Encountering Occupy London: BoundaryMaking and the Territoriality of Urban

Activism

PLEASE NOTE: This is a draft version of an article, laterpublished as:

Halvorsen, S., 2015. ‘Encountering Occupy London:Boundary Making and the Territoriality of Urban Activism’Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(2): 314-330.

Abstract

This article examines the practices of encountering ofOccupy London, and argues that they provide a means forrethinking the production of territoriality.Specifically, I argue that boundary making not onlyinvolves hierarchical relations of power-over but alsothe articulation of bottom-up power-to. The article firstexamines literature on boundary making, and proposesencountering as a more appropriate vocabulary torepresent this practice in the context of urban activism.It then conceptualises encountering as the articulationof power-to, a moment in the production of territorialityfrom below, bringing together John Holloway’s dialecticalunderstanding of power and Henri Lefebvre’s writings onterritorial autogestion and urban encounters. The remainderof the article examines practices of encountering inOccupy London, based on militant research with themovement that combined ethnography, interviews andarchive analysis. It focuses on the spaces of the GeneralAssembly and the protest camp, exploring how encounterswere productive of new social relations and highlightingkey tensions. In particular I note the inevitableephemerality of activist encounters, tensions overinstitutionalising encounters, and end by calling forgreater attention on the power relations involved,warning against assumptions that encounters of power-tonecessarily lead to positive outcomes.

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Keywords: Encounters, Territoriality, Boundaries, Occupy,Urban Activism

Introduction

On October 15th, 2011, around three thousand peoplegathered in the financial district of London with theintention of occupying the London Stock Exchange (LSX).Just over a month previously, a similar act took place indowntown New York where activists occupied a square nearWall Street in order to not only protest the failures ofcapitalism, but also demonstrate working alternatives(see Graeber, 2013). Inspired by the explosion of urbanprotest camps worldwide, from Tahrir Square to Puerta delSol, a new social movement was born under the name andspatial practice of Occupy, and October 15th sawoccupations spring up in hundreds of cities worldwide. InLondon, the heavy police fortifications at the LSXinformed our decision to camp in the adjacent courtyardof St Paul’s cathedral. Unlike the secluded space infront of the LSX, the courtyard was a busy thoroughfareand provided endless potential for encounters. OccupyLondon camped at St Paul’s for four and a half months,becoming one of the longest standing camps in the Occupymovement, and subsequently occupied a second protest camp(Finsbury Square) as well as several buildings. Theseoccupations - urban ensembles between people, things(e.g. tents) and the built environment -provided spacesof encounter in which power was negotiated and new socialrelations were produced.

In this article I explore practices of encountering atthe St Paul’s camp and argue that they provide a meansfor rethinking the production of territoriality. I arguethat practices of boundary making do not only involvehierarchical relations of power-over, following dominantunderstandings of territoriality, but also involve thearticulation of bottom-up “power-to” (Holloway, 2002) andthe creation of urban ensembles akin to Lefebvre’s (1966)notion of “territorial autogestion”. The production ofterritoriality by social movements has been little

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explored in Anglophone literature, presenting a researchlacuna that is particularly striking following the waveof protest camps in 2011. While recent attention has beengiven to the importance of materiality to the geographiesof occupation (Arenas, 2014; Vasudevan, 2014), thereremains a need to examine the role of territoriality.

I suggest the lack of attention to activistterritorialities is for two reasons. Firstly, muchresearch on territoriality has understood it in narrowterms, broadly inline with Robert Sack’s (1986, page 5)seminal definition as “a powerful geographic strategy tocontrol people and things by controlling area”. As LatinAmerican research over recent years has demonstrated,however, territoriality is not only a hierarchicalstrategy of control, but is also a bottom-up process ofgenerating new social relations and values in space(Haesbaert, 2007; Porto Gonçalves, 2001; Zibechi, 2012).Secondly, in the limited discussions on territoriality inAnglophone literature on activism it has generally beenunderstood in relation to the production of networks (e.g.Beaumont and Nicholls 2007; Routledge and Cumbers, 2009)the central spatiality for much research into socialmovements. Although researchers have helpfully pointedout that territoriality and networks may be co-constituted, and are not opposed, they nevertheless failto consider how territoriality is produced in and ofitself as a spatiality of activism. Doing so requires agreater theoretical and empirical focus on territoriality andthe practices through which it is produced.

This article focuses on one element of territoriality,the practice of boundary making, and proposes encounteringas a more appropriate vocabulary to represent thispractice in the context of urban activism. Afterexploring literature on boundary making in the followingsection, including research on boundaries and socialmovements, I develop my understanding of encountering andterritoriality. Specifically, I bring together JohnHolloway’s dialectical understanding of power and HenriLefebvre’s writings on territorial autogestion and urbanencounters in order to conceptualise encountering as the

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potential articulation of power-to, a moment in theproduction of territoriality from below. The remainder ofthe article then examines practices of encountering inOccupy London, in the context of the General Assembly andthe protest camp. In so doing I expose how power isnegotiated in encounters, pointing towards the potentialfor forging new social relations. In addition I explorecertain tensions - over the institutionalisation ofencounters, their ephemerality, and the clashing ofpower-to - leading to a broader reflection on OccupyLondon’s politics in the conclusion.

