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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
As capitalism triumphs on the ruins of utopias and faith in progress fades, revolts are breaking out everywhere. From London to Hong Kong and from Buenos Aires to Beirut, protests flare up, in some cases spreading like wildfire, in other cases petering out and reigniting elsewhere. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop them: as many were reflecting on the loss of public space, the fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis with the brutal murder of George Floyd. We are living in an age of revolt. But what is revolt? It would be a mistake to think of it as simply an explosion of anger, a spontaneous and irrational outburst, as it is often portrayed in the media. Exploding anger is not a bolt from the blue but a symptom of a social order in which the sovereignty of the state has imposed itself as the sole condition of order. Revolt challenges the sovereignty of the state, whether it is democratic or despotic, exposing the violence that underpins it. Revolt upsets the agenda of power, interrupts time, throws history into disarray. The time of revolt, discontinuous and intermittent, is also a revolt of time, an anarchic transition to a space of time that disengages itself from the architecture of politics. This brilliant reflection on the nature and significance of revolt will be of interest to students of politics and philosophy and to anyone concerned with the key questions of politics today.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Quote
The Right to Breathe
The Constellation of Revolts
Between Politics and Police
Occupations: From the Factories to the Squares
Bella ciao
: Notes of Resistance
A Spectral Era
In Search of the Lost Revolution
What Does Revolt Mean?
The Individual’s Cry – and the Wounds of History
Spartacus’s Day after Tomorrow
The Limits of Public Space
The Right to Appear
A Volte-Face on Power
Prefigurations
An Existential Tension
If Dissent is a Crime
The New Disobedients
Anonymous’s Grin
On Invisibility: A Show of Self-Concealment
Masks and Zones of Irresponsibility
Leaks
Resident Foreigners: The Anarchist Revolt
Barricades in Time
Bibliography
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Time of Revolt
Donatella Di Cesare
Translated by David Broder
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published as Il tempo della rivolta © Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino, 2020
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4838-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4839-2 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939487
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Quote
My hope is the last breath …
My flight is revolt,
My heaven the abyss of tomorrow.
Heiner Müller, ‘The Angel of Despair’1
Notes
1
Heiner Müller, ‘Three Angels’, in Gerhard Fischer (ed.),
The Mudrooroo/Müller Project
. Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1993, p. 45.
The Right to Breathe
Revolt is breaking out all over the world. It flares up, it peters out, then it continues its spread once more. It crosses borders, it rocks nations, it agitates continents. A glance at the map of its sudden outbreaks and countless eruptions reveals its intermittent advance across the bumpy political landscape of the new century. Its vast scale is matched only by its intensity. Its topography outlines a landscape in which confrontation turns to opposition, discord and open struggle. Protests spread, acts of disobedience multiply, and clashes intensify. This is the time of revolt.
The blaze of revolt may seem short-lived, the event fleeting. But revolt ought not to be considered merely ephemeral. Through all its surges and retreats, it comprises a global phenomenon, and one which promises to endure. Not even the pandemic has been able to put out the flames. At a moment when many were already reflecting on the disappearance of the pólis and the loss of public space, revolt resurfaced, overwhelming and uncontainable. It surged forth from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, from Rio de Janeiro to Beirut, and from London to Bangkok.
The fuse of a fresh explosion was lit in Minneapolis. George Floyd’s final words, spoken as his executioner continued to suffocate him – ‘I can’t breathe’ – have become emblematic. The importance of these words is no accident but owes to a coincidence revealed by the secret synchronism of history. George Floyd’s terrible death was the result not of the virus stopping him from breathing but, rather, the work of a racist tyranny perpetrated through police techniques.
Suddenly, the right to breathe appeared in all its existential and political significance. ‘I can’t breathe’ rose up as the battle-hymn of revolt – both an accusation against the abuse of power and a denunciation of that asphyxiating system which steals the breath away.1 In capital’s compulsive vortex – that catastrophic spiral that has turned the right to breathe into a privilege for the few – what comes to the fore is breathlessness of the exploited, those who have to submit to an accelerated, relentless rhythm, the most vulnerable, confined to an oppressive, anxious scarcity. ‘I can’t breathe’ has thus become the slogan that claims the right to breathe – the political right to exist.
But the killing of George Floyd is one of a long series of abuses that the forces of order have perpetrated using similar methods – often termed the ‘excessive use of force’. One commonplace notion holds that the police legitimately resort to violence in response to some other, prior violence. On this reading, as the police impose control, as they seek to pacify things, it is inevitable that a misstep will be made, that excesses will occur. Any resulting discrimination thus appears as an unavoidable anomaly, the malfunctioning of an otherwise correct system built on equality. But is this really the case? Or is the malfunction itself systematic – providing a glimpse of the fundamental workings of an inscrutable institution?
