Several days after the encampment at Zucotti Park had been “cleared” by the police, the New York Times writer David Carr declared it “inevitable that Occupy Wall Street will eventually become more of an idea than a place.”[1] In the same vein, political scientist David Plotke of New York’s
New School claimed about a year later that due to the movement’s rapid decline and lack of actual staying power, “no one gets to own [Occupy Wall Street] except as a memory.”[2] Yet, in the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MORUS) on the Lower East Side in a small exhibition space dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots activism in the city, Occupy Wall Street manages to be both idea and place, memory and lived experience. Here at 155 Avenue C, OWS is put into relation with a long history of reclaiming urban spaces for public purposes in New York City, while objects tell a story of practices and motivations specific to OWS’s unique context and often intriguing blend of anti-greed, anti-capitalist, anarchist, communist, reformist, and revolutionary elements. One object exhibited in the small section on OWS is the bronze-colored, battery-charging Schwinn bike that helped to power the laptops and cell phones of the protesters, replacing the generators that had been forcibly removed from the park by NYC’s fire department. I think I never asked the museum staff whether it was permitted to sit on it or not, partly because the exhibition itself did not exactly evoke questions of museum etiquette, and partly because the very structure of its space, in which the visitor descends and disappears into the basement of a narrow tenement building, ensures a feeling of retreat, of remaining unobserved in your engagement with the exhibition. And so I sat on the Schwinn. Perhaps I was in search of that feeling of being part of a community of the like-minded and the not-so-like-minded again, of feeling like an individual at the very moment of appearing in public. My feet made contact with the pedals and I began generating. My bike ride back to 2011 was equally reflective and nostalgic, and reflective nostalgia “loves details, not symbols.”[3] The bike rejected being seen simply as a shiny representation of abstract ideas. Back in 2011, I took several New School students from my course “Reframing the Political” to one of the General Assemblies at Zucotti Park (or did they take me?). We had just read several texts by Hannah Arendt and there was no better thinker to think with, and against, to create our own stories of what was happening to us and the city. The bike retells the stuff of those stories eerily well: The fact that politics, following Arendt, is above all else a matter of spontaneity and ingenuity. The fact that politics, against Arendt, sooner or later also needs to address social questions, matters of the reproduction of life . . . and battery life. And ultimately, the story of the bike’s own role as an indicator of its failure, since any notion of self-sufficiency, in Zucotti Park or beyond, is doomed to sooner or later implode. The bike was a symbol after all. But not in a straightforward, restorative-nostalgic sense. Rather, in the reflective-nostalgic sense: embodying challenges, contradictions, multiplicity, and a longing for the future as much as for the past. According to the common expression, we never forget how to ride a bicycle. But we do forget what it feels like to act collectively. The MORUS on Avenue C may be one of those rare spaces in New York that allows us to remember “life in common.” And it is a reminder that struggles over the city are also struggles over whose “memory [and] whose aesthetics . . . are to be prioritized”[4] in the symbolic capital embodied in its built environment. [1] David Carr, “For a Movement, a Question: What Now?,” New York Times, November 20, 2011 [2] David Plotke, “Occupy Wall Street, Flash Movements, and American Politics,” Dissent, August 15, 2012 [3] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), p. XVIII [4] David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2012), p. 106 [Printed in I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb, Parsons The New School for Design, Spring 2014]
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AuthorBenjamin Nienass Archives
March 2024
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