They don't represent us? Synecdochal representation and the politics of occupy movements

Abstract

In 2011 and the ensuing years, the world witnessed a global wave of various "occupy movements," from the Spanish 15-M and the Greek anti-austerity protests of 2011 to Occupy Wall Street (OWS), and from the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul to Nuit Debout in Paris. Inspired by the Arab Spring earlier that year-and by the iconic image of an occupied Tahrir Square in particular-protesters in different parts of the world took possession of public spaces in order to oppose the austerity measures of their governments, to challenge the power of financial industries and economic elites, and to voice their widely shared experience of a democratic deficit. I emphasize from the outset that there are many, and often very substantial, demographic, cultural, economic, and political differences among these various occupy movements and among the contexts in which they intervened. There is thus no particular reason to assume, as some enthusiastic commentators suggested at the time, that they were all exponents of a single global movement (Hardt & Negri, 2012; Mason, 2011). But it is also clear, on the other hand, that they often expressed a strong sense of solidarity with each other, and referred to each another as important sources of inspiration (Graeber, 2013, p. 237). Notwithstanding the many differences between these movements, they did share at least a number of important points in common. What, then, did these movements have in common-next to the obvious but important fact that they all involved the occupation of public space (Harvey, 2012, pp. 161-162)? First, in most cases conventional political organizations or institutions played a minor role, if any, in these mass mobilizations. None was spearheaded by established political parties or politicians (Tormey, 2015, p. 8) and they often had a strikingly diverse composition (Juris, 2012, p. 265). Most categorically refused to negotiate or even engage with any representative institutions or public bodies (Klein, 2011). One possible explanation for this, second, is that many of these movements had strong horizontalist aspirations (Sitrin, 2012) and advocated direct or participatory forms of politics, organization and decision-making. Finally, not only This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Manifesting the revolutionary people: The Yellow Vest Movement and popular sovereignty

“…They did not need any of these, or more precisely they actively refused to use them, because it would have impeded their ability to claim to be the sovereign people, i.e., the represented, those who hold no mandate. Because they individually represented no one but themselves, they were collectively the represented, a manifestation of the true French people, following a logic of synecdoche, or pars pro toto, where one part stands for the whole without any mandate (Ankersmit, 2019;Sande, 2020). 4 During the movement, this claim to be a manifestation of the sovereign people was put forward by several Yellow Vests in the way they staged their protest and presented themselves.…”

“…The Yellow Vests situated their action within the narrative of the Revolution, presenting their movement as a resurgence of this founding uprising. They used a populist discourse, but unlike most populist movements, their aim was not to mobilize an electorate to come to power but to prove that they were the constituent people-a claim similar to those made in the Occupy movement (Brito Vieira, 2015;Sande, 2020). To support their claim, they performed a resurgence of the (imagined) French constituent moment, the Revolution.…”

Unrepresentative Claims: Speaking for Oneself in a Social Movement

“…As an article from The Occupied Times explained in 2011, “We do not ‘speak for’ the poor and oppressed around the world, but we are in solidarity with them.” 26 Most certainly, there is a representative claim at work when constituting the “We” of the Occupy movement, and the “We are the 99%” should be understood as a proper representative claim. But inside the movement, unrepresentative claims were constantly made, supporting a strategy of “synecdochal representation” (Sande 2020). As Mathijs van de Sande explains, Occupy activists set up a website on which “thousands of people, mostly from the US, posted pictures of themselves, accompanied by a brief statement that described their individual situation, (…) all undersigned by the slogan “I am the 99%.…”

“…As Mathijs van de Sande explains, Occupy activists set up a website on which “thousands of people, mostly from the US, posted pictures of themselves, accompanied by a brief statement that described their individual situation, (…) all undersigned by the slogan “I am the 99%. (…) It seemed that, in a way, every single personal story could embody or encompass all the others—they all represented the entire 99%” (Sande 2020, 407). It is precisely because they offered a solely personal testimony that they could embody “the 99%,” using the logic of pars pro toto.…”

“…The problem is that in order to exist as social movements, they must speak as the people and therefore make claims to represent them. The popular upheavals of the 2010s were cases in point: protesters claimed that elected representatives did not represent the people—“¡Que no nos represantan!” shouted the Spanish crowds during the 2011 15M movement—and offered a “counter-representation” (Brito Vieira 2015), such as the famous motto “We are the 99 percent.” Many works have discussed these movements’ combination of a radical critique of (constituted) mandate representation and strong claims to collectively embody the (constituent) people (Brito Vieira 2015; Caraus 2017; de Barros 2020; Gerbaudo 2017; Prentoulis and Thomassen 2013; 2014; Sande 2020; Tormey 2015; Tufekci 2017; Wessel 2013). In these movements, “self-authorized representatives” constitute the people in whose name they speak through representative claims; for example, in the motto “We are the 99 percent,” “We” stands for the “the imagined possibility of a democratic people empowered to name and confront a wrong that Occupy is already enacting” (Brito Vieira 2015, 506).…”