Taylor Politics of Passion

8/12/2019 Taylor Politics of Passion

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The Politics of Passion

What I shall have to say here is neither difficultnor contentious; the only merit I should like to

claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts.

J. L. Austin,How to Do Things with Words, pg. 1.

I This chapter explores the ways in which individual bodies and affects (passion)

define todays political struggles taking place at the margins or outside traditional

political parties and hierarchies. We have only to think of movements driven by outrage

against political and economic injustices such as the so-called Arab Spring, European

summer, Americanfall (Occupy Wall Street) and Chilean winter of 2011 as a few

notable examples of affects that transcend individual feelings to form transnational

conditions (perhaps unspoken coalitions) of resistance or even revolt. While clearly the

seasonal arrangement of these events misleads us into imagining a natural or sequential

rhythm, at the same time the pattern serves to underline the fact that outbursts seem to

occur spontaneously during certain historical moments. The 1930s, 1960s and the 2010s

are simply three examples. All of a sudden, out of seemingly nowhere, massive protests

erupt one after another. Words like contagion and entrainment suggest the ways that

people can become seemingly not only of one mind but of one body: Canada, Nigeria,

Mexico, Greece, Israel, Portugal, Hong Kong, Taksim Square in Istanbul, Cairo (again).1

In Brazil a hundred thousand people took to the streets.2Marcelo Hotimsky of Brazils

Free Fare Movement said, Its not something we control, or something we even want to

control,3though certainly political parties from left to right are trying to name it and co-

opt it. Many protestors respond to local and deep-seated economic inequalities

exacerbated by the ever-widening income disparities worldwide. While these groups may

(unknowingly) share common cause, they further transmit and elaborate what Teresa


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Brennan called "energetic affects" (51)4. The INDIGNADOS, or as Manuel Castells

refers to them, the INDIGNADAS of Spain, the over two million people who manifested

in over eight hundred cities around the world between May and October 2011 fueled by

indignation, as their name suggests, enact pure affect.5All of a sudden, commentators

write of the Brazilian situation, a country that was once viewed as a stellar example of a

rising, democratic power finds itself upended by an amorphous, leaderless popular

uprising with one unifying theme: an angry, and sometimes violent, rejection of politics

as usual.

But unruly acts and passions cannot be limited to the outsidethey cross

ideological bounds, showing the fears, anxieties, prejudices, and hopes that animate the

attitudes and actions of the State itself. While usually commentators assign affect to the

opposition, characterizing those outside established political systems as irrational or

angry, what Freud observed just after WWI remains true today: it would seem that

nations still obey their passions far more readily than their interests.6

Hitler's Germany

offers only an extreme illustration of the ways in which the governmental mobilization of

poisonous affects and structures for identifying and loathing ones adversaries create the

conditions of moral panicthat overwhelm all rational and juridical systems designed to

contain them. Moral panic emerges, according to Javier Trevio Rangel, when an

episode, person or group are defined as a threat to certain social values or interests. They

conjure irrational fear or a phenomena out of control.7By politics of passion, then, I

refer to the mobilization of affect for political ends on collective, structural, and trans-


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ideological levels that skirt the traditional organization of political parties and practices

(such as lobbying and voting).

Once again, it seems, political decisions during the past decade have been

increasingly forged through affective and embodied struggle. Mexican theorist Rossana

Reguillo has noted the move towards the de-politicization of politics through a politics of

passion that exceed (and reject) traditional institutions.8Convinced that the electoral

process has been violated or corrupted, that leaders support corporate interests, that the

media is sequestered in the hands of the power-brokers, and that official institutions

cannot adjudicate in a way that is seen as transparent and legitimate, people across

political persuasions throughout the world have been gathering, demonstrating,

demanding, and pressuring for change through enacted, rather than discursive or

representational, practice.

The role of physical bodies in political movements has been strongly debated in

the U.S. and beyond since the 1960s when street protests proved successful in civil rights,

feminist, and anti-war demonstrations. Since then, for example, Critical Arts Ensemble

argued in their 1994 work,Electronic Civil Disobedience,Nostalgia for the 60s activism

endlessly replays the past as the present, and unfortunately this nostalgia has also infected

a new generation of activists who have no living memory of the 60s. Out of this

sentimentality has arisen the belief that the take to the streets strategy worked then, and

will work now on current issues (10). They conclude with as far as power is concerned,

the streets are dead capital! Nothing of power to the elites can be found on the streets

(11). Instead of blocking access to government buildings and what used to be stable


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structures of power, CAE advocated electronic civil disobedience to block the electronic

flow of information-capital (9), the Deleuzian undulatory nature of control society.9

The derision of affectof nostalgia and sentimentalityblindsided CAE, for all

their brilliance. While they focused on efficacy, they neglected the other vital aspects of

civil disobediencethe visionary, the communicative, the affective, and the

contestational. Instead of endlessly replay[ing] the past as the present, we might argue

that the marches and occupations rehearse a democratic present too long promised and

too long deferred. By gathering together, those in opposition identify themselves to

themselves. By being there, they prove that people can become active participants;

protest can happen; resistance is not only possible but it is being enacted. The art projects

and collaborative activities keep the protestors emotionally strong and focused enough to

keep up their activism day after day. The streets make manifest that WE ARE HERE.

Visibly. Hormonally. Experientially. Politically. Not an abstraction like the "American"

or in this case "Mexican" people. Not a poll number, not an easily divisible subgroup or

constituency.

Clearly, to think of political performance more broadly, we need to look at the

role of social media and digital networks. Recent protest movements show the degree to

which earlier separations and tensions between street and online activism seem to be

dissolving. Many protestors have smart phones; they are always onlinenetworked, in

contact with each other and of course identifiable to those in power. The role of digital

technologies in uprisings around the world includes traditional mediaradio,

photography, and videoand sites of social networking such as Facebook and Twitter.

