Author Archives: josegabriel

josegabriel

This week’s readings focus on the notion of the digital and the potentialities and pitfalls that they produce for political action and spectatorship at the dawn of the new millennium.

The Collective Arts Ensemble recognizes the digital’s revolutionary paradigm shift and how entire cosmologies shifted and modified our understanding knowledge and history and the nature of existence itself. The digital is especially influential in our way of consuming commodities, in that consumers now want products that are the same as everybody else’s but still unique and personalizable, juxtaposing digital practicality (replication) to analog aesthetics (artisanship). In an era of increased worker alienation through neoliberal hyperspecialization, recombinant theater—which include happenings and street theater practices—serve as bridges between the digital and the analog, bringing in alienated populations to the spectacle of the theater of everyday life, spurring spectators into critical assessment of social relationships.

In “Citizens, Digital Media, and Globalization”, Poster posits that social media and the digital age are reconfiguring our understanding and our practice of politics: “The conditions of globalization and networked media present a new register in which the human is recast and along with it the citizen” (70). There are ways of accessing a specific, normative type of citizenship through consumption, to buy green or rainbow, for example—citizenship becomes an extension of consumption” (73)—and in this sociopolitical climate, politics becomes a mode of consumption. Poster highlights the need for a planetary (as opposed to universal) democratic movement that takes into consideration the new ways of embodying citizenship in the digital age, including the intromission of machines and the ubiquity of consumption as an inescapable process.

In “The Politics of Passion”, while framing the differences between performatives and animatives, Taylor foregrounds the importance of the body that assembles and becomes one in a crowd for the mobilization of affects that produce mass mobilizations. In light of the digital, Taylor underscores the importance and the influence of physical space for the channeling of political affects, in the creation of the space of appearance in the front lines: “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”. Echoing Butler and the power of bodies assembled, huge swaths of bodies in protest invoke a more solid form of political identification and representation, an embodied democracy, more so than in traditional political performatives like elections which can be so easily robbed. In brief, Taylor purports that, even in the eve of the digital, we must not forget the body, because in this age, spectators “are simultaneously political agents, the objects of politics, and performers for other spectators watching events from a different vantage point”—like those watching protests from their phones and computer screens maybe thousands of miles away.

This changing notion of spectatorship is echoed in Arditi’s conceptions of insurgencies in contemporary massive demonstrations. First he highlights the political importance of insurgencies despite the misconception that they are less organized or doomed to failure because contemporary examples do not propose a specific political plan: by not prescribing themselves, the spectacle can be the end in itself, and does not close off its meanings or exclude populations like any other political goal: the ends of insurgencies remain open. Arditi also notes an interesting change in our conception of the spectator in the context of insurgencies: users of social media amplify insurgencies, “giving rise to a spactactor”, a subject who participates in the inauguration of a new space with every like and share. They act to multiply the space of resistance in ways different than simply spectators documenting: they are also holding the state accountable for misdeeds and join in the joy or dread of open rebellion.

These conceptions of the world of politics in the digital age coalesce in the figure of Donald Trump, which Edwards breaks down in “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations”. By highlighting how our state political systems are facilitated (if not predetermined) by the technological advancements of the time (think printing press), Edwards suggests that the digital communication age, coupled with the ease of access of platforms like Twitter, are conducive towards figures like Trump—whose rhetoric reaches his base with ferocious speed. Similarly, Trump transforms the stage of American politics by incorporating the logics of mass media entertainment and reality television—pushing for ratings, reviews, roaring applause—as a real-time measure of his labor as POTUS. The digital age defines and facilitates new ways of forming social alliances and the individual’s place and response to them: by extrapolating the image of the reality TV show contestant, the WINNER, to social media, every existing user would be motivated to accrue the highest approval ratings quantifiably (through likes or reblogs, much like votes on reality competition shows). Therefore, thanks to the advent of the digital, politics in the US swerves more towards the idea of celebrity, of popularity, of approval ratings and consumption, rather historically predetermined notions of the political and of democratic participation.