This article is based on militant research conducted withOccupy London over three years. Shukaitis and Graeber(2007, page 9) define militant research as an“intensification and deepening of the political…[that]starts from the understandings, experiences, andrelations generated through organizing as both a methodof political action and as a form of knowledge”. Myinitial involvement in Occupy London was as a participantin the movement, and only later did it become the focusof my research. Bridging the gap between activism andresearch, and thought and praxis, has provided numeroustensions, in particular between my institutionalrequirements and responsibilities (e.g. ethics reviews,PhD criteria, the pressures of building an academiccareer) and my commitment to a social movement and theeveryday practices of activism. In academia, militantresearch is necessarily located not only within, but alsoagainst-and-beyond the university (see AutonomousGeographies Collective, 2010; Russell, 2014). My researchcombined a seven-month ethnography, together with 43 in-depth interviews with Occupiers and archive analysis.Although Occupy London continues to exist at the time ofwriting, albeit without a protest camp, my ownparticipation in the movement lasted less than a year.i

This has posed additional tensions as I continue to writeabout the movement from an increasingly detachedperspective. Militant research is based on a commitmentto intensifying and deepening struggles, yet a keychallenge is being able to balance critical reflectionwith political support. In what follows I present my

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research with the aim of learning from the case study ofOccupy London, and with the hope of making it useful tohow we think, and practice, in relation to ongoingstruggles over the production of space.

Territoriality and Boundary Making

Territoriality is a fundamental concept of politicalgeography (Cox, 2003), and has been discussed widely overrecent decades. Early discussions on territoriality weredominated by ethological approaches, which focused onbehavioural practices that demarcate spaces forbiological functions (Ardrey, 1967; Malmberg, 1980). Soja(1971), however, suggested that whilst ethology has beenimportant to human society historically, it isincreasingly being replaced by a political imperative toorganise space, particularly through the form of thestate. In what has arguably become the defining text onhuman territoriality, Sack (1986) took this discussionforward by both rejecting outright an ethological basis,and emphasising how territoriality is a multi-scalarstrategy existing beyond the confines of the state. Hefamously defined territoriality as “the attempt by anindividual or group to affect, influence, or controlpeople, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting andasserting control over a geographic area” (page 19). Itis this understanding of territoriality as a strategy forproducing abstract space based on exerting power overothers, that has come to dominate its usage in muchgeographical analysis (e.g. Agnew, 2008; Herbert, 1997).

The concept of boundaries is central to most definitionsof territoriality, and is the aspect I focus on in thisarticle. For Sack (1986, page 32), boundaries are a corefeature of territoriality via their role in communicatingsome hierarchically imposed classification of space thatinvolves “a statement about possession or exclusion”.Territoriality is a strategy for exerting power overpeople and things in space, and boundaries are a simpleand effective means of communicating this. As Sack (1986,page 19) states, “boundaries are used by some authorityto mold, influence, or control activities”. Boundaries

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thus serve as markers for the ordering of space and “arepolitical strategies designed to attain particular ends”(Storey, 2012, page 9). In this way territoriality hascommonly come to be understood as “the assignment ofmeanings – of various sorts – to bounded spaces, toborders and boundaries, to the crossing of lines”(Delaney, 2005, page 28).

Across the ever-expanding literature on boundaries thereis a recognition of the need to consider them as activeprocesses rather than as fixed containers or markers(e.g. Jones and Johnson, 2014; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr,2007). Paasi (1996; 2009) has pointed out that boundariesare in constant flux and rely on ongoing practices thatreconstitute them at a range of scales. He emphasisesthat boundaries are social processes that take place inparticular socio-spatial contexts, through which otheringand exclusion may take place. Elsewhere Novak (2011) haspointed out that although boundaries may be produced as astrategy of territoriality, a hierarchical attempt toreach a particular end, there is nothing pre-given aboutwhat they may lead to. Boundaries are precisely anattempt, an attempt that is constantly being contestedand often leads to unknown outcomes. Novak (2011) thusargues that boundaries are part of a “flexibleterritoriality” that is a much more open process than thework of Sack, and others, has recognised.

While the work of Paasi and Novak is useful forconceptualising boundaries as social processes that arepart of a flexible territoriality, their starting pointis the attempt to order space from above through astrategic understanding of territoriality, which is oflimited use for understanding social movements. There isa growing literature, however, that considers boundariesfrom the perspective of activism. Many have pointed outthat boundaries often act as spaces of resistance, forexample through contestations and struggles against theproduction of international borders (Antonsich, 2013;Pallister-Wilkins, 2011; Staudt, 2008). Mostoptimistically Hardt and Negri (2004) suggest that bordercrossing and mobility can act as weapons against

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dominant, territorialised forms of power. Elsewhere,Jones’ (2012) research at the India-Bangladesh borderdemonstrates how state-based territoriality is never allencompassing and that borders are as much “spaces ofrefusal” as they are of domination, in which the everydaypractices of local populations are able to resist andescape the imposition of boundaries from above.Boundaries are not only associated with the nation-state,but take place through ongoing practices of enclosure and“accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003). Onceagain, social movements are framed as breaking downfences (Klein, 2002) and transforming enclosures intocommons (Jeffrey et al, 2011).

At the same time, however, boundaries can be generativesites of struggle that activists strive to construct, asrecent research has pointed out. Firstly, the productionof temporary boundaries such as barricades has long beena feature of social movements, part of what Schulze(2012) terms “revolutionary borders” that consistentlyreappear in urban battlegrounds (see Routledge, 1994;Scholl, 2012). Here boundaries, and barricades, arecrucial for practices of resistance, defending spacesfrom externally imposed violence. Although Feigenbaum etal (2013) have noted barricades to be a common feature inprotest camps worldwide, in the case of Occupy Londonthere was little need for such a defensive strategy, inpart because for the camp’s duration there was an ongoingbattle in court over its legality. Secondly, boundarieshave been crucial to more long-lasting attempts atcreating spaces of autonomy such as squats and socialcentres (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010, Squatting EuropeKollective, 2013). Ince (2012, page 1654) notes that anautonomous reading of borders shifts the focus from“controlling flows” towards “nurturing or adapting…relationships”, tying in with Novak’s (2011) “flexible”reading of boundaries, dynamic processes through whichpower relations are negotiated. This aspect of boundarymaking has been central to Occupy London, as Idemonstrate below.

