Prepared for the New York Workshop on Contentious Politics

32

“What’s in a Word?

Repertoires of Contentious Language

Sidney Tarrow

Cornell University

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Prepared for the New York Workshop on Contentious Politics,

CUNY Graduate Center,

March 21, 2013

September 17, 2011: A group of young people carrying tents, cooking equipment, and sleeping bags sets up camp in a privately-owned but public square in downtown Manhattan, near – but not in front of – the New York Stock Exchange. As they describe themselves: “Occupy Wall Street is a people-powered movement that began on September 17, 2011 in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District, and has spread to over 100 cities in the United States and actions in over 1,500 cities globally.” The protesters claim to be fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement, they argue, is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.[1]

Media-savvy and well-connected nationally and internationally, the Wall Street protesters are soon joined by sympathizers around the country and from abroad.[2] By late October, there are at least 250-odd occupy sites across the country in which some form of occupation is being mounted. Here are the “occupy” sites that were recorded over the first ten days alone:

The occupation goes through a number of phases, punctuated by the positive support of trade unions and sympathetic public figures, and the periodic intervention of the New York Police Department, mayor Bloomberg, and the ever-present media, whose reporters are at first puzzled (“What do they want?”, asks more than one reporter), then fascinated (some see it as a homologue to the Tea Party Movement), and, finally, bored. For their part, the occupiers busy themselves keeping order in their rapidly-growing tent city, listening to speakers, whose words are spread by a unique human microphone chain, and, as winter creeps up on the toe of Manhattan, keeping warm. In late November, a small radical group breaks away to march on Washington, but the attention of the media is diverted by the brutal pepper-spraying of another group of protesters by campus police in Davis, California. After this, the movement continues to spread, first across the U.S. and Canada, as Map 1 shows.

Map 1 here

As it diffuses across the country, the movement diversifies in the kind of places its activists occupy. Forty-four percent copy the New York pattern by setting up tents on public squares, but another 40 pitch their tents outside state or federal public buildings, 58 in parks, 35 and on city streets. Increasingly, college campuses become the sites of occupations, as Table 1shows:

Table 1

Main Locations of OWS Protests,

September 17 – November 30, 2011

Location / Cities / Location / Cities
State Public Buildings / 37 / Parks / 58
Federal Buildings / 3 / Plazas, Squares, Commons / 44
Banks / 12 / Streets / 35
Chambers of Commerce / 1 / Downtown/Centers / 18
University Campus / 35 / Bridges / 2
Other / 20

Note: The table contains information on the location of OWS protests in 265 Cities from the press and from self-reports by protesters.

A Long Tradition

When they first camped out on a square near Wall Street, the Occupy protesters may have thought they were inventing a new form of demonstration – and in some ways OWS was more creative than the set-piece marches that marked American politics in recent years. But the OWS protesters were using a basic form of protest that has marked American and European history for almost a century. It began with the occupation of Italian factories after World War One by workers trying to prevent themselves from being locked out of their workplaces (Spriano 1975); it reappeared with the “sit-down strikes “in France and the United States in the 1930s; it appeared again with the sit-ins of the 1960s and the squats of the 1970s and 1980s. For almost a century, protesters have used one or another form of the occupation.

Figure 1 here

Figure 1 tracks the appearance of the words used for the occupation of factories, university faculties, private dwellings, and public spaces from 1914 through 2008 in Google Books in English. The first form to appear in significant numbers were factory occupations, which peaked after World War One and then again in the literature of the 1970s. These are followed by the sit-ins, which arose in the 1960s, never significantly declined, but reappeared in large numbers around the turn of the century (Tilly and Tarrow 2007). Building occupations describe a more jagged line, first appearing in the Depression and then subsiding until the squatter movements that followed the 1960s. Only in the 1990s do the occupations of public space like OWS begin to appear in significant numbers in our tracking in Google Books, and continue to rise through the first decade of the new century. Although the Occupy Wall Street protesters added something new and fresh to the repertoire of contention, they were operating in a long and checkered repertoire of occupations.

WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE?

Readers may wonder why I have begun a book about changes in the language of contention with a potted history of the occupation. It was striking that the Occupy movement turned politics on its head, using the occupation in exactly the opposite way in which it was used in the past: “to refer to a state’s forced occupation of another country” (Pickerill and Krinsky 2012:281). This was a meaning that the campaigners sought deliberately to overturn, as they struggled to reclaim available space and resources for the public. “As such,” write Jenny Pickerill and John Krinsky, “to ‘occupy’ had a stronger and more controversial implication than simply to set up a camp or hold a sit-in” (Ibid).

There are at least five things the Occupy story can help us to see about the language of contentious politics:

First, words that emerge as symbols of contention are seldom invented on the spot: they have their sources in ordinary speech, in popular folktales or music, commercial media or huckstering, previous experiences of war or conflict, and authoritative statements of law and policy. Though it had new and refreshing permutations, the term “Occupy” in Occupy Wall Street was part of a long linguistic narrative (Polletta 2006) that merged out of an episode of contentious interaction almost a century earlier and has evolved in response to changing strategic situations.