I agree with Poster in that the Net does provide new ways of forming political alliances (like hashtags and crowdfunding), but what is meant to be put to test is the potential of these new configurations to subsume and substitute traditional forms of cohesive political practices. I would say that Trump’s ability to transform politics to reality TV, that is, consumerist entertainment, uses the Net to promote backwards, neoliberal, stagnant political spectacles that only reifies old political bonds and configurations.

After never quite grasping the epithet Machiavellian, reading The Prince directly with historical distance created shockwaves within me: has anything really changed since the sixteenth century Italy, are we doomed to reproducing the dynamics of power at the expense of the planet and all its inhabitants? Machiavelli offers logical arguments for the sustainable administration of principalities (as opposed to republics): “what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones” (27). He fancies himself a keen observer of human nature, from the highest examples of nobility to the faceless majorities that principalities encompass. While democratically-elected republics conform our current understanding of political spectacles, Machiavelli’s views on the ethics of statesmanship and the art of war can still inform our ways of interpreting the roles and actions of contemporary political actors.

While elaborating a robust ensemble of international affairs and public relations, princes are presented as actors in front of an audience, on the world’s stage, manipulating affects, bending the map to their will, the literal embodiment of the dialectics of power. Contemporary politicians and Machiavellian princes, using Schechner’s terms, are still urged to make their constituents and subjects believe their hegemonic discourses on domestic as well as international issues; with the world spiraling towards the right and fascism, we are made to acquiesce to their belief systems, to take part in their secretive negotiations by offering our bodies to their whims and ambitions.

While reading Machiavelli, certain personality traits—which we would hold as detestable in acquaintances—are ideal for the administration of state powers: facetiousness, fickleness, ruthlessness, compassion only when necessary, cruelty as a medicine liberally administered. He offers examples of “great men” who have ruled principalities in the past and critically examines their labor, their pitfalls, for signs of laudable statesmanship or insufferable weaknesses (and every shade of tyranny or liberalness in between). Also, by juxtaposing the will of the people to the will of the nobility, Machiavelli still operates within a system of politics in which a statesperson must negotiate between differing interests, between dangers from within and from without, dangers from the past, the present, and the future, by recognizing that the influence of the affluent minority is just as challenging and important to manipulate as that of the majority, though less righteous than the latter.

Then I ask: how can Machiavelli sermon about righteousness, when he is talking about the ethics of power, if his Machiavellian princes can be called ethical at all? When inconstancy and opportunism are political ideals, how can there be morals, how can there be a constant ethical framework upon whose foundation a people and a principality can achieve democratic freedom like we aspire to have in our contemporaneity? When power is its own dialectic, its own desire of itself, ad infinitum, where can the limit of morals be placed?

If anything we can learn from Machiavelli, is that his text needs to be read with historical distance, with utmost care, and more consciousness than those political actors today that see in the Machiavelli prince “a great man”, a model to uphold. Spectators caught in the maelstrom of political spectacles should heed Kolbert’s warning of being trapped into believing what we want to believe, to feel truths subjectively and not observe them factually, when we know, through Machiavelli and elsewhere, that contemporary politicians (not unlike Machiavellian princes) are always making belief, moving chips not in our favor but in the stead of maintaining power, first and foremost.

José Gabriel

This week’s readings relate to two modes of representation—speech and image—and the pitfalls, limitations, and interconnectedness of each within the field of politics.

In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay rescues the original, democratic project of photography as a tool for the practice of plurality, of active spectatorship. Azoulay foregrounds an “original” conception of photography—which motivated the French state to support the creation of patents and to promote photography as a democratic tool, as a new method of civic engagement, in which anything can become an image and anyone (with the right tools) can participate. In this (Arendtian) sense, photography resembles action in that photography was originally purported as a tool available for the masses, inaugurating “a new form of civil relations… not mediated by a sovereign power” (134), which had unpredictable ends, which did not end with the click of the shutter or the printing of the surface of the image. Therefore, within the citizenry of photography, the space depicted on the surface of a photograph, every non/citizen within the frame has equal rights, establishing civil contracts of photography. This opens the potentiality of images as a political tool because photographs do not simply depict “what was there”, for there are always external factors imbuing the photographic moment with power relations. As a democratic tool, Azoulay proposes analyzing political images by becoming citizens of the citizen of photography, which means to not take the image as a finished representation of “what was there” but as a stepping stone towards changing the conditions in which a photograph was taken, the very situation which compelled the photographer to share the photograph in the first place.

