Ongoing Appropriation: Invisible Seattle and Red May

Abstract

During the last few days of April, 2017, I began to see announcements online and around Seattle about a festival called Red May. With speakers drawn from both academia and the arts, the events promised to bring diverse radical thinkers—including Kathi Weeks, Michael Hardt, Jason Read, China Miéville, Geoff Mann, and Nisi Shawl—into conversation in various venues around the city: cafes, art galleries, Town Hall, the Grand Illusion Cinema. As I attended events and met the organizers, I discovered that these events were a mature and explicitly anti-capitalist development of a project from the early 1980s called Invisible Seattle, which drew heavily on Surrealism and Situationism. The playfulness of Invisible Seattle lives on in Red May as a roving festival of ideas and imagination which seeks to make the month “the public home for Left reflection absent since the Occupy Movement was evicted from the heart of America’s cities” (Wohlstetter, 2017). This chapter serves as both a history of the movement between the two groups and their work, as well as an application of, and a theoretical contribution to, the concept of “transindividuality” (Read, 2016). The central argument is that although urbanists and activists often focus on the spatial dimensions of occupation, the temporal dimension is perhaps even more crucial for the constitution of collective subjectivity.