591943

research-article2015

SOC0010.1177/0038038515591943SociologyTremlett

Article

Affective Dissent in the Heart

of the Capitalist Utopia:
Occupy Hong Kong and
the Sacred

Sociology
2016, Vol. 50(6) 11561169
The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0038038515591943
soc.sagepub.com

Paul-Franois Tremlett
The Open University, UK

Abstract
Hong Kong has been represented as a politically indifferent, capitalist utopia. This representation
was first deployed by British colonial elites and has since been embroidered by Hong Kongs
new political masters in Beijing. Yet, on 15 October 2011, anti-capitalist activists identifying with
the global Occupy movement assembled in Hong Kong Central and occupied a space under the
HSBC bank. Occupy Hong Kong proved to be the longest occupation of all that was initiated by
the global Occupy movement. Situated in a space notable for previously having been the haunt
of Filipina domestic workers, the occupation conjured a community into the purified spaces of
Hong Kongs financial district. I describe this in terms of an eruption of the sacred that placed
conventional norms of Hong Kong city life under erasure, releasing powerful emotions into
spaces once thought to be immune to the ritual effervescences of the transgressive.

Keywords
emotion, Hong Kong, ritual, the city, the occupy movement, the sacred

Introduction
In this article two problematics converge: first affect and the city and second, the spatialorganisational politics of the Occupy movement explored through an analysis of the
camp that was established beneath the HSBC building in Hong Kong.1 They are drawn
together through Emile Durkheims conception of the sacred. For Durkheim (1915: 38)
the sacred and the profane were marked by their mutual heterogeneity: that is, the sacred
was defined by its otherness to or transgression of the profane. The camps of the Occupy

Corresponding author:
Paul-Franois Tremlett, Dept of Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts, The Open University, Walton Hall,
Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK.
Email: paul-francois.tremlett@open.ac.uk

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movement were transgressions of specific kinds of urban spaces, that is, spaces purified
of all forms of activity except those of transit and transaction. In Hong Kong, the transformation of these spaces with materials including chairs symbolising among other things
leisure, slowness and conversation, enabled the suspension of the quotidian urban routines
of transit and work, and generated rite-like assemblies of people coming together to debate
political and economic ideas, watch films, establish plans for the future, listen to music
and share food, in a manner reminiscent not only of Occupy camps in other cities around
the world but also of migrant workers meeting in various parts of Hong Kongs urban
landscape on their days off. In the first part of this article I describe the setting up of the
Hong Kong camp and the principal groups involved including some remarks about the
wider Occupy movement. I also contextualise the occupation in terms of aspects of Hong
Kongs (post)-colonial and economic histories, using field research conducted at the Hong
Kong Museum of History as a point of departure. In the second part drawing from tropes
of indifference and emotion I move on to analyse the occupation in terms of the sacred
and in terms of ritual, suggesting that the event released powerful emotions into streets
and spaces once thought to be immune to the ritual effervescences of transgression.2

Making a Scene
The preliminary point of departure for this article is the representation of Hong Kong as a
politically indifferent, capitalist utopia. This representation first deployed by British
colonial elites but since embroidered by Hong Kongs new political masters in Beijing
has masked the citys complex and ongoing history of struggles and dislocations. On 15
October 2011, anti-capitalist activists identifying with the global Occupy movement
assembled in Exchange Square in Hong Kong Central before occupying a space under the
HSBC bank at the heart of the financial district, and in doing so marked their participation
in a global wave of occupations of over 900 cities in more than 80 countries that followed
the global financial crisis of 20078. The occupation was dominated by two political
groupings and, despite the political frictions between them, the occupation proved to be
the longest of a single site among all those that were started by the global Occupy movement. Situated in a space notable for previously having been a haunt of Filipina domestic
workers congregating to share food, relax, play cards, connect with loved ones back home
via text message and exchange stories on their days off (see Law, 2001; Tillu, 2011: 11,
15, 34), the occupation conjured a new community into the purified spaces of Hong
Kongs financial district settling into both a physical and virtual spaces.
On 15 October 2011, when protestors assembled in Exchange Square in Hong Kong
Central, they were heeding call outs that had been made on social media by Left21,
Socialist Action and the League of Social Democrats and the appearance of Facebook
groups discussing the Occupy Wall Street protests. Some activists had met a few days
before at Hong Kong Reader, a cramped bookshop in Mong Kok to plan for the day. Their
expectations were modest: they anticipated only small numbers would assemble and they
predicted that after a few speeches and some banner waving that people would disperse and
go home, to be followed by minimal reporting in the press. But perhaps, they reasoned, a
demonstration in solidarity with protests in New York, Madrid, Cairo, London and elsewhere might make possible at least a brief, public conversation about capitalism.

