The (EM)placed vernacular: Rhetorics of transgression and control in New York City

Traversing the vectors and tensions of everyday places is to experience a profoundly powerful rhetorical force. Through the particularities of place, identity is forged, communities are created, and ideological wars are waged through images, aesthetics, and materiality. The (Em)placed Vernacular: Rhetorics of Transgression and Control in New York City explores these intersections and the larger rhetorical possibilities of taking a vernacular approach to the study place through an exploration of New York City as an ideological text and site of rhetorical acts of place-making. This project develops the notion of the (em)placed vernacular as a critical framework that acknowledges the important ways that place is perpetually created, maintained, and re-coded by the actions and reactions of users. The (em)placed vernacular is defined as the visual, aesthetic, and material codes embedded in the particularities of place. These codes not only provide the symbolic resources for living in the contemporary moment, they are one of the fundamental ways that ideology is materialized and acts of transgression and control emerge in the city. I explore three particular engagements within the (em)placed vernacular of New York City. As a larger dwelling place that has historically existed as a microcosm for the larger United States, I study the use of Zuccotti Park by Occupy Wall Street, the everyday surfaces used by British street artist Banksy, and the memory place of the 9/11 Memorial. Because of the intersectional dimensions of the (em)placed vernacular, I engage the virtual contexts and (cyber)places where the images roam, the constitutive force of materiality in producing ideal and transgressive subjectivities, and the larger political and rhetorical implications of transforming contemporary (non)places into places where new subjectivities can emerge through acts of place-making. I argue that acts of place-making provide particular ways of seeing the world, through which the possibilities of transformation are seen and engaged. The (em)placed vernacular provides a useful critical framework for studying acts of transgression and control that work always within the contingent foundations of postmodern politics.

THE (EM)PLACED VERNACULAR: RHETORICS OF TRANSGRESSION AND CONTROL IN NEW YORK CITY by Elinor Light A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah August 2015 Copyright © Elinor Light 2015 All Rights Reserved The Un i v e r s i t y of Utah Gra du at e School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Elinor Light has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Kevin DeLuca Helene Shugart Danielle Endres Craig Denton Lela Graybill Chair Member Member Member Member 12/10/2014 Date Approved 12/10/2014 Date Approved 12/10/2014 Date Approved 12/10/2014 Date Approved 12/10/2014 Date Approved and by Kent Ono Chair of the Department of Communication and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Traversing the vectors and tensions of everyday places is to experience a profoundly powerful rhetorical force. Through the particularities of place, identity is forged, communities are created, and ideological wars are waged through images, aesthetics, and materiality. The (Em)placed Vernacular. Rhetorics o f Transgression and Control in New York City explores these intersections and the larger rhetorical possibilities of taking a vernacular approach to the study place through an exploration of New York City as an ideological text and site of rhetorical acts of place-making. This project develops the notion of the (em)placed vernacular as a critical framework that acknowledges the important ways that place is perpetually created, maintained, and re­coded by the actions and reactions of users. The (em)placed vernacular is defined as the visual, aesthetic, and material codes embedded in the particularities of place. These codes not only provide the symbolic resources for living in the contemporary moment, they are one of the fundamental ways that ideology is materialized and acts of transgression and control emerge in the city. I explore three particular engagements within the (em)placed vernacular of New York City. As a larger dwelling place that has historically existed as a microcosm for the larger United States, I study the use of Zuccotti Park by Occupy Wall Street, the everyday surfaces used by British street artist Banksy, and the memory place of the 9/11 Memorial. Because of the intersectional dimensions of the (em)placed vernacular, I engage the virtual contexts and (yber)places where the images roam, the constitutive force of materiality in producing ideal and transgressive subjectivities, and the larger political and rhetorical implications of transforming contemporary (non)places into places where new subjectivities can emerge through acts of place-making. I argue that acts of place-making provide particular ways of seeing the world, through which the possibilities of transformation are seen and engaged. The (em)placed vernacular provides a useful critical framework for studying acts of transgression and control that work always within the contingent foundations of postmodern politics. iv To Jonathan. Everyday. Always. All the time. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................................................. iii LIST OF FIGURES..............................................................................................................................viii LIST OF TABLES................................................................................................................................... x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................................xi Chapters 1 INTRODUCTION: THE (EM)PLACED VERNACULAR.................................................... 1 Rhetorical Intersections .............................................................................................................5 Moving Methodology............................................................................................................... 17 Chapter Overviews....................................................................................................................23 Endnotes.....................................................................................................................................27 2 PUBLIC DWELLING AS ARGUMENT: POLITICS IN (NON)PLACES, (CYBER)PLACES, AND BEYOND............................................................................................35 Excitable Images .........................................................................................................................40 Adventures with Mobile Images.............................................................................................44 Dwelling in (Non)place/(Cyber)place.................................................................................. 46 The Rhetoric of Public Dwelling...........................................................................................73 Endnotes.....................................................................................................................................76 3 BANKSY IN RESIDENCE: ART CRIMES, PLAY, AND OTHER SUCH NONSENSE TAKING PLACE................................................................................................... 85 Architectures of Seeing.............................................................................................................92 Moving with an (In)Visible Author....................................................................................... 97 Better Out Than In: Postsubject(s) in Play....................................................................... 111 The Rhetoric of Play............................................................................................................... 125 Endnotes.................................................................................................................................. 133 4 VISUALIZING HOMELAND: MEMORIALIZING 9/11 AND THE PRODUCTION OF THE SURVEILLING FLANEUR....................................................................................139 Struggles over Memory and Mourning at Ground Zero .............................................. 145 Adventures in Diffuse Place..................................................................................................153 Reflecting Absence..................................................................................................................142 The Surveilling Flaneur..........................................................................................................179 Endnotes.................................................................................................................................. 183 5 GLANCING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD: PRACTICES OF PLACE-MAKING AND SEEING IN THE CITY................................................................................................... 192 Making Place, Making Do..................................................................................................... 194 Glancing Back...........................................................................................................................198 Looking Forward.....................................................................................................................203 Endnotes.................................................................................................................................. 207 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................................208 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1: New York City at Times Square...................................................................................................... 13 2: Graffiti Outside the North Metro Train....................................................................................... 17 3: Zuccotti Park....................................................................................................................................... 47 4: Adbusters Occupy Poster.................................................................................................................... 52 5: Our Lady o f Liberty Park by Molly Crabapple.................................................................................66 6: Fight the Vampire Squid by Molly Crabapple.................................................................................. 71 7: Banksy Painting in Chinatown "Graffiti is a Crime" .................................................................86 8: Banksy Prank in Central Park, "Pop Up Booth"......................................................................112 9: Banksy Prank, "Sirens of the Lambs" .........................................................................................118 10: Banksy Video, "Ants" ................................................................................................................... 123 11: 9/11 Memorial at the North Pool...............................................................................................144 12: Names Panels at the 9/11 Memorial..........................................................................................158 13: Museum Building at the 9/11 Memorial...................................................................................161 14: Secondary Pools at the 9/11 Memorial..................................................................................... 164 15: Police and Park Rangers at the Memorial Entrance.............................................................. 169 16: No Restrooms Memorial Signage............................................................................................... 170 17: Reflection from the Museum Building...................................................................................... 173 18: Merchandise at 9/11 Memorial Preview Site............................................................................175 19: Overview of Memorial Site in Commemorative Guide........................................................ 176 20: Park Rangers Pose for Photo Outside of Museum Building............................................... 178 ix LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1: Instagram Images at #banksyny...................................................................................................99 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am truly humbled by the support, feedback, and time given by so many people over the course of this project. I am particularly indebted to my dissertation chair, Kevin DeLuca, who sent me to New York City with a note that read, "We aim for insights and provocations, not exhaustive comprehensiveness." Kevin's feedback, guidance, humor, and various forms of support over the course of my Ph.D. program went far beyond what was asked or expected of him. Portions of this dissertation were written under the guidance and support of my other committee members. Thanks to Danielle Endres, who encouraged me to explore the notion of intersectionality in the particularity of place. Thanks to Craig Denton, who helped train my eye to better engage the rhetoric of place through photography. Thanks to Lela Graybill, whose guidance and knowledge of unusual aesthetics is woven through this project. And, thanks to Helga Shugart for her unwavering support and for her academic honesty, which is equally refreshing and terrifying in the very best of ways. I am also deeply indebted to the Department of Communication and The Graduate School for their academic and financial assistance, which allowed me to present portions of this dissertation at the 2011 National Communication Association Conference and the 2011 International Communication Association Conference. I am grateful for the support of Kent Ono, Connie Bullis, Mark Bergstrom, and Jessica Tanner. Special thanks are owed to Natasha Seegert and Maria Blevins, whose words of encouragement and suggestions for improvement gave me direction when I was unsure of where to turn. Thanks are owed to Devon Fullford for her assistance with the editing of this document. I am also indebted to my mentor, Greg Dickinson, whose friendship, suggestions for improvement, and guidance simply made this project better. Outside of the academic world, I am profoundly thankful for the support of my parents, Kevin and Kathleen Christopher. Dad, thank you for guiding me academically, financially, and emotionally throughout my entire life and throughout this project. Thank you, mom, for always showing me the world through different perspectives and for giving me a gypsy spirit. Special thanks are owed to Dotti and Ken Fite whose presence in my life is eternally kind and supportive. Thank you also to Mark and Kori Dienes for their support and encouragement. I am also especially grateful for the support of my brother, Adain Elkins, and good friends Kara and Mark Cutter and Merritt Valentine who all helped motivate me. Many, many hours of this project were spent with my son, Noah Light, sleeping peacefully in my lap. Thank you, my sweet one, for sleeping. Special thanks are also owed to Nana, Sara Hornbacher and my mother, who cared for my baby so that I could work and whose love is such a beautiful part of my life. Most of all, thanks to Jonathan Light, my partner in life whose research, passion for learning, and critical eye are woven throughout this project. I simply could not have