Occupy All the Dispositifs: Memes, Media Ecologies, and Emergent Bodies Politic
Item
Title
Occupy All the Dispositifs: Memes, Media Ecologies, and Emergent Bodies Politic
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Creator
Jack Bratich
Abstract
This article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispositifs of subjectivation from the perspective of resistance. In addition to examining the accumulation of mediated subjective apparatuses, I propose we think of OWS as an ecology, one that engenders an antagonistic response by a militarized biopolitical state subject (itself an accumulation). I end with some preliminary thoughts on OWS' recomposition after the state's decompositional dispositifs.
volume
11
issue
1
pages
64-73
Date
January 2, 2014
Language
EN English
doi
10.1080/14791420.2013.827351
issn
1479-1420, 1479-4233
short title
Occupy All the Dispositifs