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In fact, things turned out rather differently. A small but committed number of protestors congregated, most having found out about the action through social media. Then,
after some speeches, a General Assembly was convened and the protestors debated
what to do next. To the surprise of some, a sizeable group decided to march together the
short distance from Exchange Square to the HSBC building at the heart of Hong Kongs
financial district.3 The location, the building itself and the fact that at its base was a large,
open, covered area, made it an ideal target. Left to their own devices by the Police, the
protestors occupied the space erecting tents, establishing a library, cooking facilities and
improvising a meeting space. In common with other occupations in other cities elsewhere, protestors quickly established procedures of horizontal process for making decisions based on consensus, working groups to manage logistical issues such as food,
sanitation and outreach as well as virtual spaces to share and publicise their activities and
experiences.
David Graeber (2013: 182) has described these camps as spaces of improvisation, a
phrase that aptly captures the DIY nature of the sites and the manner in which life
unfolded in them. However, in the case of Occupy Hong Kong perhaps the protestors
were also following the example of Filipina and other groups of migrant workers who
regularly congregate in the ignored corners of Hong Kongs hyper-modern city-scape
with pots, plates, magazines, mobile phones and food to sit, text, relax and talk the hours
away (Law, 2001: 2748; Tillu, 2011: 523). Either way, the successful establishment of
the camp ensured that the occupation generated significant local media attention.
Moreover, it was the first time in Hong Kongs history of political dissent that protestors
had ever occupied a public space. It was also the first time that a protest had been
organised in Hong Kong under the banner of anti-capitalism.
The camp was dominated by two political groupings, Left21 and FM101. The latter is
now known as the Tak Cheong Lane Group, although for ease of reading I will, hereafter,
only refer to them as FM101. Although both groups can be aligned with the radical left
neither really define themselves on the kind of rightleft spectrum associated with Cold
War or Chinese politics. In some respects, Left21 is a quite conventional political pressure
group with offices in Mong Kok and a website in English and Chinese that since Occupy
has been campaigning on behalf of domestic workers and in support of striking dock
workers.4 It regarded 15 October 2011 as an opportunity to broaden resistance to what
might be termed Hong Kongs neo-liberal or post-industrial settlement. I interviewed a
number of Left21 activists who participated for the most part in the early stages of the
occupation. They saw the protest as a vehicle for the articulation of specific demands:
one senior Left21 activist said that they (Left21) had wanted to seize the chance to talk
about capitalism in Hong Kong as a means to empower ordinary people to, in the words
of another Left21 activist, fight back.
FM101 activists by contrast saw the protest as an opportunity to establish a community
that would itself be the demand. Since the occupation FM101 has been involved in struggles around gentrification and they now operate a caf in a mixed-ancestry working class
neighbourhood of Yau Ma Tei. The FM101 group focused on trying to establish Occupy
as a methodology of protest and the camp as an experiment in horizontal process and
community building or what elsewhere has been termed relational place-making (Pierce
etal., 2011: 60; Tremlett, 2012: 132).