done it without you. xii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE (EM)PLACED VERNACULAR Social space is not an empty arena within which we conduct our lives; rather, it is something we construct and which others construct about us. It is in this incredible complexity of social interactions and meanings, which we constantly build, tear down, and negotiate. And it is always mobile, always changing, always open to revision and potentially fragile. -- Doreen Massey New York City has always existed in our popular imagination as the archetypal American city, where the greatest of opportunities exist and where the American dream seems to lurk around every corner. As Gregory Clark writes, "Manhattan symbolizes for most Americans the essence of what the expansive and unimaginable continent that is the nation offers them. It symbolizes a national community that can encompass almost every American aspiration."2 It also has a rich history of reflecting and reproducing the anxieties and hopes of particular time periods. Architecture, city planning, gentrification, the development of parks and high rises all function as both a reflection of and an active agent in the production of cultural norms, dominant ideology, and subjectivity in the experience of the contemporary moment. The materiality of the city embodies the complexity of modern life, where the cyclical time of the pastoral life is complicated and displaced by the linear logic of modern time and where the notion of nature is constituted through its absence. According to urbanist Lewis Mumford, "By contrast with the slow-paced, family-based village defined by continuity and conformity, the city was an unstable community that welcomed strangers, embraced individuality, and was energized by change. It was bold and bustling, exciting and inventive, arrogant and aggressive."3 Success and opportunity called thousands to this life. Simultaneously, it also produced new forms of social anxieties. As individuals lived closer together in larger numbers, a sense of alienation and pacification became a dominant characteristic of the city subject.4 Out of all U.S. cities, New York City has always been a particularly turbulent one. Writing in the 1980s from the 110th floor of The World Trade Center, Michel de Certeau describes the city as embodying the "extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban interruptions that block out its space."5 Historians agree. New York City has seen numerous nonviolent, but especially violent uprisings, demonstrations, and riots throughout its history. 6 In addition to the numerous minor riots, Historian Joanne Reitano documents major violent responses to the status quo including the "Stamp Act riots of 1765, the antiabolition riots of 1834, the Astor Place riots of 1849, the draft riots of 1863, the race riot of 1900, the Harlem riots of 1935, 1943, and 1964, the Columbia College, CUNY, and Stonewall riots of the late 1960s, and the Hard-hat and Blackout riots of the 1970s."7 These various uprisings, described as "social exclamation points" by historian David Grimsted, both gave voice to the powerless while simultaneously pointing to the tensions inherent in the very fabric of the American Dream.8 The emergence of graffiti in the early 1970s is a particularly visual exclamation point in New York's history. In 1971, The New York Times published an article titled, "‘Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals," detailing how a New York teenager's practice of marking his name "Taki 183" throughout the city was causing others to do the same.9 This article is cited by both 2 artists and scholars alike as the inception of the widespread practice of graffiti in the United States, and ultimately, around the world.10 Today, not only is graffiti arguably the largest artistic movement in the history of the world, it is also one of the most controversial forms of visual communication, with most cities modeling their antigraffiti laws after those developed in New York City.11 Today, as the most densely populated area in the United States and as a leader in culture, entertainment, fashion, finance, commerce, and technology, "Gotham city" is globally recognized as a symbol of the United States and of democracy. However, the city takes on additional meaning in the contemporary moment because it exists as the central place in which the events of September 11, 2001 occurred. Images of the twin towers falling cemented New York City as not just an archetype of all American cities, but as a symbol and archetype of a post-9/11 world. The surveillance practices resulting from 9/11 are now embedded in the fabric of the city. National Guard periodically watch over Grand Central Station and police watch for behavior that seems "out of place" throughout the five Burroughs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these aspects of hyper-security, the city continues to exist as a place of civil and uncivil disobedience. For example, the city continues to attract street artists from around the world. In 2012 one of the most famous street artists, Banksy, spent the entire month of October creating images and performances in and on the streets and buildings of New York City.12 More traditional acts of protest make a home in the city as well. Shortly after the tenth anniversary of 9/11, thousands flooded the small place of Zuccotti Park located only several blocks from Ground Zero, spurring the massive Occupy Wall Street movement that eventually spread throughout world in protest of financial inequality, corporate control, and consumerism. In response to these and other worldwide protests, such as those known as 3 the Arab Spring, caused Time magazine to name "The Protestor" as Person of the Year in 2011.13 Thus, the intersection between the imagination of the city as a place of progress and the real violence and dissensus experienced in New York causes most Americans to fear the very city which embodies the most important myths of America in a post-9/11 world.14 This project engages the place of New York City as a rhetorical text and puts forth the notion of the (em)placed vernacular as a critical framework for exploring both acts of control and transgression in the contemporary moment. I define the (em)placed vernacular as the material, visual, and aesthetic codes that are intersectionally embedded in the particularities of place. Just as language is intelligible through the operation of a specific code, the particular places of our cities operate as coded signs as well.15 Due to their existence in the fluidity of place, users of place may take up these codes as speakers take up words to either reiterate or challenge dominant ideologies. This framework responds to the growing emphasis in communication studies on the importance of place in the production of power and ideology as well as the need for intersectional approaches to studying acts of power and transgression in the contemporary moment.16 Accordingly, the following research questions guide my analysis: 1. In what ways does the (em)placed vernacular function rhetorically in reinforcing or transgressing dominant ideologies in the contemporary moment? a.) In what ways do contemporary image-makers use the emplaced vernacular in transgressive ways? b.) In what ways can the use of the (em)placed vernacular function as a form of control? c.) What are the implications of place-making tactics in practices of seeing and issues of social justice? 4 The following chapter outlines the central theoretical tenets that structure the concept of the (em)placed vernacular. I begin with a discussion of the importance of attending to the intersectional dimensions of rhetoric before turning to the specific intersections that make up the notion of the (em)placed vernacular which include place, aesthetics, and images. I then turn to the methodological concerns of this project and end with an introduction to my case studies and subsequent chapters. Rhetorical Intersections This project takes a critical orientation to rhetorical analysis and is grounded in the notion that rhetoric is both constitutive of identity and ideology. I utilize Kevin DeLuca's definition of rhetoric as the "mobilization of signs for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousness, communities, publics, and cultures."17 With a particular focus on poststructural notions of power, resistance, and social justice, my theoretical foundation rests on the work of Philip Wander, Michael Calvin McGee, and Ramie McKerrow who argue that a critical rhetoric seeks to understand the relationship between visual, discursive, performative, and structural aspects of culture and power.18 With this foundation, my project can be read as a part of a larger effort in communication studies to expose systems of domination and move towards cultural transformation.19 This transformation is not a utopian one. Instead, it is the unstable and always relative transformation of postmodern politics. Of particular importance to the critical project is the force of the rhetoric of everyday places as well as the importance of transgression and resistance within those places. From explicitly ideologically places, such as museums and memorials to the everyday places of coffeehouses and fast-food restaurants, the study of place is an important component of 5 understanding of both systems of domination and transformation in the contemporary moment.20 Edward Soja argues that, "Focusing in on specific examples of where and how (in)justice takes place helps to ground the search for spatial justice in socially produced contexts rather than letting it float in idealized abstractions and too easily deflected calls for universal human rights or radical revolution."21 Every city place becomes a dense concentration of global and localized ideologies, manifested in material form in architecture, the smell of local food preparation, the localized soundscape, spatial organization, and in the embodied uses of particular places. New Orleans, for example, is particularly famous for offering visitors a unique aesthetic discourse in the French Quarter: one might enjoy the European-styled architecture while eating an alligator cheesecake and wandering the narrow, sour smelling, streets. As one experiences the streets through these elements, one is also experiencing the manifestation of profound racial and classed inequalities: the boundaries of the French Quarter mark a distinct separation where images of poverty emerge in stark contrast to the aesthetic of the French Quarter. When these codes are experienced in an embodied way, they intersect with the previously experienced visual vocabulary of the city and act rhetorically by interpellating visitors into particular subject positions.22 Moreover, the city is profoundly complex, merging the materiality of buildings, streets, roadways, and parks with images, smells, and noise. The complexity of the city as a place, then, calls for not only a critical approach but also an intersectional approach. Within the larger critical project the concept of intersectionality arose from conversations in feminist debates to assert that dominant ideologies, and therefore systems of oppression, are interlocked.23 Racism, classism, sexism, and heteronormativity, for example, support one another in powerful ways. Particularly interested in the intersections between class, gender, and race, scholar bell hooks argues that we must "expand our 6 awareness of sex, race, and class as interlocking systems of domination, [and] the ways we reinforce and perpetuate these structures."24 Intersectionality has also been discussed using spatial metaphors, such as "marginality," "standpoint," and "location." As Jessie Stewart and Greg Dickinson argue, place and space are not only helpful metaphorically for understanding the intersectional dimensions of subjectivity, oppression and domination, but are also important because of the rhetoric of place in and of itself.25 Working from a social movement perspective, Darrel Enck-Wanzer identifies several important features of the intersectional dimensions of place, defining intersectional rhetoric as, "a rhetoric that places multiple rhetorical forms . . . on relatively equal footing, is not leader-centered, and draws from a number of diverse discursive political or rhetorical conventions."26 I believe we can build on this definition, however, to take seriously the critical components to the history of the term. Just as multiple forms of domination are interlocked, multiple texts are interlocked as well. These textual forms support one another, reiterating and reproducing both dominant and transgressive ideologies. This is not unlike intertexuality, where various texts reference one another, particularly within a mediated framework. However, intersectional rhetoric focuses not on only on how texts reference one another, but how various texts across a wide range of forms work together to produce a particular rhetorical force. To approach the intersectional dimensions of place is to recognize the tensions inherent in everyday city life: roads intersect, bodies of people intersect on the streets in fumbled ways, and dominant ideologies intersect with the transgressive tactics.27 Intersectionality, rooted in rhetorical and critical theory, is the foundation on which the notion of the (em)placed vernacular is built and allows for a study of both power and transgression in the particularity of place. Furthermore, I understand transgression as distinct from resistance. Transgression, 7 according to Tim Cresswell, is an action that may or may not be intentionally opposed to the status quo.28 The homeless who sleep on the park benches or the person who refuses to use the crosswalk to cross the street may be engaged in a transgressive act without the intention of opposing the larger spatial structures that organize our experience within particular places. Resistance, however, is a more conscious act that does come from an intention to disarticulate some aspect of spatial logic or the meaning associated with a place. A transgression of place consists of undermining the logics of spatial practice through, for example, acts of the body or reappropriation of visual signs within the environment. Thus, the (em)placed vernacular can be used as a theoretical and methodical lens for the analysis of the intersectional dimensions of everyday life. It will focus on the ways that images, places, and aesthetics converse with one another in the ephemerality of city spaces. The Fluidity o f Place Attention to the cultural significance of city places arose first within the field of geography and is founded on the distinction between space and place.29 The notion of space was initially understood as an abstract and infinite system of logic or practice, which invested the more particular concept of place with particular ideologies.30 David Harvey, for example, discusses the logic of capitalism and its influence on city structures and divisions of labor.31 Place, then, is more particular, semibounded, visibly material, and imbued with specific (and sometimes more personal) meanings.32 From a rhetorical perspective, Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook argue that places can be defined as "particular locations with material/symbolic, embodied, and dynamic characteristics that are related to but not absolutely determined by spatial social structures. Part of the particularity of places derives 8 from their material (i.e., physical) form."33 Places, they argue, are a particularly material form of rhetoric because they are experiential and experienced in fully embodied ways.34 Materiality is an important aspect of place and one of the intersectional dimensions of the (em)placed vernacular. Materiality, from a rhetorical perspective, is the notion that all texts have both a physical and symbolic presence as well as having material consequences in the world.35 In built environments like cities, the materiality of rhetoric is made particularly visible and is an important aspect of its force in the world.36 The architecture, the ways that sidewalks dictate movement, the larger organization of the city, and the lines that roads and railroads cut through the urban scene are so clearly material that they fail to appear rhetorical. They are powerfully rhetorical because they fail to appear that way and symbolism and ideology of spatial structures are embedded into the materiality of place. Salt Lake City, Utah, is a prime example of how larger spatial ideologies manifest themselves into materiality of the place of the city. Salt Lake City is organized around a large grid of streets with the Church of Latter Day Saints Temple sitting at the center. The influence of Mormon ideology exerts itself into a material organization of the city, and directs all roads to lead to the central ideology and the central place of the church. The materiality of all cities is dependent on larger ideologies that structure it. Simultaneously, the materiality of place structures the larger spatial ideologies as well as the bodies who move in and through it. While place is imbued with a particularly visible form of materiality, its rhetoric is not static nor is it only a site for control and privileged discourse. Instead, as Doreen Massey argues, places are extraordinarily fluid, "extroverted," always in the process of becoming, and open to revision.37 The concept of Thirdspace offers a particularly useful way of understanding this fluidity. Henri Lefebvre argues that people cannot constitute themselves as subjects unless they produce a place and offers three modes of what he terms "social 9 space," which include conceived, perceived, and lived space. 