On Occupy Wall Street: People’s Mic

My colleague Chris Garces has contributed this insightful post to the somatosphere blog on his ethnographic study of the Occupy Wall Street movement: http://somatosphere.net/2011/10/preamble-to-an-ethnography-of-the-people’s-mic.html.  I’m fascinated by the echolalic character of the “people’s microphone”–a phenomenon that in other settings (church, court, presidential swearing in ceremonies) is less an expression of popular heterodoxy than ingrained orthodoxy.

This strange, effervescent and recently discovered mode of address is actually part-in-parcel with a much longer-standing American tradition of hallowed political speech—actively cultivating a sense of deep horizontal community and democratic process not felt on the Left in this country for what seems like generations.

Read more on Chris’s post.  For me, the aesthetics of the people’s mic recalls two distinct experiences of the material world: the natural sublime of the echo (e.g., standing on the rim of a daunting canyon) and the technological sublime of the outdoor rock concert (e.g., Hello, Cleveland….leveland….eveland…eland…and…).

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