But while flesh bodies expand into their electronic and digital bodies, the balance


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between online and off does not always work in the same way. When Mubarak shut down

the Internet in Egypt, people took to the streets. But they knew where to go because plans

for contestations using Internet platforms had been in the making for a couple of years. In

Turkey, conversely, tweets informed the general population of the country what was

happening at Taksim square.10

Sandra Gnzalez-Bailn and Pablo Barbar, also

commenting on protests in Turkey note: There is abundant evidence suggesting that

social media have been pivotal in the spread of information, especially in the absence of

coverage by traditional media [1]; to recruit and mobilize protesters [2]; to coordinate the

movement without the infrastructure of formal organizations [3]; and to draw the

attention and support of the international community [4]. That social media is at the heart

of these protests was defiantly acknowledged by the Turkish Prime Minister himself

when he described them as the worst menace to society [5]. There are also reports that

25 people were arrested because of their use of Twitter to spread information about the

protest [6].11

Bodies and social media inhabit the same albeit expandedworld of

power. Repressive forces know where to locate and arrest their critics, as PRISM and

other information gathering and surveillance programs make evident. Protestors and

whistle-blowers end up in jail or in transit pens in Moscow airports. While most recent

uprisings involve mixed modes of digital and embodied practice, Ricardo Dominguez

reminds us that the "indigenous avant-garde" demands that we consider lands without

streets and communities without networks.12

But for now, in the context of events that happened in 2006, before the political

uptake of social media, I will think about bodies acting in public space in relation to

traditional mediamostly advertising and television that have been dominated by


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powerful business interests on the political right. While I do not want to essential the

notion of bodies, lets assume that due to specific historical, phenomenological, and

political reasons these bodies give at least the illusion of ontological stability and

coherence.

II Here, then, I focus on Mexicos contested election of 2006 in which two million

protestors gathered in the Zcalo (Mexicos central square and the symbolic heart of the

nation) to challenge the election results through acts of civil disobedience. This example,

I hope, will shed light on the importance of bodies in politics that we can extend to more

recent Occupy Wall Street movement and other youth-driven protests.

I will not go into all the ins and outs of the 2006 election and Mexican politics as

such or in relation to the elections of July, 2012. Instead I focus on the efficacy and

limitations of performance as politicsusing the 2006 election as a stunning case study

of several performances taking place simultaneously in the public sphere:

1) Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador (AMLO), the mayor of Mexico City and the popular

presidential candidate for the PRDthe ever so slightly left of center party-- gathered

millions in the Zcalo when he heard the elections had gone to his opponent, Felipe

Caldern, candidate of the PANon the political right.13Many believed then, as they do

now, that Calderns victory was a product of electoral fraud. Nearly half of the ballots in

designated voting places did not add up.14

AMLO knew he would no longer have access

to TV or other media.15

It was now all about bodies. You-Tube and Twitter had not yet

become part of the distributive network that politics take for granted today. Millions of


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Mexicans concerned that the PAN might have again stolen the elections after seven

decades of make-believe democracy demanded a recount.162)Protestors, organized by

the performance and cabaret artist Jesusa Rodrguez, took to the streets and organizing a

massive sit-in and tent-city (orplantn) that lasted for fifty days and clogged the Zcalo

of Mexico City and the main boulevard, Reforma. Protestors enacted non-violent

resistance during which three thousand four hundred performances took place and 3)

AMLO was sworn in as the Legitimate Presidentin a pretendinaugurationpretend,

that is, in relationship to the realone that was out-performed as illegitimate. The official

swearing-in could not be celebrated in a public place for fear of popular outragerather,

it took place during a four-minute ceremony in the midst of a congressional brawl.17

These competing utterances, displays, and ceremonial acts however, erupted in a

political environment of moral panicin which AMLOs opponents had depicted him as

a political monster,a danger to Mexico,and a messianicpopulist.18These acts

illustrate the degree to which performance and/as politics comprise multiple, overlapping,

and often contested cultural repertoires and legitimating practices. I will look at the

staging, the power of political performatives and what I will call animatives, and the role

of spectatorshipthat characterized the scenario of democratic participation that has yet

to come into being.

Performatives, in the J. L. Austin understanding of the term, refers to language

that acts, that brings about the very reality that it announces (i.e., the preachers

declaration I now pronounce you man and wifehas the force of law.)19

Legally, in some

religions, the two individuals are now 'one.' These utterances are verbal performances


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that take place within highly codified conventions; their power stems from the legitimacy

invested in authorized social actors rather than individuals (the priest, the judge). All

parties need to be acting in good faith. No crossing ones fingers while making a promise,

no ignoring the priests injunction to speak up, or forever hold your peace. These

breaches would render the act voidrather than trueor false.True, the act took place,

but it failed to achieve its desired goal of legitimizing a union. In political rather than

linguistic terms, we might say that performatives belong to the realm of internal

cohesion, clearly defined authority, enabled by popular consensus, producing a

recognized, agreed-upon real.

Animatives, as I define themare grounded in bodies-- the becoming of 'one

body' exceeds discursive formulation. Animatives are part movement as in animation,

part identity, being, or soul as in anima or life. The term captures the fundamental

movement that is life (breathe life into) or that animates embodied practice. Its affective

dimensions include being lively, engaged, and moved."Animo" in Spanish, emphasizes

another dimension of the Latin 'animatus': courage, resolve, and perseverance.

Animatives, thus, are key to political life. As Castells reminds us, emotions are the

drivers of collective action(134). Animatives refer to actions taking place in the messy

and often less structured interactions among individuals. They encompass embodied, at

times boisterous, contradictory and vexed behaviors, experiences and relationships. This

then is the realm of the potentially chaotic, anarchist, and revolutionary that Judith

Halberstam refers to as the wild, that which disturbs the order of things and produces

new life.20

Performative, in my example here, might index the Electoral Commission s


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declaration of the winner in the 2006 election with its binding legal force, while

animative signals the ruckus that broke out in the Zcalo and in the country.