38 Perceived space, he argues, is the materiality of particular places, produced through spatial practices. Conceived space, on the other hand, is the larger imaginations that help to understand social space. This is where domination and ideology function. This third space, Lefebvre argues, is lived space, the space where the body becomes an important aspect and where perceived and conceived space become both fused and fluid. Soja theorizes further to argue that the lived and liminal space of Lefebvre's formula offers the area of critical intervention in dominating ideologies.39 The lived quality of Thirdspace is of particular importance when attending to transgressive acts. One of the primary characteristics of lived space is the actions and use of place by the living body. Numerous scholars have highlighted the body as both a site of discipline and transgression. For example, de Certeau argues that power and resistance are born in the lived space of walking and it becomes the area of the weak to deploy temporally situated and site-specific tactics of resistance.40 Michel Foucault similarly discusses the heterotopias of lived engagement where knowledge and power intersect and individuals might take hold of particular nodal points and produce different forms of knowledge.41 From a rhetorical perspective, scholars such as DeLuca, Phaedra Pezzullo and Jake Simmons demonstrate through specific rhetorical studies the importance of the body in reiterating or transgressing dominant discourses.42 The body may engage place in any number of ways: visually, through movement, or through verbal interaction. Since place is always in the process of becoming and the citational actions of the actions of users are always active in this processing, place is inherently always partially a voice of the vernacular. The vernacular is defined by Kent Ono and John Sloop as "speech that resonates within local communities. This discourse is neither accessible in its entirety, 10 nor is it discoverable except through texts. However, vernacular discourse is also culture: the music, art, criticism, dance, and architecture of local communities."43 While social media and information technology expand our notions of what constitutes "local," particular places continue to be texts where discourse is negotiated and where communities constitute themselves. As a text, place is a particularly important arena to study the vernacular and an essential nodal point in mapping out means for social change. Moreover, the notion of a vernacular approach to the study of place moves beyond understanding merely individual engagements with particular places. Places can be studied as a collective rhetoric, built slowly over time and infused with both local and global practices and customs. The gestures of the body are both productive in the creation of particular places as well as dependent on their existence. As Lefebvre illustrates, bodily gestures are the movement of the body that is made possible and which create place to begin with.44 In this way, place-making is always a rhetorical act and is legible only through repetition. As Judith Butler argues, discourse is legible and given force through historicity, ritual, and citational dimensions in language.45 In both gestures and language, this can lead to the cementing of meaning that perpetuates domination and hegemonic ideologies. However, the opportunity for transgression also occurs in the citational dimensions of language and place. The body may choose to use the sidewalk, obey all spatial codes, and move through the city in ways that reiterate dominant ideologies. Alternatively, critical intervention can occur through what Butler terms the "social performative" which is a process of reappropriating language so that its meaning and effects can be revised. In using place in transgressive ways, the performative has the potential to work against dominant ideology and is one of the most "influential rituals by which subjects are formed and reformulated."46 11 The central framework of the (em)placed vernacular is built on the notion of the fluidity of place and the vernacular characteristics of its material production. In addition, a vernacular perspective on the study of place continues the critical project of postmodern transformation. Rather than simply criticize the dominant ideology in elite places, a study of the vernacular of place allows the critic to, as Ono and Sloop would argue, "move beyond challenge to transformation."47 To study this transformation, however, it is necessary to study the importance of the culture of the image and the politics of aesthetics that are embedded alongside materiality in the particularities of place. The Culture o f the Image Images are everywhere. They can be found on surfaces ranging from the massive public billboard screens that dominate the visual experience of the postmodern city with moving images designed to inspire consumption, to the personal laptops, smart phones, and televisions that fill the contemporary individual's private home space with sound, light, and image. In cities, the screen increasingly becomes a part of the urban environment (see Figure 1). Kirsty Best argues, "urban screen ecologies are nodes of information exchange which overwhelmingly privilege the facilitation of visually interfaced consumption: bank machines and grocery store screens most obviously, but also ad-based television wallpaper, interfaces between cell phone screens and vending machines, banner ads on computer screens and so on."48 Personal smart phones (PSP) come equipped for lightning-fast access to communication and entertainment and as individuals move through the various screen ecologies of the contemporary moment, people and their personal screens seem merged as one. The relationship between the PSP and the person becomes a manifestation of Donna Haraway's cyborgs.49 12 13 Figure 1: New York City at Times Square One of the most prominent forms of communication in the contemporary moment is the image.50 Of the numerous theoretical perspectives of the image, most important to this project is simply the notion that images have assumed ubiquitous importance in everyday life.51 Rather than simply a cultural fad or influential contemporary custom, image making in the contemporary moment is the force through which reality is perceived, created, and experienced. W. J. T. Mitchell is perhaps most famous for his work on the pictorial turn, which refers to the increasing importance that images take over language in the construction of social reality.52 The privileging of images and image-based technology is powerful not only because the rhetoric of images is everywhere, but because they also operate in unique and different ways from language. Mitchell traces a history of the treatment of images, arguing that there exists a "double-consciousness" towards the image in contemporary culture.53 On one hand, there is a general belief that images are magical creatures that have unique and deadly force over us and have a direct connection to what they represent. This is why, Mitchell explains, most people would refuse to cut out the eyes in a picture of our mother. On the other hand, there is the simultaneously shared and contradictory belief that "Other" people who believe that images are magical must be "primitive" and uneducated.54 The story, which has evolved into somewhat of a cultural myth, of indigenous tribes who refuse to have their pictures taken for fear it will steal their souls, exemplifies this attitude. The double-consciousness towards images results in either an iconophobic/iconoclastic or iconophilic relationship with images. These attitudes may be the result of the fact that our perception of images uses different cognitive processes from what is used for language. In fact, visual perception is always emotional before it is rational.55 Any visual stimuli initially bypass the neocortex (the center of reason and intelligence) and are sent to the thalamus and the amygdala. These areas of the brain deal with emotions and fight or flight responses.56 The contemporary culture of the image alters our perceptions of self, of others, and of the nation.57 Images call us to assume particular subject positions, persuade us to purchase particular products, or invite us to live in particular places and inside of specific homes. Images are the rhetoric of social movements and the tool by which contemporary war is waged.58 Images are embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives and make up a large part of the (em)placed vernacular and our everyday engagement within it. Victor Burgin writes, "The city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart, and so on."59 Thus, the city is a lived site where images intersect with place and where the imagination of the city collides with our experience in live time. 14 The Rhetoric o f Aesthetics Despite a long history of the study of aesthetics, the term remains somewhat elusive. From Immanuel Kant to Pierre Bourdieu to Jacques Ranciere, the study of aesthetics has produced important conversations about the field of art, the nature of beauty, and the political force of aesthetics.60 In anthropology, Victor Turner and Mary Douglas discuss the notion of aesthetics that centers on cultural performances, liminality, and the theatrical dimensions of everyday life.61 From a postcolonial perspective, scholars such as Edward Said, Marianna Torgovnick, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o demonstrate the importance of art in both colonial discourses of oppression as well as modes of intervention and transgression.62 From a rhetorical perspective, Burke argues that aesthetics, or form, "is the creation and fulfillment of desires."63 For Kenneth Burke and other rhetoricians, aesthetics functions as a form of communication that helps people adopt particular identities through the use of shared symbols.64 In particular, communication scholars have taken up aesthetics to demonstrate the potential for social change as well as their role in establishing modes of power and control.65 Helene Shugart and Catherine Waggoner, for example, discuss the transgressive rhetorical force of mediated representations of the camp aesthetic.66 Throughout all of this research, however, there is an underlying tension produced from the slippery foundation of aesthetics, that of the notion of artistic practice. While most scholars would agree that art is more than just something you find in a gallery, the boundaries of what is art and what is not art are blurry. Does, for example, the 1900s ironwork on the side of a New York City Brownstone count as art? How would one categorize the cultural performances embedded in contemporary culture, such as airport security? Is one's choice of clothing each morning an artistic practice? These questions are central in understanding the boundary of art, but the implications are profound. Aesthetics 15 maintain systems of domination and discipline.67 As Bourdieu argues, aesthetic taste is one of the most fundamental ways that class divisions are upheld and maintained.68 Thus, the aesthetic element of the (em)placed vernacular is an exceptionally important part of its rhetorical force. Taking these various lines of argument and theory into account, I define aesthetics as creative practices that work to produce subjectivities, communities, politics, and ways of seeing the world and what is possible within it. This definition works from the assumption that aesthetics are the visual, auditory, textual, material, and experiential elements of everyday life rather than the products of a separate sphere of work or practice. Ranciere offers a particularly useful way of understanding aesthetics and the stakes of aesthetics in contemporary culture. Through what he terms the "distribution of the sensible," he argues that a community or society deems certain things sensible, sayable, seeable, and knowable. 