It’s straight out of a Don DeLillo novel: A few hours after television producers set up a replica of Occupy Wall Street for the filming of a new episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, the real Occupy Wall Street announced plans to occupy the fake one. At 11:30 p.m. the call to occupy the set went out on Twitter with the hash tag #Mockupy. Located at nearby Foley Square, the fake camp includes a replica of the OWS kitchen and library as well as numerous tarps, tents, and signs. “They’ve delivered us this perfectly wrapped Christmas present with a bow on top: They rebuilt our camp,” OWS organizer Jake DeGroot told me shortly before the announcement went out. “How could we not go and take it?”
…At one point, an occupier asked an officer, “Are these real barricades, or a set piece?”
“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself - such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.” [emphasis mine]
“Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation.” [emphasis mine]
- Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations.”
I am constantly going around saying “Man, that’s some Baudrillard shit right there.”
I love my tumblr fam.
Fear and War: Censorship Warning: LAPD Handpicks Media to Cover Occupy LA
Quick Thought: Don’t other nations that our government/ journalists criticize practice this?
Occupy Economics?
The perfect compliment to the NYT article I linked to yesterday, what’s going on with the C-word?
Concerns about the impact of growing economic inequality fit neatly into a larger critique of mainstream economic theory and its deep faith in the efficiency of markets.
Many unbelievers (including me) insist that we inhabit a global capitalist system rather than an efficient market. Willingness to use the C-word (capitalism) often signals concerns about a concentration of economic power that unfairly limits individual choices, undermines political democracy, generates financial and ecological crises and limits access to alternative economic ideas.
We can’t address these concerns effectively without a wider discussion of them.
Seventy Harvard students dramatized dissatisfaction with the economics profession when they walked out of Prof. Gregory Mankiw’s introductory economics class on Nov. 2, protesting, in an open letter to their instructor, that the course “espouses a specific — and limited — view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.” (Professor Mankiw, a periodic contributor to the Economic View column in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, discussed the protest in an interview with National Public Radio.)The event prompted online discussion of conservative bias in introductory economics textbooks, including an anti-Mankiw blog set up by Daniel MacDonald, a graduate student in my own department. Prof. John Davis of the University of Amsterdam and Marquette University posted a video arguing that economic researchers, like fish, engage in herd behavior in order to minimize individual risk.
Similar themes were explored at the recent meetings of the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics, a forum for a remarkable variety of dissenting views deploying the C-word. I participated in a session discussing blogs maintained by David Ruccio of Notre Dame, Perry Mehrling of Barnard College, Tiago Mata of Duke University and Tim Wise of Tufts University, as well as an independent blogger, Peter Radford.
At the final plenary session of the conference, titled “Ethics and Economics,” participants discussed an “Economists’ Statement” in support of Occupy Wall Street that has been posted online at Econ4, a new site aimed at popular economics education. As of Nov. 27, the statement had gotten more than 220 signatures.
In other words, let’s talk about Capitalism again as some economists begin to unite with OWS under the “this sucks and we need to rethink some things” flag. Read The NYT blog post here.
h/t: @moorehn [tumblr here]
Map: How Occupy Wall Street Chose Zuccotti Park
This week in the magazine, Mattathias Schwartz writes about the origins of Occupy Wall Street, including an explanation of how New York’s general assembly decided on Zuccotti Park as the site of original encampment. After discussing possible sites at the G.A.’s weekly Tompkins Square Park meetings, the decision was ultimately left to a small group known as the Tactical Committee, who narrowed the choice down to eight candidates. During the week leading up to the protest, the Tactical Committee scouted the remaining sites. On the afternoon of September 17th, three of the committee’s members decided on Zuccotti Park, which they then called Location Two.
Above, a copy of the map that the Tactical Committee distributed at Bowling Green. Click through to see the notes of one member of Tactical Committee on the locations’ advantages and disadvantages: http://nyr.kr/tAM8Z6
What I’m currently reading, you should too.