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The Occupy movement and groups like Left21 and FM101 can be positioned within
the recent history of the so-called Global Justice Movement that has sought to contest
what many call neo-liberalism, a form of capitalism that is characterised, or so these
groups claim, by the socialisation of risk and the privatisation of profit (Mertes, 2010:
78). They reflect the emergence of various locally experienced and globally linked struggles against neo-liberal regimes and are notable for their use of social media and new
developments in communications technology to build networks to share information,
tactics, strategies of opposition, and alternative economic practices (Mertes, 2010: 79).
For example, Manuel Castells (2012: 45) has described the Occupy movement in terms
of the emergence of hybrid public space made up of digital social networks and of a
newly created urban community. The movement and the camps it inspired are examples
of post-territorial place making, that is place making that transgresses the boundaries of
the territories and sovereignties of the nation-state (see Chandler, 2007) and that occupies multiple physical and virtual spaces simultaneously. Importantly, before Occupy in
Hong Kong, social media sites such as Facebook had played a key role in mobilising
environmental activists against an Express Rail link with Guangzhou in 2009 and school
students in the so-called Scholarism protests against the introduction of patriotic education in 2011. These protests were important beyond their specific objectives because
they were the first, in Hong Kong, to be mobilised and mediated through social media,
combining demonstrations in physical and virtual spaces. However, Occupy was the first
to use social media to fabricate constitutive connectivities beyond Hong Kongs borders.
If the advent of printing in Europe can be linked to the emergence of decomposing and
de- and re-territorialising processes that were central to the formation of the cultures of
the modern state, tourism and nationalism (for example), so these new media technologies likewise appear to augur a significant break in the sites and occasions of social and
political solidarity (Anderson, 1991; DellAgnese, 2013; McLuhan, 2004). As such,
these groups and movements can be seen to be symptomatic not only of local but also of
global fractures of older sovereignties and territorialities struggling to contain the energies unleashed by the centrifuge of neo-liberal post-modernity, as well as the emergence
of new senses of agency, subjectivity and territoriality.
Although frequently characterised as anti-globalisation, these groups are not so much
against globalisation as for alternative forms of (globalism) exchange and they typically
indicate emergent solidarities often lying outside conventional territorial and political
frameworks. Left21 and FM101 very much reflect the post-Mao and post-Tiananmen
alignments of left-wing politics in Hong Kong. Both have also been shaped by their experiences of advocacy on behalf of, and of living alongside, marginalised communities of
migrants and workers. However, although Left21 and FM101 agreed that the Occupy
movement constituted a potential moment of articulation through which to develop an
alternative social and political imaginary for Hong Kong, they nevertheless disagreed as to
the forms such an imaginary might take and how it might be realised at the camp. The territory over which these disagreements were played out might be termed communicative.
For Left21, politics was defined through the location of seats of agency recognisably
grounded in a representational theory of politics. The first seat was the activist citizen as
a bearer of territorially delimited rights constituted through political practices of representation and as a global citizen acting both inside and outside the territorially limited

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political apparatus of Hong Kong (Isin, 2009). The second was the vanguard political
organisation set up to enable the formation of individuals into a politically self-conscious
class through the adoption of a leadership role. Organisationally then, Left21 reflected a
pyramid model and for them the camp was, instrumentally, a container an opportunity
to build a platform from which to articulate together a series of demands comprehensible
to Hong Kongs political establishment that would be potentially actionable by that
establishment.
For FM101, politics and organisation were defined rather by the network and focused
on generating a new kind of relational, political subject which meant the camp itself as
an assemblage of chairs, individuals, banners, rice cookers, tents and the relations of
people and objects that was the beginning and the end of the protest in as much as the
camp could be understood as possessing its own distributive agency (Bennett, 2010:
21, emphasis in original; see also Feigenbaum, 2014). Within this imaginary, agency was
located not in any vanguard political organisation or indeed in any citizen as a discrete,
reasoning, meaning-endowing or voting subject but rather in the networks, connectivities
and materialities of the camp and the manner in which they intertwined to produce a new
if uncertain agentive post-territoriality.
These differences were more than simply cognitive or ideational and the research
methods used reflected the different ways in which these groups imagined and practised
communication. I previously conducted ethnographic research on Occupy London in the
few weeks prior to the eviction of that camp from outside St Pauls Cathedral on 28
February 2012 (Tremlett, 2012). In that work I had been able to participate in Occupy
life, but this research was conducted in December 2013 long after the dissolution of the
camp under the HSBC. Although I had conducted a search of English-language news
sources and web-pages (official and independent), political science and anthropological
scholarship on Hong Kong and had established contact with, and interviewed, an activist
who had participated in the Hong Kong camp before travelling to Hong Kong, participation in General Assemblies, for example, or more mundanely but just as importantly,
participation in the banalities of daily camp life, was not possible. The only way to
research the camp was through talking to those who had been a part of it and the easiest
way to accomplish that was through interviews.5 I was not so nave as ever to hold to the
view that an interview might permit privileged access to an unmediated memory or experience of the camp itself. Like ethnography and journalism, interviews constitute not
so much descriptions of an event as inventions this kind of research does not simply
document but actually participates in the production of a social-historical trace.
Left21 activists were interviewed one at a time, face-to-face in public places such as
noodle bars and tea houses. I was also invited to their offices, taken on a tour to Exchange
Square and the HSBC following the route taken by the protestors on 15 October 2011, and
I met students and established intellectuals involved in contemporary events and struggles
past. By contrast, FM101 preferred group discussions in their space, which involved multiple responses to questions, people leaving, people arriving, eating, smoking, paying
attention, not paying attention, staring into space, starting separate conversations, sharing
and not sharing words, pauses, glances and knowing and unknowing asides.
It is worth reflecting that the method of communicating one-to-one in a neutral setting
as compared to a conversation that unfolds amid a group in a space that holds affective

