Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street

Archiving Occupy Wall Street

Kylie Message

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781315294070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street explores the material collections produced by participants of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 that bear witness to the experience and agency of 'the 99%'.

Examining processes of collection development as a lens through which to investigate the sociology of protest and reform movements, the book questions what contribution a dual study of the material culture of dissent and the production of a collection hosting the material culture of dissent might offer to a range of disciplines and practices. It asks if and how a collections-based study can test the propositions, tactics, and limits of activism from archival, museological, and political perspectives.

Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street draws from interdisciplinary fields, including museum studies, collection studies, archive studies, cultural studies, and public history. It will be a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners engaged with contemporary cause-based collecting, activist archiving, public history, and the cultural politics and sociology of social reform movements. It models strategies for 'activating' historical archives and collections-based data, and for engaging with autoethnographic records to represent and analyze the material residue of protest and reform movements today.

1 Activist collecting

Writing movement lives through things

When I talk about ‘a collection’ in this book, I am primarily referring to the official ‘Occupy Archive’ at Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive 2018). For the pragmatic reason that it has distinct parameters that facilitate the making of observations, my efforts at collections analysis are restricted to that physical assemblage unless otherwise stated. At times I do extend my analysis to include a number of collateral or comparative collections that are conceptually cognate or related to my principal case study, but not held by Tamiment Library. These collections are collectively referred to as the ‘OWS archives’. My approach recognizes Bold’s argument that ‘it is incorrect to refer to this collection [at Tamiment] as “the” OWS Archives collection, especially as respects the fact that many collections of OWS materials exist’ (Bold 2012a). ¹ Debates about whether the Tamiment collection does or does not constitute the sole or singular Occupy Wall Street Archives highlights internal debates within the Archives Working Group about ownership of the materials. ² These debates also reflect contention over the fact that although this collection was created by the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group, it is now located externally, even if partially, at Tamiment Library. ³ In the final instance, I distinguish the Tamiment collection (the Occupy Archive) from the wider cohort of Occupy collections (the OWS archives) throughout the book, but present the Tamiment collection as offering a representative physical assemblage of Occupy materials such that this distinction is more semantic than particularly significant.

Figure 1.1 Archive box, Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group Records, TAM 630, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Photograph by Kylie Message.

My interest in researching the collection is guided by the aim to describe how the processes and actions of the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group – as embodied in the collections they created – contributed to the movement as a whole. Much of the material culture ‘repatriated’ from Liberty Plaza is now held within collections at Tamiment Library, described by the institution’s finding aid in the following way:

The Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group Records document protests by the Occupy movement between 2011 and 2013, and the work of the Archives Working Group (AWG) to collect materials from these protests. The bulk of the collection documents the first Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest in the fall of 2011 in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, New York. Materials include placards, signs, fliers, artwork, clippings from print and online news sources, letters of support, diaries, periodicals, pamphlets, music, born-digital photographs, material from the Occupy Wall Street Library, stickers, buttons, textiles with protest slogans, notebooks, correspondence, organizational documents, and the movement’s newsletter, The Occupied Wall Street Journal. The ephemera, clippings, pamphlets, and periodicals document Occupy, climate change, and racial justice protests in New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. The placards and signs were created by members of the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park in 2011 and document the main issues of the movement, in particular income inequality, wealth distribution, and the influence of corporations on the government. The ephemera includes buttons, fliers, and posters. Artwork includes large and small scale pieces, including two one dollar bills with protest slogans stamped on them, casino chips with protest slogans, and posters. The letters of support are letters from friends and family of the members of OWS in Lower Manhattan, supporters from across the country, and one seventh grade social studies class in New Jersey. Some of the letters contained financial donations, food, gift cards, and other items supporters thought may be of use to the members of the movement. The diaries contain personal entries and meeting notes created by unidentified members of the Occupy movement. The notebooks were found in Zuccotti Park after a raid on the protesters by the New York Police Department in November 2011 and collected by members of the Archives Working Group. The organizational documents include draft vision statements, a “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City”, meeting agenda and notes, and notes taken by Amy Roberts at working group meetings. The working groups documented in this collection include the Archives Working Group and the Music Working Group, with some unspecified working groups. The born-digital photographs depict protesters and police officers, the signs provide information for members of the protest, and the music is a CD with the song “People’s Park”. Material documenting the AWG includes mission statements, draft budget proposals, meeting agenda, minutes, and notes. The bulk of the AWG records consist of notes taken by Roberts at AWG meetings, with other material consisting of budget proposals presented to the OWS General Assembly and notes on collecting oral histories and archives best practices.

(Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive 2018)

Members of the Archives Working Group used the materiality of the collection to ‘increase our visibility to others in this movement’ (Roberts n.d.c). The group’s aim was to improve the movement’s support of their work. As with all presentations to the General Assembly, their opportunities for attention were brief and needed to be translated across a large and diverse crowd using the hand gesture communication techniques employed by Occupy (Hand gesture palm card descriptors 2011; also Hudgins 2011a). This support and the subsequent approvals it engendered was not a ‘nice to have’ optional feature of Occupy. It was a necessity. Without the full backing required for consensus, their proposals for funding for storage and preservation for the materials were rejected. In one public forum that sought to increase understanding about how material items embodied the fundamental ideological premise of Occupy, Roberts’ incorporated props into her presentation:

Here’s an item! Look at what this sign is made out of. It’s a reclaimed orange police net.

(Roberts n.d.k)

Resist, reclaim, recreate [is] what occupy means. Reclaim ideas, space, definitions and meaning. What an orange police net signifies is not entrapment. A lot of these signs were made from this orange net. This sign says ‘Screw you to the police.’

(Roberts n.d.k)

The orange net became a central signifier for the Archives Working Group. ⁴ In re-using it for attention, the group came to identify its potential value in connecting their commitment to the cause with that of other working groups. It is a recurring emblem in many speeches, including at a ‘Public Forum on the OWS Archives’ held February 5 that asked ‘What should an archive of Occupy Wall Street look like?’ (Ng 2012a). It was also used at an OWS Archives Share Day, on March 31, 2012 (Ng 2012b). Roberts opened the discussion at this event by saying

I’d like to draw people’s attention to this orange net that says Info and Media on it. People from OWS will remember these signs were all over the park to show where Kitchen, Medical, Arts & Culture, Media, Sanitation were in the park. This is an incredibly unique artifact for many reasons. This material that the signs were made out of came from the orange police nets that the police use during mass arrests.

(Roberts n.d.c)

The Archives Working Group articulated a clear belief in the activist role of archiving and of the contribution that the collection would make to the movement. They aimed to assert self-determination and control over the material products and memory of the movement, and to assert authorship over the way in which the movement was included in an historical context (Roberts n.d.g). ⁵ The key purpose of the Archives Working Group was to:

• Go document history as it happens.
• W/the archive working group we’re also archiving ourselves as participants.
• no such thing as objective or unbiased archiving.
• Our archive project reflects the challenges of this mvmt [movement] and this society. (Roberts n.d.f)

Working group members did not attempt to be neutral observers, and had to balance their documentation and collection activities with the daily operations, actions, and training sessions of Occupy. ⁶ As such, they explained their aim as being twofold: creating a collection and organizing politically (Roberts n.d.g). The intersection of the two informed their actions as explained by one set of notes that considers how to simultaneously contribute to the movement and collect various items including, in one instance, the painted umbrellas used as props in one direct action: ‘Should we try to go inside and risk arrest?’ … ‘better to stay outside and do outreach? Is it a better use of resources? Do speak-outs’ (Roberts n.d.g, emphasis in original).

