Umbrella Occupy: Everyday Utopianism & the Actualization of the Virtual

Abstract

The grand narratives of politics explain the immediate catalyst of the Umbrella Movement, that is, Beijing’s denial of democratization in Hong Kong. However, it does not explain the actual cultural habits, creative content and performative politics of the participants at the different occupy zones on a daily basis. Nor do they explain why the original Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) movement led and designed by the democratic old guards was not acted out as planned by the students and the ordinary people, when they chose their sites of action and started to do things on their own. To fill the gap, this paper addresses what kind of cultural values and habits do we actually see in the Umbrella Movement? In what contexts have these values and habits emerged and developed? Who helped set these agenda and develop these values and cultural habits over the years and brought them on site? According to my frontline observations and analysis, the culture of the Umbrella Movement is what I call a culture of “everyday utopianism.” This everyday utopian impulse is what drives and guides most Hong Kong social movements in the post 1997 era. Thus, there is no better way to understand how Hong Kong culture has evolved than analyzing this social movement culture. It demonstrates a kind of theoretical and methodological production that departs from the pre-1997 postmodern generation’s discursive tactic of deferral against essentialism in identity politics. In the previous generation, there was an assumption of the virtual as simulacrum, with the real being assumed as the forever unrepresentable. The hermeneutic circle/ representational terrain is assumed to be the absolute horizon of politics and experience. This Western-centric theoretical assumption can only imagine a tactic of eternal deferral, with the fear of essentialism as a strategic justification and the anxious (心虛) tactic of procrastination/deferral as an ethics. What I see now in the Umbrella Movement however, is a tactic of actualization of potential, virtual subjectivities and agencies in the real, whenever and wherever possible, in view of the increasingly suffocating conditions of Hong Kong. In face of the enormity of China at large and the Beijing government in particular, Hong Kong culture is forced to come up with temporal, spatial orders and tactics of subjectivity that are totally altered and more utopian than the previous generation of theory. It works according to a more quotidian and less pretentious logic, which can be understood in terms of a rudimentary idea of Buddhahood. The Buddha is a real human being who has achieved enlightenment/liberation in the real and has taught the methodology of this actualization. Thus, if I were to theorize, Buddhahood is real/actualizable, but it is also virtual, anticipatory for any practitioner who has not yet actualized Buddhahood. So, the virtual is real and can be actualized in the real. Thus, both the virtual and the actual fall on the side of the real and are not merely linguistic and conceptual. Moreover, the real is actualizable and not inaccessible. The, temporal-spatial order of this utopian becoming, be it democracy or Buddhahood, has therefore, extended far beyond the barrier called China.