[...] the ambiguity of the inside/outside distinction – where the latter is both a police mechanism, an enforcement of the rule of property by the police, and a weapon in the hands of militants. While the occupiers barricaded themselves into the second floor of the building – using chairs, u-locks, tie-downs and their own hands to deny the police entry – scores of riot police set up a perimeter around the building, first with police tape and then with metal barricades, which they defended with batons, rubber bullets and the threat of arrest. The double barricade and the double siege – the occupiers besieged by police themselves besieged by close to a thousand sympathetic people – renders in very clear terms the topology under discussion here [...] The police are the agents of this reterritorialization, but just as often the limits are self-imposed as an action collapses under its own gravity, leading to bargaining, concessions or a simple lack of will to continue. The outside becomes an inside, and the act of self-subtraction converts into this or that preservationist form of belonging. To survive, a new outside needs to be set up, new forms of refusal need to take root [...]