69 Politics and social transformation emerges, he argues, when there is a rupture in this distribution, in the given order of a society.70 This rupture always occurs as another aesthetic and oftentimes occurs within the particularities of place. As a city that is perpetually remade into the image of America, New York City is an appropriate rhetorical text to investigate how individuals utilize intersections between place, images, and aesthetics to navigate the dominant ideologies embedded in the materiality of the city. Just as larger discursive formations may be altered through the linguistic social performative, larger spatial structures can also be altered through the aesthetics of place. It is within the fluidity of place that reappropriations function as an aesthetic social performative to redistribute the sensible and allow for the possibility for the carving out of new critical spaces in the intersection between ideology and materiality. This project is motivated by the conviction that the rhetorical force of contemporary acts of control or transgression arise in 16 17 profound ways from the intersectional dimensions of everyday life. Rather than attempting to simplify these acts down to some "essential" rhetorical nature, I mean to complicate them, to help excite them into revealing their complex and fluidly powerful rhetorical potential. Moving Methodology Riding the Metro-North train into the city is a wild experiment in movement. Image after image of unkempt forests, graffitied walls, and buildings pass by the window, only to be interrupted by the occasional passing train (see Figure 2). Inside, the train is squeaky clean. Sitting in a north-facing car, the Hudson River scenery on the left is contrasted to the increasingly urban images to the right. As one penetrates the boundaries of the city, the graffiti images increase in number and they appear as blurs of color amidst the concrete and metal of the train tracks. Figure 2: Graffiti Outside the North Metro Train As the train comes to a stop in Harlem, I am reminded of my father. My experience of the city exists both in the aesthetic experience of the now as well as in the collection of mediated images of the city, knowledge of Harlem from stories that my father told me from his youth, and from my previous experiences with researching graffiti. These layers of mental images juxtapose themselves with the materiality of the experience of the Harlem stop. This experience becomes profoundly liminal; the train acts as a catalyst for moving from one state of being (the suburbs) to another (the city). As "betwixt and between" passengers of the train not only experience the liminality of penetrating the diffuse boundaries of the city, they also experience the liminality of perpetual image-making of the city itself.71 The city as place is neither static nor permanent. Rather, it is continually transformed in its materiality and in each of the minds of those who walk its streets. As rhetorical, aesthetic, and performative landscapes, embedded within the city of New York and responding to specific economic and place-specific exigencies, I engage three case studies through a critical and creative rhetorical methodology. In the following I first detail how critical rhetoric acts as a foundation for this project, which allows me to view all texts as rhetorical and constitutive. Second, I discuss how creativity is an inherent aspect of critical rhetorical methods of any kind, but it is of particular importance when engaging the diffuse text of the city. Third, I show how conceptual and physical movement becomes key aspects of the research process. Finally, I discuss particular methodological concerns when studying images, performance, and place, including the importance of not reducing everything to words and the importance of the glance when studying the rhetoric of the (em)placed vernacular. 18 Critical Orientations Scholars have taken up critical methods in a number of ways as both McGee and McKerrow argue that a critical method is more of an orientation towards research and scholarship, rather than a method.72 In critical rhetoric, however, the practice of close reading, the idea that we produce rhetoric when we do rhetorical criticism, and the notion that our work is in fact a reconfiguration of fragments rather than a "whole" text, has engendered the need to view texts as diffuse and created by the critic.73 Within this larger critical framework, this project assumes that all places are diffuse, experiential, and constitutive. Just as in the experience on the train, it becomes impossible to treat any of the texts within the city as distinct and closed. Rather, they are connected to other signs, images, and places in ways that make objectively determining an end and a beginning impossible.74 As an experiential text, images, bodies, and material experiences of place intersect and collide with the immediate landscape and the previous assumptions, ideologies, and experiences of the individuals experiencing the place. Again, places become "intersections of both physical and cognitive landscapes."75 Finally, as Dickinson, Brian Ott, and Eric Aoki argue concerning experiential landscapes, these types of texts work constitutively to "invite visitors to assume (to occupy) particular subject positions. These subject positions, in turn, literally shape perceptions; that is, they entail certain ways of looking and exclude others."76 These assumptions about the nature of place from a rhetorical perspective engender the need for creativity and movement as well within the analysis. 19 Creativity has been highlighted as an important dimension of rhetorical studies by a number of scholars.77 As Bonnie Dow argues, since all rhetoric is made of fragments, the role of the critic becomes one of a bricoleur, recombining pieces of rhetoric from here or there in a creative process.78 Particularly when discussing visual artifacts or places, creativity is important because the act of seeing is creative and relies on a dynamic mixture and interplay between the physical process and the psychological and cognitive processes which allow us to make sense and meaning out of visual stimuli.79 Beyond a theoretical focus on creativity, I also utilize some aspects of the photo documentary process within my methodology. The process of photo documentary work provides an important aspect of creativity in line with my larger critical orientations towards rhetorical study. Craig Denton argues that photo documentary is a kind of method that begins by asking questions, creating a plan of research, and engaging in a qualitative process of information gathering, attaining access to specific places and groups of people, and engaging in participant observation to attain the desired material for the formulation of thematic narratives that tell stories, document the existence of certain phenomena, or raise critical consciousness about certain topics.80 Similar to what is currently being termed "rhetorical field methods," which blend performance, ethnography, and participatory research, the use of photography within analysis of the (em)placed vernacular engages communities, performances, and issues of social justice.81 Deciding which images to take, which to analyze, how to bound the text, which theories to incorporate, and what data to include is all a part of the creative process. Unless otherwise indicated, I took all photographs utilized in this dissertation.82 Movement Along with creativity, the analytical orientation used in this dissertation is grounded in conceptual and physical movement. In terms of conceptual movement, Greg Dickinson, 20 for example, articulates a spatial methodology that "emphasizes the movement among the local, personal and ‘formal' details of the site and the abstract, cultural and discursive structures in which these details are embedded."83 While this suggests a theoretical movement, my physical movement is important in the conceptual process. My own ability to move down the street, stopping at areas that seem particularly prominent or salient in my analysis of the place, helps to connect material conditions to larger discourses. Moreover, movement is particularly important when engaging place, performance, and images. Marc Auge suggests that because movement is now an important part of how we understand the new place of postmodernity, scholars must reorient themselves towards how they study place, incorporating movement into their analysis.84 Movement also naturally incorporates the body of the critic into the method for analysis of place. Following scholars like Blair and Pezzullo, being present in a particular place is paramount for rhetorical studies of any kind of "live" rhetoric.85 They argue that focusing on "live rhetoric" will allow the voices of the vernacular to be heard and that issues of social justice might be better addressed if the critical project is embedded in the practice of social interaction and praxis.86 Therefore, along with visual analysis of representations of the city, I also made two research trips to New York City, the first in September of 2012 and the second in April 2013 so that my physical presence in the particularity of place would ground my research and provide illumination to the way that place works rhetorically. Images, Performance, and Place Within the study of place, special attention must be paid to the bodies and performances of users of place as well, which calls for particular methodological concerns. First, it is important not to ignore the inherent excess of the bodies that do the performing. 21 As Conquergood warned, textualizing performances "flattens" them and takes away their embodied power.87 The body is not merely a signifying system, a visual image, or a series of movements. Rather, bodies (just as images do) resist interpretation, meaning, or as Elkins might argue, function at times as the "anti-semiotic."88 Similarly, when studying place and visual and performative texts, one of the most important areas rests on the urge to turn everything into words. In terms of the visual, DeLuca argues that a tendency in visual rhetoric is to engage in "doughnut" analysis where scholars talk around images but never study the actual images themselves.89 Visual images operate in fundamentally different ways than words. They are particularly affective and their force as rhetorical agents cannot be simplified down to an essential meaning.90 Instead, images can be thought of as verbs. They do and the role of a visual rhetorician is to locate their force in both the screen ecologies of the contemporary moment. Furthermore, the method for analysis is different than that of "purely" discursive texts because of the nature of images, performance, and place. Both Casey and Deluca argue that the glance rather than the gaze is a more accurate way of studying photographs because if this unique nature.91 DeLuca argues that speed, glances, and distraction can become an effective mode of engagement, writing, "In our present moment of the public screen, glances of distraction emerge as a way of making do in this new civic space. In response, to see images, critics need to become intoxicated and distracted wanderers reveling in debauchery."92 The gaze, Casey argues, is a mode of viewing privileged by modernity and defined by its gravity, by its ability to take things seriously.93 While the gaze is often privileged in contemporary Western culture, the glance, Casey argues is actually the fundamental way in which individuals interact and learn about the world. The glance is inherently subversive because it subverts the "sober spirit" of the gaze through its speed and 22 inconsistency, and it "dis-establishes what is perceptually (and ultimately socially) established. Even as it stays on the surface, it gets under the official and officious skin of the epistemic establishment, which favors the gaze as a matter of principle."94 Rather than abandon the practices of close reading within rhetorical criticism altogether in favor of a glance, I use the notion of perpetual glancing. This mode of seeing is actually most like the physical movement of the eye, which perceives environments and images through short, small, movements, called saccades.95 These small movements capture what could be thought of as a series of snapshots, which understood in relation to one another, create perception. As a theoretical approach to analysis, this results in close readings of many images surrounding particular places or events, with the understanding that this analysis is always subjective and a result of my own eyes. Additionally, it is with the knowledge that a scientific gaze when approaching rhetorical texts is an unattainable and problematic ideal. Through a critical orientation, creativity and movement, my mode of analysis resists overly method-based approaches to analysis and follows the advice of Edwin Black, who states, "How does one examine a prism? By looking at it though one facet after another, in no particular order . . . sometimes-maybe even all the time-a subject deserves to supersede a method, and to receive its own forms of disclosure."96 Thus, each of my three case studies uses a unique methodology, suitable for the text under analysis and appropriate for the theoretical underpinnings in the argument. Chapter Overviews This project will explore the rhetorics of control and transgression in the (em)placed vernacular of New York City through three engagements with specific places. These case 23 studies include the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement in Zuccotti Park, the artistic work of the street artist known as Banksy in his residency titled Better Out Than In in October of 2012, and the 9/11 Memorial, which opened in 2011. In Chapter 2, I analyze the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement from the perspective of the (em)placed vernacular. I begin with a spatial study of New York City's Zuccotti Park to argue that Auge's concept of nonplaces and the notion of dwelling have important connections to place, political subjectivity, and aesthetics. In addition, I analyze three of the more forceful image events that arose out of the occupation of the park, including an Adbusters image, the Brooklyn Bride March, and the artwork of Molly Crabapple. Ultimately, I argue that the collective subjectivity of OWS used public dwelling to produce an abject aesthetic in the (em)placed vernacular of New York City's Financial District. This use of the (em)placed vernacular transformed the (non)place of Zuccotti Park into a place where a collective subjectivity could be born. In addition to the notion of public dwelling as a transgressive tactic in social movements, I also introduce the concept of the (cyber)place, which I define as a virtual place such as Facebook or Twitter that is characterized by its own aesthetics, physicality, and materiality that are distinct from the places of the urban, home, or built environment. This chapter focuses on the transgressive use of the (em)placed vernacular in the Occupy protests to illustrate the important relationship between place and (cyber)place, aesthetics, and image in contemporary protest. Chapter 3 expands my discussion of aesthetics and visuality in the contemporary moment through the notion of architectures o f vision, which refers to the structures of vision that affect the potentiality for transgression. Through an analysis of the street artist Banksy's residency of New York City, I identify three major themes: The Residence o f Art, Images o f Discontent, and Re-Visions o f the City. I argue that Banksy's images exert an influential postsubject 24 voice into the visual discourse of (em)placed vernacular of New York City, which I define as a visual articulation in both material and/or virtual form that resists traditional markings of identity and authorial intent in favor of play, dissemination, and the invitation for multiple interpretations. In play, elements of the (em)placed vernacular are turned into visual toys through a critical orientation towards the urban landscape, postmodern aesthetic codes, visual violence, and the logics of the public screen. I conclude by arguing that play may offer an innovative, transgressive, and effective mode of engaging in the (em)placed vernacular and contemporary rhetorical argument. In Chapter 4, I engage the (em)placed vernacular of the 9/11 Memorial to understand the political, social, and rhetorical implications of the struggle over images and place in response to an attack on the America's homeland. Through a spatial study of the Memorial and visual analysis of several relevant (cyber)places, I identify three major themes of the Memorial site, which include Spectacles o f Terror, Disciplining Remembrance, and Practices o f Touring. By embedding particular lines of vision, what I term vectors, within the (em)placed vernacular, I argue that the Memorial works through a rhetoric of control by visually framing the events of 9/11 through the binary of good versus evil. This rhetoric perpetuates a form of patriotism whose habitus is both fear and consumption. In addition, I suggest that this type of rhetoric produces what I term the surveillingflaneur, a security-conscious consumer who actively helps to fix dominant (em)placed meaning and watch for behavior that is out of place. I conclude this project by revisiting the distinction between place and space to argue that place-making is a fundamental aspect of issues of social justice because of its profound connection to practices of seeing. I then return to my case studies to offer two specific types of place-making that have emerged from this analysis, transgression and control. (Em)placed 25 26 transgression, I argue, can be understood as acts which reappropriate aesthetic codes by individuals or groups working performatively within the particularities of place. Alternatively, (em)placed control refers to acts which embed dominant ideology in the (em)placed vernacular and make altering it by individuals or groups difficult, illegal, or immoral. These two different ways of approaching place can be understood as extremes on a spectrum: in everyday life individuals can expect to encounter disciplinary strategies embedded in the places they traverse, but these places also always offer the codes of transgression as well, hidden beneath and on top of place surfaces, waiting to be seen, used, and transformed into the political. 