The readings for this week go over the power and mechanisms of popular demonstrations. Arendt (1958) emphasizes how action and words become a way to speak and show ourselves by becoming a “who” that performs their agency; “To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin… to set something into motion.” (177) This mobility finds its power in their unpredictability and plurality; “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.” (178) For Arendt, action takes more power when enacted in collectivity. She sees also the power of the individual moving the collective even in the smallest action that can create a movement; “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation” (190).
Butler (2015) examines the idea of public assemblies moved by fear or chaos that can produce what she calls a “radical hope” To analyze this, Butler adds to the conversation of who is considered “the people” and how this category implies the exclusion of others and the building of a demarcation as; “the body politic is posited as a unity it can never be” (4). Here, Butler, same as Arendt, recognizes the performativity and power of people gathering together on what she calls “bodies assembly” moved by their same realization of precarity; a body that acts and enacts its presence stating a “we are here”. Butler talks about different types of assembly and asserts that when bodies assembly in any part, even if its virtually like in the #NiUnaMenos movement, they are exercising a plural and performative “right to appear, one that asserts and instated 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 inflicted by induced forms of precarity” (11) These disposable bodies then have the potential to express even if its silently.