Transgression As a Mode of Resistance: Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization

Transgression as a Mode of Resistance Transgression as a Mode of Resistance Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of C...

Author: Christina R. Foust

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Transgression as a Mode of Resistance

Transgression as a Mode of Resistance Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization

Christina R. Foust

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foust, Christina R. Transgression as a mode of resistance : rethinking social movement in an era of corporate globalization / Christina R. Foust. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4335-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4337-7 (electronic) 1. Social movements. 2. Social change. 3. Anti-globalization movement. 4. Anarchism. 5. Hegemony. I. Title. HM881.F68 2010 303.48'4—dc22 2010013866

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Bessie, Joan, and Virginia

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introducing Transgression as a Mode of Resistance

1

2

Logics of Hegemony, Degrees of Transgression

31

3

Companions: Transgressing Friend-Enemy Subjects

85

4

Flashpoints of Transgression: Considering Companions in Classical Anarchism

115

Performing Resistance: Transgressing the Hegemony of Representation

143

Flashpoints of Transgression: Materializing a Politics of Enactment in Resistance to Capitalism

171

Conclusion

209

5 6 7

References

225

Index

241

About the Author

245

vii

Acknowledgments

Having reached the publication of Transgression as a Mode of Resistance, I feel it appropriate to extrapolate Nietzsche’s observation about philosophy to scholarly writing: Writers “must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster.”1 As a newly minted PhD, I appreciated conversations with Robbie Cox, Julia Wood, John Jackson, and Ed Schiappa, who generously shared insights on the book publishing process. I also acknowledge the opportunities I have had to share and test out ideas leading to this work: with students in my first-year seminar, and graduate seminars on resistance, social movement, and Nietzsche; and with colleagues at conferences over the last few years, including the Trope, Affect, and Democratic Subjectivity conference at Northwestern University, the Western States Communication Association, and the National Communication Association conventions. I would like to thank the many people who have read this book (or research leading to it) in its joyful and arduous process of becoming. Robert Cox, Ron Lee, John Poulakos, and Greg Dickinson were kind enough to read very early, rough drafts of ideas contained herein. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose ideas contributed to this book’s development—thanks also to Rebecca McCary and the editorial staff at Lexington Books for their help along the way. I am also grateful for the support of my colleagues at the University of Denver, particularly Kate Willink and Darrin Hicks for their careful critiques of advanced drafts of these chapters; and to Roy Wood for his wise perspective, and Bernadette Calafell for always encouraging me to believe in my work. I am grateful for Dean Anne McCall’s generous support of the faculty at the University of Denver; and to Jacquelynn McDaniel, ix

x

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who helped polish up the citations of an early draft. Thanks to my family, especially Mom and Steve, for their continued support and understanding of my professional (and personal) life. I am endlessly grateful to my partner in life and marriage, Charles, who has provided sanctuary, counsel, and great ideas at exactly the right moments during the book’s gestation. And lastly, I want to thank Rose Adele, who has been a constant companion during some intense times, and whose smile and sparkle inspired me to keep going.

NOTE 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6.

1 Introducing Transgression as a Mode of Resistance

[I]f anarchist-influenced groups look disorganized, this is perhaps because the ways in which they are organized cannot be understood from within the common sense maintained by the hegemony of hegemony. Perhaps a new, uncommon sense is needed.1

November 30, 1999, stands out as one of the most important days in recent history. Generations removed from the “golden age” of labor activism, nearly half a century away from civil rights agitation, decades from the radical identity politics of feminism and gay liberation, the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) caught many by surprise. Perhaps more surprising than the appearance of tens of thousands reclaiming the city streets was the possibility that people would protest neoliberalism: an ideology that seeks to free trade, deregulate and expand markets, in the interest of global prosperity, peace, and profit.2 With the election of President William Jefferson Clinton in 1992, and the subsequent expansion of trade agreements throughout the world since, it appeared that corporate globalization was inevitable.3 The Democrats would no longer fight policies which several of their constituencies deplored. America’s two parties had reached a consensus. In the years since the Seattle protests, activists have continued to implicate corporate globalization in a host of social and economic problems, including: abuses of the environment and workers’ rights, an eclipse of representative democracy, and cultural homogenization, among other ills.4 Activists have framed their protests and related discourses as a social movement (typically not an “anti-globalization,” but a “global justice” movement). Global justice advocates have fashioned a rudimentary life 1

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story for their movement out of disparate events, ideologies, and rhetorical styles. Often beginning in the early to mid-1990s, with representative “glocalities” such as southern Mexico and the Niger River Delta, the narrative unites seemingly isolated indigenous struggles for human rights with anticonsumerist youth cultures of Northern industrialized nations. Established movement organizers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) fertilized this ground of resistance. In spite of the ideological tensions between coalition partners, the anti-globalization sentiment converged against the WTO in 1999, and has continued to materialize in cities around the world. The more “networked” character of global justice organizing leads to a plethora of tactics and ideologies at protest sites.5 Unlike more traditional social movements, global justice has commenced without identifiable figurehead-leaders or a hierarchical structure. Even groups that had been pitted as “enemies” in previous political conflicts (e.g., environmentalists and trade unionists) have co-existed on the same political stage through the looser structure of networks. Network organizing also reflects the use of new communication technologies, which allow for more spontaneous and potentially impacting protest: activists may adapt to changing street conditions through the use of cell phones and the Internet.6 Yet, the network structure celebrated by global justice advocates is only symptomatic of anti-globalization’s anarchist character. Activist and anthropologist David Graeber advances that the contemporary anarchist imperative “to reinvent daily life as whole” through “decentralized, nonhierarchical consensus democracy” has deep historical and philosophical roots that defy simple comparisons between global justice resistance and computer modeling.7 The spectacular defiance of social norms (such as consumerism and civility) demonstrates, more broadly, that “the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism.”8 Moreover, many anti-globalization protestors identify as anarchists or enact resistance which is anarchistic: activists practice self-organization and direct intervention in local contexts, while linking their concerns to the oppressive authority of global capitalism and the state.9 The anarchist character of today’s resistance threatens not only the current neoliberal order. As sociologist and activist Richard J. F. Day argues, it undermines the standard ways of doing, and thinking about, political action: “What is most interesting about contemporary radical activism is that some groups are . . . operating non-hegemonically rather than counterhegemonically. They seek radical change, but not through taking or influencing state power, and in so doing they challenge the logic of hegemony at its very core.”10 As Day suggests, anarchists tend to view hegemonic collectives (whether they are neoliberal institutions, political parties, or even NGOs and social movements) with suspicion. Preferring direct action to party politics, anar-


3

chist performances often defy common sense or common ground. Rather than operating primarily through representational politics, anarchy works more immediately, in ways which emphasize agency (as a potential, or capacity for change) over agent (the individual or collective subject doing the change). Symbolic property damage and radical street performance, like the smashed GAP windows and human blockades that rocked the Seattle WTO meetings, do not clearly communicate “global justice.” They constitute, instead, an instant and direct challenge to those forces which undermine and oppress human autonomy. Anarchy embraces transgression, rather than hegemony, as its primary mode of resistance.11

TRANSGRESSION AND HEGEMONY AS MODES OF RESISTANCE Transgression generally refers to discursive actions which cross boundaries or violate limits.12 As Michel Foucault develops, transgression illuminates limits even as it attempts to destroy them: For instance, it highlights those discursive and material lines which separate, and thus define, the normal and abnormal, the healthy and diseased, the domestic and foreign.13 Transgressions which are permitted, or escape the notice and discipline of boundary-policing authorities, push the boundaries further (toward those resisting or away, depending on the eventual response of authorities).14 In other words, transgression redefines lines of distinction, giving new meaning to identities and social practices. Transgression thus shares a deep conceptual relationship to immanence, as that volatile force which ceaselessly attempts to consume, break down divisions, hybridize, or couple those elements which had been divided transcendently.15 In common parlance, transgression is a violation of propriety. Such violations may be as simple as teenagers “making out” in public places, or as sophisticated as civil rights protests like the Freedom Rides, in which Whites and Blacks rode side by side on segregated buses. Transgressions are indiscretions that incur various reactions from the mildly normative (glares or sighs of disapproval from passers-by), to the brutally disciplining (facing violent arrest or fiery retribution from locals). Transgressive actions incite reactions due to their relationship to norms: Transgressions violate unspoken or explicit rules that maintain a particular social order. Yet, as scholars and practitioners have figured it, transgression’s threat to social order runs deeper than violating the rules and expectations that govern what is normal. As transgressions exceed normalcy, they threaten the community’s imperative toward conformity. Even transgressions as elementary as public displays of teenage sexuality may enact an alternative way of living within a