In “The Intolerable Image”, Rancière dissects the political praxis of photography by asking what makes an image intolerable, under what conditions, and what are the pitfalls of photography which aims to represent the intolerable. Stemming from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Rancière claims that within the society of the spectacle, the image has come to represent reality itself, because which an image of appearance can be just as shocking (or intolerable) as an image of Reality, making all images complicit in the same system of images that makes them all equivalent, incapable of moving affects for political means. In my view, according to Rancière, the effect of the society of the spectacle interrupts the conquest of the world as image according to Azoulay: because so many images occupy so much of our time coming at us from so many angles and so many citizens depicted therein, “it now seemed impossible to confer on any image whatsoever the power of exhibiting the intolerable and prompting us to struggle against it” (84). Therefore, instead of “inviting the participation of others in the negotiations of what and how that image signifies” (Azoulay 143), we are trapped in the constant substitution of one image for another, never achieving a true or total image of Reality.

Therefore, this massive influx of images is enough to interrupt the civil contract of photography by bombarding us with images of an ever-increasing detachment from reality. In the maelstrom, how can we not inject ourselves with percepticide, nor be complacent in the predigested journalistic teleprompters and talking heads spewing a curated flow of sometimes violent, always consumer-friendly, images of reality? Within this framework, Rancière dissects action as the response to “the evil” of the image and “the guilt” of the spectator who is compelled to action by what is represented in certain images. If the only response to evil is action, Rancière assumes that a main goal of images interpreted as intolerable and/or political is to move affects in the spectator through guilt—which is already such a loaded term.

Therefore, this massive influx of images is enough to interrupt the civil contract of photography by bombarding us with images of an ever-increasing detachment from reality. In the maelstrom, how can we not inject ourselves with percepticide, nor be complacent in the predigested journalistic teleprompters and talking heads spewing a curated flow of sometimes violent, always consumer-friendly, images of reality? Within this framework, Rancière dissects action as the response to “the evil” of the image and “the guilt” of the spectator who is compelled to action by what is represented in certain images. If the only response to evil is action, Rancière assumes that a main goal of images interpreted as intolerable and/or political is to move affects in the spectator through guilt—which is already such a loaded term.

For her part, Beltrán purports new political movements by DREAMers and other undocumented youth that do not care for the guilt of spectators, which is motivated by a paternalistic view of pity and which moves the body to action through charity. The Undocuqueers exemplify how combativeness, visibility, unapologeticness, produce their own speeches and images, their own written and bodily languages, their testimonies, to spur action through solidarity, through the visibilization of the violence of the invisibilization of mass deportations. Her recount of undocumented youth coming out of the closet of being documented, queering democratic processes by foregrounding contestatory methods of representation through speech, text, and image, that defy normalization and assimilation in favor of a new arena of political representation. If we are to be citizens in the citizenry of photography, we are to face the same stark and intolerable reality that these noncitizens throw in our faces. If. according to Rancière, the true witness is they who share their testimony despite the horror they have faced, who are compelled by the voice of an Other to share their take on Reality, then these DREAMers are an even truer witnesses to their daily horrors of racist and xenophobic violence. Because of the injustices they have suffered, they cannot continue to tolerate their intolerable reality: they aim to move the public not through guilt, but through a collective call to solidarity, through newer and queerer bonds of kinship outside the heteronormative realm of American assimilation. In an interesting reversal, despite being compelled to not speak, they choose to speak up in so many ways, to resist and transgress. Thus, this imperative to share the intolerable, to make their story intolerable, to spur action through solidarity, could prove to be more effective a political tool than to simple make a spectacle of the horrors of society and incite action through a passive relationship to image and speech.

Dis/Identification: as a general tendency in the readings, for there to be politics, there needs to be an us and a them. The various forms of identification coalesce large populations into electoral groups: these can be either agonistic or antagonistic, depending on how closed the us is and how dangerous or undesirable the them is conceived. I add the dis- prefix to allude to José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification to underscore how marginalized populations take hegemonic symbols and queer them to their will and for their own benefit and/or transgression.

