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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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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,
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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.