My distinctions clearly need some stressing. Are performatives always codified

and conventional, even in bringing about the newness they announce? Political theorist

Benjamin Arditi notes the utopian potential of performatives: They are actions and

statements that anticipate something to come as participants begin to experience as they

begin to live what they are fighting for while they fight for it.21Surely let there be

light inaugurates life itselfthough even here too the act depends on the power of the

authorized speaker, God. AustinsHow To Do ThingsWith Wordsis nothing if not an

extensive exploration of the convoluted groups and subgroups defining what

performatives are and are not, what they can and cannot perform. Performatives, in the

Austinean sense, function only within the clearly demarcated conditions that he outlines

and, in that sense, always rely on authority and consensus. I would not go so far as to

align performatives with sovereignty and regulatory powers of state as debates on Hobbes

and performatives did in the 1960s and 70s.22I maintain that performatives, like all other

forms of performance, can be liberating or oppressive, depending on the context. But

performatives, it seems to me, rely on conventional structures for their efficacy. Yet, for

that reason, the threat of disruption hovers over them. One of the many things I love

about Austins writing on performatives is his elaboration on the multiple ways they can

go wronginfelicities, unhappiness, misfires, misinvocations, misapplications and so on.

These, it seems to me offer rich examples of strategies of resistance against the

conventions and codes within which performatives claim enunciatory power. I have

already written about relajo as acts of as spontaneous disruption that defy authority,


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rupturing (even for a moment) the configuration and limits of the group or community.

Translated into English as both commotion, ruckus and joke, laugh, relajo only ever

works to upset conventions. Without authority to be defied and codes of conduct to be

upended, there would be no relajo. It is an act of devolorization, or what the late

Mexican intellectual Jorge Portilla calls "desolidarization" with dominant norms in order

to create a different, joyously rebellious solidarity-- that of the underdog. It is a

negative form of expression in that its a declaration against, neverfor, a position. Yet,

relajo proves non-threatening, because it is humorous and subversive in ways that allow

for critical distancing rather than revolutionary challenge. It is an aside, not a frontal

attack.23

Art and activist practices often disrupt performatives. One example: Las Yeguas

del Apocalysis (Mares of the Apocalypse, comprised of Francisco Casas y Pedro

Lemebel, two radical and brilliant gay performers in Chile) were feared at literary and art

exhibits given their relish for scandal and crashing self-declared high-brow events. They

were not invited to the meeting of intellectuals with Patricio Aylwin (president of Chile

from 1990-94) just before the elections of 1989, but they came anyway. They came

onstage wearing high heels and feathers and extended a banner that said homosexuals

for change. Upon coming down from the stage, Francisco Casas jumped on then

senatorial candidate, Ricardo Lagos, and gave him a kiss on the mouth.24

Performatives and animatives, as these examples make clear, only ever work

togethernothing pronounced means much without the re-action of those addressed or

invoked. The terms call attention to different political acts, uptakes, and positionalities

encompassed by the broader word, performance. The reason for teasing out the ways in


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which these various acts work is not to cement distinctions and binaries but rather (in the

spirit of Austin) to expand the range of political possibilities and methodologies within

the broader rubric of performance.

The efficacy of performatives, then, depends on the acknowledgment/agreement

of those in attendance.And the addressee also always enacts a positionit might be one

of agreement or consensus, it might be one of dis-identification, dissensus, or radical

rejection. The two million people in the Zcolo overtly denounced the results announced

from above. They supported their own candidate as President Legtimo whether or not

that act produced a widely-recognized real.I use these terms, then, not to illustrate clear-

cut distinctions between some high/low, elitist/populist, real/pretendunderstanding of

politics. The space between those terms, the space of friction, contradiction, exposure,

and interface seems far more productive to me in understanding how traditional political

hierarchies and structures have been stretched and upended by contemporary

participatory politics.

The multiple Mexican political performances(like all performances) of course

need to be understood in situ, within the context of the political acts that gave them rise

the decades of electoral fraud and corruption, endemic poverty (half of all Mexicans live

in poverty and 20% live in extreme poverty), the brutal battle of images waged through

the media during this specific election, the traditionally marginalized poor bursting in on

the electoral process, the show of force by the Mexican military following the election,

and the escalating waves of violence and human rights abuses evidenced in parts of

Mexico since 2006 that have left close to 100,000 people dead or disappeared.25


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The Sunday following the announcement of election results, a million people

converged in Zcalo to show their support for AMLO. From that moment onwards, the

various protest acts broke new ground, social actors improvised as they went along. The

contest of power was clearon one hand, the PAN was the party in government

controlling the resources, the armed forces, and legitimating institutions. It made

alliances with the PRI (the party that ruled Mexico for over 70 years and which is now

again in power), with media conglomerates, wealthy industrialists in the North of

Mexico, and the U.S. right. On the other side were millions of peopleprogressives,

intellectuals, young people, and a huge number of indigenous and mestizo people who

had finally found a role in a political party. Important to note,the Zapatistas condemned

the elections claiming that the Mexican government, the mal gobierno(bad government)

had failed to support them or honor any agreement with them. They ran their own

campaign, La otra campaa,as one commentator noted, is not anothercampagne but a

campagne of others.26

Mexico became a massive training ground for staging scenarios

of democracy through civil disobedience.

AMLO started the march at the Auditorio Nacional, walking down Reforma to the

Zcalo, the seat of executive power for the past 700 years when the Aztecs built their cue

(or main temple) on the same ground. There he met his followers, who had come from

throughout the country to join him. His proposal was that every single ballot be

recountedvoto por voto, casilla por casilla.