Spectatorship: politics, like theater and performance, would not be possible without a spectator. Active versus passive spectatorship seems to be a critical point of influence, like all audiences can be. Understanding what politicians want of their spectators, therefore, is crucial.

Power: it has been defined and re-defined in so many ways. Where does power really reside, in what instances, under what conditions? How does power shift from the head of state to the assembling populations? How can popular power be cemented in the same way state governments centralize power through institutions?

Resistance: Balibar defines resistance as the limit to power, that is, the force which resists power at its margins. However, what if power resides in the people: is government the resistance? I believe we should define resistance more thoroughly if we are to consider power as an indispensable concept.

Emancipation: the great take-away from modern liberal politics. Though a vast concept, we should be able to come up with a working definition for emancipation that encompasses the concept both as an embodied practice and as an inalienable right.

Both videos (the one on the left shorter, the one on the right queer-er) showcase the moment of perreo combativo (a rebellious/transgressive/combative twerk-a-thon) held in Old San Juan on 24 July 19, the night former governor Rosselló resigned after fifteen days of intense protests.

José Gabriel

Crear espacios de visibilidad, seguridad y resistencia es sumamente importante. La revolución es queer.

@tacha-rola,
Queer Puerto Rican (Drag) Performer and Promoter

Summer of ’19 in Puerto Rico was spectacular for all the right and all the wrong reasons. After a contentious, storm-laden quadrennium; and after 889 pages of private (and unencrypted) text messages between former governor Rosselló and his closest political allies were leaked, the entire Puerto Rican community (insular and diasporic) was racked by two weeks of protests and police clashes centered on the governor’s mansions, La Fortaleza, in Old San Juan. The end result: the first ousting of a head of state in Puerto Rican history, without a single death. Both an achievement widely considered unlikely (if not inaudito or insólito) for any country in Latin America, let alone a US colony that has never once been a modern, independent nation state; and an exemplary feat of participatory democracy and political spectacle–from above and from below.

For our purposes, I would rather hone in on the bottom-up (no pun intended) queer spectacles unleashed by the youthful resistance, and how a queer subject (usually out of time, out of place) occupies public spaces in protest and in solidarity with the larger normative cisgender community. The most marginalized and downtrodden communities on the island banded together for an ephemeral moment of plurality, of absolute power, in a frontal assault against tyranny. By creating for themselves a space of appearance in an Arendtian sense, they lay a claim for futurity by speculating over and embodying a new island they demand for themselves and for future generations–decidedly anti-neoliberal, anti-racist-misogynistic-homophobic, and anti-Rosselló. In the following three instances of queer resistance, the frame is occupied front and center by queer subjects, but gradually pans out to encompass, I dare say, every Puerto Rican on Earth.

La Resistencia Ball

Queer balls are spectacles in and of themselves, the campiest of gender performances steeped in traditions of queer resistance and creative expression, that is, critical art in how balls challenge the constitution and maintenance of a symbolic order (Mouffe 91). We could digress into the racial and gendered systems of oppression that pushed LGBT communities (particularly Puerto Ricans) to establish balls in the first place, but I would rather concentrate on the fact that the ball was not held underground, isolated from mainstream society. Through La Resistencia Ball, this young group of queers dared to create an agonistic public space in the heart of it all, in broad daylight, surrounded by a sea of protesters: they wished to, first and foremost, make people (muggles, rather) uncomfortable; to bring to the fore “conflicting points of view” concerning gender expression and transgressive sexuality (92); to expose “alternatives to the current political order” and add their voices to the maelstrom of creative protests and public demonstrations (93).

By naming themselves collectively as the Haus of Resistance, they are establishing for themselves parameters for open agonistic dialogue, inaugurating a space of queer appearance to disclose a futurizing discourse, speculating amongst the masses a possible nation, a different nation, in which systemic corruption is extirpated and queer bodies are celebrated. By naming themselves the resistance, they create an Us that exists in contraposition to a Them: the heads of the Puerto Rican colonial government. These queer youths embody the future they want to see and live, and by establishing this moment of appearance, they perform the equality and the respect they exige not only from the government against which they protest, but also from the popular masses protesting in tandem (and not in opposition, as would happen any other day, probably) with them.