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significance for co-participants, points to two quite different methodologies with distinct
epistemological and political foundations. The interviews with Left21 activists conformed
to a model of communication characterised by isolated, individual egos that send, signal
and then receive and decode the messages passed between them. I asked questions and
my informants answered them, their words and sentences standing in as representations
of an event and of an experience. Information or knowledge was passed from head to
head in neat, mental packets. Working with FM101 required a rather different epistemological sensibility whereby knowledge was understood not as neat, pre-fabricated packets
that could be sent from head to head through the vehicle of words, but rather as something messy and always having to be co-assembled through the process of materials and
entities coming together. For FM101 there were no isolated egos to send or receive
messages, only a material assemblage of agencies and interactions of which my field
research was a brief part.

From the End of History to the Beginning of Occupy

Hong Kong
In the Hong Kong Museum of History, eight galleries beginning with dioramas exploring the Pearl deltas geological and ecological make-up serve to naturalise the history
that follows. Visitors are guided through ethnological displays of the regions peoples
and historical galleries about the Opium Wars, the occupation of Hong Kong by the
Japanese in the Second World War, the heady days of the 1970s and the emergence of
Hong Kongs consumer culture, before concluding with the citys 1997 returned to China
where, apparently, Hong Kongs history ends.6
An alternative history of the city might have focused on how Hong Kong has passed
through distinctive crises of economic organisation, having been drawn into British rule
as an entrept where local elites prospered according to their ability to act as brokers
with the colonial regime, facilitating trade with China. Prior to the British acquisition
of Hong Kong island, the Qing strategy of depopulating the delta had done little to inhibit
the tentacles of illicit trade, and those tentacles would later make Hong Kong elites rich
under British rule. In the years after the Second World War and following the mass
migration of refugees to the colony following the retreat of the Kuomintang (Nationalist
Party) to Taiwan in 1949 and the ascent of the Communist Party to power on the mainland, Hong Kongs economy changed rapidly. The development of a light industrial
infrastructure manufacturing textiles, garments, household and cheap electronic goods
was buoyed in part by the arrival of cheap and plentiful migrant labour and of entrepreneurs from across the border but also by the US embargo on trade with China that
followed the outbreak of the Korean War (Pepper, 2008: 11415). Industrialisation was
however, short-lived. Hong Kongs manufacturing, export-led growth and development
lasted until the announcement, in 1978 by Deng Xiao-ping, of Chinas open door policy
(Poon, 2011: 64; Vickers, 2005: 25). This effectively launched Hong Kongs neo-liberal
or post-industrial experiment: factories were relocated to China in search of cheap labour
and Hong Kongs economy transformed from light manufacturing to financial services,
property development, conspicuous consumption and tourism. Old industrial elites
turned to real estate to consolidate their wealth and influence, switching allegiance from