Rethinking Boundaries: Encounters, Power-to and

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Territorial Autogestion

In order to develop a more relevant vocabulary for theterritoriality of social movements I suggest thatpractices of boundary making can be rethought through theconcept of encounters. The idea of the encounter is oftenemployed to describe diverse practices of meeting,typically in unexpected or causal ways, through whichidentities are constructed and negotiated acrossdifference (Ahmed, 2000; Watson, 2006). Increasingattention has been paid to spaces of encounter and theirtransformative potentials (Askins and Pain, 2011),particularly in the context of urban inclusivity andcosmopolitanism (Binnie et al, 2006; Mawani, 2012;Watson, 2006). Much of this literature referencesAllport’s (1954) “contact theory”, which argued thatincreased contact between different social groups woulddecrease prejudice and improve relations. In aninfluential text on the geographies of encounter,however, Valentine (2008) emphasises that encountersshould be not romanticised, and that practices ofencountering often fail to change underlying values andprejudices (see also Lawson and Elwood, 2014).

Spaces of encounter thus tend to be based on ambiguousand antagonistic practices, and remain unpredictable andopen in their outcomes. In one of few attempts to exploreencounters in the context of activism, Chatterton (2006)examines the mundane encounters that take place between“activists and their others” during protests, and arguesthat spaces of encounter are produced based on the notionof “uncommon ground”, sites of uneven power relations andassumed identities. These encounters problematise binarydivisions and create spaces for relations and values tobe built across difference. Spaces of encounter thusprovide generative sites in which boundaries aresimultaneously constructed and broken down. Yet it isimportant to emphasise that the outcomes of encountersare open and unpredictable, based on constantnegotiations of power-relations, and thus have a politicsto them. In order to build a deeper conceptualisation ofencountering, and the production of territoriality, it is

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thus necessary to examine in more detail the powerrelations involved.

I have suggested that territoriality is typically definedin Anglophone research in relation to the concept ofpower-over, a particular modality of power broadlyassociated with domination and which is typically seen ina negative light. Power-over was famously summarised byRobert Dahl (1957, page 202-203) who stated “A has powerover B to the extent that he can get B to do somethingthat B would not otherwise do”, a definition that led todebates over the multiple “dimensions” (Bachrach andBaratz. 1970) and “faces” (Lukes, 1974) of power-over(see Haugaard, 2012). In contrast, others have sought totheorise power as both a precondition for power-over andthe potential for empowerment, commonly referred to aspower-to (e.g. Ardent, 1970; Parsons, 1963). Thedistinction between power-over and power-to remainscommon in contemporary understandings of power (Göhler,2009; Pansardi, 2012), and provides the basis for myrethinking of boundaries, via the dialectical approach ofJohn Holloway.

Holloway (2002, page 28) argues that the starting pointfor power is a “capacity-to-do, the ability to dothings”, a power-to. This power-to is a social capacityto create based on our needs and desires, what Marxtermed ‘concrete labour’ and Holloway calls ‘doing’. Withthe development of capitalism, power-to is fractured andturned into its opposite: power-over, “a relation ofpower over others” (page 29). Power-over, however, onlyexists through the constant rupturing and transforming ofpower-to, appropriating and fetishising our socialcapacitates into abstract labour. Crucially, then, power-to can only exist in the negation of power-over, anegation that exposes power-over’s inherentvulnerability. As Holloway (2002, page 36) summarises:

Power-to exists as power-over, but the power-to is subjected to and in rebellion againstpower-over, and power-over is nothing but,

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and therefore absolutely dependent upon, themetamorphosis of power-to.

The relationship between power-to and power-over is thusan internal one, a dialectical relationship based on aconstant negation-and-creation. In his more recent work,Holloway (2010, page 24) argues that the revolutionarychallenge is to constantly create “cracks” in capitalism,“space[s] or moment[s] of negation-and-creation, ofrefusal and other doing”. Cracks are based on theconfluence and coming-together of power-to, of practicesof “doing”, always pushing against-and-beyond power-overand the abstraction into labour. The challenge ofencounters, then, is to articulate relations of power-towhile negating power-over. Doing so may allow for “thepresent creation or strengthening of social relationsincompatible with capitalism” (Holloway, 2010, page 41).Following Holloway, power-over cannot be consideredwithout reference to its opposite, power-to, and it iswithin this antagonism that potential for revolutionarystruggle opens up.

Although there have been critiques of the power-to-power-over binary, which I explore below, my starting point forrethinking boundaries is that both power-to and power-overare implicated in the production of territoriality, andboundaries in particular, but that much closer attentionneeds to be given to this dialectic, particularly fromthe side of power-to. Indeed, in one of the mostconcerted efforts to think through the geographies ofpower, Allen (2009) argues that the territorial power ofboundaries relies predominantly on the modality ofdomination, a “top-down” and “centre-out” relationshipbased on a geometry of extension and reach. AlthoughAllen goes on to develop a more nuanced, topologicalunderstanding of power (see also, Allen, 2003), he failsto recognise how a modality of power-to could also becentral to thinking through territorial power andboundaries. The dialectical power relations underlyingthe production of space are central to the work ofLefebvre, which complements Holloway’s theory of power.