Ricky Martin Leads the National Strike

pic.twitter.com/KVF3yGkIVO

— Seyer III (@JJReyesIII) July 23, 2019

On 22 July 19, the entire island shut down. The closest guestimates count over half a million islanders congregating on a huge twelve-lane highway in front of the largest mall in the Caribbean bopping rain or shine to the beat of #RickyRenuncia. With Ricky Martin spearheading the movement, the symbols have changed. After being mentioned by name in homophobic comments in Rosselló and friends’ leaked messages, he and other prominent members of the Puerto Rican artistic class, including rappers Bad Bunny and Residente, took on a protagonist role and convened the country’s most multitudinous political protest in its history. Furthermore, in a similar manifestation of critical art, Bad Bunny, Residente, and iLe released “Afilando cuchillos”, which calls for outright revolution and public displays of violence against La Fortaleza. Despite both Ricky Martin’s homonormativity and Bad Bunny’s consumer-friendly gender-bending deserve their own tangents–not to mention the despicable misogynistic (yet seductively rhythmic) reggeatón lyrics that Residente and others are known for–I would like to rescue that fact that thousands upon thousands of Puerto Ricans cheered (and not jeered) at a gay man waving a pride flag together with a Puerto Rican flag, two overtly political symbols of resistance unfurling proudly in the hopes of effectuating revolutionary change in our colonial administration.

Plurality has never been more closely achieved for the Puerto Rican community. Every single Puerto Rican living off the island would have wanted to be there–yet still made their presence known on social media, adding to the foray. At this point, Rosselló had been rejected by the highest members of his political parties, the calls for his resignation have turned unanimous, and he still holds steadfastly to his seat, unflinching and unwilling to become the Rosselló that failed (unlike his father, who was governor for two consecutive terms in the neoliberal nineties). Protected by the police force in La Fortaleza, utterly powerless in his isolation, he has become a tyrant: when the National Strike occurs, the power has shifted to the people–a plural mix of every social strata imaginable, of members of his own political party as well as his political antagonists, cheering and raging for his resignation. For Arendt, power in a political sense surges forth from the people when they are united for a common cause; public assemblies are powerful in that individuals make their senses and subjectivities known in a way that seems boundless, limitless, infinitely potential.

In a country wracked by homophobic and transphobic violence, in a colony steeped in political inertia if not indifference, the resistance is suddenly led by a light-skinned cis gay male and his allies. Under the ephemeral veil of public assembly, under the inebriating allure of infinity, queers and muggles walked as equals. For Butler, equality has to do with how we treat each other, and power comes from the bond. Equality does not come from The Rights of Man, but “from what is between us, from the bond we make at the moment in  which we exercise freedom together, a bond without which there is no freedom at all” (52). Therefore, the political of equality (like emancipation) is different from the daily practice of equality; therefore, equality is an embodied practice, a performative. When Ricky Martin jumps on top of the 18-wheeler and waves the rainbow pride flag together with the Puerto Rican, a new nation is suddenly possible right then and there. If over half a million Puerto Ricans (and even more abroad) can all unite under the double banner of a gay (queer, rather) Puerto Rico, then Rosselló has lost all his power: his adversaries, united, have made a spectacle of themselves, and call for bloody justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ia84oaEHnI

Queers Host ‘Twerk-A-Thon’ on San Juan Cathedral Steps

In a truly Caribbean spectacle, the masses were convened to Old San Juan for a twerk-a-thon event on 24 July 19, the fifteenth day of massive protests. This mingling of participatory democracy and cheerful festivities is in no way contradictory: when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones), they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity (Butler 11). If action (in Arendtian terms) occurs whenever humans come together in a concerted effort to appear to each other and to discuss the terms of a possible shared future, and if polis is not a localizable place but a queer spacetime phenomenon in which unequal bodies assemble to propose an embodiment of political equality, then it should be no surprise that a convocation for un perreo combativo (that is, a combative twerk-a-thon) would sprout various parallel manifestations all across Old San Juan. Including a queer one held on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica of Saint John the Baptist, the second oldest cathedral in the Americas, originally constructed in wood in 1521.

