1
The Politics of Passion
“What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor
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
today’s 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, ‘American’ fall
(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).i In Brazil a
hundred thousand people took to the streets.ii Marcelo Hotimsky of Brazil’s Free Fare Movement
said, “It’s not something we control, or something we even want to control,”iii though 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 Brennan called "energetic affects" (51)iv. 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.v “All 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 ‘outside’—they 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
2
than their interests.”vi 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
one’s adversaries create the conditions of “moral panic” that overwhelm all rational and juridical
systems designed to contain them. Moral panic emerges, according to Javier Treviño 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.”vii By politics of passion, then, I refer
to the mobilization of affect for political ends on collective, structural, and trans-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.viii Convinced 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 structures of power, CAE advocated electronic civil disobedience to block the electronic
flow of “information-capital” (9), the Deleuzian “undulatory” nature of control society.ix
The derision of affect—of nostalgia and sentimentality—blindsided CAE, for all their
brilliance. While they focused on efficacy, they neglected the other vital aspects of civil
disobedience—the 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"
3
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 ‘online’—networked, 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 media—radio, photography, and video—and sites of social
networking such as Facebook and Twitter. But while flesh bodies expand into their electronic and
digital bodies, the balance 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.x Sandra Gónzalez-Bailón and Pablo Barbará, 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].”xi Bodies and social media inhabit the same –albeit expanded—world 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.xii
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 media—
mostly advertising and television that have been dominated by powerful business interests on the
political right. While I do not want to essential the notion of bodies, let’s 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 Mexico’s contested election of 2006 in which two million protestors
gathered in the Zócalo (Mexico’s 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
4
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 politics—using the 2006 election as a stunning case study of several
performances taking place simultaneously in the public sphere:
1) Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the mayor of Mexico City and the popular
presidential candidate for the PRD—the ever so slightly left of center party-- gathered millions in
the Zócalo when he heard the elections had gone to his opponent, Felipe Calderón, candidate of
the PAN—on the political right.xiii Many believed then, as they do now, that Calderón’s victory
was a product of electoral fraud. Nearly half of the ballots in designated voting places did not add
up.xiv AMLO knew he would no longer have access to TV or other media.xv 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 Mexicans concerned that the PAN might have again stolen the
elections after seven decades of make-believe democracy demanded a recount.xvi 2) Protestors,
organized by the performance and cabaret artist Jesusa Rodríguez, took to the streets and
organizing a massive sit-in and tent-city (or plantón) that lasted for fifty days and clogged the
Zócalo of Mexico City and the main boulevard, Reforma. [IMAGE 1, Photo credit: Diana
Taylor] Protestors enacted non-violent resistance during which three thousand four hundred
performances took place and 3) AMLO was sworn in as the ‘Legitimate President’ in a ‘pretend’
inauguration—‘pretend,’ that is, in relationship to the ‘real’ one that was out-performed as
illegitimate. [IMAGE 2, Photo Credit, Cristina Rodríguez, Courtesy of La Jornada] The official
swearing-in could not be celebrated in a public place for fear of popular outrage—rather, it took
place during a four-minute ceremony in the midst of a congressional brawl.xvii
These competing utterances, displays, and ceremonial acts however, erupted in a political
environment of “moral panic” in which AMLO’s opponents had depicted him as a “political
monster,” a “danger to Mexico,” and a “messianic” populist.xviii These 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 spectatorship—that 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 preacher’s declaration “I now
pronounce you man and wife” has the force of law.)xix Legally, in some religions, the two
5
individuals are now 'one.' These utterances are verbal performances 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 one’s fingers while making a promise, no ignoring the priest’s injunction to speak up, or
forever hold your peace. These breaches would render the act ‘void’ rather than ‘true’ or ‘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 them—are 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.”xx Performative, in my example here, might index the Electoral Commission’s
declaration of the winner in the 2006 election with its binding legal force, while animative signals
the ruckus that broke out in the Zócalo 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.”xxi Surely ‘let there be light’ inaugurates life itself—
though even here too the act depends on the power of the authorized speaker, God. Austin’s How
To Do Things With Words is 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.xxii I 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 Austin’s writing on
performatives is his elaboration on the multiple ways they can go wrong—infelicities,
6
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, 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 it’s a declaration against, never for, a position. Yet, relajo proves nonthreatening, 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.”xxiii
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.”xxiv
Performatives and animatives, as these examples make clear, only ever work together—
nothing 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 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 position—it might be one of agreement or consensus, it might be one of disidentification, dissensus, or radical rejection. The two million people in the Zócalo overtly
denounced the results announced from above. They supported their own candidate as Presidente
Legítimo 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’/’pretend’
understanding 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.