Abuses by police arouse such boundless indignation because they appear not as mere accidents but, rather, as revelatory acts – the tip of the iceberg for a whole system of violence built on discrimination. On the one hand there are blacks, and on the other whites; on the one hand the poor, and on the other the rich; and so on. So, these abuses are no mere anomalous application of the rules but the functioning of a mechanism that defines the political order. The police draw boundaries, choose, discriminate, allow some into the centre and push others back to the margins. For this reason, there is something rather misleading about an economistic reading that sees the police’s job only as a matter of normalization for the sake of increasing the wealth of the few.2 Rather, the question of policing is part of the economy of public space. For this is where the right to belong and to appear is determined: who is allowed access, to circulate freely, to feel at home, and who is profiled, intimidated, chased into zones of invisibility, if not even jailed? There can be no denying the police’s segregationist use of power. This is a means of more or less brutally consolidating the supremacy of some – but isn’t this itself racism, state xenophobia? – and sharpening differences, which it makes plain for all to see.
This is not to say that the police are illegal. Rather, they are authorized by law to carry out extra-legal functions. They do not stop at administering the law but constantly re-establish its boundaries. Walter Benjamin speaks of the ‘ignominious’ aspect of the police as an institution, situated in the ambiguous sphere where all distinction between the violence that founds the law and the violence that maintains it disappears.3 This ambivalence also helps to explain the police’s juridical extraterritoriality, which makes them an exceptional case even within the logic of institutional power. In short, the police monopolize the interpretation of violence, for they redefine the norms of their own actions and, appealing to ‘security’, increase their grip over individuals’ lives. Their violent sovereignty is as slippery as it is spectral.
For this reason, instances of police violence are no mere anomalies but reveal this institution’s dark, opaque foundations. These outrages are like snapshots which capture the police as they conquer space, take power over bodies, examine and experiment with a new form of legality, as they redefine the limits of the possible. If these scenes are the cause of such indignation, if they seem so ‘ignominious’, it is because they are the sign of an authoritarian power, the proof of the undeniable existence of a police state within the state of law (Rechtsstaat).
In this light, just as these acts of violence reveal the true essence of the police, they also shed light on the architecture of a politics which captures and banishes, includes and excludes. This is an architecture in which discrimination is always already latent. Suddenly we can see the borders of immunodemocracy, where the defence reserved for some – the guaranteed, the protected, those who cannot be touched – is denied to the others, the rejects, the exposed, reduced to superfluous, unwelcome bodies who can ultimately be got rid of. Coronavirus has made the immunization of the people within these borders even more exclusive and the exposure of those on the outside even more implacable. The police make this immunopolitics visible in the public space.
The revolt is no accidental response. It would be mistaken to consider it a simple explosion of anger, a directionless reaction against the incumbent suffocation. The scenes that have repeatedly played out in streets and squares, even despite the pandemic, are a direct response to the police’s actions – they are a way of taking back the square, restoring the presence of the excluded, and defending the rights of the undesirables.
The close connection between revolt and public space thus again becomes apparent. We find further confirmation of this in the protests that have targeted statues, especially in US cities. Some vilify these protests as iconoclastic riots; and yet, when we look at them more closely, we see that they express the need not only to reoccupy the urban landscape but also to rearticulate its memory. The struggle projects itself onto a past celebrated in monuments to Confederate generals, slave traders, genocidal kings, architects of white supremacy, and propagandists for fascist colonialism. Why go on living in this suffocating atmosphere, surrounded by these statues? If it is wrong to erase the past, it is no less of an error to reify it. Faced with the honours and glory conferred on butchers and oppressors, asserting the perspective of the conquered is an urgent necessity. This gives rise to a clash over rights and memory.
The pandemic has intensified a process that was already under way. It has aggravated an already latent discord between the disciplining of bodies, the militarization of public space, and struggles that express dissent, contradict existing divisions, and undermine the architecture of order. The preventative policing of relations is a regulated ‘shielding’ measure that culminates in the abolition of contact with the other, who is taken for a possible enemy and source of contagion. This police measure is always already the norm, the marker of immunodemocracy. Thus, the danger of the vibrant, uncontrollable mass, the hazard of the open community, and the spectre of revolt are all kept at bay.
The public space has long been disciplined and controlled. The right to demonstrate can no longer be taken for granted; today, marches, rallies and sit-ins require authorization. If the new revolts are ever more nomadic and transitory, it is no accident that they have taken to any number of sites far beyond the city squares, from the open sea to cross-border spaces and even the decentralized web. Hence the recourse to creative acts and unprecedented means of action. And hence their capacity to reinterpret even biosecurity measures such as antibacterial masks, which are now employed as an outward display of invisibility and openly declared anonymity. The political use of masks sublimates their use as a tool of immunity.
It is, therefore, worth asking whether a politics outside this regimented and surveilled public space is possible. It had become difficult to act in this space even before it was occupied by the sovereign virus. To answer this question, we ought to reconsider the mechanism of public space and turn our gaze to the anarchist extra-politics which is preparing itself through the new revolts.