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In his influential spatial theorisations, Lefebvre (1991)argues that the production of space tends to be dominatedby certain representations (tied to state and capital)and the need to create exchange value, leading to anabstract, and seemingly homogenous space. For Lefebvre,however, the domination of space is never complete, andalways exists in an antagonistic relationship with theappropriation of space, its reproduction through newpractices, representations and imaginations based oncollective desires of ‘the possible’ towards a self-managed differential space. Lefebvre (1976, page 36) thusemphasises that dialectics is a fundamentally spatialcategory, revealing the contradictions of abstract spaceand “making possible tomorrow what is impossible today”.As Lefebvre (1991, page 165) states, the concept ofdominated space “attains its full meaning only when it iscontrasted with the opposite and inseparable concept ofappropriation”. Bringing this together with Holloway’sunderstanding of power, I suggest that the production ofspace be seen as a constant struggle between power-over,creating spatialities that control and delimit thepossibilities for consuming and reproducing space, andpower-to, a collective capacity to create space based onneeds and desires.

Across his diverse writings, particularly in the yearssurrounding the uprisings of 1968, Lefebvre developed theconcept of autogestion, loosely translated as “self-management”, to describe the radical potential ofappropriating space. Similar to Holloway’s understandingof power-to and “doing”, Lefebvre saw autogestion as an“oeuvre”, something “unique: an object bearing the stampof a “subject”, of the creator or artists, and of asingle, unrepeatable moment” (Lefebvre, 1991: 422), anon-accumulative act of creation (Lefebvre, 2002). As hestated:

Only through autogestion can the members of afree association take control over their ownlife, in such a way that it becomes theirwork [oeuvre]. This is also calledappropriation, de-alienation. (Lefebvre,

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1966, page 150)

Like Holloway’s “cracks”, autogestion is a dialecticalconcept based on both a refusal “to accept passively[the] condition of existence” and also a creation, a push“to master [the] conditions of existence” (Lefebvre,1979, page 135). There are two features of Lefebvre’sautogestion that can help us rethink boundaries, and theproduction of territoriality, developing the notion ofencounters.

First, Lefebvre emphasised that autogestion should take ona territorial form, stressing the need to occupy spacesoutside the form of the state. In The Production of SpaceLefebvre (1991, pages 292, 382, 416) highlights theimperative for autogestion to occupy “territorial entities”that are autonomous of state and capital, something heelsewhere referred to as “territorial autogestion”:“exerting pressure against the summits of state power andleading a concrete struggle for concrete objectives”(Lefebvre, 1978, page 250). Lefebvre stated, “I believethat autogestion initiatives are rooted, embedded withinthe soil” (Lefebvre, 1976, page 163) and emphasised theneed for the production of a material space in whichautogestion could develop. The most concrete examples ofterritorial autogestion he gave included the occupation ofprivileged spaces in the Paris Commune (e.g. the CityHall), and occupying the “domains abandoned by thecolonialists” (Lefebvre, 1966, page 145) in Algeria. Theprotest camp appears to be another good example. In anexploration of Lefebvre’s reading of territory, withparticular reference to his theories of the state,Brenner and Elden (2009, page 361) helpfully point outthat Lefebvre also “mobilizes the concept of territory todescribe the site and the target of contemporarystruggles for autogestion”. In addition, I suggest thatLefebvre’s territorial autogestion can be put to work inexamining practices of territoriality, such as boundarymaking, focusing our attention on the negotiation ofpower relations in struggles over the production ofspace.ii

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Merrifield (2013) has drawn on Lefebvre’s urban writingsto argue that the wave of protest camp movements in 2011,including Occupy, was based on a “politics of encounter”.Lefebvre (1996) defined the urban as “a field ofencounters” (page 111), a “mental and social form” thathe often associated with “simultaneity” and “gathering”(page 131). Lefebvre (2003) saw this urban field ofencounters “not as an accomplished reality…but…as ahorizon, an illuminating virtuality” (pages 16-17).Encounters, then, suggest a potentiality, a push towards“the possible”. Care should be taken not to understandencounters as an inherently radical, or revolutionary,feature of the urban form, but instead focus on the politicsof encounter, as Merrifield (2013) argues. Lefebvre’stexts on the urban can be usefully brought together withhis notion of territorial autogestion, highlighting howpractices of encountering are a central battleground forthe dialectic of the appropriation-domination of space,the struggle to “take control” over life.

Second, in contrast to Holloway, Lefebvre argued thatnegativity is insufficient in itself to sustain thebottom-up power that produces territorial autogestion. ForLefebvre (1966, page 147), the key challenge of autogestionis to move beyond negation and “to constitute itself as apower which is not that of the state”. A key form thatautogestion must take is therefore that of an institution(Lefebvre, 1969), an institution that moves both againstand beyond the state. The failure of autogestion toconstitute itself as an institution risks it beingreappropriated by the state or unable to sustain itself.This implies that practices of encountering, without ameans of institutionalisation, are liable to be ephemeraland of little lasting change.

Bringing together the work of Holloway and Lefebvre, Isuggest that practices of encountering be understood as apotential moment in the articulation of power-to-against-power-over, a moment in the creation of territorialautogestion in which space is appropriated as an oeuvreagainst tendencies of domination. Encounters offer aradical re-thinking of boundary making, as a bottom-up

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practice of territoriality that has the potential togenerate new social relations that sit antagonisticallytowards capitalist society.