From a conceptual point of view, this performance had political and symbolic

force. But the staging posed a real problem. Jesusa Rodrguez (Mexicos most famous


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cabaret performer and activist) went to the Zcalo that first Sunday only to find a huge

platform structure--an empty stage. During the three hours it took for AMLO to walk

from the Auditorio to the Zcalo, the million people waiting there had nothing to do.

When AMLO finally did arrive, all his political advisors and followers crowded around

him. No one could see him. Jesusa remembers thinking. a stage is a stage. It has its

rules and norms. Someone has to organize itpeople have to be able to see and hear

things.As Rodrguez pointed out, many politicians dont understand liveteatro poltico.

For the second massive rally in the Zcalo, Jesusa had orchestrated the event. The

platform now had risers so that AMLO could stand stage-center; party members would

line up behind him. While AMLO walked from Reforma to the Zcalo, well-known

actors and writers read, sang, and entertained the public. As Mayor of Mexico City,

AMLO was able to have huge TV monitors installed along the route so that those

walking could see what was going on in the Zcalo, and those waiting in the Zcalo

could see their leader coming closer. The walk itself took on a sense of dramatic

crescendo, symbolically building on and amplifying the effect of AMLOs approach to

occupy the center of power. When he arrived, he was greeted with open arms by the

admiring PATRIAthe actress Regina Orozco as Motherland.

More important, the participants could see themselves magnified as a collective

body both on and off screen; they were now visibly a part of a historic movement they

could visualize and identify with. The staging did not in fact change what happened. Its

efficacy, rather, lay in changing everyones sense of participation in the event.

Performance, the poor persons media in this case, made it possible for people to


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represent themselves (in the democratic rather than mimetic sense of the word --as in

political representation) and to see themselves inand asa political force. By fueling

passionate identification, the force of the event created the very bodyit claimed only to

represent.But insteadof language that acts, here bodies act, bodies that feel themselves

robbed of their language in the form of their vote. They were voting with their feet, as the

saying goes. Political participation begins to take other, more affective, forms.

Theplantnwas a different kind of performancethe animative challenged the

official performative. The occupation was both an embodied claim to inclusion and the

performance of belonging, of establishing a different citythat people would occupy and

control for over 50 days. The tent city enacted an alternative vision of what communal

social life might look likea more open and equitable society. Representatives from all

around Mexico lived in the make-shift tents installed along several miles of the protest

route. Gender roles underwent change as men cooked and cleaned and new forms of

collaboration came into being. Theplantninverted the private/public weve become

used to--the use of publicspace as if it were private. Cell phone conversations and I

Pods have created a new etiquettewe take our private world with us wherever we go.

These daily acts reaffirm the private publics of capitalism with its privatization of public

space. My bubble world allows me to lock out all and everyone else. Here, however, the

private became public as people literally rubbed shoulders and lived together peacefully

in one of the worlds largest cities. A different notion of politics was not only envisioned

but enacted. The radical utopian characterof theplantn, to recall Herbert Marcuses

words about the 1968 uprisings, were expressions of concrete political practice.27


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Living as ifculminated in the strangest performance of allAMLOs swearing in

as the Presidente Legtimo, head of a parallel government that boasts about one million

constituents. The performative declaration misfiredfor one essential reasonhe did not

have the recognized authority to enact the claim. The act was voidaccording to Austin,

but certainly not without effect(16). The misfire worked to question the authority of the

'official' decision. Rather than participate in the simulated democracyof the Right, his

performance accentuated not only the theatricality and make believe quality of the real

but the very real potential of the what if. The scenario offered another framework for

envisioning a way forward by calling attention to the sham and imagining alternative,

plausible futures. The as ifsand what ifs, as Aristotle noted, are very serious business.

[and] the poets job is not to report what has happened but what is likely to happen: that

is, what is capable of happening according to the rule of probability or necessity.28

Political as ifscreate a desire and demand for change; they leave traces that reanimate

future scenarios. In Mexico, this means imagining the political as a space of convergence

and potentiality rather than (as we know it to be) a done-deal, brokered behind closed

doors by those in control. The as ifsand the what ifs, often dismissed as posturing or

only pretendingby cynical commentators, can open liberating and progressive pathways

to social re-inventions, amplifying the limits of the political imagination.

I asked Jesusa what, from her experience as a cabaret artist, had prepared her for

this task of choreographing an entire political movement. Judging from her response,

cabaret might indeed be essential training for politics. While she had to keep the general

structure of the scenario in mindthe creativenon-violent struggle against fraud and


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oppressionshe had to act without a script. Her body became central to the performance

(with advantages and draw-backs that we will see later). The improvisational nature of

her work in Cabaret, where she constantly pulled topical issues and figures into a loosely

structured art piece, had trained her to stay on her feet and respond creatively to what was

going on around her. Improvisation, as a methodology, is practiced basedyou can only

learn to improvise by improvising,she reminds me. She also stressed the quality of

bodily presencedeveloping a deep focus and connection to the people and place around

her, allowing herself to become a body of transmission for the energy that moves in and

through her to the crowd. Affect, as Teresa Brennan reminds us, circulates among and

between us; we as individuals are not self contained (14). The enormous power of

embodied protest stems from this unconstrained flow of energy and affectthe

expansion and constant regeneration of the body politic. Presence of mind is equally

important as she weighed various options. A good imagination and a sense of humor are

key, not only to performance and cabaret but to envisioning a better world. Moreover,

running El Habito, an alternative performance space for fifteen years with her wife

Liliana Felipe, Jesusa had learned to plan, program activities, and look ahead six months.