Butler claims that actions are invariably bodily, and needs supports to lay a claim at all: at this point, in neoliberal times, these supports are what we are all fighting for. The fortnight of protests were initially sparked by the leaked text messages, but it was the final straw in a long line of injustices committed against the population–which we will not get into for sake of time and space, but which also galvanized the people in opposition to the neoliberal precarity that Rosselló’s political maneuvering had caused on the island. Therefore, to understand political demonstrations, we need to better understand the bodily dimensions of action–what the body requires, what the body is allowed (or not) to do in public and in private. Puerto Rican queers, especially (queer) femmes, share with the rest of the population (though obviously in relative terms) precarity as a galvanizing force, as well as a penchant for perreo‘s power of convocation. Faced with generations of violence, the most precarious of bodies invite their fellow protestors to join them in dance, to break down the barriers that divide us usually and to bring down Rosselló once and for all. For the first time, all sectors of society can come as one plurality.

But the most spectacular and transgressive of the cuir interventions in Puerto Rico’s fortnight of protest was El Perreo Intenso, a kind of competitive dance-off that featured twerking contestants unashamedly flaunting their assets on the steps of Old San Juan’s most cherished Catholic cathedral. They left no doubt that Puerto Rico’s new political freedom could not happen without free sexual expression.

Ed Morales for The Nation

Perreo combativo is but another example of the creative power (that is, their potentiality for political action) that Puerto Ricans outraged are capable of summoning and utilizing: crisis breeds creativity. En masse, Puerto Ricans speculated over the meaning of political agency, of resistance, of national unity, and broke off into so many groups to establish their own spaces of appearance, spreading Arendtian action in its wake–jet skis, horse rides, queer balls, yoga classes, motorcycles and banshees, even twerk-a-thons. Every act was suddenly and unmistakably an act of resistance, every meeting a polis embodied. Power undulated all about us–even about those of stuck on the continent staring into their phones for live updates.

To twerk in front of a trans flag duct taped to the entrance of the oldest cathedral in the United States embodies a plural performativity which “seeks to produce a rift within the sphere of appearance, exposing the contradiction by which its claim to universality is posited and nullified. There can be no entry into the sphere of appearance without a critique of the differential forms of power by which that sphere is constituted, and without a critical alliance formed among the discounted, the ineligible–the precarious–to establish new forms of appearance that seek to overcome that differential form of power” (Butler 50-1). Arendt claims that politics requires a space of appearance, the very space which makes politics possible. Therefore, plural action creates space for dialogue. To paraphrase a common queer chant, “La revolución será afro-trans-cuir-feminista, o no será“. Queer bodies force the muggle masses to face their difference, to watch them create an agonistic public space of the very space which rejects and condemns them, the seat of power upon which La Fortaleza founds its paternalistic authority. In the whirlwind of twerk-a-thons, feminists took to the streets with trans and queer activists, queer bodies touted their difference with showmanship, and the spectators embodied a newfound equality which–despite being later rejected because of the the supposed desecration of religious symbols–was nonetheless celebrated as a spectacle of the bodies coming together for a common purpose.

Needless to say, the governor resigned that same night. Perhaps twerking has more political power than it ever could have anticipated.

The Im/Possibility of a (New?) Nation

The Boricua Summer of ’19 is a prime example of the spectacle of emancipation. And here spectacle takes on its ultimate performativity as an ephemeral performance of national sovereignty by a nonsovereign nonnation. After the governor resigned, his cabinet pretty much stayed the same. Instead of open elections, Rosselló’s same political party (pro-statehood) suddenly turned constitutionalist and vied to activate the constitution’s line of succession (yes, line of succession) in order for the highest seat on the island to stay within the same party. There was never a complete shift of circumstances, no relief to the precarity: it was three-hundred and sixty degrees of revolution in fifteen days.

