Occupation ~ polis

What we are seeing in the Occupy gatherings is a true polis as Aristotle imagined it. These people are gathered here to ask basic questions: What is good for our society? Contemporary “political” discourse is not political at all, in the true sense of the term. For it never engages with what is good for society, but only with questions of efficiency, or expediency, or affordability, or “social contracts.” And it is fundamentally reflexive: it originates no questions of its own, but only responds to perceived threats – to borders, to markets, to vague moral positions, to identities, etc. All of these are, more properly, derivative issues. Even the question of rights is derivative, and cannot be meaningfully broached until we have a sense of what rights are meant to do, how they are supposed to function, in this imagined society. The polis is a space in which to ask, What kind of society do we want to create?

Such a question asked today will of course engender the kind of noise we are hearing out of the Occupy Wall Street people. And by “noise” I don’t mean to imply that it isn’t meaningful. Rather, it contains too many meanings for a single ear to comprehend. It’s hard for us to impose any recognizable structure on it, or detect a syntax that would make it recognizable as language or music to our modern ears. And it is no wonder that they speak in many voices and are concerned with many injustices. For it is the nature of true political discourse that it arise out of the individual living conditions that each one of us creates and suffers. Let’s keep listening to these Occupiers. They are learning how to ask fundamental questions about our society, to imagine something new that has never been seen before. And we are learning how to hear them, perhaps for the first time in our own lives.