While performance is always in the now, it also has an eye to the future. Durational

III The politics of passion, and the scenarios of a more equitable society that these

sometimes give rise to, can prove politically efficacious. Since 2000, popular marches by

ordinary citizens have peacefully toppled fiveundemocratic governments in Latin

AmericaEcuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina, and Peru. Erica Chenoweth and

Mara J. Stephan in Why Civil Resistance Works, note the success of non-violent


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overthrow of regimes in Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Georgia (2003), Ukraine

(2004-5), Lebanon (2005) as well as the ongoing uprisings in the Middle East. They note,

moreover, that between 1900 and 2006, non-violent resistance campaigns were nearly

twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts (7) in part

because the moral, physical, informational, and commitment barriers to participation are

much lower for nonviolent resistance (10).

But there are dangers and risks to relying so heavily on performance as politics

some of them having to do with the highly unstable nature of performance itself. It can

cut officials down to size but its hard to know when resistance, civil disobedience, and

protest might trigger a violent backlash. In Why Civil Disobedience Works, Chenowith

and Stephan label the 2006 protests as a Failurein the outcome graph (33). What does

failure mean, in a case such as this one?

On a simple level, the protests failed to reach their objective of forcing a total

recount. The power brokers managed to resist the demand for clarification. The long-term

effect was that the Caldern presidency, like the first George W. Bush presidency, was

marred by the cloud of illegitimacy.

On another level, theplantnwas depicted as a strategic disasterturning off

supporters and giving spectators and critics occasion to paint AMLO as a radical. A

couple of months after the contested elections, many of those who voted for AMLO said

that if the elections were held again, they would not vote for him. They were put off by

all the acting out. For others, still supportive of the movement, the truck drivers and taxi

drivers who had to endure the daily grind of navigating a complex city, theplantn


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proved too muchthey would not forgive AMLO for what came to feel like, so very

literally, as the enactment of obstructionist politics.

But perhaps more serious, the rejection of AMLO following the 2006 election

seemed to be a rejection of the performance of a more equitable society. It s fine for the

middle class and even progressives to embrace equalityon an abstract level, yet become

afraid when they actually see the power of a dynamic and motivated working class.

While many of the featured speakers were white, almost all of the people gathered in the

Zcalo were brown. Did the white students, artists, and intellectuals abandon the

struggle? Or did they feel that the largely mestizo social movement did not represent

them? Even a cursory look at the faces associated with the Mexican student movement,

#YoSoy132, shows a very different constituency in terms of age, class, and race.

The plantn reminds us that protests and occupations are framed by many

mediated forces and interests. Animatives terrify governments whose main goal is to

control bodies through the mobilization or threat of force, or the use of performative

edicts, decrees, and official utterances with the force of law. They also challenge on-

lookers who respond differently to spectacles of defiance and resistance. Who controls

the action? For better and for worse, animatives lack the legitimating structures,

authority, and hierarchies that empower performatives. Animativeslinguistically so

close to animation, as in what Sianna Ngai calls the non-stop technologyof cartoons

raise serious questions of agency. In Ugly Feelings, she explores what she calls

animatednessas unusually receptive to outside control(91). The inanimate body


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usurps the human speakers voiceand agency (123).29

The ruckus may be liberating on

one hand, but its not always clear what its about.

The plantn offered up the bodies on the streets and in the squares to be framed

by the media as racialized rabble manipulated by outside forces. The same thing

happened in Occupy Wall Street. One of the first articles about the movement to appear

in The New York Timeswas accompanied by a photograph of two young men. One, a

nicely dressed Latino in a suit and tie, was depicted as hard working. The other, a

disheveled white man, looked like a lazy slacker. The text summed up the message

those who work hard in the U.S. get ahead. Others, who feel things should just be handed

to them on silver platters, just sit around and complain. Economic inequalities?

RidiculousThose who were protesting, in both cases, were painted as pawns under the

spell of some delusional power. Power brokers and media commentators conjured up

scenarios of moral panic and approaching economic disaster. The people in the tents,

many of them of indigenous and mestizo racial origins, triggered a deep-seated fear and

racism. For some participants, the tent city offered an a utopian possibility of trust and

collaboration, but for too many on-lookers, the tents, especially as they were pictured

through the hostile media, foretold the fallof the middle class that the ads had

announced. AMLO (another Castro or Chvez), the Right had warned, will take all your

property and belongings away.30

And here they were, his followers sleeping on the

streets! His followers were called stinky,lazy,irrational thieves and lowlifes, who

knew nothing of politics.31

Worse, they were depicted as alien to modernity,in Jean

Francos words, a drag on a country striving to become part of the First World.32

So who


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controls whom? Does agency and action stem form the bodies on the street or from

brokers off to the side? And who is watching? Who witnesses the battle of presentation

and representation to decide whether to join to protest or turn off the T.V.?

IV Political spectatorship, then, is a force to be reckoned with. Revolutions take

place (for good or bad), as Kant reminds us, when they arouse in the hearts and desires

of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost

on enthusiasm.33

Passion, Kant recognizes, is powerful though politically invalidating

becauseall passion as such is blameworthy

(184). It

s clear, and not only to Kant, that

spectators, situated somehow outside the action, are as vulnerable to manipulation as the

bodies onstage. Theorists from at least as far back as Plato to the present have recognized

that there is a power and politics to seeing, although few might agree on what those

politics might be. For Plato, the skilled artist or charlatan can deceive children or

simple people who cant distinguish between knowledge and ignorance, reality and

representation.34

Aristotle, inPoetics, affirmed the pedagogical power of representation,

but argued to keep violence offstage for ethical reasons, not necessarily because

spectators should not see it (i.e., because it was obscene), but because the stage was

reserved for the recognition and understanding of that violence. Aristophanes in The

Frogspointed out that spectators were sometimes the objectof political machination,

rather than simply learning from it. While the notion that all vision is partial, mediated,

and susceptible to all forms of distortions and manipulations goes back at least as far as

Platos cave, the debates about what can and cannot be known through spectatorship


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continue into the present, further complicated now by the prevalence of mediatized

spectacles and interactive digital technologies.