The focus on producing new social relations has beencentral to Latin American research that has been at theforefront in rethinking territoriality from theperspective of social movements. Following theinfluential work of Porto Gonçalves, who researched theindigenous struggles of the seringueiros in the Amazon,arguing they were producing a new territoriality based onself-affirmation of their own identities and values,Zibechi (2012) has since argued that the production of“new territorialities” is the central feature of urbanactivism across the continent. These territorialities areno longer based on spaces tied to the state and capitalsuch as the factory, political party, or trade union, butfocused on the material and symbolic appropriation ofspace, from road blocks to neighbourhood assemblies(Stratta and Barrera, 2009), in which “encounters andrelationships occur that may give rise to new potentials”(Zibechi, 2012, page 78). The opportunities andchallenges of producing new social relations throughterritoriality is an important lesson from OccupyLondon’s practices of encountering.

Encountering Occupy London 1: General Assemblies

October 17th, 2011, day 3 of the Occupation,and I sat down on the steps of St Paul’s witharound 100 others for a general assembly(GA). I felt a real buzz in the air as weassembled ourselves to collectively discusshow to take the movement forward. After someannouncements from working-groups, theremainder of the GA focused on tonight’stheme: “what do we want and how do we getit?” We split off into small groups anddiscussed a range of issues, such asresistance to the government’s austeritypolitics, addressing sexual and racialprejudices and helping build self-managed

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workers movements. No decisions were made atthis GA, but there was much enthusiasm tokeep putting our ideas into practice, andworking-groups were tasked with takingforward the issues discussed. iii

The GA was not only a tool for horizontal decision-making, a form of self-management in line with Lefebvre’sterritorial autogestion, but provided a space of encounterin which people could meet each other to share ideas andbuild social relations. For many of my interviewees,participating in the GA for the first time was one themost significant experiences they had with Occupy London.Many talked of the sudden confidence they felt, and asense of empowerment in encountering others who werespeaking out on issues that resonated with them.Reflecting on one of the initial GAs Occupier Sara toldme, “I really like that we broke out into groups verysoon, I remember talking to the other people in thegroup, and that was like really empowering”.iv There was anewfound potential, a power-to, which for some meant thatit was not even necessary to speak, rather it was enoughto be present. As another Occupier, Chris, told me:

I arrived on the first day, and I attendedthe General Assembly and I sat on the stepsof St Paul's and had this really overwhelmingsense for the first time in my life I had avoice, and it really felt like that, in agroup of people, and in a decision-makingprocess, and I hadn't, I mean I never spoke,I didn't say a word, but I felt that I had avoice, in other words if I needed to saysomething I could have done.

The GA provided Chris with a space of encounter in whichhe could express himself and exert his power-to. Formany, the significance of creating a non-hierarchicalspace of encounter was the contrast it provided todominant forms of politics, including the government andleft-wing political parties. Sara told me of how she hadstruggled to get politically involved in the UK for many

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years:

If I wanted to get involved in politics thenI had to fit into the organisations that werealready there, and they were often connectedto political parties, and that put me off…andI sort of went on reading and stuff and notfinding anyone or anything I wanted to engagewith and then like it was like coming down toOccupy and suddenly really feeling that therewere so many people I was connected with, andthat I could understand, and that we couldcommunicate with, it was really shocking! CosI hadn't found that for such a long time!

The space of encounter of the GA was both a rejection ofprevious political experiences and a simultaneous desireto recreate a horizontal political space of encounter.The territoriality of Occupy London was thus beingproduced through a confluence of power-to, an ensemble ofrelations that was seeking to foster new ways of relatingto each other in a political space. These new socialrelations produced by our territoriality could besummarised in the notion of “horizontality”, which Sitrin(2006) examines in the context of Argentine socialmovements. Horizontality, (horizontalidad in Spanish):

does not just imply a flat plane fororganizing, or non-hierarchical relations inwhich people no longer make decisions forothers. It is a positive word that impliesthe use of direct democracy and the strivingfor consensus, processes in which everyone isheard and new relationships are created.Horizontalidad is a new way of relating, basedin affective politics, and against all of theimplications of “isms.” (Sitrin, 2006, pagevi)

Although some Occupiers had previous experience withhorizontality from other social movements, for many thiswas a new way of relating. Simon, who became active in

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organising GAs through the “process” working group, toldme how he felt when attending the GA:

It was just such a nice place to be, it wassuch a sort of antithesis to everythingsurrounding it, it was a really powerfulplace to be in that sense and I just learnedhow to listen to politics, and….then realisedwhat I wanted to start adding.

This “antithesis” that Simon talks about can be read asthe importance of generating social relations that arequalitatively different to “the commodified, monetisedrelations of capitalism” (Holloway, 2010, page 43).Indeed, the GA was located in the City of London, thecity’s financial district, a highly monetised space. Itprovided a space of encounter that allowed for new socialrelations to develop based on an affective politics ofhorizontality, opening up new potentials in what Lefebvredescribes as a push towards “the possible”.

In the production of territoriality, then, the GA is anexample of a delimited space in which difference could bearticulated, presenting an open and flexible practice ofboundary making. Yet, although the GA had begun with muchhope being invested into its potential, over time itwould not live up to the high expectations that wereplaced on it.

Institutionalising the GA

7.15pm, a cold and dark evening, sometime inDecember (2011). We were now huddled togetherinside the Tent City University - we haddecided several days ago that it was too coldto be sat outside on the steps. The coldweather seemed to have made tensions on campworse, with numerous conflicts developingbetween different individuals and factions,who were often in disagreement about how totake the movement forward. On tonight’sagenda, a perennially painful topic of

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discussion: finance. There was a rowdeveloping over how money should be allocatedto different working-groups, camps, andoccupied buildings. This GA soon became apainful experience, dominated by those whocould shout the loudest, and who had the willto stay put for over three hours on thisfreezing evening. It became clear to me thatthere was little hope for resolving theseissues at the GA, and I left.