7
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.xxv
The Sunday following the announcement of election results, a million people converged
in Zócalo 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 clear—
on 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 people—progressives,
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 campaña,” as
one commentator noted, is not ‘another’ campaign but a campaign of ‘others.’xxvi 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
Zócalo, 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 recounted—voto 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 Rodríguez (Mexico’s most famous cabaret performer
and activist) went to the Zócalo 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 Zócalo, 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 it—people
have to be able to see and hear things.” As Rodríguez pointed out, many politicians don’t
understand that they ‘live’ teatro político.
8
For the second massive rally in the Zócalo, Jesusa had orchestrated the event. [IMAGE 3,
Courtesy of Jesusa Rodríguez] The platform now had risers so that AMLO could stand stagecenter; party members would line up behind him. While AMLO walked from Reforma to the
Zócalo, 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 Zócalo, and those waiting in the Zócalo could see
their leader coming closer. The walk itself took on a sense of dramatic crescendo, symbolically
building on and amplifying the effect of AMLO’s approach to occupy the center of power. When
he arrived, he was greeted with open arms by the admiring PATRIA [IMAGE 4, Courtesy of
Jesusa Rodríguez ]—the 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 everyone’s sense of participation in the event. Performance, the poor person’s media in
this case, made it possible for people to represent themselves (in the democratic rather than
mimetic sense of the word --as in political representation) and to see themselves in and as a
political force. By fueling passionate identification, the force of the event created the very ‘body’
it claimed only to ‘represent.’ But instead of language that acts, here bodies act, bodies that feel
themselves robbed of their language in the form of their vote. [IMAGE 5, photo Diana Taylor
]—They were voting with their feet, as the saying goes. Political participation begins to take
other, more affective, forms. The plantón was a different kind of performance—the animative
challenged the official performative. The occupation was both an embodied claim to inclusion
and the performance of belonging, of establishing a different ‘city’ that people would occupy and
control for over 50 days. The tent city enacted an alternative vision of what communal social life
might look like—a 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.
The plantón inverted the private/public we’ve become used to--the use of ‘public’ space as if it
were private. Cell phone conversations and I Pods have created a new etiquette—we 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 world’s largest cities. A different notion of politics was not only
envisioned but enacted. “The radical utopian character” of the plantón, to recall Herbert
Marcuses’ words about the 1968 uprisings, were “expressions of concrete political practice.”xxvii
9
Living as if culminated in the strangest performance of all—AMLO’s swearing in as the
“Presidente Legítimo, head of a parallel government that boasts about one million constituents.
The performative declaration “misfired” for one essential reason—he did not have the recognized
authority to enact the claim. The act was “void” according 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 democracy” of 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 ifs and what ifs, as Aristotle noted, are
very “serious business…. [and] the poet’s 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.”xxviii Political as ifs create 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 ifs and the what ifs, often dismissed as posturing or ‘only
pretending’ by cynical commentators, can open liberating and progressive pathways to social reinventions, 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
mind—the ‘creative’ non-violent struggle against fraud and oppression—she 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 based—“you can only learn to improvise by improvising,” she reminds me. She also
stressed the quality of bodily presence—developing 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 affect—the 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 Hábito, an alternative performance space
for fifteen years with her wife Liliana Felipe, Jesusa had learned to plan, program activities, and
10
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 five undemocratic governments in Latin America—Ecuador, Bolivia,
Venezuela, Argentina, and Peru. Erica Chenoweth and María J. Stephan in Why Civil Resistance
Works, note the success of non-violent 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 it’s 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 “Failure” in 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 Calderón presidency, like the first George W. Bush presidency, was marred by the cloud of
illegitimacy.