So what constitutes political spectatorship? Are spectators the stupefied mass that

Brecht maligns, that sits in a darkened room as in a trance, like men to whom something

is being done.35

Spectators, Rancire suggests like many have before him, are trapped in

a paradox. On one hand, in the Brechtian worldview, according to Rancire, viewing is

the opposite of acting: the spectator remains immobile in her seat, passive. To be a

spectator is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act (2).36

On the other, in Artauds ideal theatre, spectators would disappear altogether, becoming

participants totally caught up in the action. Rancire sums up Artauds position: the

spectator must be removed from the position of observerdisposed of this illusory

mastery, [and] drawn into the magic circle of theatrical action(4). In fact Althusser, far

more than Artuad, insists on the privilege and power afforded the distanced spectator:

Mother Courage is presented to you. It is for her to act. It is for you to judge. On the

stage the image of blindnessin the stalls the image of lucidity (148).37

While Althusser

critiques the identification model of spectatorship as reducing social, cultural and

ideological consciousness to a purely psychological consciousness (149), the

distanced or hegemonic spectators profit from non-identificationthey dont have to get

involved. As Althussers image of the judge indicates, these spectators enjoy the

superiority and power that accompanies the lofty position of sentencing without ever

feeling oneself implicated in the proceedings. The problems of hegemonic spectatorship

are more accentuated in the realm of political performance, where people feel even less


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implicated in the ideological construction of the event and even more empowered to

demand explanation. The onus is on the protests, not the hegemonic spectator, to create

meaning.

Others, such as Brazilian theatre practitioner and theorist Augusto Boal, also

refuse the equation of seeing with passivity so often assigned to spectatorship. Boals

conclusion to Theatre of the Oppressed, where he concludes Spectator a Bad Word!,

might rehash some of the same arguments that Rancire raises, but his methodologies to

(re)train people who have learned to behave as passive political observers seems as close

to an implementation of Rancires emancipation of the spectator as I can think of.

Theatre is a form of knowledge Boal writes in 1992, it should and can also be a means

of transforming society(16).38

Image theatre, legislative theatre, newspaper theatre,

invisible theatre among other forms he developed taught participants to see critically, and

reflect, act, and intervene on what they saw. Emancipation for !"#$%&'(begins when

we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting. The relations between

saying, seeing, and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and

subjugation (13). Boals spect-actors assume their roles as active observers,

participating in the actions around them.39

He too understands that seeing is a doing, just

as not-seeing is the act of not doing. Both are acts.None one has more effectively

developed a strategy for the emancipated spectator, if by that we accept Rancires

definition of what the word emancipation means: the blurring of the boundary between

those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of the collective

body (19).


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Part of the paradox of spectatorship, I believe, stems from the fact that most

theorizations about active or passive viewing stems from theatre, as my examples so far

illustrate. Theatre, from the Greek theameaning"a view," was the place for seeing.

Spectator comes from the same word, theates.Theorydoes too. The etymology suggests

that from its linguistic origins, the person (spectator), the act (the see), and critical inquiry

(to theorize) were inseparable. Nonetheless, centuries of training spectators to sit still in

their seats and follow theatrical conventions has produced not only the idea of the passive

spectator but too often, perhaps, the passive spectators themselves. But there is nothing

inherently passive about spectatorship, even when we confine our analysis to the

theatrical.

Along the same lines, Israeli theorist Ariella Azoulay develops the idea of the

ethical spectator who assumes her/his role as participant in the scenario. Although

Azoulay refers to photography rather than live, embodied action, her emphasis on ethics

is key to understanding performance and/as politics: the shift moves from the ethics of

seeing or viewing to an ethics of the spectator, an ethics that begins to sketch the contours

of the spectators responsibility towards what is visible (130).40

Political performances make dissent visible. Protests, acts of civil disobedience,

strikes, marches, vigils, and blockades challenge the spectator to assess the situation,

think critically, and maybe even take sides. What are these protests about? Anti-

hegemonic spectators will get informed. But even keeping the imperatives of ethical,

emancipated and anti-hegemonic spectatorship in mind, its important to recognize the

multiple stagings of seeing/being taking place simultaneouslysome separated out as in

conventional western theatres with their onstage and stalls as in Althussers example,


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some taking place incessantly as people walk down the street, looking at others and being

watched and surveyed and tracked at the same time. This is a far more intense visual field

than that described by Sartre or even Lacan.41

The boundaries between performance and

politics (always porous) have become increasingly blurred. We see political performers,

performing politicians, performers as politicians, and the performance of political office,

as cameras zoom in on flags, military attire, national colors, presidential podiums, sashes,

and seals. Algorithms process which Internet sites to make available to whom.42

Spectators are simultaneously political agents, the object of politics, and performers for

other spectators watching events from a different vantage point.

43

Almost every event is

performed for television, or transmitted online, for the distant (unseen but, in our age of

data mining, not unknown) audience at home. Participants can also be there through

streaming video or chats. At conventions and rallies, those who are physically present

often watch the events on the giant screens projecting the speakers. The live participants

serve as an enthusiastic background for the other show taking place offstage, in the

virtual public arena. Performance efficacy is measured, not by the reaction of viewers in

the room, but by daily polls. These stagings complicate whatever we might say about

spectatorship in current protests. They also pose age-old questions about perspective,

embodiment, and location long associated with studies of vision, but with a fascinating

twist. Does the dominance of technological mediation signal the failure of the live and

seeing as a means of knowing? Or has the triumph of other systems of transmission

rendered embodied vision one more repeatwe can only see and recognize that which

we have been taught to see, that which we have seen before? In any case, a new form of

spectatorship is taking place through all these mediated frames that complicates Brechts