Two months since I had sat at our GA on the steps of StPaul’s, feeling the buzz as new social relations wereforged, this experience presented a marked contrast, andwas becoming typical of GAs. Although the GA had begun asa space of encounter - allowing for diverse powers-to tocome together and resonate with each other, creatingsocial relations of horizontality - it was increasinglyacting as a space of power-over, an institutional spacethat attracted bitter disagreements and had little roomfor collective practices.

The issue of institutionalising movements through thespace of the GA has been widely commented in differentOccupy camps worldwide. In their study on OccupyPittsburgh, Smith and Gidden (2012) discuss the“fetishisation of the consensus model”, which compelsthose Occupiers who are able to attend hours of GAs perday, thus excluding those who lack the time, patience orinterest in doing so. Elsewhere Rohgalf (2013) suggeststhat by prioritising the space of the GA, Occupy WallStreet provided an unrealistic expectation that theplurality and diversity of voices could ever berepresented through one institution. Finally, in herinvestigation of Occupy in San Francisco and Dublin,Szolucha (2013) argues that the model of participatorydemocracy as practised in the GA was far from an “ideal”form of society, containing numerous unresolved tensionsand conflicts. All of these issues were present in OccupyLondon, whose GA was increasingly excluding people fromit, producing boundaries less through an articulation ofpower-to and more through an exertion of power-over.

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For Holloway (2002), power-over involves a rupturing ofthe social flow of doing (the coming together andconfluencing of power-to) and is based on the fixing ofdoing to particular forms, a process of fetishisation(Holloway, 2002) A key mechanism in this fixing of thesocial flow of doing is that of institutionalisation,“the subordination of we do to what is” (Holloway, 2002,page 243). In the case of the GA the various powers-to ofdifferent Occupiers, their potential to do something,were being subordinated and held hostage to theinstitution of the GA. If the GA did not grant permissionthen an Occupier would be prohibited from putting theiridea into practice. This in turn relied on the capacityof an Occupier to sit through long and (sometimes)painful discussions. All too often the potentialarticulation of power-to, Holloway’s ‘social flow ofdoing’, was shattered by the negative experience ofattending the GA. One Occupier, Miranda, explained thisto me in the context of women’s voices being marginalisedat GAs:

[in GAs] you're supposed to be equal, but Ithink we still have a lot of work to do withGAs to make sure that we don't have the samepeople speaking…and unfortunately we lost alot of our women at Occupy because it becamevery much, like the loudest man, as always,would have a bigger voice…we didn't respect[women’s] voices and that was a really bigmistake.

This quote raises more general issues over themasculanist practices of activism that were prevalent inOccupy London (see Halvorsen, 2014), but also highlightshow the GA became a exclusionary space for many, ignoringthe ongoing need to forge alternative social relations,based on horizontality, through encounters. OccupyLondon’s GA was unable to resolve most of these issues,and many Occupiers looked elsewhere to forge socialrelations and continue practising horizontality.

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Encountering Occupy London II: the protest camp

Articulating New Social Relations

The protest camp at St Paul’s provided an open space ofencounter through which new social relations could beforged, generating some of the most valuable experiencesexpressed to me by my interviewees. Julia, an Occupierbased at St Paul’s, told me that the protest camp, as aspace of encounter, was one of the most importantachievements of the movement. She told me:

it was a meeting place for people, you knowfor different kinds of activists, anddifferent kinds of activist groups thatdidn't tend to meet, and people who weren'tactivists....it was much more diverse thanthe standard snapshot of any standarddemonstration…it felt really good, I met alot of people and had a lot of discussionswith people who I would otherwise never havetalked to.

The protest camp thus facilitated the crossing ofboundaries between different groups of people, anarticulation of power-to that was productive of whatLefebvre (1991, page 52) terms a ‘differential space’: aspace that “accentuates differences” against thehomogenising logic of abstract space. The encounters ofthe protest camp were productive of new social relationsthat were central to territoriality of Occupy London.Rather than marking a boundary that excluded “us” from“them”, exerting a power-over space, the protest camp wasproducing a flexible boundary that encouraged thearticulation of power-to. Martha, who lived at St Paul’s,described the new social relations being forged on camp:

I was walking around camp and it was amazingbecause people would smile and say hey [and]give me a hug…creating bonds with strangerswithout knowing anything about them, and it

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was so like, unlike any other relationshipsthat perhaps people have outside of that…itwas more friendly but it was also based onnot how much money they might have had orwhere they came from or what their backgroundwas, because you didn't necessarily know, youwould just meet with them and get on with itand just work together…it was less prejudicein friendship making if you see what I mean.

The social relations built on camp thus had a qualityabout them that seemed “unlike any other relationship”that people have elsewhere. Latin American literature onsocial movements and territoriality has described the newsocial relations being forged as part of an affectivepolitics (Mazzeo, 2006; Zibechi, 2007, 2012), in which,as Sitrin (2010, page 178) summarises, “the beginningpoint is solidarity, not competition or the market”.Affect (full stop) has become a much more contested termin Anglophone literature, and my aim here is simply topoint towards some of those social relations being forgedthrough practices of encountering. Importantly, it wasthe urban ensemble of the protest camp that provided whatLefebvre (2003) refers to as “centrality” – an attractionand bringing-together of differences – a key feature ofOccupy London’s territoriality that allowed for theseaffective social relations to be forged.

