…but this is rather funny. From The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.
Category: Performance
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Carnivalesque windows of opportunity
Two similar ‘carnivalesque’ moments in protest history, consider:
In 1982, during the [Polish] May Day celebrations, members of [the activist group] Orange Alternative dressed up in ridiculous costumes, rented a bus, went to the local zoo, and waved red flags and sang communist songs while ironically demanding “freedom for the bears,” the bear being an obvious Soviet symbol. Although the “protesters” were arrested, they were so ridiculous that the police refused to fine them, particularly because it was difficult to know where to draw the line when it came to this obscure kind of political performance. Additionally, because the government wanted to take advantage of its newfound ability to distance itself from direct Soviet intervention in local economic and political affairs, officials did not want to be seen as returning to the more openly brutal political oppression of the past.
And;
The idea for the turtle people [during the Seattle WTO demonstrations] was the brainchild of Ben White of the Animal Welfare Institute, mainly as a reaction to the fact that the WTO court had overturned a US law passed in 1996 banning the sale of shrimp caught in nets that killed endangered sea turtles. The WTO court’s reasoning was that the law constituted “an unfair barrier to trade.” White thought that a public performance by “turtle people” could send a number of important symbolic messages. […B]ecause unelected courts in newly empowered international government organizations designed to enforce “free trade” were (and are) now able to overturn the laws of nation-states, the turtle people wanted to provide a “street theater [sic] spectacle” to draw attention to this new and relatively unknown form of corporate global governance.
Then as a summary;
These two examples, limited as they are, suggest that the humorless [sic] state has a very difficult time dealing with absurdity, symbolic protest, and the curious blending of the fictive and the real—people becoming turtles, elves becoming “real”—but it has much less trouble violently dealing with more “serious” forms of protest. And perhaps this has always been true.
Really enjoying Michael Lane Bruner’s (2005) ‘Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State’ in Text and Performance Quarterly. Available here (subscription only). He argues that whilst playful protest does indeed work in subverting and inverting typical social roles and power hierarchies they only work during specific ‘windows of opportunity’. In his examples, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 80s and pre-9/11 era USA. Is there a similar window currently open across the UK and Europe? That’s difficult to say. I’m tempted to say yes, only because I think there is a particular ideological objective to be reached for those in power, and ‘serious’ protest arguably is only having a detrimental effect to those involved. At least in the UK that is. Carnivalesque forms of protest (similar to calls for ‘playful protest’) open the door for a wider inclusion of those who otherwise might not have engaged in any protest at all. The ‘seriousness’ of protest can frequently deter those who feel like they need to in some way ‘swot up’ on what they’re protesting about. No doubt there needs to be a certain amount of education involved, but that’s not to say that people should be deterred from heading out onto the streets. I do think carnivalesque forms of protest can help in mobilising people. As Major Fydrych (leader of the Polish Orange Alternative movement) was quoted as saying in Padraig Kenney’s A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (2002);
Orange Alternative “happenings” were “places to learn opposition” and to “discover more political forms of protest.” He argued, “The WrocŁaw street slowly ceases to fear, and through participation in the fun, people learn to support more serious [protest] . . . [and slowly the] fear of detention—usually for a few hours, without serious consequences—evaporates” (190). It was, as Kenney remarks, a kind of socialist surrealism as sociotherapy.
A sociotherapy I’m sure many people in the UK would welcome now.
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Gamification of Protest
Yesterday I intended to follow up my first post on ‘march dynamics’ with a second on the ‘gamification of protest’. I ended up reading the whole of the fantastic Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) paper, posting a short comment on it, and failing to even consider my second theme of protest and play! Anyway I shall say a few words now.Following on from Wednesday’s somewhat bodged NUS march, Samuel Carlisle of the protest application Sukey posted a few interesting discussions over on his soundcloud page, here. The first of interest was entitled ‘Gamifying Volunteer Participation’ where Sam talks of auto-assigning roles to online volunteers. This basically means that anyone who’s willing to help out but isn’t at the live demo, can assist in completing lots of little tasks (meta-tagging photos, adding users to the ‘whitelist’, finding trolls to add to the blacklist, mapping facilities etc.) in a service called freenode, an open-source network that helps Sukey distribute these kinds of jobs to eager volunteers. Now, the only problem Sam found with this distributed tasking is that people aren’t always proactive in getting started on a job, whilst nonetheless wanting to help in some way because they feel like they have a particular skill, or specific experience of doing a certain job. So, says Sam, how do you get these people involved? This is where the gamification element comes in, because if people get rewarded for their work they tend to want to continue doing that work, so with the assigning of particular roles (‘tagger’, ‘whitelister’, blacklister’, ‘mapper’ etc.) each group have clearly defined divisions (tag division, whitelist division etc.). This ‘gamification’ dynamic can help in engaging far more people in the application’s workflow, and ultimately, in increasing the efficacy of the Sukey project.
The second clip; ‘Dynamic Random Role Assignment’ discussed bringing this kind of gamified interaction out onto the ground, so that protesters during a demo could, perhaps, be given a specific task to do based on their geographical location. So they mention what Sam calls ‘pseudo-leadership’, although I really want to call it ‘fleadership’ (fleeting-leadership!), where protesters are given a specific, momentary command (‘start chant’, ‘speed up crowd’, ‘direct to X’ etc.). It’s a kind of distributed leadership role that allows protesters to sink back into anonymity once their job is complete (back into ‘civilian mode’ as Sam points out); only to pick it up again should they be called into action. Moreover it allows people who maybe don’t even know each other to coalesce around a set of shared objectives (i.e. on the Sukey platform). Of course, this is presuming the crowd’s a) big enough and b) willing enough to recycle roles. But they’re interesting tactical points nonetheless.