27 Endnotes 1 Doreen B. Massey, "Time-Space and the Politics of Location," in Interdisciplinary Architecture, ed. Nicoletta Trasi. Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2001, 162. 2 Gregory Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke (Columbia: South Carolina Press, 2004), 32. 3 As quoted in: Joanne Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History o f New York from Colonial Times to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2. 4 Guy Debord, The Society o f the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1983). 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice o f Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 91. 6 Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History o f New York from Colonial Times to the Present. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 David Grimstead, as quoted in Ibid. 9 Don Hogan Charles, "Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals," The New York Times, July 21, 1971. 10 Jack Stewart, Graffiti Kings: New York City Transit Art o f the 1970's (New York: Melcher Media, n.d.); Janice Rahn, Painting Without Permission: Hip-Hop Graffiti Subculture (Connecticut: Burgin & Barvey, 2002). 11 To read the New York City Anti Graffiti Legislation visit: http://www.nyc.gov/ html/nograffiti/html/legislation.html. 12 Cara Buckley, "Monthlong Chase Around New York City for Banksy's Street Art," The New York Times, October 28, 2013, sec. N.Y./Region, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2013/10/29/nyregion/monthlong-chase-around-new-york-city-for-banksys-street-art. html?_r=0. 13 Kurt Andersen, "The Protester," Time, December 14, 2011,http://www.time.com/ time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132,00.html. 14 Milton Klein, as quoted in Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History o f New York from Colonial Times to the Present, 2. 15 Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 163-73. 28 16 Henri Lefebvre, The Production o f Space (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); de Certeau, The Practice o f Everyday Life. 17Kevin M. DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric o f Environmental Activism (New York: Routledge, 1999). 18 Philip Wander, "The Third Persona: The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism," Central States Speech Journal 34 (1984): 1-18; Raymie E. McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis," Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91-111; Michael C. McGee, "The ‘Ideograph': A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 66 (1980): 1­17. 19 Communication scholars engage the critical project from a variety of perspectives. For examples from a rhetorical perspective see Dana L. Cloud, "Beyond Evil: Understanding Power Materially and Rhetorically," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 3 (2003): 531-38; Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 291-309; Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites, eds., Rhetoric, Materiality & Politics (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009); Danielle Endres, "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (March 2009): 39-60, doi:10.1080/14791420802632103; Maurice Charland, "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple QUEBECOIS," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133-51; Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, "The Critique of Vernacular Discourse," Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19-47. From a media perspective see, for example: Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki, "The Politics of Negotiating Public Tragedy: Media Framing of the Mathew Shepard Murder," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5, no. 3 (2002): 483-505; A. Hoskins, "Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age," Media, Culture & Society 25, no. 1 (2003): 7-22, doi:10.1177/0163443703025001631; Greg Dickinson, "The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia," Western Journal o f Communication 70, no. 3 (September 2006): 212-33, doi:10.1080/10570310600843504. From a social movement perspective, see: Kevin M. DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, "From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence' of Seattle," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125-51; Phaedra C Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics o f Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007); Endres, "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism." 20 For scholarship on the rhetoric of place see, for example: Daniel Makagon, "A Search for Social Connection in America's Town Square: Times Square and Urban Public Life," Southern Communication Journal 69, no. 1 (2003): 1-21; Lawrence W. Rosenfield, "Central Park and the Celebration of Civic Virtue," in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Carole Blair and Neil Michel, "Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2000): 31-55; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum An Earlier Version of This Essay Was Presented at the 2002 Convention of the Western States Communication Association.," Communication and 29 Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2006): 27-47, doi:10.1080/14791420500505619; Greg Dickinson, "Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2002): 5-27; Tamar Katriel, "Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums," The Quarterly Journal o f Speech 80, no. 1 (1994): 1-20; Jean Rahier, "The Ghost of Leopold II: The Belgian Royal Museum of Central Africa and Its Dusty Colonialist Exhibition," Research in African Literatures 34, no. 1 (2003): 58-84. 21 Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 31. 22 For a discussion on the interpolative effects of particular places, see: Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting." 23See, for example: bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990); Kimberle Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241-99. 24 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1989). 25 Jessie Stewart and Greg Dickinson, "Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle," Western Journal o f Communication 72, no. 3 (2008): 280-307, doi:10.1080/10570310802210148. 26 Darrel Enck-Wanzer, "Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization's Garbage Offensive," Quart 92, no. 2 (2006): 177. 27 Carole Blair and Neil Michel, "The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 4 (2007): 595-626; V. Carrington, "I Write, Therefore I Am: Texts in the City," Visual Communication 8, no. 4 (December 17, 2009): 409-25, doi:10.1177/1470357209343356; Carrie Crenshaw, "Resisting Whiteness' Rhetorical Silence," Western Journal o f Communication 61, no. 3 (1997): 253-78, doi:10.1080/10570319709374577; Endres, "The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism"; Charles E. Morris III, "Pink Herring & The Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Crime Panic," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 88, no. 2 (2002): 228-44; Nakayama and Krizek, "Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric"; Mark P. Orbe, "Constructions of Reality on MTV's ‘The Real World': An Analysis of the Restrictive Coding of Black Masculinity," Southern Communication Journal 64 (1998): 32-47; Phaedra Pezzullo, "Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances," Quartery Journal o f Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345-65; Rahier, "The Ghost of Leopold II: The Belgian Royal Museum of Central Africa and Its Dusty Colonialist Exhibition." 28 Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out o f Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 29See Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1996); Lefebvre, The Production o f Space; David Harvey, The 30 Condition o f Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins o f Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1990); Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits o f Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Doreen B. Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2005); Tim Cresswell, Place, A Short Introduction (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Cresswell, In Place/Out o f Place; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study o f Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1989). 30 For a sustained discussion of the how changing meanings of place and space as well as the role of Christianity and the hard sciences in forming the notion of space as abstract and infinite, see Edward S. Casey, The Fate o f Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 31 David Harvey, The Condition o f Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins o f Cultural Change. 32 Cresswell, Place, A Short Introduction; Tuan, Topophilia: A Study o f Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. 33 Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, "Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 257-82, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.585167. 34 This is not to say that a book, a movie, or even a speech is not material. Certainly all rhetorical texts have material form, even if it just the air vibrating on one's windpipes. To read about debates over materiality, see: Dana L. Cloud, "The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron," Western Journal o f Communication 58, no. 3 (1994): 141-63; Jessie Stewart and Greg Dickinson, "Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle," Western Journal o f Communication 72, no. 3 (July 2008): 280-307, doi:10.1080/10570310802210148; Endres and Senda-Cook, "Location Matters." 35Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Aoki Eric, "Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum," Western Journal o f Communication 69, no. 2 (April 2005): 85-108, doi:10.1080/10570310500076684. 36 For an exhaustive discussion of the materiality of rhetoric and the relationship to place, see: Endres and Senda-Cook, "Location Matters." 37 Massey, For Space. 38 Lefebvre, The Production o f Space. 39 Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. 40 de Certeau, The Practice o f Everyday Life. 41 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 42 Jake Simmons, "Performing ‘Of and ‘In': Charting a Body of Ambiguous Performances," Text and Performance Quarterly 28, no. 3 (July 2008): 330-43, doi:10.1080/10462930802107407; Pezzullo, "Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness 31 Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances"; Kevin M. DeLuca, "Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation," Argumentation & Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 9-22. 43 Ono and Sloop, "The Critique of Vernacular Discourse," 20. 44 Lefebvre, The Production o f Space. 45Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics o f the Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). 46 Ibid. 47 Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, "The Critique of Vernacular Discourse," Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 19-47. 48 Kirsty Best, "Interfacing the Environment: Networked Screens and the Ethics of Visual Consumption," Ethics and The Environment 9, no. 2 (2004): 65-85. 49 Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 50 See, for example: Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: University of California Press, 1994); Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, "Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos," Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 1 (2004): 1-24, doi:10.1080/0739318042000184370; Gerda Cammaer, "Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Creating Moving Still Images and Stilling Moving Images of Ecological Disasters," Environmental Communication: A Journal o f Nature and Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 121-30, doi:10.1080/17524030802700599; Christine Harold and Kevin DeLuca, "Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 263- 86; Cara A. Finnegan, "What Is This a Picture Of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 116-23, doi:10.1353/rap.2006.0023; Janis L Edwards and Carole K. Winkler, "Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons," Quarter^ Journal o f Speech 83, no. 3 (1997): 289-109; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, "Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm,'" Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 1 (January 2003): 35-66, doi:10.1080/0739318032000067074; Dana L. Cloud, "‘To Veil the Threat of Terror': Afghan Women and the ( clash of Civilizations ) in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 90, no. 3 (2004): 285- 306, doi:10.1080/0033563042000270726. 51 James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves o f Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. 32 Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994); Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador USA, 1973). 52 Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. 53 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want. 54 Ibid. 55 Ann Marie Steward Barry, Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication (New York: State University of New York press, 1997); Robert L. Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994); Rick Williams, "Cognitive Theory," in Handbook o f Visual Communication: Theory, Methods and Media (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005). 56 Solso, Cognition and the Visaul Arts.. 57 See, for example: Hariman and Lucaites, "Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography"; Cloud, "‘To Veil the Threat of Terror.'" 58W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War o f Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 59 Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 28. 60 Immanuel Kant, Critique o f Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing, 1951); Jacques Ranciere, The Politics o f Aesthetics: The Distribution o f the Sensible (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1987). 61 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness o f Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis o f Concepts o f Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966). 