I should have just asked Teh Googles. Yes, apparently it has everything to do with it. In the following account of situation impulses in 1968 France, the idea was to disrupt capitalist time.
On list, one criticism of an occupation is that it doesn't stop capitalist time: they fail to shut down business as usual and so can't possibly gain any leverage in achieving their demands.
But this is where the rejection of demands comes in, as tactic guided, I think, by strategy based on their understanding of social change. I think more on that next week. Meanwhile:
The material I read about the NYU occupation argued that, while shutting down capitalist time (occupying factories especially in wildcat strikes) is important, indeed a major goal, sometimes you're in a situation where it's not possible to do this: severe lack of organized labor would be a big reason why. It's one of the reasons why I exclaimed, Occupy Walmart! What would it mean to occupy at the site of consumption / production. Don't just picket Walmart or stop shopping there, turn the place into - i don't know - something that it's not intended to be for. This is what happened, apparently, in 1968. Or simply turn it into a place where the inmates are running the asylum. That is, where consumers take it over and, temporarily, run the place according to direct democracy. It would be hella interesting to occupy a Walmart and turn it into a forum for debate or to put on an opera or play or concert. Impossible to do, but for now: imagine!
According to this account, '68 was also about disrupting the capitalized time of union bureaucrats who wanted things nice and orderly and predictable, as much as their capitalist adversaries did.
Anyway, in some of the contemporary discussions of what's going on with occupations is that it would never be enough to simply occupy capitalist time in workplaces only. Here there's overlap with (my socioloogical reading of) Postone who gestures at how the habits and practices of everyday life reinforce -- normalize -- capitalist time by making it appear natural, normal, something that needn't be questioned. This is what Postone means, I think, by domination. I haven't unpacked books, so can't look it up.
Anyway, according to contemporary literature I've read, when the opportunity arises, there must be a strike, as in a coup, a blow. Strikes here, there, back there, in the corner, over there. Strikes are constant blows, unrelenting irritants, forcing the system to incessantly swat at these irritants.
Occupations of public space disrupt space and time too. Zuccotti park is no longer a place for people to takje their lunch break, but is now also a place where people live, debate ideas, play drums without doing it to the incessant tick tock of capitalist time. Time is, as one essay said, exploded. As you said earlier, the war is against the theft of time, the very thing we can never ever get back. Compared to the loss of our lives - i.e., time -- the theft of money is nothing.
Occupations disrupt the ways we think aobut what counts as public property. My take: Property is nothing more and nothing less than a social relationship regarding how we should use property. If it's PUBLIC property, what are the rules about how we use it. And what ideological interests do these rules serve. What are the tacit norms we have about the appropriate use of public space.
One of the things I'm seeing is how people are all of a sudden finding out just how regulated and circumscribed are our public spaces, not only formally but informally. It isn't just the formal laws that regulate what the public in public property means but our informal norms as to how that space should be used.
It is no longer a mere classroom exercise in philosophy class. Now, you are actually *using* that public space in ways you may never have thought of. That use is situated, embodied, physically enacted.
Locally, there's been discussion of how our plaza's seating isn't comfortable. Aha! Better to deter the homeless from actually using the park. There's a realization that it's acceptable in their minds that the homeless were made uncomfortable. But now, we are all uncomfortable. Why did we never use the plaza before? No one is really supposed to relax or get comfortable there. Why do we even have these parks if no one can use them? What are parks *for*. This has extended to a discussion of the way that public spaces called "gardens" (they used to be part of the trolley system) around here no longer have nice shade trees, benches, or even trash cans. Their absence is to discourage the use of that public space. The city has "green spaces" to make it look nice, but for it to retain its pristine appearance, to sell ourselves as this wonderful community for tourism, it is important not to actually use it. (Which reminds me of the rules about how to sell your house: make it look like no one actually lives there!)
Anyway, that's my rantage. Here's the piece I read:
"The violence of the police that night, which followed earlier repressive actions, garnered considered public sympathy for the demonstrators and helped to fuel the discontent and political demands that stretched far beyond the universities. A massive demonstration and general strike followed on May 13th. The Sorbonne was occupied. Social and cultural institutions such as the Théatre de l’Odéon were seized and opened for political debate. Ignoring the disapproval of the Communist Party and trades union officials, workers occupied factories and work places through wildcat actions. Within days around ten million people had joined the general strike. Much to the consternation of the bureaucrats of both left and right, the aims of participants could not be simply channelled into piecemeal demands.
The map of barricades speaks of a moment when the city as a space of circulation was interrupted. Streets as conduits for flow, dominated by traffic and commerce, gave way to spaces and times of congregation, dialogue, encounter and struggle. ‘Capitalised time stopped,’ writes Viénet in his account Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations, written in July and published in France that year. ‘Without any trains, metro, cars, or work the strikers recaptured the time so sadly lost in factories, on motorways, in front of the TV. People strolled, dreamed, learned how to live. Desires began to become, little by little, reality.’(2)
His map is also indicative of the significance of spatial struggles in the May 1968 uprising more widely. Conflicts over the uses of streets, public spaces, buildings and neighbourhoods were crucial to the constitution of revolutionary movements, not only in Paris but also in many other cities in France and elsewhere. Makeshift barricades, themselves a product of the unleashing of playful activity connected with the disappearance of forced labour, according to Viénet, may have had limited effect strategically but played a significant political role, staking broadly defined positions between insurgents and the police. Walls were filled with posters and slogans, clamouring with different voices and desires. Streets and public spaces became arenas in which elements of the uprising came together, exchanged views and were challenged through encounters.
Walls were filled with posters and slogans, clamouring with different voices and desires. Streets and public spaces became arenas in which elements of the uprising came together and exchanged views. ‘The critique of everyday life successfully began to modify the landscape of alienation,’ recalls Viénet. ‘The Rue Gay-Lussac was named the Rue du 11 Mai. Red and black flags gave a human appearance to the fronts of public buildings. The Haussmannian perspective of the boulevards was corrected and the green belts redistributed and closed to traffic. Everyone, in his own way, made his own critique of urbanism.’(3)
Streets and public spaces were particularly significant in one of the most challenging aspects of the revolts, namely its horizontality: how to forge connections between students and workers, between intellectual and manual labour, between social categories typically kept apart; how not simply to accept those categories with their specialisations and assumptions of expertise but to question and undermine them, and to reach beyond the spaces through which they are constituted, such as faculty, factory, office, farm and so on; and, in the process, how to cut across hierarchies of power, to strive for equality?(4)"
http://www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=cur&siz=1&id=980