On another level, the plantón was depicted as a strategic disaster—turning 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, the plantón proved too much—they 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 ‘equality’ on 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 Zócalo were brown. Did the white students,
artists, and intellectuals abandon the struggle? Or did they feel that the largely mestizo social
11
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 plantón 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. ¿Es tan claro que
hay todo esto en los performativos y no los hay en los animativos? Daría la impresión de que tu
reflexión acerca de los animativos se basa en una teoría de la producción de los mismos y no se
contempla su recepción. Esta distinction la hace Eliseo Verón, y la retoma Emilio de Ipola para
cuestionar la teoría de la ideología de Althusser: al hablar de la interpelación al margen de la
recepción de las interpelaciones, Althusser asume que el éxito de la interpelación es una
consecuencia directa del acto de interpelar. Mutatis mutandis, si los performance artists como Las
Yeguas planean con bastante detalle su irrupción en el espacio en el que Aylwin se encuentra,
vale decir, si imaginan modos de acción que logren tener efectos sobre el público presente, ¿no
están acaso generando marcos de referencia, cálculo costo-beneficio, normas de funcionamiento
de acciones de relajo, etc? Animatives –linguistically so close to animation, as in what Sianna
Ngai calls the “non-stop technology” of cartoons—raise serious questions of agency. In Ugly
Feelings, she explores what she calls “animatedness” as “unusually receptive to outside control”
(91). The inanimate body usurps the “human speaker’s voice” and agency (123).xxix The ruckus
may be liberating on one hand, but it’s not always clear what it’s about.
The plantón 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 Times was
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? Ridiculous… Those 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
12
many on-lookers, the tents, especially as they were pictured through the hostile media, foretold
the ‘fall’ of the middle class that the ads had announced. AMLO (another Castro or Chávez), the
Right had warned, will take all your property and belongings away.xxx 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.xxxi Worse, they were depicted as “alien to modernity,” in
Jean Franco’s words, a drag on a country striving to become part of the First World.xxxii So who
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.?
Hay algo más que tomar en cuenta. Mencionas muy bien las críticas de los medios de Televisa y
Azteca, del PAN, la racialización de los integrantes del plantón (“la raza”) y también el hartazgo
de los taxistas y trabajadores del centro del DF. Yo estaba de sabático en Escocia en ese
momento y no lo viví, pero me cuentan mis amigos que lo que golpeó más a AMLO fueron dos
cosas. (1) Decir “Al diablo con las instituciones”. La derecha de Televisa-Azteca más el holding
de PRI-Pan o Prián, como se les dice, capitalizaron eso con mucho éxito debido al peso de las
instituciones en México: todos las pisotean con corrupción, trampas y mordidas, pero no quieren
que parezcamos a un Estado fallido. Y entre quienes apoyaban a AMLO, cuando dijo eso redujo
el problema de la legitimidad de un proceso electoral (IFE, partidos, observadores, transparencia,
credibilidad) a un problema de legitimidad personal por encima de cualquier otra cosa. Al Diablo
con las instituciones es también al diablo con las elecciones si no te favorecen. (2) Jesusa, AMLO
y los demás carecían de un “exit strategy”. Puedes comenzar un plantón, y la gente te va a seguir
pues está todo en caliente, pero no lo puedes extender sine die pues la gente tiene que volver al
trabajo, a sus estudios, sus familias y en general a sus vidas. Se desestimó la fatiga democrática
de la acción directa en nombre de una revolución permanente para AMLO sin darles una salida
digna en caso de no ganar. ¿Iban a estar allí durante todo el sexenio?
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.”xxxiii
Passion, Kant recognizes, is powerful though politically invalidating because “all 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 can’t distinguish between “knowledge and ignorance,
reality and representation.”xxxiv Aristotle, in Poetics, 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 Frogs pointed out that
spectators were sometimes the object of political machination, rather than simply learning from
it. While the notion that all vision is partial, mediated, and susceptible to all forms of distortions
13
and manipulations goes back at least as far as Plato’s cave, the debates about what can and cannot
be known through spectatorship 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.”xxxv Spectators, Rancière suggests like many have before him, are trapped in a paradox. On
one hand, in the Brechtian worldview, according to Rancière, 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).xxxvi On the other, in Artaud’s ideal theatre,
spectators would disappear altogether, becoming participants totally caught up in the action.
