ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how 'Occupy' has entered the vocabulary and discourse of academics, activists and the general public to produce and reproduce people's expectations of activism, protest, democracy and citizenship. Rather than taking Occupy as an exemplar, or even simply an object of study in and of itself, it examines discourses around Occupy as a path to understanding the politics of protest and citizenship in the early twenty-first-century city. It argues that Occupy is misrecognized first, as the 'start' of a new beginning that will be the rebirth of the Left, democracy and/or ourselves, possibly even through the formation of a 'global social body'; second, as a more authentic and real form of politics; and third, as an inclusive, solidaristic mobilization that represents the 99" or 'the people'. Occupations mobilize an art and grammar of the activist crowd; leaderless, demand-less Occupy only intensifies the importance of the crowd.