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London to Beijing as it suited them. It was through these elites that British and then
Chinese bureaucrats governed the city. Of course,
The domination by these elites of the local society was not complete. This allowed an
unregulated space to form within which groups whose interests were not in accordance with (or
some instances, hostile to) the colonial regime were able to operate. (Thomas, 1999: 275)

The British colonial period was punctuated by episodic eruptions of Chinese politics
into Hong Kong. The General Strike of 19256 was organised by the Chinese Communist
Party while in the 1950s disgruntled Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party; KMT)
Republican elements were also stirring unrest. In the late 1960s and in common with cities
such as Paris and London, students and leftists organised protests against imperialism,
and Hong Kong was gripped by strikes and riots. Armed urban insurgency erupted as a
result of intense agitation by pro-communist elements registering the spill-over of
turmoil generated by the Cultural Revolution (Thomas, 1999: 146). Indeed, until the
protests that culminated with the killings of 4 June 1989, Chinese communism (Maoism)
constituted a powerful imaginary in Hong Kong both for those opposed to British rule
and for those afraid of Beijing.7 But if 1989 forced the Hong Kong Left into a radical
re-think of its political alignments with the wider region, it was a cluster of political and
economic crises including Hong Kongs reconfiguration as a Special Administrative
Region of China as a result of the 1997 handover, the Asian financial shocks of 19978,
the 20023 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak and various food
safety scandals in China and in Hong Kong rising property prices, rising unemployment
and increasing job insecurity (Poon, 2011: 132) that opened up new lines of fissure and
new spaces of political possibility in Hong Kong society. Hong Kong had been an amplifier of Cold War paranoias and sensibilities in which political dissent was expressed
according to Cold War and colonial logics. But with the handover accomplished, Hong
Kong entered a new liminal geo-political space (see Corcuff, 2012). Coupled with the
impact of the constitutive connectivities of the new mobile and global social media on
Hong Kongs business and political elites and its increasingly politicised migrant,
student and activist populations Hong Kong found itself acutely vulnerable to a range
of new economic, political and epidemiological risks.

From Indifference to Emotion

Occupy Hong Kong, then, did not emerge in a vacuum local, global and historically
articulated political, economic and urban factors were constitutive of the protest, and the
fact that it was the longest single occupation of an urban space that began with the wave
of global occupations on 15 October 2011 neatly punctures the orientalising representation of the colony cum territory and now Special Administrative Region as a site of business, indifferent to politics. This myth (Pepper, 2008: 66) emerged as a convenient prop
to British colonial rule in the 19th century and was aided and abetted by local elites keen
to maintain the image of Hong Kong not merely as a passive island of commercial calm
that would remain unruffled by the then turbulence of Chinese Republican and communist politics, but also as a haven where traditional [Chinese and British] ideals of social

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harmony and deference to established authority might always find sanctuary (Pepper,
2008: 73). This myth or representation which today is as convenient for Beijing as it
was for London elides Hong Kongs history of political dissent as well as deep inequalities of wealth and power. Significantly, it was elaborated in media stories about the
occupation in which an emergent discourse built upon a binary of real and fake protestors
rendered the Hong Kong occupiers pale imitations of genuine protestors in the West.
Commentators reflected on the hands off approach of the Hong Kong government, the
Police and the HSBC towards the camp, and the myth of a politically indifferent society
was subtly altered to produce a discourse of the studied indifference of the political and
financial elites towards the protest. No longer a discourse disseminated by Hong Kongs
elites about Hong Kong people and Hong Kong culture, it became a discourse that elites
used to describe themselves and their beneficent if time-limited tolerance of the protest:
The real message from Occupy Central does not come from the protest group but from the way
the rest of us have tolerated its antics. The remnants of the unruly, self-styled anti-capitalist
gathering are facing eviction. Rest assured, though, they will not face the same brutal police
tactics as their far more successful and worthy Occupy colleagues did in New York and London.
Compared with the officially sanctioned violence unleashed in these Western financial capitals,
the rights of assembly and free speech are alive and respected in our city. (Lo, 2012)

This calculated indifference in fact betrayed a considerable interest, among Hong