Second, over time the meanings of words change, merge, divide and diffuse, as the various forms of occupation in Figure 1.1 show. From its original connotation of the occupation of territory in war to occupations to avoid to the practice of peaceful nonviolence in the 1960s and the dramatization of inequality, the meaning of “occupy” has continued to evolve. Historian Daniel Rodgers puts this well when he writes that “though words constrain their users, hobble political desires, nudge them down socially worn channels, they are in other circumstances radically unstable” (1987: 10).

Third, changes in contentious language are “dialogic” (Bakhtin 1981; Steinberg 1995, 1999): they are not simply dreamt up by political wordsmiths or dictated by courts or legislatures; they result from the thrust and parry of the political process and from the slower rhythms of political and cultural change (also see Freeden 1996). This construction and re-construction of language results from the interaction between opposing actors in contingent action situations, using the stock of symbols available to both elites and ordinary people. In ordinary times, elites possess power over language, but in critical junctures ordinary people not only erupt on the stage of history; they gain a power to affect the language of contention.

Fourth, although we usually think of words as the expression of something, words themselves can mobilize, unite, divide, and even conquer. “Words are tools, often weapons,” writes Rodgers; “the vocabulary of politics is contested terrain and always has been” (1987: 11). When Italian university students occupied their faculties in the 1960s, they saw themselves as part of a story that had begun in Turinese faculties a half century before but also in the occupation of Sproul Hall in Berkeley and Hamilton Hall at Columbia a few years earlier (Tarrow 1989). Like the terms “barricade”, “strike”, “boycott”, and “revolution” that we will encounter in this study, the term “occupy” has brought people together in episodes of contentious collective action for at least a century.

Finally, some words survive and diffuse as symbols of contention while others disappear or are absorbed into ordinary language. “Occupy” has already been adapted to other settings (e.g., “Occupy Sandy”, after the superstorm of 212). The term will undoubtedly remain part of the repertoire of contention, but its meaning may have changed after its association with “the 99 percent.” That brings us to the repertoire of contention and its relation to the construction, the durability, and the diffusion of language, for language – no less than the forms of protest people use – are part of an ongoing and ever-changing repertoire.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF CONTENTIOUS LANGUAGE

We owe the concept of the repertoire of contention to the work of Charles Tilly, as well as his systematic analysis of the words used to describe forms of contention (Tilly 1995a and b; 2008). In his archival work in France, Tilly noticed that a few central forms of action recurred over and over, while a much larger number were threoretically possible (Tilly 1986). From these forms of contention, he identified a “traditional’ repertoire, made up of forms of action that were parochial, local, and direct, and a “modern” one, made up of forms of action that were indirect, translocal, and modular. In the former, attacks on bakers and millers, the tearing down of houses, forced illuminations, and charivaris or “rough music” were mounted by local actors against their direct opponents; in the latter, marches, demonstrations, and strikes were organized through associations that frequently targeted national institutions.

Tilly saw changes in repertoires occurring incrementally, as actors improvised around the central core of known forms of action in response to different circumstances. In research extending his work, Tilly’s student Takashi Wada has shown how British actors “either mastered a small number of forms of contention well (rigid users) or experimented with a large number of forms and became flexible users” (Wada 2009:19). Seldom did they invent new forms of contention out of whole cloth; more often, then innovated on existing performances. In the culmination of his career, his magisterial Contentious Performances (2008), Tilly systematized these findings and gave microscopic attention to the words that actors and observers use to describe collective actions.

For Tilly, it was only as major shifts in the economy and state-building presented new constraints and opportunities that fundamental changes in language repertoires occurred, as Tilly found in his systematic study of British contention from 1758 to 1834 (Tilly 1995a and b). These changes marked major stages in the construction, the durability, and the diffusion of new contentious language as well as the forms of action they describe. But major innovations tended to cluster in critical junctures of contentious interaction – wars, revolutions, religious and nationalist conflict, even in ordinary cycles of contention (Collier and Collier 1991; Tarrow 2012).

Critical Junctures of Contention

When people are thrown together in new combinations against new or different targets under new configurations of opportunity and threat, they produce both new forms of action and the words to describe them. The barricade in the French revolutions; the sit-in in the American Civil Rights and the anti-Vietnam war movements; the occupation of central squares in the Middle Eastern and North - African revolutions in 2011: these critical junctures give rise to new forms of action and affect the narratives that describe them. Critical junctures are the synapses between “traditional” and “modern” repertoires of political language.

Of course, this does not mean that contentious language emerges only within critical junctures. The French charivari was reproduced in North America in the form of the “shivaree” in which community members who violate community norms are humiliated and sometimes physically abused (Thompson 2009:523). The boycott of slave-produced sugar was invented in England in the 1770s but was only “named” in Ireland over an entirely different issue. And the strike developed its characteristic routines and narratives over the century that followed its first naming (see Chapter Three). But critical junctures raise the awareness of the public, heighten the tension between authorities and claims-makers, attract the attention of the media, and set off spirals of protest and response that lead to the invention of new forms of action and efforts to name and frame them (Snow and Benford 1992).

Some names for contentious interaction that emerge during cycles of contention rapidly disappear, or are absorbed back into ordinary language. Take the term “male chauvinist pig”: it was conjoined by a radical section of the feminist movement from the term “pig”, a derogatory term for a policeman in the 1960s, and the term “chauvinist” for an arrogant male (Mansbridge and Flaster 2007). But although the term eventually entered ordinary usage, it never stuck as a movement term as the movement entered a more institutionalized phase, as we will see in Chapter Four.