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vision of people sitting in a darkened room. There are many ways of participating, many

ways of being there, though not all feel as powerful and immediate and experientially

vibrant as some protesters feel about embodied practice.44

The complications around representationwhether in traditional political systems

or the mediaI believe, helps explain the resurgence and even centrality of the body in

politics, bodies (as I noted earlier) that claim some degree of ontological stability. Bodies

communicate far more than visual experience. People share the energy that builds as it

passes through crowds. Feelings of solidarity allow some protesters to take risks they

would not necessarily take on their own. They may be out protesting for a cause, but their

allegiances often grow to encompass their fellow protesterswere in this together. Do

the protests transmit the sense of energy and solidarity to bystanders? It depends in part

on the conditions. Chenoweth and Stephan noted more participation in non-violent

movements because people felt safe and justified in expressing their views. Activist

groups such as Otpor recommend that protest be as fun and interactive with the public as

possible, and their non-violent, and endlessly creative resistance, led to the overthrow of

Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia. As political parties fail to represent their

constituencies, people are re-learning to represent themselves. But that in no way protects

them from media mis-representations. The PROTESTER was Time Magazine Person of

the year for 2011. The cover image of the young, beautiful, veiled/masked?, dignified yet

exotic seemingly Middle Eastern woman, designed by Shepard Fairey, enacts its own

skewed representation. Her face gives definition to the unidentified mass clamoring in the

back grounded behind her in the image.


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What are spectators and commentators to make of all this? Critics called on the

protestors to name their demands! Slavoj !i"ek, who was against the protests until he was

for them, accused protestors in the U.K. of being thugswhose zero-degree protestwas

a violent action demanding nothing.Where were the performatives? As Arditi writes,

!i"ek stated that participants had no message to deliver and resembled more what Hegel

called the rabble than an emerging revolutionary subject. The problem for him is not

street violence as such but its lack of self-assertiveness, impotent rage and despair

masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival. 45

Later, of course,

!i"ek called for occupy first, demand lateranimatives before performatives. What

caught on in Mexico, in Spain, in OWS, however, were the animatives. The occupation

of public space with their tents, libraries, meeting spaces, food centers, digital

communication centers and much more caught on around the world. The movements, all

gestus, involved repetition, citationality, and improvisation. Everyone came up with all

sorts of acts to instruct and amuse. Figures such an Anonymous refused the lure of clearly

individuated leadershipthey all form part of the 99%. These animated gestures enact a

politics of massive unified presence. OWSunwillingness to make a demand, to narrow

their force to one or more specific claims, speaks for itself. But here again, this only

works if others join in. I would argue that our role (and by this I mean mine, and !i"eks,

and Arditis and all of those who write about these movements) is not to try to lead, or

prescribe but to assist, especially in the Spanishasistir, which means also to be present. It

means to legitimate the act of occupation by being there, physically or virtually, as

consenting addressees. Again, as in the case of Mexico, the very REALis under debate


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and construction. Who gets to decide? ASISTIR means to defend, to augment, to assure

that the injustices they name are not just theirs, a disenfranchised group as the media

often calls them, but ours as well. We are, after all, invoked in the 99%. But the beauty of

the 99% is that is calls for solidarity and for identification, not for the individual

protagonism of the famous, recognizable figures. Here too, we're talking about

distributive networks. The !i"eks, and even the Jesusas, cannot lead this kind of

movement that requires an individual, everyday practice that exceeds them. As Mexican

protestors said, democracy is not about voting once every six years, its about defending

the vote. One protestor in Occupy Wall Street put it slightly differently (though I still

edited it): You dont have intercourse every four years and call it a sex life. Politics is a

durational engagement, a process, a daily act, a way of envisioning a future, a doing and a

thing donewhich, incidentally, is also the definition of performance.

Diana TaylorNew York University


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Bibliography

1

See Public Protests Around The World inGlobal Issues

:http://www.globalissues.org/article/45/public-protests-around-the-world, last accessed

July 1, 2013.2Asked why the protests were emerging now, he said, Why not now? This isnt

something happening just in Brazil, but a new form of protesting, which is not channeledthrough traditional institutions. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at

Columbia University who has studied social movements, including Occupy Wall Streetand the Arab Spring, said it was hard to know exactly what sparks would set off a broader

movement. Simon Romero and William NeumanSweeping Protests in Brazil Pull In

an Array of Grievances New York Times, June 20, 2013, A1.3Op cit.

4

Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell UniversityPress, 2004.5Manuel Castells,Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet

Age.Cambridge UK: Polity, 2012, pg. 1136Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death(1915), Freud, Sigmund.

1957 (1915). Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.InThe Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the

History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other

Works,trans. and ed. James Strachey.London: Hogarth Press.p 288,7Javier Trevio Rangel, Pnico moral en las campaas electorales: La elaboracin del

peligro para Mxico.Foro Internacional, Vol. 49, No. 3 (197), Jul-Sep 2009), p 645.8Rossana Reguillo, Sujetividad sitiada. Hacia una antropologa de las pasiones

contemporneas.E-misfrica4.1, 'Passions, Performance, and Public Affects.'

http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-41/reguillo, last accessed April 6,2013.9Giles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992),p. 6.10Josh Tucker, A Breakout Role for Twitter? Extensive Use of Social Media in the

Absence of Traditional Media by Turks in Turkish in Taksim Square Protests, June 1,

2013, http://themonkeycage.org/2013/06/01/a-breakout-role-for-twitter-extensive-use-of-

social-media-in-the-absence-of-traditional-media-by-turks-in-turkish-in-taksim-square-protests/last accessed June 27, 2013.11Sandra Gnzalez-Bailn and Pablo Barbar,The Dynamics of Information Diffusionin the Turkish Protests, June 9, 2013. http://themonkeycage.org/2013/06/09/30822/Last

accessed June 27, 2013. This research as well as that by Josh Tucker (ftn 9) was

developed in New York UniversitysSocial Media and Political Participation(SMaPP) laboratory.


