Volume 1 issue 2 October 2013
Rights, Constitution and Radical Democracy in Occupy Wall Street and Occupy LondonSimon Thorpe
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15 October
2011 witnessed the emergence of Occupy as a global phenomenon, part of a new
and important stage in the young global project of radical prefigurative
democracy, with implications for how we continue to think legal concepts such
as right and constitution. Occupy has not tended to constitute itself in the
recognisable terms of rights, demands, charters or constitutional documents,
but this enticing lack does not make these concepts automatically irrelevant,
it rather demands their reconceptualisation. To be able to start thinking
rights and constitution on Occupy’s terms, we will divert from narrowly
conceived legal theory, detouring through radical political and social theory
in the forms of Rancièrian democratic political ontology, and power theory
drawn from Foucault and Holloway. Rights will be treated both in terms of their
strategic deployment and the way in which Occupy’s internal process might be
seen as suggesting something akin to Foucault’s ‘new relational right’. The
analysis will be radiated across a triadic spectrum, both conceptual and
chronological: Occupy as successful democratic event; Occupy as
experimental democratic process; and the challenges of viewing Occupy as
part of an emerging democratic movement, moving towards our constitutive
vanishing point: the need for a new right and the ways in which the ‘Safer
Spaces Policy’ is embryonically suggestive of this radical constitutive horizon.
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