Central to the task of collections analysis presented throughout this book is the understanding that, like the act of creating an activist archive, the act of analyzing one is not unbiased. A ‘subjective’ approach to collections analysis seeks to makes explicit the human relationships embedded within the materials, as well as those generated subsequently by, as well as those missing from, the collection. ⁷ It draws from Star’s (1999: 379) work on systems, which informs an understanding of archives as being more than a sum of their parts, with the potential to play critical roles in the shape and experience of other adjacent knowledge systems they interact with, inform, and are influenced by. Work by Star and others referenced here (Stoler 2002) acknowledge a theoretical genealogy that includes Foucault and Derrida, amongst others, who have argued that archives are ‘neither passive or value free but rather serve as active sites where social power is negotiated, controlled and confirmed’ (Schwartz and Cook 2002: 1). For example, identification of the interaction – and subjectivity that can guide interactions – between content, collection, and context is also fundamental for any attempt to pursue Stoler’s (2010) project of engaging with archives as primary subjects rather than as secondary contexts.

This chapter starts by explaining ‘what’ the collection at the heart of this study is. From here I offer an overview of the historical context for activist collecting before moving on to examine some of the motivations and methodologies employed by working group members in regard to the development of the collection. The final section considers the subjective nature of collecting, and some of the first-person stories that contributed to and are represented within the Occupy Archive. I conclude by making some comments about the contribution that material and archival case studies can offer to political discourse and the field of social movement studies.

Contemporary cause-based collecting

In an interview with Roberts (as interviewer) in 2013, one working group member said that in his view – as a member of Occupy who was also a professional archivist – the intentions and collections of the Archives Working Group were ‘precedent-setting’. He recognized the contribution that the collection makes to the profession of archiving and to the related field of historical knowledge. He also made a critical association between what the Archives Working Group sought to do and other historical examples of cause-based collecting:

And I will say this about the collection, to give you and the rest of the folks in the working group and in the movement credit. The collection exists because of what you guys did. And that accomplishment should not be underestimated. The fact that there is an OWS collection that was collected and gathered by and within the movement, I think it’s precedent setting. Again I leave that up to you and your research to look at other social and grassroots movements to say who else has done something like this in a contemporary fashion. ‘You know there’s 40 years since that March on Washington and I wonder what’s in my old shoe box, maybe I should give it to them.’ You know, that and the fact that I don’t know what the linear cubic footage is but it’s not small. It’s not a box. It’s not two boxes. There is weight and substance to it for future historians to use and for a good purpose. But I think, from what I’ve seen of it, I think you accomplished the mission statement – to self-document, absolutely.

(See Roberts n.d.h: 24) ⁸

Contemporary cause-based collections can be defined as groups of materials acquired from social movements, usually in collaboration with participants, or through a process of self-documentation by members of the movement. In Museums and Social Activism (2014), I investigated the occurrence of contemporary cause-based collecting at the National Museum of American History from the mid- to late 1960s, arguing that the activities of Smithsonian Institution curators Keith Melder and Edie Mayo were precedent setting in their interest in representing key social movements (including the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom mentioned by interviewee above; also see Message 2014: 24). While collecting from social reform movements has become an almost ubiquitous requirement for museums, archives, and other collecting repositories today, there remains a difference between the ways they typically go about this task and how movements are represented in self-collected, if not independent, archives.

The practices and protocols pioneered by Melder and Mayo remained firmly aligned with an institutional perspective, ⁹ yet they were also committed to the practice of curatorial activism that was sometimes at odds with the agenda or procedures of the museum in which they were employed. They both made significant contributions to the discourse around contemporary collecting that is also evident in the work of the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group, many of whom were professional or student archivists. However, despite sharing comparable motivations and aims, archival activism appears to have developed alongside rather than in alliance with museological collecting practices. This means that the previous statement about the working group being precedent setting is accurate, but that it is also useful to examine some of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Go document history as it happens
• 1 Activist collecting: Writing movement lives through things
• 2 Object lessons: Occupy Wall Street. Bring tent
• 3 Organizing action: Archiving Occupy
• This changes everything
• Bibliography
• Index