Kong publics, in the daily life of the camp and media representations of the first few
weeks of the occupation are notable for their interest in the life-style of the camp. For
example, [p]articipants insist that communal living has not put a strain on their relationships. They cook for one another; everyone takes what they need from the communal
stores and they still make decisions at nightly meetings (Ip, 2011).
This interest put on hold if only for a moment Hong Kongs image of cool radical
detachment (Lindner, 2013: 329) which like Simmels blas attitude, is so indelibly
implicated in the cold, impersonal system of commodity exchange (Lindner, 2013:
328).8 This sense of Hong Kong oozes not only from the neon-lit buildings and advertisements but also from the films of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai whose depictions of
melancholic individuals incapable of forming lasting emotional bonds (Robinson,
2006: 190) appear to frame Hong Kong culture as a passive reflection of post-modern
dislocation and post-colonial, urban inauthenticity. Between an imaginary of Hong Kong
as a site of the cold transaction (as opposed to the warm authenticity of Tnnies
Gemeinschaft) and as simultaneously politically and emotionally indifferent, the Occupy
encampment under the HSBC can be understood as a transgression of these frames and
narratives and it was the materiality of the camp that disturbed these conceptions of cool
urban detachment. The groupings of chairs and tents pointed to the camp as a community
committed to the exploration of slowness in a city of speed, and to face-to-face discussion and debate in an urban environment of digitally mediated and highly mobile (i.e.
atomised) communication systems. This materiality pointed to an alternative imaginary
of Hong Kong not as a site of purified indifference but as a place of emotion and affect
(see Bridge and Watson, 2013; Feigenbaum, 2014) mediated through chairs, tents and
bodies. As Luke Robinson (2006: 2045) has argued, Wong Kar-Wais films portray not

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so much alienated individuals seeking solace in commodities, but people engaging with
one another and their environment through the mediation of objects.
According to Steve Pile (2005: 236) cities are implicated in feelings such as anxiety,
fear, trauma, wounding, dread, fright, grief, mourning and melancholia. These emotional unsettlements are, at the very least, reminders of other people. The Occupy camp
at the foot of HSBC was such a site of unsettlement and it established a series of new
entanglement[s] between affect and physical space (Pile, 2005: 243) opening a niche
for repertoires of affective and embodied dispositions to breathe that were not based on
cool. Arguably they referred back both to the culture of the global Occupy movement but
also to bands of domestic workers occupying little patches of Hong Kongs non-places
(Aug, 1995) on their days off.

The Eruption of the Sacred

I have already pointed towards the agency of the camp-assemblage as a site for the production of a new affective sensoria for Hong Kongs hyper-modern and purified urban
landscape, claiming that it borrowed from both experiences of other Occupy camps
located in other urban environments (as mediated through social media) but also through
observations and experiences of Filipina migrant workers and their weekly occupations
of the sky-ways, parks and ignored patches of mall and unused space (such as the space
under the HSBC). These gatherings of bodies, voices, food, memories, mobile phones,
SMS messages and camaraderie among workers many of whom support families back in
the Philippines, indicate emergent forms of translocal subjectivity (Conradson and
McKay, 2007: 169) that albeit fleetingly re-configure Hong Kongs urban purity and load
Hong Kongs urban landscape with social practices saturated with emotion (McKay,
2007). The malls and sky-ways become new forms of transnational place that communities are reterritorializing in new forms, occupying virtual spaces and corridors and
continuing to produce new versions of rooted identities (McKay and Brady, 2005: 90).
Law and Tillu have independently described how the hegemonic space of Central Hong
Kong is remade as a site of resistance (Law, 2001: 266) through occupation by migrant
Filipina women and how the landscape of power of the HSBC and the surrounding area
of Hong Kong Central is transformed on a weekly basis by Filipina women into a festive
enclave (Tillu, 2011: 8; 32). Moreover, just as these assemblies of migrant workers produce new forms of identity and resistance through their congregations, so the siting of
the Occupy camp in the financial heart of the city was similarly an attempt to transform
an urban space held by activists to be an uprooted space characterised by blas indifference. As another activist put it to me, when you change the use of space you change
the relationships of the people; another remarked that we started under the HSBC to
build a community living in a different, non-capitalist way we ate together, we cooked
together, we slept together in our tents, while another spoke of the occupation as an
experiment in which ideas and practices about community, sharing [living] without money were explored. The Occupiers hosted gift shares and over the Christmas
period organised a concert and a barbecue. They threw parties, film nights and discussed
politics in short, they did all the things that the space under the HSBC was not built for.