Rancière sums up Artaud’s position: the spectator “must be removed from the position of
observer… disposed of this illusory mastery, [and] drawn into the magic circle of theatrical
action” (4). In fact Althusser, far more than Artaud, 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 blindness—in the stalls the image of lucidity” (148).xxxvii 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-identification—they don’t have to get involved. As
Althusser’s 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 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. Boal’s conclusion to Theatre
of the Oppressed, where he concludes “’Spectator’ a Bad Word!,” might rehash some of the same
arguments that Rancière raises, but his methodologies to (re)train people who have learned to
behave as passive political observers seems as close to an implementation of Rancière’s
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).xxxviii 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
Rancière “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). Boal’s “spect-actors” assume their roles as active observers, participating in
the actions around them.xxxix 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 Rancière’s definition of “what the word
14
‘emancipation’ means: the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look;
between individuals and members of the collective body” (19).
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 thea meaning "a view," was the place for seeing. Spectator comes from the same
word, theates. Theory does 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 spectator’s responsibility towards
what is visible” (130).xl
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, it’s important to recognize the multiple stagings of seeing/being taking
place simultaneously—some separated out as in conventional western theatres with their onstage
and stalls as in Althusser’s example, 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.xli 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.xlii
Spectators are simultaneously political agents, the object of politics, and performers for other
spectators watching events from a different vantage point.xliii 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 ageold 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
15
transmission rendered embodied vision one more repeat—we 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 Brecht’s 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.xliv
The complications around representation—whether in traditional political systems or the
media—I 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 protesters—we’re 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.
What are spectators and commentators to make of all this? Critics called on the protestors
to name their demands! Slavoj Žižek, who was against the protests until he was for them, accused
protestors in the U.K. of being “thugs” whose “zero-degree protest” was “a violent action
demanding nothing.” Where were the performatives? As Arditi writes, Žižek 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.’xlv Later, of course, Žižek called for “occupy first, demand later”—
animatives 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 leadership—they all form part of the 99%. These animated gestures enact a
16
politics of massive unified presence. OWS’ unwillingness 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 Žižek’s, and Arditi’s and all of
those who write about these movements) is not to try to lead, or prescribe but to assist, especially
in the Spanish asistir 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 ‘REAL’ is under debate and construction. Who get’s 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 Žižek’s, and even the Jesusa’s, 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, it’s about defending the vote. One protestor in Occupy Wall
Street put it slightly differently (though I still edited it): You don’t 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 done—which, incidentally, is also the definition of
performance.
Diana Taylor
NYU
i
See “Public Protests Around The World” in Global Issues:
http://www.globalissues.org/article/45/public-protests-around-the-world, last accessed July 1,
2013.
ii
“’Asked why the protests were emerging now, he said, “Why not now? This isn’t something
happening just in Brazil, but a new form of protesting, which is not channeled through traditional
institutions.’ Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University who
has studied social movements, including Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, said it was
hard to know exactly what sparks would set off a broader movement.” Simon Romero and
William Neuman “Sweeping Protests in Brazil Pull In an Array of Grievances” New York Times,
June 20, 2013, A1.
iii
Op cit.
iv
Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2004.
v
Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age.
Cambridge UK: Polity, 2012, pg. 113
17
vi
Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), Freud, Sigmund. 1957
(1915). “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey.
London: Hogarth Press. p 288,
vii
Javier Treviño Rangel, Pánico moral en las campañas electorales: La elaboración del ‘peligro
para México.’” Foro Internacional, Vol. 49, No. 3 (197), Jul-Sep 2009), p 645.
viii
Rossana Reguillo, Sujetividad sitiada. Hacia una antropología de las pasiones
contemporáneas. E-misférica 4.1, 'Passions, Performance, and Public Affects.'
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-41/reguillo, last accessed April 6, 2013.
ix
Giles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59 (Winter, 1992), p. 6.
x
Josh 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-mediain-the-absence-of-traditional-media-by-turks-in-turkish-in-taksim-square-protests/ last accessed
June 27, 2013.
xi
Sandra Gónzalez-Bailón and Pablo Barbará, “The Dynamics of Information Diffusion in 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
University’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory.
xii
Ricardo Domínguez, teach-in, “Convergence” Conference, Duke University, October 2012.
xiii
PRD refers to the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, a left of center party, while PAN
refers to the conservative Partido Acción Nacional.
xiv
Mark Weisbrot “Irregularities reveal Mexico's election far from fair.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/09/irregularities-reveal-mexico-election-farfrom-fair.” July 9, 2012.
xv
Op cit. The Guardian article continues: “About 95% of broadcast TV is controlled by just two
companies, Televisa and Azteca, and their hostility toward the PRD has been documented.”
xvi
While the 2000 elections, in which the PAN won after 71 years of rule by the PRI, the
widespread practice of electoral fraud –including the infamous elections of 1986—have 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 of electoral fraud during the 2006
elections, see James K. Galbraith’s “Doing the Math in Mexico.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jul/17/themexicanstandoff Accessed April 30,
2013.
