"The Polis Is Oneself:" The Occupy Movement as a Site of Public Pedagogy

Authors

  • Panayota Gounari Università degli Studi di Bergamo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2014.i3.693

Keywords:

American studies, Occupy Wall Street

Abstract

We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual. That is what we seek to occupy. We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world (…) What do we want from Wall Street? Nothing, because it has nothing to offer us. We wouldn’t be here if Wall Street fed off itself; we are here because it is feeding off everyone. It is sustaining the phantoms and ghosts we have always known and whose significance we now understand. We have come here to vanish those ghosts; to assert our real selves and lives; to build genuine relationships with each other and the world; and to remind ourselves that another path is possible. If the phantoms of Wall Street are confused by our presence in their dream, so much the better. It is time that the unreal be exposed for what it is. (Communiqué 1)

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. In Search of Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

---. Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002.

Boggs, Carl. The End of Politics. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.

Castoriadis, C. 1998a. The Rationality of Capitalism [Η «Ορθολογικότητα» τουΚαπιταλισμού]. Athens: Ypsilon Publications.

---. “Contre le Conformisme Generalisé: Stopper la Montée de l’Insignificance.” Le Monde Diplomatique (August 1998b) : 22-3.

---. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998d.

---. The Rise of Insignificance. [ΗΆνοδοςτηςΑσημαντότητας]. Athens: Ypsilon Publications, 2000.

Chomsky, Noam. Occupy. Brooklyn: Zuccotti Park Press, 2012.

Occupy. “Communique 1.” Tidal Magazine 1 (December 2011): 3.

Edmonds, Lynn. “Is Greece in Shock? Naomi Klein tells Enet how her bestseller The Shock Doctrine relates to Greece.” Eleytherotypia Online April 26 2013. http://www.enetenglish.gr/?i=news.en.article&id=766 Last visited 25/3/2014.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

Giroux, Henry. Public Spaces, Private Lives. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.

---. “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy and the Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1.1 (March 2004): 59–79.

---. “Educating Obama,” CounterPunch, February 2009 6-8. Last visited 21/3/2014.

---. “Gated Intellectuals and Ignorance in Political Life: Toward a Borderless Pedagogy in the Occupy Movement,” Truthout 20 March 2012. Last visited 21/03/2014.

---. “The Occupy Movement Meets the Suicidal State: Neoliberalism and the Punishing of Dissent.” Situations 5.1 (2013): 7-34.

Gitlin, Todd. Occupy Nation. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine. New York: Henry Holt, 2008.

---. “The Most Important Thing in the World.” Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement. Ed. Amy Schrager Lang and Daniel Lang/Levitsky. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications Ltd, 2012.

Kroll, Andy. “How the Occupy Movement Really Started.” Mother Jones 17 October 2011. Last visited 21/03/2014.

Roos, Jerome. “How Occupy Reinvented the Language of Democracy.” Roarmag 17 September 2013. Last visited 21/03/2014.

Downloads

Published

2014-06-01