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It is precisely through these performances as well as more apparently mundane

performances of, for example, sitting and relaxing in a chair in a space usually reserved
for transit that it becomes possible to start to think of the Occupy camp under the
HSBC not merely as an instance of transgression and thereby as a manifestation of the
sacred but as a ritual event. Ritual is a constant of the classical and contemporary anthropology and sociology of religion and indeed of the study of religion (or religious studies),
and is practically a sine qua non of standard conceptions of the field. But from Van
Gennep onwards (1961), it has been possible to consider ritual not simply as something
related to religion but equally as something related to a constellation of problems concerned with social change. Important is the extent to which ritual is understood as a
means of containing, inhibiting or marking a moment of potentially disruptive change.
For example, sociologists and anthropologists interested in ritual have emphasised the
regulative and constraining effects of ritual on bodies, the relationship of ritual to symbolic and instrumental forms of action, the opposition of private states to public performances and the implication of ritual in the reproduction of social, political and economic
power and its effects (and affects) on language and communication (see, for example,
Asad, 1993; Bloch, 1986; Bourdieu, 1991; Durkheim, 1915; Tomlinson, 2014). Following
a counter-Durkheimian genealogy of thinking that is, from Durkheim to Georges
Bataille and the Collge de Sociologie, and the importance of the sacred and of performance to the contestation of power Mikhail Bakhtins interest in carnival offers an
alternative point of departure through which ritual can be understood, notably in terms of
the transgressive, the polyphonic and the open-ended. According to Bakhtin (1973: 100,
emphasis in original), carnival was a syncretic pageant form of a ritual nature. Although
it had all but disappeared as a popular cultural form in Europe, it re-appeared in sublimated form in the novel. For Bakhtin, the novel was characterised by polyphony.
Polyphony meant dialogic and multi-layered forms of linguistic exchange in which sense
and meaning would always be unstable and open. Bakhtins (1973: 140) conception of
social life as a stream of always unfinished, communicative interactions offers a point
of departure for thinking about bodies, emotion, power and language at the threshold of
urban space. Following Bakhtin (1984: 10) then, the Occupy camps were carnivalesque
sites which celebrated liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established
order. But they were also sites and occasions for a complex series of experiments
in communication that included not just human speech but, as I have suggested, communicative assemblages of material objects including chairs and tents. If these latter are
implicated in alternative senses of communication and agency and the disruption of
blas, urban indifference then the General Assembly a key feature of camp life at Hong
Kong Central, as well as at other camps such as London constitutes a useful point of
departure for thinking further about the camps as sites for the release of powerful emotions
into the purified streets and spaces of Hong Kong.
The function of the Assembly was decision making by consensus. I described the
General Assembly at Occupy London as an experiment in proximity (Tremlett, 2012:
133), which captures something of the desire to establish a politics without mediators
that is a feature of the Occupy movement, and its privileging of the embodied dimensions of voice and participation (see Garces, 2012). The assemblies convened under the
HSBC became a site of conflict between Left21 and FM101 activists, particularly during