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particular community—in the moments in which they are enacted, such alternatives (however uninspired) reveal social order to be a fluid and fragile system of power, one which requires constant maintenance to appear stable and orderly. More complex transgressions may threaten the legitimacy of authority structures that maintain the “common good,” for they undermine the hierarchical basis of a social order. The Freedom Riders, for instance, performed hybrid racial relationships that called into question the ethics and necessity of America’s segregated hierarchy—and literally performed a new daily life of Black and White integration, amidst the violence of Jim Crow. At the same time, Freedom Riders risked incurring violence from those supporting the status quo, for their transgressions crossed the line of racial normalcy in the South. While hegemonic resistance also incites responses, its relationship to dominant powers is fundamentally different than that of transgression. From a hegemonic perspective, social change occurs as the result of crystallizing a new order, one which will replace the status quo following a revolutionary or reformist struggle. A hegemonic movement may manifest alternative ways of living, ones which also disrupt the normal operations of a dominant bloc: But hegemonic movements are typically vested in becoming the new status quo. So while liberal feminist organizations (like the National Organization for Women) may undermine patriarchy by advocating for women’s equal pay, they do so in ways which speak to cultural common sense. By focusing on women’s rights (to fair compensation for their labor), NOW may link their anti-patriarchal efforts to other struggles (such as migrant workers’ rights campaigns, fostered by MRI, Migrants Rights International). In so doing, NOW widens a collective consciousness in an attempt to replace the patriarchal perspectives that pervade the status quo. Hegemonic movements often turn to the same tools that dominant powers use to ascend to and maintain authority over wider swaths of the community. These tools are particularly useful at building common ground, or speaking to and widening common sense, as the means to expand power. Two of the most important tools of hegemonic power (though certainly not the only tools available or ascribable to hegemony) are friend-enemy agents and an economy of representation. Positing a common enemy, like patriarchal imperialism, groups like NOW and MRI might expand their common ground to other “friends,” such as the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD). Through representational rhetoric, NOW, MRI, and GLAD might cast a wider net: sharing a common message of freedom to live as one chooses, unthreatened by the potential for workplace violence and repression, the anti-patriarchal efforts might include other groups, until a new, non-patriarchal way of life is achieved. Certainly, hegemonic resistance is more complex than this brief illustration. The point is that hegemony relies upon linking issues, ideas, and


5

identities into coherent change agents or blocs, which are the motor force of social change. Transgression deconstructs the natural and normal, at the same time it enacts alternatives to a social order: it does so by (more or less) immediately undermining (versus representing) the common sense which helps build social order (or a related, but different, common sense which might replace it). Transgression thus takes agency as the driving force for social change, versus dialectical change agents (friends against enemies). Transgression’s violations of propriety may become celebrated as performances of radical individualism or masculine prowess (as I elaborate below); but taking each transgression as unique and contingent demonstrates the true risk involved, particularly for transgressions that are open-ended tactics of resistance. Transgression’s violations of propriety incite responses from those vested in, subject to, or in conformity with the status quo. Operating through transgression, anarchist movements and actions have inspired criticism, particularly from those who take hegemony as the natural means for orchestrating social change. For instance, rhetorical critic Martha Solomon concluded that Emma Goldman’s charismatic persona could not overcome the limitations of her ideology, an ideology which eschewed the common bonds necessary for social movements.16 Today, critics charge that anarchist property destruction and confrontation violates the common sense of non-violence, with dire consequences. As one skeptical journalist wrote, “Disrupting the pageantry of trade summits is one thing: building a broad-based enduring campaign against global inequity and the abuses of corporate power is another . . . the violence of a few threatens to alienate the public at large.”17 While anarchist transgressions spark revolutionary fervor, critics invested in (counter-)hegemony question how, and how much, anarchy advances social change. Debates over the efficacy of transgression as a mode of resistance are neither new, nor limited to anarchism. They infiltrate our common sense understanding of social change, through seemingly intractable questions such as “Should protestors work in the system or outside the system for change?” or “Is it better to advocate reform or revolution?” Such debates arise in the cultural memory of social movements past, whenever we query whether or not groups like the Students for a Democratic Society really made any difference after their disruptions of the 1960s.18 Questions also appear throughout scholarship, as critics debate whether, for instance, carnival is truly resistance, or a cathartic and sanctioned identity play.19 Unfortunately, the terms for debating (or even conceptualizing) transgression as a mode of resistance have been, often silently, set by the hegemonic perspective: Demanding that resistance reveal itself in the form of a collective agent, reinforcing that it participate in representational politics, critics mandate hegemony as the natural means for social change.

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However, strict hegemony is not the only mode of resistance. Indeed, there is a broad spectrum of transgression, ranging from that which blends with and supports hegemonic action, to that which virulently opposes or evades the common sense of social change. Performance scholar Jill Dolan writes, “People need to see, to change the conditions of their own vision, to stretch the parameters of what they can see.”20 Our interpretive practice must be re-trained to see outside of (or at least in degrees of, and alternatives to) hegemony, in order to more fully grasp the potential of transgressive resistance. This book takes a meta-critical perspective. It collapses distinctions between various approaches to social change, for the sake of a broader view on theoretical assumptions underlying scholarship on social movements and resistance. Others have taken care to distinguish social movements from campaigns, revolts, and even personal vendettas.21 This definitional effort has been motivated, in part, by a desire to legitimize the fragile efforts of social movements, which are more widespread and lasting than organized campaigns; more democratic or ethical than armed struggle; more concerted and collective than individual grievances. Moreover, from a disciplinary perspective, such definitions were designed to advance rhetoric’s unique contribution to the study of social change: for if social movements were large-scale, uninstitutionalized, democratic, collective efforts to lead change, their primary tool was public persuasion.22 To know social change necessitated carefully analyzing the rhetoric of social movements. But the narrowing and defining of social change is not without its drawbacks. As Scott asserts, “open, declared forms of resistance” such as the tactics of social movements, “attract the most attention,” leaving a host of “disguised, low-profile, undeclared resistance” understudied.23 More specifically, as I argue throughout the book, the move to give rhetoric unique status as the medium through which social movements conduct their business reifies agents as the primary drivers of social change. The agent-centered approach reduces rhetoric’s contribution to constituting a collective (or mediating an abstract agent), rather than creating powerful impacts on its own. So, for instance, the immediate impacts of property damage (such as slowing the ability of an exploiting, alienating company to conduct “business as usual”) become read as constituting the “diversity” of global justice activism. In order to avoid the trappings of centering social change on the agent, I consider a wide variety of theories, interpretations, and tactics of social change (whether they are attributed to social movements or not). I have consciously invoked the term “resistance,” in spite of its baggage, to advance my ability to think social change beyond collective subjects.24 So why take a meta-critical approach to hegemony and transgression as modes of resistance? As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, theories of hegemony form the “deep structure” or grammar for how we


7

understand, interpret, and evaluate efforts for social change. The depths of hegemony, as introduced above, are evident in the reporting on protests, the scholarly analysis of social movements, and the theorizing of rhetoric’s role in social change. This deep structure is sometimes invisible, as in mainstream social movement rhetoric literature which does not directly engage hegemony. But hegemony’s influence is nonetheless discernible, particularly in the assumptions that social change must (or should) occur through friend-enemy antagonisms and representational rhetoric. Hegemony’s presence is also noticeable, as its limits are illuminated by transgressive resistance. The moments in which proponents of hegemony become the most deterministic or prescriptive—when they “police the boundaries” of “proper” resistance—are typically inspired by transgression. So naming transgression as a mode of resistance, and coming to know its alternatives to hegemony (e.g., companion subjectivity and a politics of enactment), are significant to obtaining a richer understanding of hegemony and social change more generally. Though few scholars have explicitly paired hegemony and transgression in their theorizing of social change, several have alluded to these sometimes oppositional, sometimes complementary modes in their work. For instance, social theorist Alain Touraine identifies two forces at work in society, which parallel hegemonic and transgressive modes of resistance: The first “changes historicity into organization, to the point of transforming it into order and power,” while the second “breaks down this order so as to rediscover the orientations and conflicts through cultural innovation.”25 While Touraine associates movements with the second force, it is clear that some efforts at social change proceed through (or at least toward) the orderly, institutionalization of power. Such movements are, I argue, hegemonic in the sense that they seek a long-term, widespread change in shared public consciousness. While such movements do not necessarily use established institutions (like political parties), they typically view institutionalized authority unproblematically. In other words, institutions (e.g., the government, schools, the family, the church, business) are a key means through which hegemonic movements gain power, for they help spread the common consciousness. By contrast, the disarticulating force of transgression questions institutional authority through the practice of social change. Transgression gives name to the anarchist and autonomous impulses igniting in the Gilded Age, with resurgences in the 1960s and today. Touraine’s discussion of movements clearly favors transgression in post-industrial, postmodern global society, where mass consumption and imperialism constrain individuals’ abilities to realize themselves as agents of change.26 Moreover, for Touraine, “the authority of a political ideology and a political strategy,” even in the hands of New Social Movements (NSMs), dulls individuals’ attempts to

