Occupation : Jacques Rancière
Contributing to a lexicon of political terms normally supposes that you take for granted that politics exists per se
as a well-established sphere of human activity, so that one should
choose either a concept belonging to that sphere or a concept dealing
with its foundations, be they ontological, theological, or other. My own
contention, however, is that this existence per se is dubious,
that the homogeneity of the multifarious practices, rules, and
institutions subsumed under the notions of politics, policy, or the
political is questionable. In my book Disagreement I proposed
to conceive politics as an alteration of a normal order of things, which
means a normal distribution of places and functions, identities and
capacities.1
I tried to show that politics is an activity that reframes the mode of
visibility of the common. It is the configuration of a space and a form
of temporality in which some affairs are seen as common affairs and
subjects are given the capacity for dealing with those affairs. This
also means that politics is a conflictual process in which the very
meaning of the words is at issue. That’s why I am not interested in
proposing a concept explaining what politics is. Instead I am interested
in examining words whose meaning is at issue in situations where the
identification of politics is itself at issue. From that point of view,
words that are worth examining to rethink politics might be words that
have two characteristics: first, they are not specific to politics but
they designate alterations in the visibility of what is normally thought
to be the stage of the political; second, they link the question of the
common with matters of time and space.
This is precisely the case with “occupation.” It is not a notion that
normally belongs to the political corpus. Until the last few years it
seemed to concern politics only as a side issue, as something belonging
to either the military sphere (as in the Israeli occupation of
Palestine) or the social sphere (as in those strikes that were named in
the US “sit-down strikes” and in France “grèves avec occupation”).
It is only in recent movements that the word popped up on what is
normally thought to be the political stage. And it popped up on this
stage as something disturbing it: as an ephemeral upsurge of inefficient
aspirations, deprived of any political program, for both our
governments and our leftist strategists; as “real democracy” pitted
against the lie of representative politics for those who took part in
those movements. We can add that this aspect of exceptionality was
marked by the privilege given in English to the verb “occupy” over the
substantive “occupation.”
This first point is strictly connected with a second. Occupation
deals with matters of space and time. But it deals with them in a way
that evinces a tension between two uses of space and time. You may
occupy a space in a normal way, as owner or tenant. But the notion takes
on its full meaning when you take possession of a space which is not
yours (in the case of military occupation) or when you use it in a way
that is not its normal use: for instance, if you put your tent on a
square that is made for urban circulation and make it a space for living
and discussing. That matter of space becomes still more explicit if, as
was the case in the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul, the conflict
dwells on the very use of a space. Second, occupation deals with time.
But it does so in a seemingly contradictory way. On one hand, the
occupation of a space always appears to be something provisional: a
military occupation is not an annexation. And the occupation of a park
is an interruption of the normal course of time which is not intended to
last forever. On the other hand, an occupation is the activity to which
you devote your time, which means that it designates not only a
specific job, but a normal use of time. The idea of occupation entails
the idea of a regular activity taking place within a regular order of
time and distribution of activities. In that sense an “occupy” movement
might be defined as a movement interrupting the normal order of social
occupations, as was condensed in the slogan of one protester in Zuccotti
Park: “Lost my job, found an occupation.” My contention is that this
interruption, and the very tension between two meanings and two
connotations of the notion of occupation, may help us to think how
politics is connected to or disconnected from a certain order of time
and distribution of spaces.
To test this hypothesis I will approach the notion from two angles.
First I will deal with the forms of spatialization and temporalization
of politics at issue in the recent Occupy movements. Then I will make a
short journey through the history of the notion in order to discern what
kind of original knot between politics, time, and space may be inherent
to that notion. Then I shall return to the present to think about the
possible shifts in the meaning of the notion.
I will first examine some aspects of the use of the notions of
“occupying” and “occupation” in the recent movements and notably in
“Occupy Wall Street.” Most of the narratives about Occupy Wall Street
begin the story with the decision to change the sense of a political
demonstration by changing its use of the space. Protesting in the
streets of a city always entails that you use a space devoted to
circulation as a metaphor of the “public space” of citizenship. In
normal protests, however, this metaphorical use is associated with the
notion of movement. Protesters take to the streets and go over them to
both make their demands visible and embody the dynamic of their protest.
