What Occupy's Tents Meant

The two strongest visual images of Occupy this fall were:

• a cardboard 99 percent sign;
• a bedraggled tent.

And in a way, Occupy in its early stages resembled nothing so much as a refugee summer camp. But this spring, as police departments continue to remove tents in the contested enforcement of "no camping" laws, the visual landscape of Occupy is changing, and with it something of the movement's political rhetoric. What are the new aesthetics of Occupy, and why should we care?

A 2007 essay by anarchist and social anthropologist David Graeber about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle was, until the Occupy movement, one of the strongest arguments for taking the politics of aesthetics in protests seriously. Graeber's mischievously-titled "On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture" (pdf) focuses on the role of visual metaphors in the so-called Battle of Seattle between protestors and police, particularly Graeber's insight that the puppetistas' monumental paper-mache puppets, which floated ridiculously above the violence, engaged in nonviolent warfare with the police forces on duty – who spent a surprising amount of time and energy devoted to destroying the puppets the day of the protests (not to mention attempting to make them illegal in the months before).

Graeber, who is credited with helping to begin the occupation of Zuccotti Park, suggests a few reasons why these puppets were such strong targets; he points out that the protesters were both creating their own media (instead of going through traditional media outlets, as both "sides" in the "battle" were supposed to do) and, more deeply, that they were reframing the way the scene itself was imagined by all sides, creating a carnivalesque atmosphere and making the police's efforts against the puppets seem absurd. As a counterpoint to the violence and violent images themselves, Graeber argues that this "political ontology of the imagination" created alternative frameworks for the protests, keeping them "living" in ways that traditional media could not.

There's been much writing about the aesthetics of Occupy since its early days this fall, most of which focuses on the movement's organization and branding, as well as the symbolism that's emerged from its internal and external communications. Guy Fawkes masks, posters, signs, and ephemera have become sources for numerous contemporary art projects. Many of these projects look like an attempt to come to terms with the Occupy movement itself – trying to sketch its outlines and name its deepest appeals, to understand how it speaks about the politics of representation and equality.

But among the many symbols of Occupy, none has been as crucial and central and ubiquitous as the tents. From the start, it was the day and night occupation of Zuccotti Park that made Occupy what it is, turning the patch of concrete into something resembling a camp (in the refugee as well as summer camp sense of the world). All tent cities simultaneously exhibit characteristics of permanence and temporariness. Nobody camps out indefinitely except for homeless people, and there's necessarily an apprehension of the inevitable acquiescence that accompanies the ends of these occupations. Anyone who goes camping knows it's going to end sometime — whether it's a back-to-nature family vacation or a civic vacation to get back to participatory democracy.

But Occupy was also aimed on permanence, and the tents played with the paradox. The temporary-permanent tents created the framework for imagining Occupy either as a kind of war zone refugee camp (if you were in favor of the movement) or an adolescent defiance about the whole thing (if you were against it). They represented the mostly idle threat that "we're not going anywhere," that "this summer can last forever! This time will be different."

This aesthetic element was just as important to the aesthetics of Occupy as the signage, hand signals, and Anonymous masks. It tapped into our cultural memory at its deepest, evoking everything from tent cities during the Great Depression to our childhood summer trips to American national parks, or a sleepover in a friend's backyard if our parents couldn't afford to take us anywhere.

Now the tent cities are disappearing. As the tents have been barred, removed with or without police force, or just packed up for the winter and not unpacked in the spring, a gap of imagination and identification has appeared in the identity of Occupy. Cities evicted Occupy protestors in public parks all fall and winter; camping in public parks is almost universally illegal in America and all over the world. At the 6 month anniversary demonstration at Zucotti, it was the presence of a 'tent' – a small tent attached to a sign post and held above the crowd, a tent being used as a kind of giant puppet – that gave the police justification to bust in and clear the park again.

Where I live, Occupy Chicago has been sending out pleading memos for sympathizers to put up the protestors who are in town for NATO – there's no pretense about even trying to put up tents. Occupy Miami's tent city was dismantled by police in riot gear in February. Tents have become the means by which to shut down protestors and reclaim the public spaces. Meanwhile the homeless' real tent cities (often outside of major cities or in parts of town with less police presence, where they are more likely to be left alone) are growing as more people lose their homes to foreclosure.

The legal question of how tents might function as part of the semiotics of protests is itself provocative. To what extent is a camp of tents in a public park pure speech? Speech as function, a kind of speech act? Function as speech? Historic American legal battles about tent cities include a 1977 gym struggle at Kent State, when students occupied a space on campus where part of the 1970 events had occurred, in attempting to keep the university from erecting a gym (the gym did eventually get built), but not before the case went to the Supreme Court.

Another Supreme Court case, Clark v. Community Creative Non-Violence et al, addressed whether protesting on the Washington mall to raise awareness about homelessness could take the form of tent camps; the Court ruled in June of 1984 that as long as nobody was living in the tents, i.e., they weren't functional tents, then it was protected speech.

Maybe Occupy, whose tents have been functional and therefore semiotically ambiguous, needs to resurrect them as pure symbols, the way a tent was raised at Occupy's sixth month anniversary (which, because that tent wasn't functional, means the police's subsequent eviction was likely in violation of the First Amendment). We might think of this use of the tent as a kind of puppetista overlay of visual rhetoric. In light of Graeber's arguments about how aesthetic symbols can reframe the way that demonstrations are understood, the Occupy movement might be able to leverage our cultural associations with tents to create new associations with those of us whose lives now feel more and more makeshift. Tents are traditionally symbols of emergency, whether it be a hurricane or other natural disaster, or a refugee camp in Kenya. By articulating everyone's anxiety about living in a provisional, unstable, vulnerable new world, Occupy might even be able to turn our desires for civic shelter into a viable, shared argument about the kinds of permanence we might want.

It doesn't seem plausible, though, to replace the "functional" tents of Occupying protestors with symbolic tents. They would probably be removed, stolen, or destroyed. Perhaps our growing homeless population would try to move into them.

By Monica Westin and Rich Zito

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