18
Lourdes García 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
xvii
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=0
Accessed April 30, 2013.
xviii
Javier Treviño Rangel, Pánico moral en las campañas electorales: La elaboración del
‘peligro para México.’” Foro Internacional, Vol. 49, No. 3 (197), Jul-Sep 2009), p 644. See too
Enrique Krauze, “Bringing Mexico Closer to God” in the New York Times, June 28, 2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/opinion/28krauze.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxn
nlx=1372350358-2P24DVAuW0K/lZ2DDhHv8A, last accessed June 27, 2013.
xix
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words. 2 ed. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press, 1975, pg. 6-8.
xx
Judith Halberstam, “Going Gaga: Chaos, Anarchy and the Wild. ” Iciberlin, published on Feb.
6, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjvLMvF7CfM last accessed June 27, 2013.
xxi
Benjamin Arditi, “Insurgents don’t have a plan—they are the plan: Political performatives and
the vanishing mediators in 2011.” JOMEC Journal: Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.
cf.ac.uk/jomec/jomecjournal/1-june2012/arditi_insurgencies.pdf
xxii
Martin A. Bertman, Hobbes and Performatives, Crítica: Revista Hispanoamericana de
Filosofía, p. 44. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40104790.
And David R. Bell, “What Hobbes does with Words,” Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1969) 157.
xxiii
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003., pg.
xxiv
Memoria Chilena notes: “El escándalo era la constante de las “Yeguas”. Para el encuentro 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 decía
“Homosexuales por el cambio”. Al bajar del escenario, Francisco Casas se lanzó sobre el
entonces candidato a senador Ricardo Lagos y le dio un beso en la boca.”
http://www.memoriachilena.cl/temas/dest.asp?id=pedrolemebel%281955-%29yeguas
xxv
The exact number of people dead from drug related violence in Mexico during Felipe
Calderón 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-failuresjoint-counternarcotics-strategy, accessed April 30, 2013. Additionally, over 20,000 people have
“disappeared” during the same period. Bases de datos sobre personas desaparecidas.
http://desaparecidosenmexico.wordpress.com/ Accessed April 30, 2013.
xxvi
John Ross, “La Otra Campana: The Zapatista Challenge in Mexico’s Presidential Elections.”
Counterpunch, November 5-7, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/11/05/the-zapatistachallenge-in-mexico-s-presidential-elections/ last accessed, July 8, 2013.
xxvii
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, pg. ix.
xxviii
Aristotle, Poetics. Translated Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1973. P. 32.
19
xxix
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P. 2005.
xxx
Treviño Rangel, p. 640.
xxxi
Op cit, p. 641.
Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, pg. 7.
xxxiii
Immanuel Kant, “The Contest of the Faculties” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed Hans S.
Reiss, translated by Hugh B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pg. 182.
xxxiv
Plato, The Republic, 374-375.
xxxv
“A Short Organum for the Theatre” in Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1964, p. 187
xxxvi
Jacques Rancière. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2000.
xxxvii
Louis Althusser, For Marx, pg. 149.
xxxviii
Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Translated Adrian Jackson. London:
Routledge, 2002.
xxxix
Boal, Games, 15.
xl
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008, pg. 130.
xli
See Norman Bryson’s “The Gaze in the Expanded Field” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal
Foster, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 86-108.
xlii
Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. New York, The Penguin
Press, 2011.
xliii
The U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Manual of 2006 makes clear that popular opinion enables
the military’s capacity to act, and therefore must be controlled: “The United States 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 defeat the United States with conventional
operations or do not limit themselves to purely military 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 and outlasting 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.”
xliv
See my chapter in this book:
xxxii
xlv
Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” London Review of Books, 19 August 2011 in
Benjamin Arditi, “Insurgencies don’t have a plan —they are the plan. Vanishing mediators and
viral politics,” delivered at "Política y performance en los bordes del neoliberalismo: tramas
contemporáneas" roundtable, King Juan Carlos of Spain Center, New York University,
September 20, 2011.