September 17, 2011: Occupy without Counting

The events of September 2011 will probably go down in history in much

the same way as the events of May 1968, with no-one being able to decide

what, if anything, actually happened.1 Zuccotti Park in New York City

briefly flickered in the global consciousness as the spark that threatened

to ignite a global revolution, just as the Latin Quarter of Paris had four

decades earlier (Buchanan 2008: 7–12). Within a month over 150

Occupy events were taking place all over the world and as one expects

these days the movement was even more prominently and diversely

represented on the internet. The message the occupiers wanted to relay

was both simple and complex. ‘We are the 99%,’ they said: the part that

in Rancière’s terms effectively has no part because the other 1% control a

profoundly disproportionate share of national – global – wealth (the top

1% in the US have a greater net worth than the bottom 90%), (Rancière

1999: 9). They demanded nothing except to be noticed.