Despite this, a substantial percentage of the population waded in the life-giving spring of emancipation, an explosive first step towards liberation of the island and the subjects who inhabit it from the shackles of neocolonial neoliberalism. Even though the main goal of the protests was to oust Rosselló himself and his closest allies (some of whom have not resigned to this day), the leaked messages were the final drop in a generation’s-worth of neoliberal policies and criminal public debt and austerity. In the meanwhile, the entire population (not just the queers) managed to recover the smallest glimpse of the prideful nationality that they were denied, which according to Fanon is at the root of colonialism. This possible new island already feels a lot more open than the one depicted by the former governors’ leaked messages. These images of a burgeoning queer emancipation are revolutionary spectacles in and of themselves, and will be studied and remembered for a long time. As Butler mentions, power can spring forth at any moment, at any time, from the people. It’s only a matter of time.

(As an extra, I attached a video of former governor Rosselló just before midnight on 24 July 19. Notice how many bullets he sweats. You can almost hear, in your heart, the crowd scream to the heavens when he announces his resignation.)

https://www.facebook.com/fortalezaproficial/videos/400356000592699/

José Gabriel

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt establishes the guidelines for her political project by valuing, first and foremost, participatory democratic processes and collective deliberations of public ails. Facing the contemporary demons of homogeneity and conformity that lead to the World Wars, Arendt purports action —as opposed to work or labor— as the vehicle by which humans make a claim for themselves in the political sphere. Through word and deed (speech and action), we insert ourselves in the public sphere. Even though we are all bound to our material and physiological needs as living beings, speech acts distinguish ourselves from the rest of our brethren, speaking to the predetermined plurality of human affairs. Surpassing the adage that actions speak louder than words, Arendt claims that there is an indivisibility between speech and action —that some actions need clarification and historization to be made significant, just as some words need actions to back up the person who speaks— just as there is an indivisibility of the individual from the collective —that is, that we never signify by ourselves, but are made visible and intelligible in the public sphere, in that space of appearance where one can appear before others and others appear before one. Therefore, in this interdependency lies the roots for power which, in Arendtian terms, appears wherever there is a polis—not a specific localizable geographic point on a map, but any space and time in which humans come together to debate a common grievance.

Butler comes into the foray in Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly by recognizing the limits of some of Arendt’s claims, recognizing that bodies assembled “speak” for themselves without the need of speech. How can the speechless, the stateless and the otherwise unprotected masses make a claim for themselves? By contributing her own theories on gender performativity, Butler localizes the differential distribution of precarity as the zone where the body speaks precisely as it acts. By recognizing the bodily dimensions of Arendtian action, by recognizing how bodies are themselves categorized and differentiated intersectionally, by also recognizing the material and infrastructural conditions necessary for a space of appearance to exist at all, Butler brings to the fore the myriad of ways in which bodies inscribe themselves in political struggles by way of appearing and congregating, by demonstrating their collective power in a concerted front against neoliberal conditions of precarity that threaten to eliminate all possibilities of political action.

Therefore, to protest precarity is to perform that very precarity. Contemporary public assemblies showcase an intersectional union of bodies, plural in form, whose predetermined living conditions make self-sufficiency nearly impossible. To act in the name of eliminating precarity means to recognize the common neoliberal struggle of so many bodies huddled together yearning to be free, and to show up in that stead despite the precarious conditions that limit our capacity to speak and act out.

José Gabriel

The following are some starting points for a greater conversation on performance and politics stemming from our last two weeks’ readings:

Politics as contention By definition, politics is adversarial. A classic(al) example: Plato, an aristocrat, expels the Poet from his Republic. Balibar contends that a necessary condition of politics is the existence of an us and a them: an inherent by-product of politics is a hierarchy of have-nots that are neither a whole subject nor an integrated part. Similarly, Mouffe adds that every identity is relational and that politics deals with collective identities, that is, a we and a they. In response to these conditions, for example, Boal’s Teatro do oprimido aims to reverse roles and have oppressed subjects act out possible futures with different outcomes than their immediate reality.

