At a meeting of the International Council of the World Social Forum in Italy in 2004, a South African trade unionist got into a debate with a couple of other participants. As in many activist spaces, decision making in the council was supposed to be based on the principle of consensus. As no consensus seemed to emerge, the trade unionist finally expressed his frustration: ‘I am here representing millions of African workers, who the fuck are you?’ After a moment of vexed silence, the situation calmed down and the meeting went on in a friendly manner.1 It was an example of the silence with which representational claims to speak for others often meet, in contexts assumedly based on the absence of representational politics. The International Council of the World Social Forum was founded in 2001 as an organisational hybrid, in which contending attitudes toward representation sometimes clash and lead to frustrations. Its individual participants are representatives of member organisations that range from trade unions to activist networks. As a whole, however, it avoids claiming to represent anything, and its working principles are influenced by ‘nonrepresentational’ activism (see e.g. Caruso 2013; Teivainen 2012). Ten years later, in 2011, Occupy Wall Street constituted general assemblies as a decision-making procedure within the occupied city squares. In many characterisations, their individual participants were not supposed to be representatives of anything but themselves. The Occupy activists have thus often been considered enthusiastic participants in what Simon Tormey (2012: 136) calls the ‘generalised revolt against representation’ …
Read more : Occupy Representation by Teivo Teivainen