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realize their agency.27 The more deterministic, dialectical politics of Marxism—by which individuals arrived at a shared collective consciousness and instantiated their power through a new social order—needs replacement. Resistors must view themselves as the generators of social change, irreducible to their status as representatives of a transcendent unity—whether that appears in the name of “God, the people or reason.”28 Though social movement or the realization of agency is a necessarily collective endeavor for Touraine, it is not a process of building commonality. Sociologist Charles Tilly also clears conceptual space for uniquely transgressive, performative, and material resistance in his work. He identifies acts of “dispersed resistance” which entail loosely orchestrated efforts, including “sabotage, ambushes, clandestine attacks on symbolic objects or places, and temporary acts of resistance, which either inflict damage on authorities or incite violent reprisals from authorities.”29 This moderate, concerted violence is thus distinct from revolutionary tactics and opportunistic thuggery. It has both immediate and symbolic impacts, which may be missed by traditional typologies of democratic social change. Tilly also names contentious performances as significant to social change, but too easily dismissed by traditional theory. Contentious performances are improvised and inventive enactments whose strength does not derive from their “precision.”30 Performance is a privileged category for analysis, because of its contingent, contextual nature. In the cases of both Touraine and Tilly, who are prolific and respected theorists of social change, the distinctions (and potential conflicts) between hegemony and transgression as modes of resistance are implicit. By naming and thinking through these two forces, in lieu of producing more empirical or historical analysis of social movements, we are better able to map a conceptual terrain. Hegemony and transgression point to a new direction for the study of social change in communication, rhetoric, and cultural studies. The debates that scholars, practitioners, and observers enter concerning social change clearly support the pairing of hegemony and transgression, even if these two modes of resistance are not explicitly identified. Naming and developing these two modes of resistance inherently involves identifying the ways in which transgression reveals the limits of the hegemonic paradigm: to acknowledge the potential power of protest which does not contribute to friend-enemy or representational politics is to call into question hegemony’s place as the sole, or standard, way of thinking and doing social change. Friend-enemy subjectivity and an economy of representation, which I attribute to hegemony, are the main touchstones for understanding social change within the practical imaginary—and they form the common sense in scholarly criticism and theory, too. A meta-critical approach to transgression and hegemony permits us to refigure the conceptual vocabulary of resistance studies, which has impact beyond scholarship:


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for the way we critically account for social change impacts actors’ inventional choices and ability to effect change. As Tilly asserts, “In some sense, every position one takes on the desirability, feasibility, or effectiveness of collective action is a political position.”31 Hegemonic perspectives, in their more deterministic guises, function politically by denying or containing the potential power of transgression. To identify a transgressive alternative invites us to consider (or more robustly debate) a broader range of effective resistance at a time in which resistance is becoming more eclectic, and more necessary. Thus, throughout the following chapters, I attempt to hold two contradictory claims in tension: hegemony and transgression are best thought as matters of degree, meaning that “pure” hegemonic or transgressive acts are difficult to come by; but transgression must be thought as a distinct form of resistance, to avoid the hegemonic tendency to ignore, obscure, or discipline it. In the remaining introduction, I offer a theoretical tour of transgression as a mode of resistance. I map the “known terrain” of transgression in communication and cultural studies, concentrating on recent performance studies and rhetoric scholarship where debates over transgression have been most apparent. Acknowledging Bakhtin’s notion of carnival as a metaphor for protest, I encourage a return to the rich rhizomes of transgression in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work.

TRANSGRESSION AND THE PERFORMANCE OF RESISTANCE: NEW RITUALS AND ANALYTICS Transgression typically translates into “resistance” as its actions oppose dominant powers which occupy preferred positions in hierarchies (e.g., the State, the Elite, the Wealthy), or/and by working to instill new ways of interpreting the world, to challenge or replace those of dominant powers (i.e., hierarchy and dualism). As it creates new ways of performing politics and life in general, transgression demands new analytics through which to interpret resistance: its challenges thus extend from the street into scholarship, inspiring debates over its efficacy. The ability of dominant institutions to co-opt the identity play of carnival, the persistent failure of body art to translate into meaningful programs of action, the many protest spectacles which have “landed with a thud,” continue to nag those who see possibility in transgressive resistance. The majority of scholarship on transgressive resistance is influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival. The ritualistic carnival performance violates hierarchies and opens alternative social relations—particularly when witnesses are attuned to such violations and alternatives, or at least not blinded to them by the interpretive frameworks of official culture. Official

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culture separates and ranks ideas and the individual and collective identities they form. Historically, carnivalesque rituals disrupt modernist distinctions that fall along the mind-body dualism, such as human-animal, man-woman, subject-object, urban-rural, master-slave, propertied-impoverished, or potentially any idea and identity that has been marked in a high-low dialectic over time. Stallybrass and White suggest that the carnivalesque might transgress official culture in two ways: it inverts hierarchy by substituting low for high, high for low; or it creates “a process of hybridization or inmixing of binary opposites, particularly of high and low, such that there is a heterodox merging of elements usually perceived as incompatible” by the terms of “fixed binaryism.”32 Inversion replaces the high and low terms in everyday life, but it fails to fundamentally change official culture’s hierarchical distinctions.33 By contrast, the miscegenation of high and low not only disrupts the order of a hierarchy, but also threatens hierarchy itself. Carnivalesque hybridity “produces new combinations and strange instabilities in a given semiotic system. It therefore generates the possibility of shifting the very terms of the system itself by erasing and interrogating the relationships which constitute it.”34 Stallybrass and White share the example of a circus act in which a performer appears with a piglet, swaddled and nursing as though it were a human baby. The performance violates the division between animal and human, while returning the audience to a carnal knowledge that humans (and loud, messy infants, in particular) are animalistic.35 The lowly swine—marked as such through its mud-wallowing, rubbish-eating behavior in urbanizing eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe—is not merely standing in for a higher-class character (as in illustrations depicting pigs wearing top hats and tailed coats, while government officials root in the dirt nearby). The circus performance dangerously hybridizes the hierarchy, celebrating the oddities that may emerge when high and low are set adrift through performance. From the Bakhtinian perspective, transgression involves events which invite play and attention to the body and excess.36 Such performances might undermine the civilized self’s authority, simultaneously transgressing the hierarchical separation of body from mind which sustains the social order.37 Importantly, transgressive performances do not merely represent a threat to mind by flaunting body, as in a staged theatrical event which spectators consume. Rather, at least in the temporary and clearly demarcated bounds of the carnival ritual, mind and body may be reunited to varying degrees, as a literal, revolutionary return of what had been separated in order for a regime to have power. Such reunification occurs as performers highlight the suppressed terms of nature, literally returning the body to mind and low to high, against bureaucratic normalcy.