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the first few days of the occupation and this conflict revealed differing epistemologies of
communication. For FM101 consensus was the most important principle. They insisted
that consensus was not decision making by the majority arguing that social movements
were not simply vehicles to transmit some kind of message. FM101 desired a complete
isomorphism of their communicative practices and their sociality over which there could
be no compromise. For them, the camp was not a container for a message: the camp was
the message and in order to decode or understand the message, one had to participate in
the camp. For Left21, this type of argument was an example of the worst excesses of
lifestyle politics. For example, Left21 activists had wanted to issue a press statement at
the start of the occupation that included a list of political demands. They also wanted to
make plans for the future of the camp, and to establish a schedule of actions and activities.
They ended up organising separately as they were unable to secure the requisite consensus
for their proposals and by the end of the first week, Left21 activists had for the most part
withdrawn from the occupation, although a couple of activists stayed on to continue
Left21s presence at the camp.
The differences between Left21 and FM101 are comparable to those drawn by Bruno
Latour between double-click communication (2013: 22) and the dream of the frictionless sending and decoding of linguistic messages as against religious speech which is
concerned less with the transport of messages and more with the emotional shock
(2013: 46) of the transformation of interlocutors. Latours meditations on religious
speech constitute an attempt to re-think the implication of speech-acts in particular forms
of community or interactivity, a re-thinking that lay at the heart of the Occupy experiment
under the HSBC and in the wider movement.

Conclusions
In this article I have applied Durkheims understanding of the sacred as a means of
thinking about Occupy Hong Kong and, by implication, the wider Occupy movement.
This has meant working with concepts and a vocabulary usually at the margins of studies of social movements such as Occupy (see Graeber, 2007; Grindon, 2007; Rieger and
Kwok, 2012). In doing so, this article has been able to explore Occupy in terms of its
spatial-organisational politics and as a series of affective transgressions of Hong Kong
urban space that puncture the orientalist myth of Hong Kong culture as politically indifferent. An important contribution of this essay to studies of Occupy Hong Kong is the
significance of the activities of Filipina and other migrant workers to the activists
imaginary while, as a contribution to wider debates about the Occupy movement and
social movements more generally, the application of the concepts of the sacred and
ritual as a means of thinking through the performative and communicative dimensions
of the occupation, of camp life and the question of social change.
Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the assistance of KW, V and K in London
and L in Hong Kong. I am very grateful to Fung Wai-Yin for use of the picture and to Edward
Vickers for his useful suggestions for books and essays about contemporary Hong Kong. I am

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indebted to Fang-long Shih who was my research assistant and translator in Hong Kong. All errors
in fact and interpretation remain my own.

Funding
This research was generously funded by the Norwegian Research Council and was conducted as
part of an international and inter-disciplinary research project led by Professor Jone Salomonsen at
the University of Oslo called Re-Assembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource. For more
information see http://www.tf.uio.no/english/research/projects/redo/

Notes
1.

The occupation of HSBC in Hong Kong that began on 15 October 2011 was known locally as
Occupy Central. To avoid confusion with protests that began on 28 September 2014 organised by a different group with a different political agenda called Occupy Central Love and
Peace, I refer to the occupation of HSBC in 20112012 throughout this article as Occupy
Hong Kong.
2. The politicisation of the sacred (or elsewhere, the aestheticisation of the political) has a certain
genealogy from Durkheim through to thinkers including Georges Bataille and the Collge de
Sociologie group (see Grindon, 2007; Richman, 2003).
3. Actual estimates of numbers from activists I interviewed hovered on an initial number of 500
as having assembled at Exchange Square and of about 200 having undertaken the short march
to the HSBC building.
4. http://left21.hk/wp/en/
5. All the interviews were conducted in English with occasional digressions, detours and re- and
de-translations into Cantonese and Mandarin. The majority of my interviewees were students
with excellent English-language skills which negated the impact of my lack of proficiency
in Cantonese and Mandarin. The presence of an experienced research assistant and translator
with a background in qualitative and ethnographic research was also a significant enabling
factor to the research process.
6. For a comprehensive overview of the politics of the museum and the selectivity of the history
it covers, see Vickers (2005: 6875).
7. One Occupy activist I interviewed had first-hand experience of the 4 June protests. The
protests were triggered by the sudden death of the reform-oriented General Secretary of the
Chinese Communist Party Hu Yao-bang. Hong Kong-born students studying in cities such
as Guangzhou experienced for themselves the intensity of the movement and the violent
crackdown that followed. Thereafter, they turned for inspiration to dissident intellectuals
such as Wei Jing-sheng.
8. The writings of Simmel were extremely influential on the Chicago School of urbanists, in
particular the claim that city living fostered superficial impersonality and routine behaviour
(Ross, 2013: 174).

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Date submitted December 2014
Date accepted May 2015