W. J. T. Mitchell, Occupy Three Inquiries in Disobedience (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013) ‘Revolutions have always been framed not only in terms of radically new turns in history, but also in images of return and the cycle of seasons.’ Preface viii ‘Taussig violates the supposedly scientific division between participant and observer that is fundamental to anthropology.’ Preface viii ‘Indeed, the very notion of the event comes under scrutiny in these pages, which explore other ways of conceptualizing revolutionary processes. Would it be better, for instance, to think of this as a revolutionary moment, with all the associated ambiguities of the merely momentary and ephemeral alongside the sense of the momentous turning point, the moment of force that torques historical events and makes tiny occurrences (a fruit vendor’s self-immolation in Tunisia) into a global incident and a catalyst for revolution? Would it be better to think of revolutions, not as specifically definable events, but as subtle shifts in language, imagery, and the limits of the thinkable? Could it be that 2011 is what Barack Obama has called a teachable moment, one in which the president of the United States, as sovereign pedagogue, learned from the Occupy movement how to speak a new, more emphatic language?’ Preface ix (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; New York, 1959), p. 178.) ‘At the heart of Occupy, whether in Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, was not quite politics and certainly not politics as usual, but a reopening of what Arendt called the space of appearance [that] comes into being wherever men [and women] are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm. . . . Unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of men . . . but with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.’ Preface xi ‘Occupy has also reversed the meaning of the notorious contemporary image of the camp, exemplified by the detention center; the tent city, for so long the emblem of refugees and displaced persons, has been transformed into a site of gathering resistance.‘ Preface xiv