The final discussion, ‘The Art of Gamification for Protest’ follows on from the nascent gamification concepts Sam talks about in clip 1 and 2. It tries to make sense of these gamified elements and suggests splitting online roles into predefined temporal tasks, so that those with a particularly long block of continuous time (a weekend) can do a specific job, whereas those with interstitial but consistent blocks (weeknights, lunch breaks) are assigned others. In other words: “little missions that fit their schedules”. The importance though still lies on it being a ‘fun’ and playful practice, so its about giving users/protesters the choice to engage in certain tasks in order to then reward their involvement (and it not be conceived as a job in the purely work-as-forced-to sense). A way of heightening participation and increasing involvement, enjoyment and togetherness leading up to, and during a protest.
Also: The picture above is taken from Sukey’s Survival Guide for protesters, which is on flickr here and on the Sukey website, here. If you click the image you can also download it as a PDF directly.
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Protest and Place
(Re)constructing the meaning of place, even in temporary ways, can be a tactical act of resistance along with the tactics we traditionally associate with protest, such as speeches, marches and signs.[…P]lace (re)constructions can function rhetorically to challenge dominant meanings and practices in place. Place is a performer along with activists in making and unmaking the possibilities of protest.
(Emphasis added)
From: Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) ‘Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest’. Available here (subscription required). I’ve italicized that final sentence because it makes an incredibly important point: who, or what makes or ‘unmakes’ the possibilities of protest? Place is no container of action; no empty grid of co-ordinates waiting to be filled by protesters. Place can be made and re-made by anyone and anything – including non-human matter, and protest equally is an event comprised of and changed by bodies, words, data, legal instruments, musical instruments, walls, temporary barriers and more.
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March Dynamics: Why place matters
This will be the first of two posts today about protest. They are both related to yesterday’s NUS march in London, ‘Demo 2012’. Below is a map of the march route and associated tweets, pictures and other media put together by East London Lines. Both the Guardian and ELL live blogged during the event too.
Take a look at the map. What do you see? What do you recognise? If you don’t know London at all this might prove difficult. The march started on Victoria Embankment (the map is orientated north, so head to the blue pin just above the River Thames). This is a common start point for London protests, no doubt partly because it can accommodate such large amounts of people. Although this isn’t the whole story as I’ll mention later. The Stop the War march in 2003, the TUC ‘anti-cuts’ march in 2011, and the TUC anti-austerity march in 2012 all started on the Embankment. It then snaked its way round to Westminster Bridge, where a flurry of tweets were sent by the ELL’s reporter Thomas Jivanda, and as the Guardian reported, a small sit-in took place.
So first up, why here? Why Westminster Bridge? Well, again, for those who don’t know London, its close to one thing: the Houses of Parliament. Now, each and every major protest in the city has gone past the House of Parliament. Why? Because it is the centre of political decision-making in the UK. Although politicians may not be in session, or even be able to hear the protesters from the chambers inside, it nonetheless forms a symbolic oppositional place. But not every city has an amenable space to protest in front of such a building. John Parkinson’s book ‘Democracy and Public Space’ is an interesting look on this subject, and he has a downloadable paper on representation and public space, here (direct download). In fact, London doesn’t really have a space for such protest either, that’s why protesters are forced to sit-down and slow-up on the road junction nearby and not in Parliament Square itself. The 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act restricted the right to demonstrate in an area up to 1km away from any point in Parliament Square (directly outside Parliament), and was in place for nearly 6 1/2 years (relevant sections of the act, section 132-138 here). The 2011 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act repealed SOCPA and, in short, replaced ‘demonstration’ with ‘prohibitive activity’ (see relevant sections, 141-159 here). So now you can’t use amplified noise equipment, tenting or sleeping equipment in Parliament Square, whereas SOCPA outlawed demonstration wholesale. So the law has been relaxed slightly, in part due to Brian Haw’s legal battles. But nevertheless, forms of demonstration are severely restricted in this area. This is why every major protest has continued it’s route north of Westminster Bridge, not over it to the south, because every protest has wanted to face the House of Parliament for the longest period possible, before heading along Whitehall to Downing Street. Every march I’ve been on slows down on this bend as people take a good old look at it, shout a lot and generally increase their rowdiness! Protesters took to occupying Westminster Bridge for a short while for this reason. The route, as you can see on the map, turned over the river and headed towards Waterloo Station away from Parliament. Even the NUS’s rallying cry for the demo seemed to re-iterate this implicitly:
Thousands of students will march through the streets of London to stand up for their future. With a government that is consistently taking students’ futures from them, it is more important than ever that your voice is heard.
It’s pretty difficult to ‘march’ on ‘the streets of London’ making sure your ‘voice is heard’ to those in ‘government’ when the march route is directed to a park bordering South London. That’s why you had people tweeting these sorts of things, and also why the rally ended, farcically, with NUS president Liam Burns being heckled by protesters and a small number of them actually storming the stage (pictures here, and video here). What this serves to illustrate, even in a growing world of ostensibly ‘online’ protest, place matters. Yes, people tweet and take photos, but they also reinforce symbolic spaces during protest events, and this is just as important as ever, as the NUS have just found out.
Below is a map of the area I’ve talked about, with descriptions of the importance of this particular point for protesters. Above it is a Google Streetview image of the same location. Note the junction at the end where the cars are turning towards the camera is Westminster Bridge. Note also the black road blocks separating the road and the pavement. My next post will be on the ‘gamification’ of protest.
Sam Hind 