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Bakhtin’s carnival names a ritual practice of transgression, as well as an analytic or interpretive system to account for transgression. As Baz Kershaw describes, carnival’s “delight in the excessive and the grotesque, its wild mimicry of the normal in order to reveal its basic absurdity . . . may encompass a wide spectrum of oppositional stances.”38 Carnival’s resistance runs from anarchy to coherent messages, lending insight into scheduled protests and mundane performances that nonetheless challenge power relations.39 As in Bakhtin’s original figuration, carnival is resistant because it transgresses modernist logics as they appear in power relations today. For instance, Nudd describes a counter-celebration thrown by the Mickee Faust Club, a Tallahassee, Florida, cabaret troupe, following President George W. Bush’s re-election in 2000.40 Though the “bawl” was a festive event, Nudd argues that it was a protest in its own right because it provided an emotional climax for the community (in this case, local leftists despondent and shocked after Bush was awarded the Presidency). Nudd attributes the success of the event, in part, to its ties to the emotional: it was a “politically and socially affirming experience.”41 By actively, symbolically asserting the unofficial, emotional, feminine, playful, and multifarious; against the bureaucratic, rational, masculine, serious, and coherent logics which suppress or oppress them; hierarchical dominance is foiled. Similarly, various forms of culture jamming confirm that carnivalesque humor, playfulness, and pranking belie and even rupture the coherent, transparent, goal-oriented meanings of advertising.42 On the street, a carnivalesque style may elude attempts by various authorities to end protestors’ fun. For instance, Bruner suggests that protestors dressed as turtles disrupted the severity of Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests.43 Protestors’ playful performances impact not only police violence. Through a case study of Italian collective YaBasta!, Vanderford argues that the ironic appropriation of consumer culture (e.g., wearing “rubber duckie” inner tubes and other recycled trash to protests) provides utilitarian and symbolic armor against neoliberalism: “The laughter of carnival overcomes the seriousness of official culture as grotesque and blasphemous bodies displace reverence and dogmatism.”44 As these examples suggest, the complicated and often incoherent discourses of carnival challenge singular, simple, or prefabricated meanings—as well as those groups who seek to use the logic of singular, simple, and prefabricated meanings to maintain power. Carnivalesque protest may complicate collective memory, revealing “the multiple, comic, sordid, and competing histories” of leaders and events.45 Likewise, carnivalesque texts (such as HIV/ AIDS zines that deploy grotesque humor and parody) may resist “dominant media and other social spaces” which value “rationality, reason, respect for competing ideologies, or credentialed expertise.”46 Through the analytic of carnival, we see that performances which flaunt those traits suppressed or

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oppressed by dominant powers—traits which continue to be organized by modernity’s mind/body dualism—constitute a form of resistance. As the most directly and extensively thought form of transgression, Bakhtin’s ritual and analytic reveals how much hegemony dictates our understanding of resistance. Critics are concerned that, like the raucous carnival that is nonetheless sanctioned by the social order, transgression ultimately upholds a dominant regime, even though carnival temporarily violates it. This concern is especially important within mediated post-industrial capitalism, where play and indiscretion are arguably the norm rather than exception.47 Moreover, skeptics assert that, as an analytic of resistance, carnival has become like an old sweater—worn and losing its utility, while comforting for critics whose desire for social change remains unsatiated amidst neoliberalism.48 Yet, behind many charges that carnival is ineffective rests an unspoken commitment to commonality (of identities, of sense, of interests, of rhetorical appeals, etc.). Until the ground for debate shifts away from such hegemonic standards, transgression will continue to be diminished by the serious, long-term work of disseminating common sense to build social change agents, and thus replace one order with another. The majority of criticisms against carnival arise from a hegemonic perspective bound to dismiss transgression as immature and ineffective; or, more “positively” but no less hegemonic, to contain transgression’s effectivity to its ability to build and maintain a collective agent, which is “necessary” for social change. For instance, critics charge that carnivalesque resistance tarnishes the credibility of those who use it, reducing them to self-indulgent children or elite idealists who ignore the rules of “real” politics. As one conservative critic of anti-war protests (political scientist Robert Weissberg) asserts, “Activists who targeted social policy with stoic measures were far more successful than activists who targeted oppressive cultural representations with carnivalesque actions.”49 This is because the first group of activists took democratic political institutions seriously and tailored their message to the audience’s vision of proper political participation. Such criticisms reveal a hegemonic baseline, as changes in institutional power become the primary measure of effective social change. Bruner’s analysis of carnival is also characterized by hegemonic boundaries. He implies that the state is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not carnival humor is permitted, let alone permitted to impact politics. Like the local government and church officials of Bakhtin’s analysis, today’s state apparatus never allows the play of identity and humorous critique to go too far: “when the window of opportunity closes[,] carnivalesque humor, especially politically consequential humor, is no longer tolerated or welcome.”50 Because carnival transgression is defined by official, powerful interests, it can never fully resist them—which is to say, it can never constitute a “real” long-term institutional politics.


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Critics argue that the gains of carnival protests are fleeting and limited. Chvasta cites activist Ben Shepard, who deemed his own group’s anti-war protest as ineffective because it could not clearly reveal “‘what kind of world we really want[ed] to create.’”51 Similarly, playful, parodic protest has been dismissed as ineffective because it is purely reactive or negative: “Saying no is itself an often satisfying alternative, but it is hardly one on which to build a lasting political movement.”52 Not only does carnival fail to offer necessary, positive agendas or constitute a long-term change in consciousness. Because transgression is, by definition, a violation of propriety, it must amplify its violations as the social order becomes more permissive. Critics are especially wary of Bakhtinian transgression, for it can be easily accommodated, co-opted, or even promoted by the existing order, particularly in today’s post-industrial society: “Whether it is the trial of O.J., the death of Di, or Zippergate [i.e., the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal], the culture industry now produces an endless series of carnivalesque spectacles and titillations to both inspire consumerism and divert consciousness from fundamental crises and the precarious nature of our age to the jouissance of fantasized realms.”53 Play and inversion have become the norm, evacuating their potential for resistance because they can no longer challenge hierarchies and worldviews.54 In other words, we should be wary of the power of transgression “in an epoch when carny consumption has been hijacked by a multinational-corporation, profit-driven ethic of rampant consumerism.”55 Driven by the desire to see resistance in today’s oddly disciplined pursuit of pleasure, critics may be in danger of overusing the carnival analytic.56 From debates over carnivalesque resistance, we begin to see what critics take as the limits of transgression, defined by hegemony. Transgression’s violations of social norms, sanctioned identities, and the democratic political process cannot constitute new lasting policies or behaviors. Moreover, transgression soils the ethos of performers associated with it. Because it blatantly opposes, or more mildly exceeds, common sense and proper identities, it threatens, or does not make sense to, those who witness it. For instance, following their performance at a parade honoring President Andrew Jackson, Schriver and Nudd conclude that their float was not as much of an interruption as they desired, for the audience could not make sense of it. Though their troupe usually “conveys political messages that playfully destabilize a concrete idea, in the context of performative protest events, it was clear that we needed to strive to strategically fix meaning, if only for awhile.”57 Not only did their protest exceed the audience’s sense-making abilities, but they were also concerned that it might have slighted other activists who used more hegemonic modes of resistance.58 Public officials and the constituents they represent, fellow activists and media analysts—in short, the standard audiences for rhetorics of social change—may be offended by, or abandoned within, the play of carnival, rendering transgression ineffective.

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Interestingly, even the more positive evaluations of carnival embrace the tools of hegemony for performing resistance effectively. For instance, several scholars applaud carnivalesque performances for building affinity among protestors, with potential to constitute a collective agent: light-hearted carnivalesque events may bring together groups not previously affiliated.59 Because carnival is a space in which roles and norms are temporarily suspended, participants are able to try on new identities and worldviews. Participants become “an indiscriminate collection of partygoers publicly communing on a counter-hegemonic playground,” building trust and affect for each other while at play.60 Further, carnivalesque fun may motivate the general public to attend a protest, even when the state would otherwise crush a “real” rebellion.61 Because carnival is marked as fictive, it entails a less rigid environment that can serve activists trying to build common identities and representations of issues. Likewise, scholars laud carnival for its ability to capture media attention, potentially growing the collective agent by spreading its common sense and identifications to a broader audience. Harold describes the Biotic Baking Brigade, a carnivalesque collective whose primary tactic is throwing pies in the faces of public officials, as successful in this regard: “It is their comedic posture and creation of spectacular images that get them the interviews in the first place.”62 Transgressive “spectacle is a vital feature of any performer who seeks to secure a place in the popular consciousness”63 (and thus grow hegemony), particularly within the post-industrial mediascape. Such interpretations may illustrate the blending of hegemonic and transgressive modes of resistance, or the idea that pure transgression is hard to come by; or, from a more critical viewpoint, they uphold the dominance of hegemony. The hegemonic standards of politics prompt some critics to qualify the impacts of carnival: “While festive street performance is a display of communal strength and a means of educating the public, no policy, or law, or budget will change unless the State feels threatened.”64 It is as though there is a permanent anxiety built into the hegemonic perspective, an anxiety which is provoked by transgression. Transgression violates or eludes hegemony and “counter-hegemony” (the somewhat odd name given to agents vying to oust a dominant hegemonic bloc, often through the same logics as the status quo). Many carnivalesque protestors refuse to represent a common agent through their unique rhetorical inventions, in an effort to perform fully outside authority: because of this refusal, they are often deemed ineffective at real politics, or a politics designed to replace one social order with another. Granted, there are other criticisms of carnival which arise from outside hegemonic political standards. For instance, as Bakhtin initially discussed in terms of grotesque humor, transgression indiscriminately destroys as it indiscriminately creates. In other words, it degrades: “Degradation here


