be seen in the erect body atop the empty plinth, thefigure of sovereignty that links monarchy, sacred icons, and the archetype ofthe Founding Fathers and is epitomizedmost dramatically as we have seen bythe obelisk of theWashingtonMonument. Not accidentally, the effect of thismonument is inseparable from its dialogue with empty space, including thevirtual space produced by the reflecting pool. Nor, of course, is it an accidentthat this is the principal site of the national exercise of the First Amendment,the right to peacefully assemble and now to occupy. Perhaps empty space isnot just the only truemonument to revolution but (as JacquesDerridawouldhave insisted) to the potential of a democracy and anewglobal constitution tocome.

42. Taussig, Im so Angry I Made a Sign, p. 75.43. See Arendt, On Revolution, p. 117.44. Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution

(Chicago, 2009), pp. 9, 16.



mitchell, w. j. t. - image, space, revolution (the arts of occupation) (2012)

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