Throughout the pages of “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt contends that denying the individual access to the realm of politics is to deny him or her their most fundamental right; the right for promise; for an utterance to actualize within space and time, transpiring as action; what I could further clarify as the right to see your own results, uncut.
Our readings this week speak on the necessary formation of the collective under this constant threat of the biopolitical, their appetite for power and control situating the political realm on its own, untouchable plane; unreachable overhead and yet still capable of causing destruction on the ground. Enter stage left, the Zapatistas and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT), led by Subcomandante Marcos and Ricardo Dominguez, respectively.
These urgent collective formations fixate their leaders as “drag-kings,” noted by Diana Taylor, or a performative measure that symbolizes both an insurgent masculinity as well as a reprieve from the identity conventions that serve to further dehumanize these groups which endeavor to depict the nakedness of Emperor.
“The intentional fiction of masculinity (the hero and the voice of rebellion) based on performatic techniques. A revolutionary symbol without face or ego, made up of words and collective dreams.[His queer/ trans act] de-privatizes the face, the name, in order to transform the body of the multitude into the collective agent of revolution” (Preciado).
Creating these collective movements depends on a figure in which his or her people can see their own transformative powers. In this way, the leader begs to be dwarfed by the idea, his body becoming as big as the assembly that exists in the many temporalities that modernity has shepherded. It is this building upwards, to the side, reaching down, and scooping up, that erects the 99% against the powerful few, for a single man can be easy to destroy, but his ideas can continue to thrive.
In “Digital Zapatista,” Jill Lane begins at our fingertips, with the world-making capabilities of cyberspace recontextualizing how we think of political legitimacy, making way for a novel, digital Zapatista whose “ virtual protests most often reveal the ways in which cyberspace itself is occupied and organized as a commercial and private, rather than public space to be protected with the full force of the law, or of the military” (127).
What the Internet does for the Zapatistas and the EDT (and potentially any other form of social insurgency) is constructing a new public sphere described by Lane as a “runway for the staging of more productive ‘lines of flight’ for those struggling for social change” (131). We can easily compare this to airplanes taking flight towards unheard destinations, or we can view it even more succinctly as a utopian performance, a fashioning of disturbance.
A modern fashioning of disturbance appears wherever the virtual and embodied blur and combine. This form of resistance comes in the form of a semantic disordering of established modes of living, in an attempt to “making visible the underlying and hidden relations of power on which the smooth operation of government repression depends” (Lane, 136). The political performance Dominguez and Marcos personify this “contention from the margins” (Dominguez) showing to the sidelined minoritarian and/or indigenous person that Limbo can be a state of mind, an abdication to Doom can be a signature silhouette worth dismantling, and fashioning one’s self towards Emancipation can be spectacle, even when banished to the periphery of Power.
Such theatrics require the refiguring of traditional resources, props, or fabulations, in order to reproduce, rehearse, and practice their world-shattering perspectives. In this way, the gestural use of the ski mask by the Zapatistas makes their presence legible to the greater public while anonymizing their personhood, as Marcos himself states, “the mask reveals” (Marcos).
Into modernity, the EDT and digital Zapatista map an “alternate form of embodiment against exploitative ‘weightlessness’,” or the dogged prescriptions of Power that restrain a working class from the editors table, a sphere of political actualization that in its essence denies these individuals their right to rights. Instead, Marcos and Dominguez implore those compelled to life on the cutting room floor, to pick up the pieces of their intolerable production, and transform them into an act worth witnessing.