Veronica, who spent much of her time at the Info Tent -which acted as an important boundary for Occupy Londonthrough its function as the main site for welcoming newarrivals on camp – told me how she encountered dozens ofpeople per day, and described one particularly memorableencounter. She recalled how a family, consisting of a mumthat was working part-time, a father that had just beenmade redundant, and their young child had come all theway down from the North of England to visit Occupy Londonand turned up at the Info Tent. They spent a whilediscussing the politics of austerity and how Occupy hadgiven them inspiration that change was possible, evendonating money to the movement. Veronica told me:

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there was a kind of an exchange of hope and,you know, keep doing what you're doingbecause you're not just doing it foryourselves or some group of hippies you’redoing it for a lot of other people that arereally encountering a lot of difficultyfinancially, and that always stuck with me,and the kid was also interested, and waspicking up leaflets and asking what theywere…

Although the family donated money, the significantexchange for Veronica was not a monetised one, but anaffective “exchange of hope” for a better world.Following Anderson (2006) this encounter could be seen asa moment in the circulation of affects and emotions, amoment in which the value of hope emerges. Theterritorial practice of encountering thus allowed for anaffective value of hope to be produced and take hold, anarticulation of “value practices” (De Angelis, 2007)based on power-to.

Practices of encountering also allowed for socialrelations to be constructed across seemingly rigidboundaries, most noticeably between the Occupiers and theso-called “one percent”, which my interviewees referredto as “people in suits”, who presumably worked at theStock Exchange or other nearby spaces of financeproduction. Although these encounters often started (andsometimes ended) in hostile ways, they had the potentialto break down perceived boundaries and forge newrelations across difference. As John, who was camping atSt Paul’s, told me:

the most interesting conversations I had werelate at night with slightly drunk people insuits…quite often it started with kind of abit of edge you know, but actually oftenpeople were really pleased to engage and notbe vilified and….we had this greatopportunity…of having this many possibleconversations with those who seem to be the

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1% or who's in line with 1% and having asmany possible conversations that break downthese barriers between people I think isreally useful, and the camp was such a greatopportunity to do that….

In many ways, then, the protest camp provided a space ofencounter in which boundaries served not tohierarchically order space, dividing and excluding, butwere instead orientated towards the forging of socialrelations. Nevertheless, encounters on camp did notalways occur through an articulation of powers-to, butthrough a clash between them. I end with an example of aless hopeful encounter, highlighting the need to examinein detail the power relations involved, and not assumethat power-to will necessarily lead to beneficialoutcomes.

Clashes of Power-to

Christina was involved in the Cathedral liaison group,attending regular meetings with the Warden, and doing herbest to please St Paul’s in order to comply with healthand safety regulations and to try and prevent any legalaction being taken. The Cathedral regularly made requestsof Occupy London, such as not having GAs during services,or refraining from posting things on the side of thechurch. This often presented a conflict for Occupiers whowanted full autonomy to be able to produce their space asthey desired. On one occasion, Christina agreed with StPaul’s for a fence to go up in order to make sure therewas access to the Cathedral’s fire exit. This led to areaction by some Occupiers who confronted Christina asthe fence went up:

there was an immediate response by quite alot of angry young guys about it and I wasquite upset by that confrontation because Iwas getting a lot of it, people shouting inmy face and so we started, as a response, twopeople came along and realised that I wasbeing shouted at by fellow protesters, and

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came and backed me up and they brought thingsalong, they were bringing wool and cotton,and they started decorating the fence andthen [St Paul’s] said yes that’s absolutelyfine…and a younger and angrier malecontingent started putting up posters inresponse to that because they felt there wasa sort of inner policing going on by us…itwas kind of the case of this symbolic thing,of a fence coming up, and this immediatereaction but really hot headedness and notunderstanding…

This encounter was far from an articulation of power-to,but was instead a clash between conflictingunderstandings over how the space of the protest campshould be produced. Ironically, although the “angry malecontingent” opposed the materiality of a barrier beingconstructed on the camp, they simultaneously reproduced aboundary through their confrontational practices withfellow Occupiers. Both Christina (and those assistingher) as well as those opposed to the fence were exertinga power-to produce space from below, and both sides wereseemingly committed to the politics of Occupy London, ofwhich horizontality was a key value. Yet, rather thanforging a new social relation based on shared values,this encounter instead produced a division involving muchhostility. This raises serious questions over how thepower relations of encounters should be read.

In a critical reflection of Holloway’s work, De Angelis’(2005) argues that Holloway fails to appreciate thechallenge of clashing powers-to, and the ways in whichpower-to is itself the basis for power-over. As hestates:

Power-over is a type of relation amongpowers-to, it is constituted by thisrelation…power-over is not something opposedto power-to, but the end result of clashingbetween powers-to running in oppositedirections. (page 244)

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De Angelis’ reading of power-to can be located withinwider critiques of the power-to-power-over binary.Scholars have suggested that power-to and power-overshould not be read as opposed, and that care should betaken not to overly privilege one. For example, Dowding(1991) suggests that power-to is a more basic, orunderlying, form of power, an “outcome power”, from whichpower-over, as a subset of power-to, a “social power”,develops. According to Dowding any deliberate attempt touse one’s power-to in order to influence the “incentivestructure” of other actors is necessarily a power-over.While this claim requires further interrogation, it seemsclear that encounters of power-to may, in certain cases,lead to a relation of power-over, and is something thatHolloway largely fails to address.