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means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better.”65 Thus, while folk rituals materialize or manifest those abstractions often associated with mind (ideals, orderliness, proportionate beauty, etc.), they must destroy some part of the abstraction to birth social life anew. In more practical and contemporary terms, carnival’s degradations may violate the ethics of democracy, justice, and equality, to which many groups strive. As Brouwer discovered through some HIV/AIDS zines, grotesque realism violated dominant discourse even while it promoted racist representations. One zine degraded medical authority over seropositive gay men, by figuring the former as an incompetent, foreign, Black female nurse. Though carnival may “create, inspire, and demand new possibilities for power formations,” it may do so without regard to possible hegemonic alliances (e.g., between the gay community and people of color).66 When taken to its extreme, transgression’s indiscriminate birthing of alternatives may occur without regard for even the barest of ethical standards.67 Similarly, Puri warns that the gendered character of carnival has become lost as scholars have romanticized it.68 Though it is associated with femininity at an abstract level, carnival may connote a masculine virility and independence vis-à-vis the ordinary, civilized realm of the feminine. Carnivalesque analytics have become fetishized, blinding cultural critics to resistant practices which are more mundane, but no less inviting of alternative possibilities: “It is a very selected everyday that we now study in our untheorized preference for . . . the spectacular everyday over a quieter, less flamboyant daily reality.”69 It is thus important to approach transgression from a contingent, nuanced perspective, given its potential for degradation and its possible ties to machismo. However, it is also important to view transgression’s power from outside the terms set by a hegemonic mode of resistance. From the perspective of transgression, the “ineffective” traits of carnivalesque performances are the very traits which “effectively” threaten the social order. Transgression interrupts the status quo, offering a critique of dominant worldviews as well as opening possibilities from which new meanings and identities may be enacted. As Stallybrass and White suggest of the carnivalesque, the power of transgression is not limited to critiquing the ideological content of a social order, but also challenges the interpretive frames which structure and give meaning to content. Put differently, transgression calls into question—and even offers an alternative to—the dominant culture’s way of seeing the world. By hybridizing the poles of a hierarchy, carnival undermines not only the order of the poles, but also the rank-ordering of hierarchy itself, while simultaneously offering a new way of seeing the world. And while carnivalesque ritual is sanctioned by the authorities, in Bakhtin’s original writ-

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ings, “the inversion of hierarchies, the reversal of binaries, and the wearing of masks . . . are also ultimately capable of serving a much greater purpose: allowing subjects to enter a liminal realm of freedom and in so doing create a space for critique that would otherwise not be possible in ‘normal’ society.”70 Carnival tricks its participants into abandoning sanctioned time and roles, inviting them to play with new ways of being in the world—at least until the officials close the festivities. The hegemonic boundaries of the carnival analogue point to the need to develop transgression beyond Bakhtin. While Bakhtin’s carnival broadens the spectrum of possible referents for tracing resistance, it perpetuates a hegemonic ground for evaluating the impacts of transgression. Taking folk festivals and culture as analogues to parodies and protests delivers us to the same structure of the carnivalesque: a raucous pause that is permitted, if not welcomed, by official culture. In other words, by limiting transgression to carnival, we never permit resistance to escape hegemony. Moving to Friedrich Nietzsche’s work, we may find more robust figurations of transgression, in which the risky festivities never fully close, and in which identity is perpetually played as pleasurable and dangerous games of resistance to those forces which encroach upon creativity and difference. Like the Bakhtinian carnival, Nietzschean transgression treats resistance as a problem of interpretation: because transgression threatens the very ways that dominant culture does politics—not just the ideological content of those politics—it demands to be read (as much as possible) from its own terms. But Nietzsche takes transgression outside the boundaries of the carnivalesque, suggesting that in order to undermine dominance, we cannot simply don a temporary, fictitious counter-identity.71 We (or, more transgressively, this being) must pursue an immanent critique of power, an immanent freedom for this embodied individual against those forces which seek to subject it. As will become clearer through the book’s case studies in anarchism and anarchistic performance, the figuration of Nietzsche’s transgression into politics shudders with pleasures, contradictions, inspirations and incompletion. From the perspective of hegemony, such qualities prove that transgression is ineffective; from the perspective of carnival, such qualities demonstrate the unpredictable power of festive folks; from a Nietzschean perspective, such qualities are present with the birth of a new philosophy, a new life.

NIETZSCHE AND THE RHIZOMES OF TRANSGRESSION In an attempt to rethink resistance, and even life itself, outside of modernist grammars of subjectivity, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer two


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constructs: roots and rhizomes. Roots function according to a filial relationship, in which family traits are passed along from generation to generation. Root logic maintains the centrality of substance, promoting commonality and stability across what appear to be different entities: the essential character of the father is reproduced in the son, and so forth. Alternatively, though not oppositionally, a rhizome “connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.”72 Like the potato which buds and burrows from eyes all around its lumpy body, or the ever-growing, ever-diminishing pack of wolves, rhizomes work through indiscriminate associations and constant motion.73 It is easy to celebrate Nietzsche as the Father of resistance, given his brazen critiques of priests, philosophers, and other figures of authority. However, it is in the spirit of rhizomes (or, at least, in excess of roots), that I locate Nietzsche’s contributions to transgression. Nietzsche’s transgression appears less as the base of a family tree whose branches include Deleuze and Guattari, Bakhtin, anarchism, and performance theory; and more as a particularly concentrated bulb which has become entangled with others, flowering transgression as meadows of performance art and drunks and monkeywrenching and cheerfulness and so on. In conversation with other infestations of transgression, Nietzsche demonstrates that resistance is not limited to building a collective agent. Through more expansive interpretive resources, resistance appears as a difficult, processural, and creative subversion of representation and agents. I term the unique, rhizomatic figures and practices of resistance (inspired by Nietzsche or Nietzschean theory) “transgressing subjects,” to evoke their doubled meaning. “Transgressing subjects” is a conceptual shorthand for embodied performers whose creative actions defy or elude (at least temporarily) the terms of prescriptive subjectivity. The term is fraught with potential tension, as it carries the connotations of modernity (with “the subject”) and nihilism (as perpetual transgression threatens to erase meaning or politics completely). Insofar as Nietzsche radically opposed the philosophical abstraction of humanity, I am transgressing Nietzsche’s thought. In his words: “‘The subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.”74 I hope that the term, and those performative events and theories I associate with it, evoke a more important violation—that of the scholarly common sense which favors hegemonic grammars, symbolic identifications, and linguistic positionalities over the rhetorical energies and excesses of embodied resistance. Bakhtin’s carnival challenged official culture, which divided body from mind in its repressive, civilizing regime. For Nietzsche, transgression more generally violates the abstract collective agents which allow philosophers, priests, and other authorities to “establish commonalities and to seal them