Notes
1
See Donatella Di Cesare,
Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia
. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2021.
2
Even Foucault tended towards such a view. See Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et singulatim: Towards a Criticism of “Political Reason” [1979]’, in
Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984
, Vol. 3. New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 298–325.
3
See Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in
Selected Writings
, Vol. I:
1913–1926
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 236–52.
The Constellation of Revolts
The highly fragmentary character of these revolts is one of their most striking features; it seems difficult even to get an overview of them. While there is no doubt as to their global reach, can we be similarly sure that they are all expressions of the one same phenomenon? Wouldn’t it be a bit of an exaggeration to use the same label for such disparate situations? Not least when we consider that, unlike the uprisings of the past, it is not easy to detect any shared aspiration in these revolts. If the insurgents of 1848 set their sights on liberty and the republic, if the revolutionaries of 1917 were guided by the twentieth-century ideal of communism, and if those who took to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s thought that another world was within reach, what unites the revolts of the twenty-first century?
One could emphasize the dissimilarities between these revolts and their discordant means of action and objectives. Some are episodic, others recurrent; some timidly raise their heads, whereas others are openly subversive. But to particularize the revolts, refusing to consider them as articulations of a global movement, amounts to taking the defence of the status quo at face value. It’s as if everything was fine – with just a few marginal problems springing up here and there.
When we point to the complicated connections between these revolts – their shifting affinities, their discontinuous movements, their countless correspondences – it may be useful to speak of a ‘constellation’. Distant stars in the night sky, scattered sparks that had earlier been hard to make out, suddenly cluster together. In this unprecedented arrangement, even the minor stars take on new value, as their previously hidden correspondence now stands out for all to see. There is no causal nexus, no linear direction, or even the semblance of a beginning. The constellation has no arché; anarchic and subversive, it is the fluid outcome of an improvised mobilization that has torn through the homogeneous darkness. In their unexpected harmony, the individual lights grow more intense, lighting each other up, seeming to converge on one focal point. Their conjuncture now appears as an allegorical prefiguration.
Unsurprisingly, Walter Benjamin himself turned to the image of the constellation in his efforts to explode the monumental architectonics of the victors. This is the way to recover what has been erased, discredited, spat upon. That which is not granted historical dignity disrupts the flow of historical becoming. But just as stars die out and sink back into the impenetrable blackness of outer space, revolts, too, can dissolve into the abyss-like backdrop of history. This fiery interruption, almost a simultaneous conflagration, is the here and now of a present that risks escaping us unless it is read in good time. We thus need to keep a nocturnal watch over the sky of history – grasping revolts, calling them back to us and redeeming them with all their charge of disruption and salvation.
Anyone who wants to ascertain the common traits of the contemporary constellation of revolts, without losing sight of their local tendencies, has to accept a twofold challenge. The first lies in seeking out, if not their common thread, at least the string underlying them, bound together by the fact that so many fibres wrap around each other and form a pattern. The second demands attention to the kinetics of revolution, in which revolt occupies an important place but, equally, an enigmatic one.4
The official news leaves revolt on the sidelines. If revolt does get past the censor, its power to stir sensation is transformed into spectacle and its transgressive obscurity put on display. It reaches our screens only as far as its gravity, urgency and dimensions warrant. Yet even when the revolt is hyper-visible and overexposed, it is condemned as senseless. There are marches, rallies, mobs in the street and, in a rising crescendo, columns of smoke, broken windows and cars and rubbish bins in flames. Whether in Portland or Baghdad, Athens or Beirut, Hong Kong or Algiers, Santiago or Barcelona, what emerges from the pictures is largely an image of disorder. The confusion of a chaotic, elusive event – that is what these portrayals insist on inferring from this disorder. Hence the lack of reflection on the question of revolt, which nonetheless beats the rhythm of our everyday existence.
If the news paints revolt in obfuscated, sinister colours – whipping up public disdain and fostering interpretative amnesia – this is because revolt extends beyond the logic of institutional politics. To be on the ‘outside’ is not to be politically irrelevant; this is precisely where revolt’s potential force resides, as it attempts to break into public space in order to challenge political governance on its own ground. It should come as no surprise that the version portrayed by the media and institutions relegates revolt to the sidelines, lessens its scope, scrubs it off the agenda and reduces it to nothing more than a spectre. Revolt thus appears as a disturbing shadow which haunts the well-surveilled borders of official current affairs.
For this reason, we need to change our perspective and look at revolt not from the inside – that is, from a stance within the state-centric order – but, rather, from the ‘outside’ in which it situates itself. Revolt is not a negligible phenomenon, nor is it the residue of the archaic, chaotic, turbulent past that linear progress is supposed to have refined and transcended. It is not anachronistic but anachronic, for it is the result of a different experience of time.
Revolt is a unique dimension of the global disorder – and offers a key to understanding an ever more