This is a diversion from the normal use of the streets, but this
diversion is still in keeping with this normal use (moving), which also
means that it remains faithful to a certain distribution of the roles
and the places, opposing the walkers who circulate their demands to the
sitting authorities to whom those demands are addressed. A deviation
from that normal diversion thus consisted in the decision to break with
that material and symbolic distribution of roles. It was the decision to
stay instead of to keep moving, and discuss among themselves instead of
shouting their demands to the authorities. This shift involved two
forms of structuration of the space: the assembly and the tent. The
assembly is the canonical form of identification between the material
configuration of a space and the symbolic configuration of a community.
It is par excellence the “common place” or the “place of the common.”
Making an assembly instead of marching in the streets thus means
reconfiguring the common, setting aside the existing configuration of
the relation between the power and the protesters by transforming the
latter into a sort of constituent assembly that decides to ignore the
existing authorities and discuss the very sense of politics or the very
essence of a political community. Making an assembly in a park meant
beginning politics again, reinventing a public space out of the very
disposition of bodies on a ground and the mode of their speech. That’s
why, in the Occupy movements, the circular structure of the assembly was
completed by another spatial feature: horizontality. The new assembly
is an assembly wherein all individuals are sitting on the common ground,
at the same level, without presidents, leaders, or professional
orators.
My point is not about the validity of the representation of the
political community that animated the Occupy movements. It is about its
significance. From this point of view, what was significant in the
questionable idea of consensus that prevailed in those assemblies was
not the fact that the decision should be unanimous (which obviously had
always been the case in the authoritarian practices of so-called
“democratic centralism”) but the fact that it could be blocked by the
disagreement of one person. Horizontality thus works as a complement and
a correction of the circle, a way to constitute a public space wherein
the collective implementation of equality is based on the direct
manifestation of the equal capacity of each speaking being. It works as
the affirmation of an anti-hierarchical subversion which questions the
usual distance between individual capability and collective power, and,
by the same token, the boundaries separating the time of political life
and the time of private and everyday life. This is how the assembly
connects with the tent. The tent is a multifarious symbol, combining the
militant—if not military—occupation, the friendly youth party, and the
refusal of a mainstream form of life. The tent is a symbol of both a
provisional settlement and a global contestation of the normal way of
“dwelling” in society. “Occupation” then seems to connect a
reconfiguration of the political space with a wider reconfiguration of
the way in which life in general is “occupied,” in which time is divided
into various spheres of activity requiring appropriate individual
capacities and appropriate forms of relations between individuals. This
connection is also made perceptible through the strange extensions of
the use of the verb “occupy” that made it the signifier of a global
conversion to another way of inhabiting the world: “Occupy language,”
“Occupy imagination,” “Occupy love,” and eventually “Occupy everything,”
which seems to mean: change your way of dealing with everything and
with all existing forms of social relationships. The Occupy movements
have thus revealed, in an exemplary way, how the existence or
inexistence of politics is embedded in forms of spatialization and
temporalization and in uses of space and time; it rests on a
distribution of activities and capacities which is also a distribution
of the common, the public and the private. They have evinced a conflict
between two distributions of the sensible.
We can move forward in the understanding of this conflict by briefly
tracing the history of the word “occupation” and of the tension between
its meanings. If we look at dictionaries, we cannot but be struck by the
difficulty they have finding the right order of derivation for the
various meanings of the words “occupy” and “occupation.” What is the
exact relation between the exceptional military occupation of a foreign
country and the usual job or way of life of an individual? Between the
fact that you reside in a place and the fact that your time is occupied
in this or that way? Between the act of occupying and the fact of
occupation? In the Oxford English Dictionary the first definition given
for “occupy” is “reside in,” whereas the first definition for
“occupation” is “what occupies one; a means of passing one’s time.” It
is not so easy to go from this “pastime” to “the act of taking
possession of a place by military force.” We can ask the French language
(from which the English word was borrowed) the reason for that
ambiguity. But there we meet new problems: the Thesaurus of the French
Language (Trésor de la langue française) first defines the verb
“occuper” as “to fill a space,” and derives from this the fact of
“holding a job” as well as that of taking over a territory. Then it
moves to a second meaning which is “to absorb, to fill,” meaning by this
that something is the concern in which one is absorbed. As for
occupation, it is defined first as the act of occupying a space, then as
the act of devoting one’s time to something, then as the action to
which one devotes one’s time, and finally, “by metonymy,” as “the thing
to which one devotes one’s time.” This “metonymy” is obviously a strange
derivation since the historical examples collected by the same
Thesaurus show exactly the contrary: the first meaning of the word in
the history of French language is “the thing which is your concern, the
thing to which you devote your activity,” a meaning which, as is
confirmed by Wartburg’s Etymological Dictionary, existed two or three
centuries before the military sense of the word.2
It seems then that occupation as the “thing to which you devote your
time” is a category much prior to and possibly independent of any idea
of “seizing hold of.”