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in truth.”75 In Nietzsche’s writings, one such collective agent is the herd. Like “the people,” the herd is a fiction, a product of discourse which comes to life as individuals create or express their identities through its terms.76 The herd operates through a logic of representation: Individuals are bound to the herd as their identity performances and language reflect its symbolic substance. Nietzsche also conceives the herd as engaged in a version of friend-enemy politics. The herd appears as an ascetic, unified, mediocre subject which despises individuality and passion: “Here is the happiness of the herd, the feeling of community in great and small things, the living feeling of unity experienced as the sum of the feeling of life.”77 The herd functions as a conceptual foil for understanding the difference between hegemonic subjects and transgressing subjects. For Nietzsche, transgression occurs as an action exceeds or violates the herd’s common “substance,” as well as its imperative toward conformity (which begins at an abstract level, but is policed and felt in concrete ways). Through an analogy, Nietzsche figures transgression as a performative endeavor whose primary impact is not the construction or representation of a collective agent. He begins: “Good [people], in all ages, are those who plough the old thoughts into the earth, planting them deep down and nurturing them until they bear fruit.”78 These good people sow common virtues, reaping patterned truths and values. The herd’s bounty provides a habitual, albeit comfortable, life for those who share the harvest or identify as “good people.” When the “newcomer” refuses the herd’s sustenance—preferring instead to forage for ideas from the earth rather than plant, cultivate, and harvest them from the herd’s field—he or she incites outrage. The newcomer’s refusal to subject to the herd’s symbolic substances appears as transgression: “The herd feels the exception, whether it be below or above it, as something opposed and harmful to it. . . . Fear ceases in the middle: here one is never alone; here there is little room for misunderstanding; here there is equality; here one’s own form of being is not felt as a reproach but as the right form of being; here contentment rules.”79 To counter conformist cultivation, Nietzsche urges readers to become “plunderers” and “thieves”—in other words, transgressors to herd values. Transgressors do not simply defile social norms and conventions. They refuse to subject to transcendent values, defying the roots of “substantial” representation which allow the herd to flourish. Through logics of representation, normative powers reinforce themselves. Because transgression necessarily violates or “overcomes” the herd’s common sense or values, it risks misunderstanding or misinterpretation. As Nietzsche describes of the Great Human Being: “[He or she] is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion;’ [he or she] lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is part of the ‘virtue of the herd.’ . . . [He or she] knows [he or


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she] is incommunicable: [he or she] finds it tasteless to be familiar; and when one thinks [he or she] is, [he or she] usually is not.”80 Transgression threatens the status quo through its incomprehensibility and foreignness. One is bound to misunderstand a non-normative existence when judging it through the herd’s terms, for any identity performance which does not conform to the herd’s common “substance” is dangerous. While our cultural connotations of transgression carry a certain thrill, Nietzsche reiterates that “true” resistance is a painful, difficult process. It cannot rely on familiar herd values—even those of a “transgressive” herd. The individual must resist morality through a terrifying journey, forced to be alone with questions of nature, being, reality, and identity—questions whose intensity had been dulled by the anesthetics of the herd subject. Nietzsche expresses the difficulty of transgression throughout his works, particularly in discussions of “self-overcoming.”81 For instance, he concludes that ascetic ideals provided humans the moral vocabulary to alleviate the nihilism of suffering. Without moral conviction and its partner, scientific certainty, Nietzsche argued that people would have to live with the horrifying truth that their lives had no purpose or meaning. Transgression is an arduous process, for it necessarily takes place without the safety of commonality, particularly those commonalities which define life as explicable, meaningful. Transgressing subjects is a long-term process, driven by a desire to free one’s life from the safety of subjection (or, in Nietzsche’s terms, the commonality of the herd). This process may be heightened in aesthetic events, such as carnival, but it is not limited to temporary festivals. Further, for Nietzsche, transgressing subjects refuse to use their words or bodies as representative of larger agents. As such, they appear dangerous to those whose identities or power are vested in common values and norms, regardless of whatever label such values and norms are given—dominant or counterhegemonic, official or folk, etc. Thus, Nietzsche expands the scope of transgression beyond Bakhtin, for the potential of transgressive resistance is not limited to the temporary identity play sanctioned by official culture. In spite of these differences, for Nietzsche and Bakhtin, transgression appears in a mutually defining relationship with common norms and values; but transgression is not totally dependent upon official culture or the herd to appear resistant. Transgression violates the logics of representation and identity which sustain collectives (whether dominant, official, ascetic, marginalized, or delinquent) overtime. It degrades. Carnival and transgressing subjects both assert the power of the body as a disruptive, resistant force, against stabilizing representations and human civilization. Both Bakhtinian and Nietzschean transgression thus relate to performance theories in imagining social change outside representational politics. Recall that in Bakhtin’s original formulation, carnival may manifest those things which had become limited to ideas and abstractions in the

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transition from a rural-folk culture to an urbanized, modern community. Similarly, scholars suggest that performance re-asserts forgotten bodies, silenced voices, and oppressed ways of living, amidst a commodified information age. The power of performance lies in its ability to exceed representation, those processes which translate live, embodied events into systems of symbols. As Peggy Phelan argues: “The mimicry of speech and writing, the strange process by which we put words in each other’s mouths and others’ words in our own, relies on a substitutional economy in which equivalencies are assumed and re-established. Performance refuses this system of exchange and resists the circulatory economy fundamental to it. Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.”82 The real-time presence of performing bodies has a transgressive quality, in that it violates the herd-like representations which attempt to abstract away embodiment and individuals’ uniqueness. As implicated in performance theory, transgression literally interrupts the status quo. It resists immediately (in terms of time) and directly (in terms of political participation and involvement). Transgression’s interruptions inspire future interruptions, particularly if witnesses are able to recognize their significance. Like the indiscriminately degrading performances of carnival, the “liveness” or “present-tenseness” of performance both reinforces and defies the available identities that maintain a particular social order.83 Performances promote identification between performer and witness, affirming the power of natural or normal roles, values, and discourses. Yet, these same events may invite “moments of transformation” which “incite people to profound responses that shake their consciousness of themselves in the world.”84 Indeed, the very unpredictability and physicality of performance may exceed the logic of “substantial” representation that binds audience, to performer, to (sanctioned) social identity. In a transgressive mode of resistance, protestors perform as “plunderers and thieves” rather than representatives of social subjects. But the transgressive power of live performance, especially those performances which bend referent-to-reference correspondence, is limited by witnesses’ interpretive resources. For instance, Dolan describes a college production in which women were cast as men, men as women, creating a safe space in which performers could transgress gender identities.85 Following the play, the cast and faculty held discussions with audience members who appeared less troubled by the hybridizing of gender, than by the play’s violation of representational logic. While cross-casting was intended “to display gender as gesture, as clothing, as a fiction, not as a biological truth,” Dolan discovered that audience members exhibited “a refusal . . . to see gender as detachable from the bodies that wear it.”86


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Taking this performance as an anecdote for politics, we may see the risks involved in transgression: Audiences are “so schooled to look for truth” that they will always seek a correspondence between body and identity.87 Like Nietzsche’s Great Human Being, the non-realist performer risks incoherence or alienation. Through a realist’s eyes, a transgressive performance must represent a transgressive identity. The interpretive scheme of realism, as well as representational logic, denies performance its most transgressive quality—that of excess. To interpret transgression as transgression, witnesses must be willing and able to acknowledge both the distinctions between, and hybrid combinations of, the immediate (body, corporeality, unrepresentable) and the mediated (mind, symbolic action, representable). Allowing the immediate (as that which exceeds mediation), witnesses are less likely to consider a performance as materializing common identities and substances. Performance, like Nietzschean transgression, defies root-like metaphorical logics which function “by erasing dissimilarity and negating difference,” replacing them with rhizomatic or metonymic logics that are “additive and associative.”88 Bodily performance is constantly slipping away from, if not openly confronting, those symbols which attempt to arrest it into coherent, and therefore controllable, representations of identity and reality.89 Though powerful, the ability of the performing body to disrupt representation is subject to intense debate—particularly when transgressive performances are tied to collective action. From a Nietzschean perspective, when a performance exceeds representation (or violates the terms of herd existence) it is powerful: It challenges the clean correspondence of body-to-symbol, individual-to-identity, tools which allow the herd to perpetuate itself. Yet, the logic of representation is also a time-tested means for individuals seeking redress, and alternatives to oppression. By embracing the power of performative excess, scholars risk discarding those very material standpoints which serve as the basis for resistance (as well as oppression). As Dolan summarizes of feminist performance scholarship, debate persists between foundationalists who approach “women’s subjectivity by their positions within race, class, or sexuality that the dominant culture—and often the dominating voices in feminism— have effectively squelched” and poststructuralists who treat subjectivity as “decentered, and constantly thrown into process by the very competing discourses through which identity might be claimed.”90 The debate over performative excess is further complicated by poststructuralists who assume identity is primarily a matter of symbolic identification, and those who treat identity as primarily a matter of embodied performance. This distinction typically appears through different interpretive practices—with the former embracing the logics of representation or identification, and the latter embracing new relationships between bodies