62 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Penpoints, GunPoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory o f the Arts and the State in Arica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 63 Clark, Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. 64 Ibid. 65 Helene A. Shugart, "An Appropriating Aesthetic: Reproducing Power in the Discourse of Critical Scholarship," Communication Theory 13 (2003): 275-303; Micheal Ziser and Julie Sze, "Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice," Discourse 29, no. 2 (2007): 384-310; Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner, Making Camp: (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008); Catherine Egley Waggoner, "The Emancipatory Potential of Feminine Masquerade in Mary Kay Cosmetics," 33 Text and Performance Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1997): 256-72; Guisela Latorre, Walls o f Empowerment: Chicana/o Murals o f California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 66 Shugart and Waggoner, Making Camp:. 67 Shugart, "An Appropriating Aesthetic: Reproducing Power in the Discourse of Critical Scholarship"; Latorre, Walls o f Empowerment: Chicana/o Murals o f California; Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste. 68 Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste. 69 Ranciere, The Politics o f Aesthetics: The Distribution o f the Sensible. 70 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics o f Aesthetics: The Distribution o f the Sensible, Gabriel Rockhill, trans. (London: Continuum, 2004). 71 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness o f Play. 72 McGee, "The ‘Ideograph': A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology"; McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis." 73 Bonnie Dow, "Criticism and Authority in the Artistic Mode," Western Journal o f Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 336-49; Dilip P. Gaonkar, "Performing with Fragments: Reflections on Critical Rhetoric," in Argument and the Postmodern Challenge: Proceedings o f the Eighth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, Speech Communication Association (Annandale, CA: Speech Communication Association, 1993); Michael C. McGee, "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture," Western Journal o f Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 274-89. 74 Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting." 75 Ibid., 30. 76 Ibid. 77 See, for example: Barbara A. Biesecker, "Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Differance," Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110-30; Maurice Charland, "Finding a Horizon and Telos: The Challenge to Critical Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 77 (1991): 71-74; Dow, "Criticism and Authority in the Artistic Mode"; Gaonkar, "Performing with Fragments: Reflections on Critical Rhetoric"; McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis." 78 Dow, "Criticism and Authority in the Artistic Mode." 79 Barry, Visual Intelligence. 80 Craig Denton, "Examining Documentary Photography Using the Creative Method," in Handbook o f Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media, ed. Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, and Gretchen Barbatsis (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2005), 405-28. 34 81 Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, "Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions," Western Journal o f Communication 75, no. 4 (July 2011): 386-406, doi:10.1080/10570314.2011.586969. 82 The images used in my analysis of Zuccotti Park, the 9/11 Memorial, the train, and some Occupy protests were taken by myself. Images used in the Brooklyn Bridge March, the art of Molly Crabapple, and Banksy were all taken from various cyber(places). 83 Greg Dickinson, "Memories for Sale: Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 83 (1997): 4. 84 Marc Auge, Nonplaces: Introduction to an Anthropology o f Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). 85 Carole Blair, "Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places," Western Journal o f Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 271-94; Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism. 86 Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism; Blair, "Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places." 87 Dwight Conquergood, "Ethnography, Rhetoric, and Performance," Quarterly Journal o f Speech 78 (1992): 80-123. 88 Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them. 89 Kevin M. DeLuca, "The Speed of Immanent Images: The Dangers of Reading Photographs," in Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture, ed. Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Dianne S. Hope (London: Sage Publications, 2008). 90 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 91 Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); DeLuca, "The Speed of Immanent Images: The Dangers of Reading Photographs." 92 DeLuca, "The Speed of Immanent Images: The Dangers of Reading Photographs," 89. 93 Casey, The World at a Glance. 94 Ibid., 145. 95 David H. Hubel, Eye, Brain, A nd Vision (New York: Scientific American Library, 1995). 96 Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 24. CHAPTER 2 PUBLIC DWELLING AS ARGUMENT: POLITICS IN (NON)PLACES, (CYBER)PLACES, AND BEYOND The police is that which says that here, on this street, there's nothing to see and so nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space for circulating is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics, by contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving along', of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens. -- Jacques Ranciere As New York City built the zeitgeist of greed and success in monumental public places, high-rises, and lifestyle, it simultaneously saw the use of public places by individuals who fell between the cracks of success. Beginning in the early 1980s, thousands of homeless people began utilizing places like Grand Central Station, Fifth Avenue sidewalks and Tompkins Square for sleeping, eating, and defecating.2 While these acts may not be intentional acts of transgression, they nonetheless function disruptively at the intersection between image and place.3 Mayor Ed Koch implemented an "antiloitering" law and defended it on the basis that a "reasonable, rational person" would only use, for example, Grand Central Station for transportation purposes. This defense, cultural geographer Tim Cresswell points out, ignores the multitude of other uses of the place, such as meeting people, admiring the architecture, or eating. The issue of homelessness in the 1980s in New York City is not about the intended use of city places; it is about the underlying ideologies on which the city itself is built. Cresswell writes, "Homelessness is treated as an instance of people out of place, dislocated from the urban politics and economics of New York."4 The use of a transportation place for sleeping not only disrupted the ideology of Grand Central Station as a place, it also pulled at the very fabric of the American Dream. While the antiloitering law was overturned by the New York State Supreme Court, today's post-9/11 Grand Central Station is often policed by National Guard who watch carefully for bodies, images, and aesthetics that are "out of place" within the (em)placed vernacular. Even in their absence, their remembered guns and presence act as an invisible eye of normalizing force. The logic used to defend the antiloitering law may have changed over the past thirty years, but the ability to dictate what behaviors are tolerated in certain places, and more importantly the ability to define which people are "out of place" remains a fundamental act of power in contemporary culture. In 2011, the intersection between aesthetics and place was illuminated in New York City once again as thousands of bodies appeared "out of place" by making a home out of Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS). Initiated by an Adbusters photo of a ballerina on a bull, the movement began on September 17th. By October 5th it had spread to fifty cities across the country and eventually spread to major cities around the world.5 The slogan "We are the 99%" emerged as a criticism of 1% of the population controlling a disproportionate amount of wealth, the influences of late capitalism, the growing economic divide, corporate greed, and the influence of lobbyists in Washington.6 The OWS occupation of parks across the country and around the world worked within the 36 logics of DeLuca's notion of image events, relying on the nonrational, the visual and the vernacular.7 OWS has been studied primarily by academics from organizational and social media perspectives.8 DeLuca, Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun argue, for example, "Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube create new contexts for activism that do not exist in old media. Plus, social media foster an ethic of individual and collective participation, thus creating a norm of perpetual participation. In OWS, that norm creates new expectations of being in the world."9 However, just as social movements utilize the public screens, they continue to use the material places of the built environment in conjunction with their bodies in their visual form of public address. Their use of these places is increasingly intersectional. Each armed with a smartphone, protestors carry with them access to the multiplicity of places online and their interaction with the material environment is mediated through that access. Importantly, as DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun suggest, the dichotomy between physical presence and social media is a false one: all social movements are mixed, using both the body and public screens.10 While the circulation and use of images within public screens were fundamental to the movement's success, the use and misuse of the (em)placed vernacular once again become an important nodal point in understanding how this movement began and how it functioned so successfully in shifting national discourse surrounding economic disparity in the contemporary moment. While communication scholars have detailed the use of social media in the OWS protests, the success in shifting national discourse from the issue of the budget deficit to the economy and economic disparity in a matter of weeks has not been studied from a place-based perspective. Along these lines, I suggest that the particularities of the (em)placed vernacular of the Financial District was a fundamental part of the OWS movement. Endres 37 and Senda-Cook argue that this type of protest is a temporary reconstruction of place, where a social movement uses place as a way to "challenge the dominant meanings of such places and temporarily enact an alternate meaning."11 Occupations of place like this utilize the power of bodily presence. The power of presence is illustrated by scholars such as Pezzullo who discusses how toxic tours may remake particular histories associated with place through embodied engagement with those places.12 Similarly, Isaac West shows how the politics of PISSAR work to deconstruct the injurious meanings and dominant understandings of corporeal hegemony through their presence and investigations of bathrooms on a college campus.13 However, the use of social media in conjunction with the use of place in contemporary social movements cannot be ignored either. As so many scholars have indicated, OWS is the first large-scale social movement in the United States where the majority of protestors owned a smartphone. Thus, the use of personal and collective images online by OWS is important to understand, even when taking a place-based perspective. In fact, just as place is often incorrectly understood as a stable and unchanging arena when juxtaposed with space, the materiality of media places is often ignored in favor of its hyper­fluidity. 14 The hyper-fluidity of the media is discussed by DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun through the notion of "panmediation" which they describe as "the media matrix itself is always in flux, an ever-changing combination of myriad media, from writing and print and photography to television and radio and cinema to the Internet and laptops and smartphones."15 Despite the fluidity of the media matrix, particular websites, social media arenas, or media outlets are encoded with their own (em)placed vernaculars and exist as "real" physical places in our experience of contemporary culture. DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun 38 continue by claiming, "Mediated worlds are real and reality is always mediated (by media, language, culture, ideologies, and perceptual practices)."16 These places are a particular kind of place, imbued with their own aesthetics, physicality, and materiality which are distinct from the places of the urban, home, or built environment. Thus, I use the term (cyber)place as a distinguishing term (i.e., media places are indeed different from built places), but one that acknowledges the materiality and (em)placed vernaculars of virtual places like Facebook and Twitter. In conjunction with the built environments of the city place, as DeLuca, Lawson and Sun argue, "social media make possible the proliferation of places that can be decentered knots of world-making."17 In the following chapter, I focus on the use of the (em)placed vernacular in the OWS protests to illustrate the important relationship between place and (cyber)place, aesthetics, and image in contemporary protest. Through close readings of the place of Zuccotti Park and three of the more forceful image events that arose out of its occupation, I argue that the OWS use of public dwelling produced an abject aesthetic in the (em)placed vernacular of the Financial District which transformed the (non)place of Zuccotti Park into a place where a collective subjectivity could be born. The Adbusters image, The Brooklyn Bridge March, and the artwork of Molly Crabapple are three image events within the first month of the protests that illustrate how this abject aesthetic was inspired, battled by police and local authorities, and (re)produced by artists and photographers to be disseminated into millions of (cyber)places. I first discuss the importance of images and place in contemporary protest before turning to the particular concerns of my methodology when studying the intersectional dimensions of place and image events in contemporary protest. Next, I move to the analysis where I begin with a spatial study of Zuccotti Park. In this section, I focus on the history 39 40 and materiality of the park and end with a discussion of Auge's concept of nonplaces, the notion of dwelling and the important connections between place, political subjectivity, and aesthetics.18 Last, I turn to the image events created through the reappropriation of the (em)placed vernacular of Zuccotti Park and the force of these events for OWS. Excitable Images A Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the graffiti-adorned streets of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010 in protest of corrupt government.19 While former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali attempted to ease the force of this powerful act by staging a photo op by visiting him in the hospital, he was forced to flee the country within ten days of Bouazizi's death. By January 28th, photographs of crowds carrying an image of Bouazzizi and chanting near the prime minister's office in Tunis began circulating through public screens. This embodied performative protest is one of the most visible catalysts for the Tunisian revolution against