Elsewhere, Pansardi (2012) argues that power-to andpower-over have little analytical distinction, and thatany instance of power-to, e.g. the power to build ahouse, necessarily involves an instance of power-over,e.g. the power to buy materials from others.Unfortunately, however, Pansardi fails to consider asocial relation of power that does not involve some formof hierarchy, whether it be the harder power-over ofphysical violence, or the softer power-over ofcapitalist/market relations.

The utility of Holloway’s approach for theorisingactivism is that he starts from the perspective ofstruggle and social change, and argues that it is crucialto appreciate that power-to is not only entangled up inrelations of power-over, but that it has the latentpotential to push against-and-beyond it. It is theantagonism dividing the dialectic, Holloway argues, whichprovides the crucial battleground for revolutionarystruggle. Nevertheless, more attention needs to be givento how encounters of power-to can lead to relations ofpower-over. Doing so may involve greater strategicthinking by activists, as De Angelis argues, bringing usback to Lefebvre’s insistence on the need forinstitutions of autogestion.

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Conclusion

This article has argued for greater attention to theproduction of territoriality by social movements,suggesting that boundary making be rethought of aspractices of encountering. By examining Occupy London’sspaces of encounter in the GA and protest camp, it hasdemonstrated how boundaries serve less as a means ofexerting power-over space, as understood in dominantaccounts of territoriality, and more as a means ofarticulating power-to, thus reorienting territorialpractices towards a more radical, and open, geography ofpower. At the same time, however, numerous tensionswithin practices of encountering were exposed. In thisconclusion I reflect on some broader challenges ofproducing activist territoriality, thus suggestingpotential resonances with other occupation-basedmovements worldwide.

First, as Chatterton (2006) has previously pointed out,activist practices of encountering tend to be ephemeral,relying on the moment of protest/occupation, and can behard to sustain over time. For example, while encountersbetween Occupiers and “people in suits” may have beenproductive of new social relations that break downdifference, few of these relations were sustained beyondthe protest camp, or even the moment of encounter.Although many encounters of Occupy London were highlytransformative, producing new activist subjectivities,they relied on the material space of encounter, adelineated urban ensemble of relations that made thedevelopment of new social relations possible. The StPaul’s camp, together with a second at Finsbury Square,were two of the longstanding protest camps in the globalOccupy movement, lasting several months, whereas campselsewhere lasted weeks, days, and in some cases activistswere prevented from taking space in the first place. Theneed to move beyond the ephemerality of momentsencounters is part of what led Lefebvre to argue for theneed to create new institutions for practices of

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autogestion, and opens up an important debate.

Second, then, this article has demonstrated a need toinstitutionalise practices of encounter, provided alasting form that can sustain the ongoing forging of newsocial relations across both space and time. Whereasprevious global social movements, such as the alter-globalisation movements of the late 1990s and early2000s, were successful in forging numerous networked,decentralised institutions – with the World Social Forumproviding a prominent example – the occupation-basedmovements of 2011 have tended to merge into distinctprojects and have yet to solidify into a lastinginstitution. The political implications of creatinginstitutions for social movement practices aredebateable, however, with Holloway providing a strongcounter argument (see Hardt and Holloway, 2011). Indeed,this article has also demonstrated the damaging effectsthat institutionalisation can have on practices ofencounter, most clear exemplified in the decline of theGA as a space of horizontality and articulation of power-to. Sustaining the radical potential of practices ofencountering beyond spaces of occupation remains a keychallenge for social movements, and the role ofinstitutions will require considerable furtherexamination.

Finally, however, irrespective of activists’ ability tosustain encounters, more attention must be given to thenegotiations of power relations in practices ofencountering, rather than assuming that, in producingterritoriality from below, power-to will necessarily bearticulated against hierarchical relations of power-over.As Lefebvre has pointed out, there is a perennial threatof recuperation of autogestion, and seemingly radicalpractices can always be turned against themselves(Lefebvre, 2005, pages 105-107). Although the Occupymovement has been celebrated for its “cosmopolitanism”(Hamad Hosseini, 2013), care must be taken to notromanticise activist practices, and presume that anencountering of power-to will lead to an articulation, ratherthan a clash, as demonstrated in this article. Practices

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of encountering demonstrate the significance ofterritoriality for social movements, and for the need tothink through the radical opportunities, as well aschallenges, of boundary making. Yet it is necessary toremain alert to the dialectics that underlie both power(Holloway, 2002) and the production of space (Lefebvre,1991) in the hope that, as occupations continue to appearworldwide, spaces of encounter provide openings towards“the possible” where autogestion “indicates the road towardthe transformation of everyday existence” (Lefebvre,1969, page 90).

Endnotesi See http://occupylondon.org.uk/ for up-to-date information onOccupy London’s activities.ii I refer to territoriality as an active mode of operating towardsspace rather than “the condition or status of territory”, adistinction that Elden (2013, page 4) helpfully makes. As such, myuse of territorial autogestion is oriented towards those practicesthrough which power-to is articulated against power-over, and spaceis appropriated against its domination, rather than towards anunderstanding of territory itself.iii Unless from interviews, indented passages are based on my fieldnotes.iv Pseudonyms are used for interviewees.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Occupy for making this research possible, andgiving me hope. I am grateful to Kye Askins, Gavin Brown,Alan Ingram, Anna Plyushteva, and Jennifer Robinson forcomments on drafts. Two anonymous reviewers and StuartElden made insightful comments, greatly improving thefinal version. This work was supported by the Economicand Social Research Council (grant: S/J500185/).

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