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and collective politics. Many performance scholars advocate stretching our interpretive and political practices beyond (though not totally detaching from) the anchors of demographic standpoints which secure representational identifications. For instance, performance theory approaches politics intersectionally, exploring the relationships between markers of representational identities (e.g., race, class, sex, sexuality).91 Performance theory acknowledges “the constructed nature of subjectivity” without abandoning embodiment, or reducing the body to a representative signifier for collective identity.92

CONCLUSION: NOTES ABOUT THIS BOOK AND ITS WRITER I join the debates between hegemony and transgression, foundationalism and poststructuralism, as a critic and social movement scholar invested in the power of rhetoric. I have become increasingly disappointed in the limits that social movement scholarship places on rhetoric: in short, by claiming the constitution of collective agents or the promotion of identification as rhetoric’s primary effect, traditional theories ignore the potential that rhetoric has an immediate (though not directly causal) impact on witnesses and surroundings, which may translate into further impacts. My search for alternative perspectives lead me to an engagement with anarchism. Anarchist action has brought new possibilities for social movement rhetoric into being in ways that theory itself could not: reading, witnessing anarchy, talking to activists, I have found that anarchy augmented my theoretical commitment to an alternative rhetoric, an alternative resistance. In many ways, it is a contradiction for me to be writing this book. While I have incorporated anarchism into my thinking, teaching, and scholarship, I live pretty much as a mainstream, left-leaning, white, married, middle-class professor. Though I have not ignored or dismissed anarchism as dangerous, impractical, and immature (as have some friends, family members, and colleagues), I do not self-identify as an anarchist, nor do I practice anarchist tactics. How do I avoid the temptation to intellectualize anarchism (or other radical politics), to limit their contributions to simply “good ideas” which have no bearing on daily life and political practice? Holding ourselves accountable to each other and our privilege is an important way to avoid subjecting others (such as practicing anarchists) to our (scholarly) authority. The norms of self-reflexivity are imperative to ethical scholarly work, even when done from the more distanced stance of rhetorical theory and criticism. Self-reflexivity is a heightened self-awareness and vulnerability to critique, particularly in terms of the effects of one’s encounters with others in the process of research. It is a situating of one’s self


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and work in “the circumstance, situation, and history of the artifact and its world,” rendering criticism a less autonomous, universalist, and objective project.93 From the standpoint of theoretical writing, reflexivity is especially important when considering the power of one’s words to shape knowledge. Such rhetorical reflexivity, as Dwight Conquergood describes, derives from a desire to question “the rhetorical construction” of our “own disciplinary authority,” through concerns like: “What kinds of knowledge, and their attendant discursive styles, get privileged, legitimated, or displaced? . . . . What are the tacitly observed boundaries—the range of appropriateness— regarding the substance, methods, and discursive styles of communication scholarship? And, most importantly for critical theorists, what configuration of socio-political interests does communication scholarship serve?”94 In addition to writing with the greater goal of rhetorical reflexivity, I have tried to avoid de-humanizing (or overly textualizing) the protestors and writers whose work informs this project. I have also tried to credit and converse with, rather than appropriate and take advantage of, anarchist thought and anarchistic resistance. As primarily a scholarly work (with implications for practical and political matters), this book offers an authentic engagement with theories and practices of social change. I do not intend for it to carry a political banner, though it will reveal my politics and positionality. With this writing, I aim to inspire, provoke thought and debate, and express hope (rather than guilt or resignation). To do so, I traverse an eclectic array of history, theory, and criticism concerning social movements, rhetoric, resistance, performance, and protest. I place these elements into relationship as rhizomes, elements which do not share a common substance but which instigate new meanings and practices when chained together. As I have attempted throughout the writing of this book, I hope that readers will reflexively acknowledge what Foucault identifies as the equally problematic (and challenging) reactions to transgression: the tendency to blindly celebrate it (as inherently more powerful or resistant than, say, hegemony), and the impulse to dismiss it (as unethical, ineffective, or improper resistance).95 This introduction has begun making a case for transgression as an alternative to hegemonic forms of resistance. Scholars drawn to Bakhtin’s notion of carnival attest to the need for a distinct theory of transgression, one which inspires alternative interpretive resources to make sense of the presence and impacts of unorthodox resistance. Nietzsche expands transgression beyond the hegemonic boundaries of carnival. Allying with performance theory, not only does transgression hybridize high and low—but its explication of the body also threatens the terms of subjectivity. Transgressing subjects disrupt the economy of representation that reinforces regimes of power, through performances not necessarily subject to official rules.

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But in the process, transgressing subjects undermine the common sense and common identities which construct the collective change agent (or counter-hegemony) supposed to overthrow the official order. The debates over the efficacy of carnival offer a taste of criticisms of transgression more generally: transgressing subjects are ineffective, or effective only insofar as their performances support a counter-hegemonic agent. Like many of the criticisms of carnivalesque resistance, criticisms of transgression are typically premised upon hegemony as the natural or only means for achieving change. Because hegemony threatens to subsume the radical difference of transgression—a difference which, as illustrated by those who plunder the Good People’s Fields, is precisely what makes transgression powerful—it is critical to distinguish transgression from hegemony. But it is also crucial to appreciate the nuances of hegemony, for hegemonic resistance may blur into transgression and vice versa. It is to this task that I turn in the following chapter. Following chapter 2’s close reading of hegemony as a mode of resistance, I consider, in theory and practice, transgressive alternatives to two major tools of hegemonic social change. In chapter 3, I take up the companion subject as inspired by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Companions gather in resistance through a process of de-subjectivation, relinquishing themselves from the authority of common collectives (like the herd). As French poststructuralist and Italian autonomist theory extend Nietzsche’s companion subject, transgression is a processural, collective endeavor. While the friend-enemy dialectic may be ascribed onto companions’ resistance, it is not needed to articulate their efforts (as in theories of hegemony, which mandate antagonism for proper politics). In chapter 4, I revisit three historical cases of anarchist resistance to illustrate the distinctions, as well as degrees of similarity, between hegemony and transgression. Chapter 5 considers the transgressive alternative to representation as the medium for social change: a politics of enactment. By explicating the body, resistors re-assert their singular, embodied presence—a move which is especially powerful amidst contemporary capitalism, where the constant circulation of signs threatens to textualize or abstract away concrete presence. Importantly, though, the body’s power does not owe to a pure or ancestral corporeality (as more modernist accounts of resistance would have it). A politics of enactment materializes its own power through hybrid rhetorical-material performances, particularly those which problematize the process of subjection. The resistance of the Situationists, New Left, and anti-globalization protestors, as I explain in chapter 6, reveals how hegemonic representation and transgression become combined in the practice of social change; at the same time that it makes a case for transgression as a unique mode of social change.


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In the book’s final chapter, I summarize the major points of distinction between hegemonic and transgressive modes of resistance, concentrating on companion subjectivity as an alternative to friend-enemy agents, and a politics of enactment as different from representational politics. Following these two transgressive touchstones, I advocate for a new approach to social change amidst corporate globalization: One that is centered on rhetorical agency (rather than agents) in its account of effectivity, one that is mindful of how immediate, embodied inventions might alter their surroundings outside friend-enemy politics. A new, immanent materialism may prove the most powerful weapon to contemporary capitalism, as new ways of being and doing could render the production of subjectivity redundant, and therefore unnecessary. Rhetorical critics have an important role in fostering a change in interpretive perspectives and communication practices, which might inspire future rhizomes of transgression.

NOTES 1. Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 (2004): 741. 2. Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 1. 3. Founded upon the post–World War II Bretton Woods institutions (particularly the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank), neoliberal policies were intended to connect the world’s people and thus promote peace. When President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into existence in 1992, he opened markets and expanded trade to augment the Bretton Woods ideal. Neoliberalism promotes “fiscal discipline, public expenditure priorities, tax reform, financial liberalization, competitive exchange rate, trade liberalization, foreign direct investment, privatization, deregulation, and property rights” (Alex Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto [Cambridge: Polity, 2003], 2). The growth in power of international trade bureaucracies like the WTO and NAFTA, and the creation of new treaties like the proposed FTAA, have caused neoliberal globalization to swell into Southern “developing” nations (Jeremy Brecher, Timothy Costello, and Brendan Smith, Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity [Cambridge: South End Press, 2000]). Proponents of neoliberal (or corporate) globalization hold that more open trade will bring greater wealth and other benefits to both developed and developing countries. However, critics argue that neoliberal economic policy became particularly sinister throughout the 1990s as the “three pillars of the Washington consensus” (namely “fiscal austerity, privatization, and market liberalization”) “became ends in themselves” rather than flexible guidelines (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002], 53). 4. Brecher et al., Globalization from Below; Naomi Klein, No Logo, rev. ed. (New York: Picador, 2002).

