We knew that Washington Square Park was closing at midnight. We felt the police tightening their line, starting to deny newcomers entry to the park. After the fifteenminute or so breakout session where we talked with those around us about taking the park, we pulled back together as one assembly. Speaker after speaker, amplified by the People’s Mic (where the crowd repeats the words of a speaker so that those who are farther away know what is being said), urged us to take the park. We are many. We outnumber them. We can do it. We must do it. Upraised hands twinkled approval in waves of support round and round the circle. Then, a tall, thin, young man with curly dark hair and a revolutionary look began to speak.
We can take this park!
We can take this park!
We can take this park tonight!
We can take this park tonight!
We can also take this park another night.
We can also take this park another night.
Not everyone may be ready tonight.
Not everyone may be ready tonight.
Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.
Everyone is an autonomous individual.
The mood was broken. The next few speakers also affirmed their individuality, describing some of the problems they would encounter if they had to deal with security from NYU or if they got arrested. We were no longer a “we,” a collective. Asserting ourselves as individuals, we became individuated, concerned first with our own particular preoccupations. Collective strength devolved into the problem of individuals aggregating by choices and interests that may or may not converge. Reducing autonomy to individual decision, we destroyed the freedom of action we had as a crowd.
Crowds and Party comes out of this moment of collective de-subjectivation. Occupy Wall Street foundered against a contradiction at its core. The individualism of its democratic, anarchist, and horizontalist ideological currents undermined the collective power the movement was building. Making collective political action dependent on individual choice, the “theology of consensus” fragmented the provisional unity of the crowd back into disempowered singularities.<sup>3</sup> The movement’s decline (which began well before Occupiers were evicted) exposes the impasse confronting the Left. The celebration of autonomous individuality prevents us from foregrounding our commonality and organizing ourselves politically.
9