their dictatorship and for the mobilization of the multiple revolutions within what is now known as the Arab Spring. In Tahrir Square, murals, street art, and graffiti sprung up in visceral vibrancy to continue to signify dissent and to memorialize these events.20 Images have been a focus of contemporary scholarship on protest and the environmental movement has been particularly adept at utilizing them to promote a change in social consciousness concerning environmental practices. The "birth" of the movement, in fact, utilized images of sublime landscapes to bring social awareness about Yosemite. These images, distributed across the United States, acted as an important rhetorical device for establishing National Parks in the United States.21 This tradition was intensified in 1975 when Greenpeace utilized images of attacking whaling ships to shock viewers into supporting efforts to save the whales.22 More recently, environmental groups utilize what is termed "toxic tours" that guide tourists through particularly environmentally damaged areas of the country to see for themselves the effects on real world communities as a result of the lack of environmental regulations.23 Photographer Edward Burtynski actually utilizes this same perspective from a purely visual approach in his work, focusing on large-scale mining projects, recycling yards, or environmental disasters like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill to bring awareness of the effects of these practices on the world.24 DeLuca argues that groups and individuals like these use image events as "mind bombs" to disarticulate hegemonic ideologies, arguing: In today's televisual public sphere corporations and states (in the persons/bodies of politicians stage spectacles (advertising and photo ops) certifying their status before the people/public and subaltern counterpublics participate through the performance of image events, employing the consequent publicity as a social medium through which to hold corporations and states accountable, help form public opinion, and constitute their own identities as subaltern counterpublics. Critique through spectacle, not critique versus spectacle.25 These image events effectively use what DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples describe as public screens, rather then the public sphere to alter social consciousness.26 As opposed to the public sphere which privileges rational argument, language, and traditional logic, the public screen takes seriously the notion of critique through spectacle, focuses on arguments that appear irrational, and utilizes images rather than words to [dis]articulate the logics that sustain problematic ideologies. Christine Harold and DeLuca argue that images of the corpse of Emmett Till, for example, "became a crucial visual vocabulary that articulated the ineffable qualities of American racism in ways words simply could not do."27 Image events, however, should not be mistaken for only the lingering photographs that circulate throughout our "virtual" worlds. While the public screen's privileging of images, spectacle, and affect are clearly fundamental modes of participatory action in 41 contemporary culture, it would be problematic to tie these modes of protest exclusively to a "virtual" context. The image of Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burning himself to death in protest of the Vietnam War in 1963 functioned as an image event, in part, because it occurred in the intersection of a busy Saigon road. The monk transformed, as Ranciere would argue, an area of "moving along" into one of politics through an affective and violent aesthetic.28 The image itself became a disarticulatory event on the public screens because it had a substantial rhetorical impact in increasing dissent against the Vietnam War through its circulation. But, second, the lived and embodied act was itself an event, whose transgressive force was formed, in part, from the aesthetic reappropriation of the particularities of a Saigon street. A part of the problem with placing too much emphasis on the cyber-image, or even image-based new technologies such as Twitter and Facebook, is that it ignores the continued importance of place in protest. The Arab Spring, for example, has been widely regarded as a social movement revolution that existed in large part on what we would term the public screen.29 Scores of scholars, critics, and consumers were quick to celebrate the use of this technology as the savior from modern oppression.30 While clearly technology is an increasingly important tool for protest and indicates the never-ending changing nature of the public sphere, ignoring the lived action of protestors, and the bodily harm they did or may have encountered is problematic, to say the least.31 The importance of the particularities of place in more traditional acts of protest has been functionalized by rhetorical scholars Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook through the heuristic of "place in protest."32 Three uses of place are included within this heuristic: 1.) The use of imagery or images of place; 2.) The reappropriation of place to mean something different temporarily or 3) The continual reappropriation of place to change the 42 meaning permanently.33 The use of images to transform ideology is exemplified by many of the environmental efforts discussed above, where images of place function to alter public consciousness about nature, preservation, or the environment.34 In addition, images function not only as evidence to support an act of protest, or as an event only on the public screen, but also as a grammar for articulating lived protest to begin with. Mohamed Bouazizi was working from the visual language of protest, created by monks like Thich Quang Duc some fifty years earlier. Many ideological conflicts, like those of the Civil Rights Movement, highlight the importance of reapproapriating existing meanings of place to punctuate a larger rhetorical point. The four freshman A. & T. students who refused to leave the white seats at the Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in the February of 1960 are a prime example of this tactical use of place; the use (or misuse) of place helped to spur a massive sit-in protest where 70,000 students ended up taking part in states from Virginia to Texas.35 Also within the Civil Rights movement is the clear example of Rosa Parks who was among tens of thousands working to reappropriate the place of the bus as a fundamental rhetorical tactic of protest.36 Today, this tactic was used repeatedly throughout the Occupy movement, where thousands temporarily reappropriated places like Zuccotti Park from a nondescript strip of concrete into a place of resistance. Last, Egypt's Tahrir Square is a clear example of how a particular place is reappropriated repeatedly to mean something different. The square was used in the 1977 Egyptian Bread Riots, the Anti-Iraq War protests in March 2003, and now more recently in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, helping to alter the meaning and rhetorical force of this place into that of revolution and of protest.37 And, perhaps a more famous example, Tiananmen Square has been used in numerous protests since the May 4th Revolution in 1919, 43 44 which has produced one of the most iconic images of protest, that of the man standing in front of the tank. By paying attention to the rhetoric of place within images events like this allows for a more multidimensional understanding of how and why some movements function transgressivly. Adventures with Mobile Images A bronze sculpture of a businessman by J. Seward Johnson, Double Check, sits at the Southwest end of Zuccotti Park. Created as a tribute to the financial worker, the image took on added significance after 9/11 when the statue remained virtually undamaged after the attacks, sitting upright in the rubble. Rescue workers reportedly rushed to help him, only to find that he was a statue. 38 It became an iconic symbol of the resilience of New Yorkers and a visual tribute to the 2977 lives lost during the attack. In the days following the attack flowers were stuffed into his arms, a military helmet was placed on his head and American flags, photographs, and a firefighter's hose were placed at his feet.39 Now a plaque accompanies the statue, reading: The ‘everyman' businessman presence in Liberty Park who, before, had faded into the background amongst his human brethren, has been called ‘the survivor.' He was lifted, battered yet whole, from the dust and rubble after the September ll, 2001 tragedy. Liberty Park was since rebuilt, and this bronze man sits again in his original site, bearing scratches and bruises he sustained that day as a poignant reminder of hope and endurance for us all. During the OWS protests, however, this image was reappropriated to become a symbol of the protest movement against the financial worker himself. Images of Double Check's briefcase filled with trash, with his face covered in a black scarf, and head adorned with an American flag bandana, not only worked within the (em)placed vernacular of Zuccotti Park but were circulated within a number of, in particular, conservative blogs as a means of demonstrating the unpatriotic quality of the OWS protests. The Lonely Conservative, for example, wrote a blog post titled "Defacement of ‘Double-Check' Statue Symbolizes Occupy Wall Street Movement Perfectly," detailing the petty, immature demands of the Occupy protestors.40 The movement of this image is an excellent example of the intersectional quality of contemporary protest. The image arose within the resources of the (em)placed vernacular but moved into particular places on the public screen. Thus, it becomes paramount to study both the (em)placed vernacular of city places in which protest occurs in an embodied way as well as the way that image events that arise out of that use function rhetorically in subsequent (cyber)places. To engage the intersectional dimensions of the (em)placed vernacular utilized by OWS protestors, the following analysis was conducted in two steps. The first step focuses on the (em)placed vernacular of Zuccotti Park and was performed through a spatial study. The spatial analysis was conducted in person in four separate sessions to the park lasting two to three hours. These research sessions were done in two research trips, one in September of 2012 and one during April of 2013 and on various days of the week (three days during the week and one weekend day) in order to study the differences in how the park might be used (i.e., tourists versus business people).41 The research sessions and the subsequent analysis of the photographs and notes focus on specific elements of the place, such as architecture, signage, surrounding buildings, and overall aesthetics. A historical analysis was also performed in relation to Zuccotti Park to better understand the meaning of parks in New York City and the potential ways that this history influences the (em)placed vernacular. The second part of the analysis was performed by studying image events that emerged from the first month of the protests. These events were analyzed through close readings of the images themselves, their use in (cyber)place(s) where their presence was particularly forceful, and their effects in the OWS movement. Analysis of the images 45 themselves consisted of studying visual form (color, composition, lighting, etc.), content (subject mater, intertexual references, political/social connections), and context of the images. The first event, the Adbusters image of the Ballerina on the Wall Street Bull, was chosen because of its substantial impact in the (cyber)place of the Adbusters website and because of its clear influence in starting the movement.42 The second image event, the Brooklyn Bridge March, was chosen because it was the moment when major news networks began to cover the movement.43 Since The New York Times is the most influential newspaper in the United States and, as Xu argues, "sets the agenda for many other U.S. news media but also has a significant impact on U.S. national policy," I focused on how the image event was covered within the (cyber)place of the Times website.44 Finally, I turn to the artwork of Molly Crabapple. In this section, I discuss two images created by the artist that include her painting "Lady of Liberty Park," and the "Fight the Vampire Squid" image as well as her embodied participation as an artist in the first month of the protests. These images were chosen because they represent a the aesthetic of OWS that continues to dwell as an aesthetic of dissonance in a multitude of (cyber)places years after the OWS protestors were removed from the park. Dwelling in (Non)place/(Cyber)place Just a few hundred feet from Ground Zero and two blocks from Wall Street, Zuccotti Park sits in the heart of the Financial District and at the feet of Four World Trade Center (see Figure 3). Despite its name, it is not, in fact, what one would traditionally envision as a park. Rather, it appears as a three-quarter-acre concrete plaza and a privately owned public space (POPS). New York City has privatized a number of public spaces such 46 47 Figure 3: Zuccotti Park as sidewalks and parks by selling public places to private owners.45 Introduced in a 1961 zoning resolution, New York City now has are over 500 POPS located throughout the city.46 While offering aesthetic interest to the city, these places operate under the guise of public ownership, while remaining under the control of the contemporary subject, the corporation. In the case of Zuccotti Park, it is owned by Brookfield Office Properties, who also own a building adjacent to the plaza.47 The (em)placed vernacular of Zuccotti park invites visitors to either move through the space by use of the central walkway or to sit momentarily to enjoy a hint of controlled nature amidst the towers of concrete and steel. Like the Wall Street Bull, who angrily resides only a few blocks away, the park exudes a masculine presence. Control over nature, signaled through the perfectly maintained concrete barriers, allows the visitor to enjoy nature while still controlling its existence. A centralized diagonal pathway directs bodies to move through the space and public art punctuates each end. Redesigned after it sustained substantial damage on 9/11, glossy granite benches and tables cluster at each end and fifty-three honey locust trees and three flowerbeds are positioned throughout the space. The rows of food stands that cluster along the southern edge of the park and the tables at either end also indicate that this place is designed for consuming food. Consumption is further reinforced within the space through the buildings that surround the park. On the Southeastern edge of the park, One Liberty Plaza rises impressively in modern black steel as one of the largest office buildings in the city. It houses the headquarters of Merrill Lynch, a wealth management division of Bank of America.48 Four World Trade Center sits across the street from its Northwest corner and a Men's Wearhouse is housed in the ground floor of a massive Gothic designed building along the Southwestern edge. The public art in Zuccotti Park infuses a masculine ideal into the aesthetics and envisions a particular type of person to utilize the place. At the Northeast end, Joie de Vivre, a seventy-foot-tall bright red steel modernist sculpture by Mark di Suvero employs a tree-like design, but with steel and an orange hyper-color. On the southwest end Double Check sits. The presence of art indicates that a certain level of cultural capital is necessary for