We can try to test this hypothesis by continuing our journey into the
past. As it turns out, we perceive a similar discordance in the Latin
language, from which the French word comes. While “occupare” clearly
conveys the meaning of “seizing hold” or “taking over,” “occupation”
mainly designates the thing to which the activity of a person is
dedicated or the concern occupying his mind. This relation between the
activity of a person and the kind of concern occupying his or her mind
can be made more explicit if we move to Greek and examine a word whose
root is different but whose use is quite close. This Greek word is epitèdeuma, often used in the plural: epitèdeumata:
the activities of the mind and the body, the concrete ways of being and
doing whose acquisition, according to Plato, is part of the education
of individuals and citizens, along with the disciplines of the abstract
sciences (mathèmata). An epitèdeuma—allow me to translate this
as “occupation”—means both the way in which an individual passes his
time, the kind of activity that he exerts, but also the way in which he
exercises his mind and his body to make them apt to the exercise of that
activity—which means that it is not simply the fact of doing something
but the fact of doing it as the thing for which you are made. In fact,
the substantive epitèdeuma comes from the adjective epitèdès which means “appropriate.” According to some dictionaries, epitèdès is made of the preposition epi and the demonstrative tèdé. Being epitèdès would
thus mean being “for that.” An occupation is a demonstration of
appropriateness, the demonstration that you are made for the activity
that you perform just as it is made for you. Such is the principle that
rules Plato’s Republic. This is how the education of the
guardians of the city firstly implies the selection of those whose
nature is appropriate (epitèdès) for that occupation (epitèdeuma).3 On the opposite side, the exclusion of poetic mimesis is based on a principle that reads as follows: “everybody should be occupied by one sole occupation.”4
This is also why the artisans must stay all the time in their workshop
and do only the job for which they have the appropriate capacity.5
The point is not the number of hours required for doing the work or for
acquiring the skill for doing it. A capacity is more than a skill: it
is a destination. And time is not a duration. It is a location. Plato’s
statement locates the artisans in the time of an eternal everyday, a
time of immediate material needs incompatible with the time of common
affairs. The only way in which the shoemaker takes part in the common of
the city is the private activity that consists in making shoes. Such is
the principle of police, the principle of a hierarchical
distribution of the sensible: an occupation is a way of being in time
and of being at the place where the rightness of your being-there is
endlessly demonstrated by the exercise of your activity. This
“demonstration” might be a rough translation of what is euphemized in a
famous sentence by Hannah Arendt, commenting on the diverse forms of the
vita activa in The Human Condition: “Each human activity points to its proper location in the world.”6
This matter of “location” makes it possible to substantiate my
hypothesis that sees in the recent “occupy” movements the pitting of one
form of “occupation” against another. Occupation is a notion that can
take on opposite meanings, which means that it signals a conflict of two
distributions of the sensible. It points to the connection between
“activity” and “location” that defines either the order of police—as the
fact of doing the activity “suitable” to your place—or the possibility
of a political disruption—as the use of a place in a way that disrupts
the normal use of that place. The occupation of a place disrupts the
distribution of the spheres of activity. This is something that we can
also understand in relation to the distinctions made by Hannah Arendt to
sustain her division of human activities. As is well known, she
denounced the rise of the social which, she thought, was predicated on
the confusion between the public and the private. Such a rise for her
blurred the specificity of the political. For my part, I argue that
politics happens precisely when the normal distribution of roles between
the private and the public is thrown into question, which means that
the “social” is a privileged place for observing how politics happens.
And it happens precisely as a dis-location of activities or a disruption
of the normal set of relations defining the time and space of an
activity, along with the kind of capacity or virtue that it sets to
work. “Occupying” and “occupation” appeared on the public stage with the
occupation of the factories which took on the character of a mass
practice during the general strike of 1936 in France. From the point of
view of those who dwell on the separation of the spheres, it is just a
weapon in a social struggle, opposing the interests of the workers to
those of their bosses. I took an exactly opposite view of it: this kind
of strike is the climax of a long historical process through which
matters of work and employment—which were supposed to be private or
domestic affairs—were transformed into a public affair. This process
entailed that its actors distance themselves from their
“occupation”—meaning their way of fitting the work that fitted them. It
entailed that they become participants in the construction of a common
stage which was built as “common” through dissensus itself. The occupied
factory was not simply the takeover of the space and the machines of
the enemy, as an economic weapon in the struggle. Nor was it simply an
affirmation that that space and those machines belonged to the workers.