Politics as exclusion Through the distribution of the sensible, Rancière reveals the internal political mechanisms that determine who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and how and when they do what they do. He asks, Who gets to be political, who has the time to be political? Boal’s analysis of the Greek system of tragedies as a means of political coercion establishes the aristocracy –whose means and state control allowed for the theater to flourish in the first place– as the determiners of the ultimate goods and virtues of their cultural and political contemporaneity.

Politics as passion Mouffe claims that we cannot understand democratic politics without acknowledging passions and affect as driving forces in the political realm. Through Boal’s breakdown of tragic(ist) coercion, we come to understand the apparatus of politically motivated emotional manipulation established at the base of Western theater whose ultimate goal is to control passions and purge dissident conducts. Brecht recognizes contemporary theater goers as sleepers whose passion for the arts has been reduced to aimless gawking, therefore rendering them malleable.

Politics as specatorship Through Boal, we come to understand how the aristocratic citizens of Ancient Greece manipulated the masses through coercive spectatorship. Recognizing this, Brecht calls for a more critical spectatorship, in which alienating effects from the actors on stage would spark interest and an awakening in the audience. On the other hand, just like in commercial theater, Taylor claims that spectators in politics are meant to sit there and watch, to absorb passively; state violence and political spectacles render citizens speechless, blinded, enthralled, incapable of responding. Performance art can call spectators to action, even if it happens in circumstances or conditions the spectator doesn’t fully understand. Spectatorship functions within systems and relationships of power, undoubtedly, and Rancière reminds us that, in the collective realm, only a few are allowed to determine for the whole. Rancière also reminds us that seeing is also a doing: spectators are able to refashion and reinterpret what they see.

Politics as emancipation Balibar provides a succinct summary of the conditions necessary for political emancipation and the subjects who achieve their own emancipation as opposed to the subjects whose previous emancipation confirms their place and rights within the political realm. Noticing the inconsistencies, Boal proposes specific theater practices as a way of emancipating spectators from their lack of political agency, therefore planting the seeds for further, more generalized political subversion.

Politics as transformation Balibar defines politics as change within change, that is, within a capitalistic system defined by (ex)change, politics is a dialectics of change. Boal proposes his theatrical practices as a way of preparing the subject for political change through artistic inquiry and performance. Taylor’s analysis of various forms of performance art reminds us that all art is political and expresses an artists’ desire for change by making possible an interaction between the artist, the spectator, and their worldviews.

José Gabriel

This week’s readings coincide in how Classical approaches to theater have established predetermined passive roles for spectators. Boal starts his Teatro do oprimido with a succinct, pragmatic background and summary of the system of Greek tragedies codified in Aristotle’s Poetics. The breakdown of the connections between politics and art reveals the coercion of a ruling aristocracy who, in Classical times, utilized public theater as a way of purging social vices through a complex of empathic identification between the spectators and the actors, achieving a climactic catharsis to modify the public’s conduct. Therefore, a spectator is a passive entity who receives an education through gut-wrenching osmosis. Boal’s revolutionary theatrical practices are aimed towards making the spectator an active participant, a spec-ator, in the play, bringing to the fore their own experiences as a way of negotiating the meaning of the play itself and their own social practices.

Through his own theatrical processes, Brecht proposes the idea that this mimetic algorithm that Boal deftly demolishes only produces passive sleepers, spectators overwhelmed to the point of numbness in the theater. While maintaining the perspective that theater’s main end is entertainment and pleasure, his theatrical practice of alienation (or estrangement) is geared towards a more critical spectatorship in which the public is pushed to react critically to the characters portrayed onstage by a process of breaking theatrical illusions of empathy and highlighting the strangeness of everyday actions, permitting spectators to engage critically with the world depicted in art with the world they navigate for themselves.

Likewise, in Performance, Taylor also postulates that, while spectators do function within a system of power relationships inside and outside of the theater, contemporary performances as embodied practices displace the role and placement of the spectator in front of otherwise dramatic acts like live performances. Seeing is a way of knowing, of reaching and even contesting power, and through the viewing of a performance, of a specific context moved by bodily actions, spectators can now be called to action in ways unanticipated by ancient Greek aristocrats, allowing for the creation of spect-actors like Boal and Brecht would have wanted.