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12Ricardo Domnguez, teach-in, ConvergenceConference, Duke University, October

2012.13

PRD refers to the Partido Revolucionario Democrtico, a left of center party, while

PAN refers to the conservative Partido Accin Nacional.14Mark Weisbrot Irregularities reveal Mexico's election far from fair.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/09/irregularities-reveal-mexico-

election-far-from-fair. July 9, 2012.15Op cit. The Guardian article continues: About 95% of broadcast TV is controlled byjust two companies, Televisa and Azteca, and their hostility toward the PRD has been

documented.16

While the 2000 elections, in which the PAN won after 71 years of rule by the PRI, the

widespread practice of electoral fraudincluding the infamous elections of 1986have

prompted comments of Mexico as a one party system, even though voting is mandatory.

The widespread accusations of fraud in 2006 were, then, especially troubling as many felt

that Mexico had finally moved into the age of legitimate elections. For discussion ofelectoral fraud during the 2006 elections, see James K. Galbraiths Doing the Math in

Mexico.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jul/17/themexicanstandoff

Accessed April 30, 2013.17

Lourdes Garca Navarro, Calderon's Swearing-In Marred by Violence,December 1,

2006. National Public Radio.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6567193. Accessed April 30,

2013. Also, James C. Mckinley Jr. Mexico Swears in New Leader, Quickly.December

2, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/02/world/americas/02mexicocnd.html?_r=0Accessed April 30, 2013.18

Javier Trevio Rangel, Pnico moral en las campaas electorales: La elaboracin delpeligro para Mxico.Foro Internacional, Vol. 49, No. 3 (197), Jul-Sep 2009), p 644.

See too Enrique Krauze, Bringing Mexico Closer to Godin the New York Times, June

28, 2006,

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/opinion/28krauze.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1372350358-2P24DVAuW0K/lZ2DDhHv8A, last accessed June 27, 2013.19

J. L. Austin,How To Do Things With Words.2 ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard

University Press, 1975, pg. 6-8.20

Judith Halberstam, Going Gaga: Chaos, Anarchy and the Wild. Iciberlin, published

on Feb. 6, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjvLMvF7CfMlast accessed June

27, 2013.21Benjamin Arditi, Insurgents dont have a planthey are the plan: Politicalperformatives and the vanishing mediators in 2011. JOMEC Journal: Journalism, Mediaand Cultural Studies. cf.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/1-june2012/arditi_insurgencies.pdf22

Martin A. Bertman, Hobbes and Performatives, Crtica: Revista Hispanoamericana deFilosofa, p. 44. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40104790.

And David R. Bell, What Hobbes does with Words, Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1969)157.


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23Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003., pg.

24Memoria Chilena notes: El escndalo era la constante de las Yeguas. Para elencuentro de los intelectuales con Patricio Aylwin previo a las elecciones de 1989 no

fueron convocadas pero llegaron igual. Subieron al escenario con tacos y plumas y

extendieron un lienzo que deca Homosexuales por el cambio. Al bajar del escenario,Francisco Casas se lanz sobre el entonces candidato a senador Ricardo Lagos y le dio unbeso en la boca.

http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/dest.asp?id=pedrolemebel%281955-%29yeguas25

The exact number of people dead from drug related violence in Mexico during Felipe

Caldern term is still under debate. Human Rights Watch in a letter to President Obama

puts the number at 70,000. http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/29/obama-address-human-rights-failures-joint-counternarcotics-strategy, accessed April 30, 2013. Additionally,

over 20,000 people have disappearedduring the same period.Bases de datos sobre

personas desaparecidas.http://desaparecidosenmexico.wordpress.com/Accessed April30, 2013.

26John Ross, La Otra Campana: The Zapatista Challenge in Mexicos PresidentialElections. Counterpunch, November 5-7, 2005,

http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/11/05/the-zapatista-challenge-in-mexico-s-presidential-elections/last accessed, July 8, 2013.27

Herbert Marcuse,An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, pg. ix.28

Aristotle, Poetics. Translated Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1973. P. 32.29

Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings.Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. 2005.30

Trevio Rangel, p. 640.31

Op cit, p. 641.32Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, pg. 7.33

Immanuel Kant, The Contest of the Faculties inKants Political Writings, ed Hans S.Reiss, translated by Hugh B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pg.

182.34

Plato, The Republic, 374-375.35

A Short Organum for the Theatre inBrecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett. NewYork: Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 18736

Jacques Rancire. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2000.37

Louis Althusser,For Marx, pg. 149.38

Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Translated Adrian Jackson. London:

Routledge, 2002.39Boal, Games, 15.

40Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008,

pg. 130.41

See Norman Brysons The Gaze in the Expanded Field in Vision and Visuality, ed.

Hal Foster, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 86-108.42

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. New York, The

Penguin Press, 2011.


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43The U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Manual of 2006 makes clear that popular opinion

enables the militarys capacity to act, and therefore must be controlled: The UnitedStates possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority. This capability has

pushed its enemies to fight U.S. forces unconventionally, mixing modern technology with

ancient techniques of insurgency and terrorism. Most enemies either do not try to defeatthe United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purelymilitary means. They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms.

Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will, aiming to win by undermining andoutlasting public support. Defeating such enemies presents a huge challenge to the Army

and Marine Corps. Meeting it requires creative efforts by every Soldier and Marine.44

See my chapter in this book:45

Slavoj !i"ek, Shoplifters of the World Unite,London Review of Books, 19 August

2011 in Benjamin Arditi, Insurgencies dont have a planthey are the plan. Vanishing

mediators and viral politics,delivered at "Poltica y performance en los bordes del

neoliberalismo: tramas contemporneas" roundtable, King Juan Carlos of Spain Center,

New York University, September 20, 2011.

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