It was the transformation of this space into a public space. This
becoming public did not happen, in the Arendtian way, by clearly
separating the domain of public action and public “excellence” from the
space of domestic life. On the contrary, it happened by the fact that
the role given to a space was blurred. A place made for working became a
place for living: for eating, sleeping, or organizing friendly parties.
The process of occupation is not simply the takeover of a space: it is a
takeover which changes the very use of this space in the distribution
of social occupations and social spheres. The “occupation” of the
workplace was part of a whole reconfiguration of the public space: the
latter was no longer beside the spheres of domestic life,
economic negotiation, etc. Instead it was built by disrupting this
distribution of spaces and competences.
We know how important this idea of the “occupied space” became in the
movements of the 1960s, notably with the occupation of the
universities. The occupation of the Sorbonne in 1968 claimed to
transform an instrument of reproduction of the elites into its opposite,
a forum open to everybody for discussion and for the invention of a
non-hierarchical form of society. This view however entailed a split in
the idea of occupation that was illustrated by one of the most famous
episodes in Paris, May 1968, when the occupants of the Sorbonne decided
to join the workers occupying the emblematic Renault factory and found
the gates closed. Two forms of occupation then were colliding: the
student’s forum and the workers’ fortress.
This tension can help us think about the specificity of the recent
Occupy movements. They are both the heirs of the workers’ occupations
and their antithesis. The new “occupation” takes up the principle of
transforming the function of a space. But this space is no more an inside
space, a space defined within the distribution of economic and social
activities. It is no more the inner space of work, as a space of
concrete struggle between capital and labor. It is the space outside: in
front of the offices of the financial power which destroys jobs and
relocates factories; in the streets of the towns where the leaders of an
invisible global power meet and make their decisions; against the
cranes and excavators that a State power sends to change the destination
of a park; or against an electoral process of reproduction of the
ruling elite. As the locating power has increasingly become a power
situated nowhere that dislocates the “inside” places wherein the order
of times and spaces, activities and capacities could be challenged, the
place that remains to be occupied is the “public space” that still lends
itself to a multiplicity of various and possibly antagonistic
activities: the streets, destined for the circulation of individuals and
commodities, which busy persons cross and where unemployed persons
remain; and the parks that symbolize the common possession of a space
whose use is indeterminate. Such places lend themselves to symbolizing a
common space opposed both to the economic dislocation of the common
spaces and to the abstract representation of the common in the State
buildings. The occupying process no longer takes place inside buildings
destined for a specific activity, as a subversion of that destination by
its normal occupants. It happens in this “public space” of the streets
and parks which is at the same time the space without specification that
everybody crosses for various reasons and the symbolic space of public
demonstrations. And it is no more the action of people that the
capitalist process has gathered. On the contrary, it is the action of
people that this process has scattered into a multiplicity of forms of
employment, unemployment, and part-time employment, a multiplicity of
connections and disconnections between the time and space of education,
the time and space of the job market, and the time and space of art.
This means that the occupying process is no longer about transforming a
given manner of being in common in a place. It is about transforming
separation into community. It is about creating a place for the common.
In a sense, the assembly and the tent are the fragments of a lost
totality. But this loss also accounts for the strong emphasis on the
assembly as a form of being-in-common and this aspiration to consensus,
which has so strongly struck all those—including myself—for whom such
forms of action are understandable as forms of dissensus. It can be said
that the consensus among the participants is one thing, the dissensual
aspect of their practice with respect to the normal order of things is
another. Nevertheless, it sounds as a division in the idea of
occupation, as if the desire for community or the desire for a new life
exceeded the specific operation of conversion of a space, as if the
desire for politics exceeded politics. Occupation, then, might be this
strange word that marks the paradoxical status of politics, the status
of an activity which is always beside itself.
*
Jacques
Rancière is a Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in
Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris
VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis.
*
Published on December 25, 2016
1. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1999).↩
2. Walther von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine darstellung des galloromanischen sprachschatzes, Vol. 7 (Basel: R. G. Zbinden & Co., 1955), 300-302.↩
3. Plato, Republic, III, 394e.↩
4. Plato, Republic, II, 374c.↩
5. Plato, Republic, II, 370b-c.↩
6. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 73.↩
