Hegemony How-To. Jonathan Smucker
clearly delineate Occupy’s boundaries. This tendency wrapped itself in ideological rationales, especially the imperative to keep “liberal reformists” from co-opting the radical movement. My intent here is not to dismiss wariness of the possibility of such cooption outright, but instead to assert that, regardless of the merit of such rationales, another force drove this wariness as well: the force of individuation itself.
To apprehend how this force or pattern played out in Occupy Wall Street, let us momentarily suspend judgment about Occupy’s ideological content and look at the movement through a lens of fashion. Many of the movement’s core participants signaled belonging in the new group by simultaneously signaling difference, defection, disobedience, or rebellion from aspects of the status quo. It may be useful to consider such signaling behaviors as analogous, at least, to how fashion functions. Fashion’s usefulness as a lens is evidenced by the fact that such signaling often manifested most visibly in the literal form of fashion—i.e., clothing, styles, and other external adornment—which any casual visitor to Zuccotti Park could corroborate.
It is hardly novel for political expression and fashion to blend together. Georg Simmel spoke of an “increased power of fashion” that “has overstepped the bounds of its original domain, which comprised only personal externals, and has acquired an increasing influence over taste, over theoretical convictions, and even over the moral foundations of life.”47 One might object that Occupy Wall Street was attempting to do the opposite of what fashion does; that fashion gravitates toward that which is considered elegant or refined, in constant imitation of the upper strata of society, while Occupy was oriented in the opposite direction.48 Occupy’s oppositional orientation may have, indeed, changed the content and kinds of expressions of fashion, but it does not negate that the same essential form or pattern of fashion was at work. Simmel’s description of “club-haters organiz[ing] themselves into a club” is apt:
…it becomes evident that the same combination which extreme obedience to fashion acquires can be won also by opposition to it… If obedience to fashion consists in imitation of such an example, conscious neglect of fashion represents similar imitation, but under an inverse sign… Indeed, it occasionally happens that it becomes fashionable in whole bodies of a large class to depart altogether from the standards set by fashion. This constitutes a most curious social-psychological complication, in which the tendency towards individual conspicuousness primarily rests content with a mere inversion of the social imitation and secondly draws in strength from approximation to a similarly characterized narrower circle.49
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