enjoyment and a pastiche of architectural styles surround the small place.49 In fact, Double Check is nearly a perfect metaphor for the plaza itself. Poised as if ready to leave at any moment, the financial worker is dressed in a suit and tie and appears distracted by his personal belongings, among which are a pack of cigarettes, a pen, and a calculator. Even in bronze, his mind seems elsewhere, the park and its amenities are unnoticed in his perpetual focus. In addition, the significance of using both a man and a financial worker as an emblematic image of the "everyday" person is profound. The (em)placed vernacular of (non)places, or as Ranciere would call it, the distribution of the sensible "defines what is visible or not in common space."50 This image indicates that the type of person who should be seen in this place is the 48 late capitalist masculine ideal, the masculine financial worker. For the average individual, for the 99%, the park is a (non)place. It is simply a place for "moving through." Auge theorizes the notion of "non-places" as places that are characterized by circulation, consumption and communication, arguing, "Big cities are defined firstly by their capacity to import and export people, products, images and messages. Spatially, their importance can be measured by the quality and scale of the highway and rail networks linking them with their airports."51 Of course the explicit transportation places are most easily identified as (non)places, but the overarching fluidity of capital and consumption can be increasingly found in numerous public places. As Harvey suggests, all places become only a temporary moment of permanent capital in the increasingly fluid movement of global capital brought on by postmodernity.52 In this fluidity, both space and place become arenas for circulation and movement, existing in permanent liminality by moving or allowing bodies to move between "here and there."53 This liminality can create a fracturing of a sense of identity and a "sense of place" must be manufactured through place-making tactics. As a consequence, contemporary places have begun to "enunciate" locality with particular aesthetic codes that evoke authenticity.54 Chain restaurants, such as Starbucks, McDonalds, or the Olive Garden, exist as both particular places and as inauthentic copies of an "original" place. The constitutive effects of these postmodern places vary. The mall, for example, might constitute individuals (among other things) as consumers.55 Other places, such as the Central Park, national monuments, or Disneyland, might constitute visitors as American citizens.56 Still other places, such as Las Vegas or a tattoo parlor, may provide the symbolic resources for the production of subjectivity, constituted out of the symbolic and material resources of the place.57 49 These place-making strategies and contemporary desire to build places that counter the fluidity of contemporary capital and circulation speak to larger issues than just nostalgia. In the (non)place of Zuccotti Park, the constitutive effects are particularly detrimental in a democratic system. The feeling of placelessness and the desire the build unique places is, ultimately, about the desire to exist as a speaking subject. Lefebvre, for example, writes that the ability to produce a place is fundamental to existence as a culture or society. In addition, while (non)places like Zuccotti Park have arisen in their use and consequence in the contemporary moment, New York City parks have a rich history of existing as sites of circulation, movement, and control. In response to both pressure to moralize the city and fears of the unknown, the mid- 1800s saw efforts to intentionally design city spaces around particular aesthetics.58 Frederick Law Olmstead emerged as a prominent designer of the city of New York, designing City Park and scores of other places with the intention of "clarifying" the city parts. In this clarifying endeavor, one of the major spatial strategies was to differentiate between residential dwelling places and commercial work places. Parks emerged as a middle ground in this division, where people could visit for an "hour or so" after work to forget about the hustle and competition of the city, enjoy nature, and gather together, regardless of social status.59 Not unlike the Habermasian coffeehouse, the park was designed as an ideal democratic place.60 However, citing Jeremy Bentham's essay on "The Means of Preventing Crime," Olmstead also designed his parks to function as a nodal point in a system of "order and security."61 With a growing population, he argued, there also emerged a growing "number of idle, thriftless, criminal and dangerous classes."62 Olmstead used the park to combat the "dangerous classes" by attempting to eradicate the residential image o f working-class, where 50 people appeared as a group by socializing in the streets directly outside of the home. Not only was this aesthetic counter to a White enlightenment aesthetic, but it was also tied to a fear of riots and dissent, which occurred regularly in New York City streets. Alan Trachtenberg writes, "Embodied in the concept of the park lay a motive to eradicate the communal culture of working-class and immigrant streets, to erase that culture's offensive and disturbing foreignness, and replace it with middle-class norms of hearth and tea table."63 In Olmstead's vision, instead of communing outside the home, in the street, citizens would commune in a particular place designed for communing, one that refused the aesthetic of the city for one of nature. To regulate behavior in these places, Olmstead advocated a corporate model of control, where an appointed board of "trusted" and elite citizens would create rules, appoint police, and supervise park activities. Thus, under the guise of democratic ideals, the park was designed as a (non)place and an explicitly antidwelling place; a place of circulation and pause where all classes (excluding, of course, the dangerous ones) could move momentarily after work before traveling to their suburban dwelling places. Beyond this, the building of city parks destroyed other places and homes in their clarifying endeavor. The (em)placed vernacular of Zuccotti Park and the larger Financial District itself hails visitors to move through the space or pause momentarily. Within this movement and circulation that mirrors the larger city and which builds on the history of parks as a site of classism and surveillance, the aesthetics and the constitutive force of Zuccotti Park functions in particularly detrimental ways in a democratic society. (Non)places constitute nothing beyond consumption and movement because bodies are always asked to keep moving rather than appear as a speaking subject. Coupled with a post-9/11 culture of surveillance, these places work to produce a culture in which speaking subjects are silenced.64 As this space functions as a form of control, intended or not, transgressive tactics emerge simultaneously. 51 To transgress an (em)placed vernacular that hails visitors as consumers and nonsubjects is to refuse that call, to refuse to consume, and to appear as a subject through the power of presence in place. As cultural geographer Tim Cresswell writes, "The unintended consequence of making space a means of control is to simultaneously make it a site of meaningful resistance."65 Image Event #1: A Ballerina on a Bull and Inspiring Public Dwelling In black and white, an angelic ballerina perches gracefully on top of a massive bull forged out of metal (see Figure 4).66 The bull faces the viewer in full attack, immediately 52 Figure 4: Adbusters Occupy Poster67 setting the viewer on a visual defensive. The background frames the central juxtaposition, where a mob wearing gas masks rushes forward from a mist, weapons raised in protest. Their gas masks indicate that the air is unbreathable, that the environment is unfit for human life. Even though a tree branch peeks through the fog, the cobblestone streets indicate that this natural life is preserved for pleasure; the park, the plaza, the concrete planters trap nature without any of its wildness. Rather than a statement of certainty to explain this image, a question is posed at the top of the image in red: "What is our one demand?" The question implies provisionalism, presupposes a grievance, and asks for just one demand, not many. Unanswered, however, it invites a different answer from each of its viewers. On the image of the street where the bull and ballerina balance directions include: "#occupywallstreet September 17th." These words give context to the bull and work with a visual framework to illustrate the profoundly interwoven nature of the city and public screens of the contemporary moment. With a final wink, the image instructs viewers to "Bring tent," a snarky but serious indication of the intentions of public dwelling, to live outside in the urban jungle, to make their private grievances known on the toxic streets of New York's Wall Street. As a symbol, the bull (as opposed to the bear) signifies a period of rising prices in the financial market but it is has become the actual embodiment of Wall Street and capitalism itself. Underlying this embodiment is a hypermasculinity, an aggressiveness and strength, existing only through the forging of nature's metals by the strength and vision of human hands. The bull was created by artist Arturo Di Modica, who originally placed it illegally outside of the New York Stock Exchange after the stock market crash of 1987. City officials quickly removed it.68 Former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern had the Bull brought back but placed in its current position just north of Bowling Green Park.69 The continued 53 residence of the bull in the heart of the Financial District has become symbolic and iconic of capitalism itself and has also become a popular tourist attraction. In fact, enough visitors have made their way to see it that local police are stationed there to direct viewers to take photographs with it. Fascinatingly, many tourists take photographs of themselves with the Bull's large testicles, even touching them for added effect. A simple Google search using the search terms, "Wall Street Bull Balls Pictures" reveals thousands of images of people touching the testicles. Because of the fluidity of actual capital in the world market, the bull is a necessary material symbol for the economic system. To visit and consume the image of the bull is to consume the essence of consumption and economic success. As John Urry argues, the tourist chooses particular places on which to gaze "because there is an anticipation, especially through daydreaming or fantasy, of intense pleasures either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered."70 In the case of the Wall Street Bull, these anticipations are located in the pleasures of ultimate capital and in the fantasy of the American Dream. To touch the testicles is to make explicit the origins of this fantasy: sexual aggression that helps to define hypermasculinity. In the consumer-based and late capitalist culture of the United States, to take a photograph of the Wall Street Bull is a metaphor for complete consumption, an image of the image of capital, consumed visually as a means of possessing the fantasy of consumption. Within this context, the ballerina's visual force arises from her almost perfect oppositional juxtaposition with the bull. She is graceful, feminine, delicate, creative, balanced, calm, beautiful, artistic, white, and small. Most importantly, she exists as a live human in motion, as opposed to the metal immobility of the bull. She appears unaffected by the toxic surroundings and dignified in her existence as a visual anomaly. As viewers, 54 however, we are not invited to identify with her. Because of the relay relationship between the words and the image, we are invited to identify with the mob who rush towards this juxtaposition.71 Her rhetoric lies not in her ability to invite behavior like her own in her viewers, but in her ability to visualize the dichotomy that exists as the foundational and underlying hyper-masculinity of Wall Street. By juxtaposing the bull with a hyper-feminine image, the hyper-masculinity of the bull is intensified. Subsequently, the hegemony of late capitalist aggressiveness and violence, which is motivated by the normalizing discourse of gender, is highlighted. The mob coming forward from the fog implies an impending violence to this oppositional juxtaposition; the image exists as nearly a perfect metaphor for disrupting binary logic that underlies oppression in the contemporary moment. The ballerina and the bull in a fog of discontent clearly resonated with people who viewed the image and they took up the call to action. On September 17th, about 150 people set up camp in Zuccotti Park and another several hundred marched along Broadway after local police blocked off the streets near the Stock Exchange.72 Over the course of the next two weeks, the slogan "the 99 percent" emerged and more protestors gathered. Inspired by the Arab Spring, Kalle Lasn and Micah White of the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters created the above image that launched the OWS movement. The original image was published in conjunction with a blog post on July 13, 2011 within the (cyber)place of the Adbusters' website.73 The post contained an explicit call to action concerning the culture of consumption and the need to begin a revolution like the Arab Spring. In this original rendition of the image the ballerina and the bull were shown in various frames with "#OCCUPYWALLSTREET" centered on top of them. Below, the connection to the Arab Spring was made explicit with the phrase, "Are you ready for a Tahir 55 moment?" The article also revealed the intention to dwell in lower Manhattan: "On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and Occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices."74 The blog post was titled, "A Shift in Revolutionary Politics" and heralded the effectiveness of the collaborative and leaderless style of Arab Spring. In addition, seeing the success of protestors in Egypt repeating the one demand that Mubarak be removed from power, Adbusters asked its readers what their one demand would be. While the post suggested that President Obama "ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington," it asked its readers what they thought the one demand should be.75 The blog received over 500 diverse posts discussing this central question and mirrored the eclectic appearance of the movement in the occupation of the park. As an image event, it operated within the frameworks of culture-jamming in the Dadasit tradition and the Situationist International style. Harold argues that what is termed "culture jamming" is a form of resistance which works within the media culture system to undermine the power of consumer culture and liberate "publics from being consumed by consumption."76 The Adbusters photo successfully hailed viewers as protestors and inspired them to not only enter the park but utilize the place of the park as a dwelling place. Protestors set up their tents, brought food and supplies, and made visible not only their intentions to live outside, but to live outside for an extended period of time. In addition to making visible their private homes in a public place, during the day, protestors took down tents and set up stations for reading, eating, and democratic assembly. Living outside, coupled with their use of cardboard for signage and barter system, caused their home[less]ness, their public dwelling to erupt as a pa