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5. For instance, consciousness-raising “teach ins” are held alongside nonviolent marches and human blockades, and culture-jamming (like draping protest messages over streetside billboards) is conducted in concert with political theater and symbolic property damage. See Victor W. Pickard, “United Yet Autonomous: Indymedia and the Struggle to Sustain a Radical Democratic Network,” Media, Culture, & Society 28, no. 3 (2006): 315–36; Alberto Melucci, “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52, no. 4 (1985): 789–816. 6. Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner, “Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive Approach,” Cultural Politics: An International Journal 1, no. 1 (2005): 75–100. 7. David Graeber, “The Globalization Movement and the New New Left,” in Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, eds. Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney (New York: Basic, 2003), 332. 8. Graeber, “The Globalization Movement,” 326. 9. Ruth Kinna, “Fields of Vision: Kropotkin and Revolutionary Change,” SubStance #113 36, no. 2 (2007): 67–70. 10. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 8. 11. Throughout the book, I explore acts of resistance, protest, and social movement that I consider anarchist and anarchistic. I denote “anarchist” tactics as those clearly connected to the history of anarchism or anarchist ideologies (e.g., workplace sabotage, the general strike, symbolic property destruction, police confrontation) or are performed by individuals who self-identify as anarchists. “Anarchistic” tactics refer to more performative actions which enact anarchy in its broadest outlines, for instance, by violating social norms: such tactics may include unsanctioned marches and spontaneous street performance. I maintain this distinction to honor the different histories of the two types of tactics (as well as those who practice or identify with either one), while acknowledging their similarities in transgression. 12. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 7. 13. Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 33. 14. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 196. 15. Foucault finds the discourse of sexuality profane, for instance, because it does not require a transcendent figure to warrant itself as legitimate, as existent. Sexuality is transgressive for it marks out “the now constant space of our experience” (Foucault, “Preface,” 32). 16. Martha Solomon, “Ideology as Rhetorical Constraint: The Anarchist Agitation of ‘Red Emma’ Goldman,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 2 (1988): 184– 200. 17. Sarah Ferguson, “First Tear Gas, Now Bullets: Activists Weigh the Costs of Confrontation,” Spectator, August 2–8, 2001, 12. 18. Michael Watts, “1968 and All That . . .,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 157–88. 19. Marcyrose Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest: Confronting the Issue of Efficacy, Again,” Text & Performance Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2006): 5–16.


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20. Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 146. 21. See, for instance, Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith, and Richard E. Denton, Persuasion and Social Movements, 4th ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2002); Charles Tilly, “Conclusion: From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements,” in How Social Movements Matter, eds. Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 256. 22. Charles J. Stewart, “A Functional Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Movements,” Central States Speech Journal 31, no. 4 (1980): 298–305. 23. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 198. 24. Employing the term “resistance” invites the opposite dilemma as the term “social movement,” for resistance has been used to name nearly any action (see Robert Cox and Christina R. Foust, “Social Movement Rhetoric: Exploring the Figures, Discourses, and Performances of Social Change,” in The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Rosa A. Eberly, and Kirt H. Wilson [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008], 605–27). Yet, I find Routledge’s basic definition of resistance helpful in making connections between social movement, protest, and other tactics of social change: acts of resistance are “assembled out of the materials and practices of everyday life, and imply some sort of contestation, some juxtaposition of forces” (Paul Routledge, “A Spatiality of Resistances: Theory and Practice in Nepal’s Revolution of 1990” in Geographies of Resistance, eds. Steve Pile and Michael Keith [London: Routledge, 1997], 69). 25. Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements, trans. Alan Duff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 31. 26. Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, trans. David Macey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 27. Touraine, Can We Live Together?, 94. 28. Touraine, Can We Live Together?, 58. 29. Charles Tilly, “Violent and Nonviolent Trajectories in Contentious Politics,” in Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox, eds. Kenton Worcester, Sally Avery Bermanzohn, and Mark Ungar (London: Routledge, 2002), 23. 30. Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 11. 31. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978). 6. 32. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 44. 33. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 57. 34. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 58. 35. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 59. 36. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 183. 37. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics, 183. 38. Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London: Routledge, 1992), 81. 39. Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, 82–83; Darren Webb, “Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque,” Theory, Culture, & Society 22, no. 3 (2005): 121.

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40. Donna Marie Nudd, “The Left Rewriting America’s Best Historical Fiction Finalist: The January 20, 2001 ‘Inaugural B-A-W-L’ in Tallahassee, Florida,” Text & Performance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2004): 74–88. 41. Nudd, “The Left Rewriting,” 85. 42. Christine Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 3 (2004): 189–211. 43. M. Lane Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State,” Text & Performance Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2005): 136–55. 44. Audrey Vanderford, “Ya Basta!—A Mountain of Bodies that Advances, Seeking the Least Harm Possible to Itself,” in Representing Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement, eds. Andy Opel and Donnalyn Pompper (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 17–18. 45. Kristina Schriver and Donna Marie Nudd, “Mickee Faust Club’s Performative Protest Events,” Text & Performance Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2002): 200. 46. Daniel C. Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 5 (2005): 365. 47. Lauren Langman, “Suppose They Gave a Culture War and No One Came: Zippergate and the Carnivalization of Politics,” American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 4 (2002): 501–34; David Larsen, “South Park’s Solar Anus, or Rabelais Returns: Cultures of Consumption and the Contemporary Aesthetic of Obscenity,” Theory, Culture, & Society 18, no. 4 (2002): 65–82. 48. Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest.” 49. Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest,” 9. 50. Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest,” 140. 51. Benjamin Shepard, “A Post-Absurd, Post-Camp Activist Moment: Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free Zone,” Counterpunch, February 5 2004, www.counterpunch.org/shepard02052004.html, quoted in Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest,” 8. 52. Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric,” 192–93. While Harold’s statement here resonates with a common, hegemonic critique of carnival, her analysis also reveals nuances of transgressive performances which are generative and inventive. 53. Langman, “Suppose They Gave a Culture War,” 504. 54. Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric,” 191. 55. Larsen, “South Park’s Solar Anus,” 80. 56. Webb, “Bakhtin at Seaside,” 121. 57. Schriver and Nudd, “Mickee Faust Club’s,” 208. 58. Schriver and Nudd, “Mickee Faust Club’s,” 197. 59. Nudd, “The Left Rewriting,” 78. 60. Schriver and Nudd, “Mickee Faust Club’s,” 201. 61. Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest,” 145. 62. Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric,” 201. 63. Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner, “A Bit Much: Spectacle as Discursive Resistance,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 69; see also Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51. 64. Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest,” 13.


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65. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968), 21. 66. Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality,” 362. 67. As I elaborate in chapter 7, such standards derive from a phenomenological or dialogic ethics, in which participants are accountable to each other in ways not defined by the propriety of hegemonic standards. 68. Shalini Puri, “Beyond Resistance: Notes toward a New Caribbean Cultural Studies,” Small Axe 14 7, no. 2 (2003): 23–38. 69. Puri, “Beyond Resistance,” 32; see also Webb, “Bakhtin at Seaside.” 70. Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest,” 140. 71. Others interpret Bakhtin’s carnival as inspiring resistance to authority even after the official close of festivities. As Cresswell argues, once life is “experienced in all its comic, grotesque vividness . . . it becomes impossible to accept as natural the rigidities of established norms” (Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 126). 72. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 21. 73. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. 74. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. William Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 267. 75. William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 138. Specifically, Nietzsche observed that the centrality of the subject offered philosophers like Descartes “immediate certainty” regarding the origins of thought (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 268). Nietzsche claims that we worship the subject because we have no sensitivity to the “thousandfold complexity” of inner life—we pose a unity, a subject, a reflection of spiritual order or of transcendent reason, to perpetuate the fiction that the world and others are knowable (and therefore predictable, controllable) through “reasonable” means (Nietzsche, Will to Power, 284). 76. Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of the ‘People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 1–16. 77. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 107. 78. Friedrich Nietzsche, Hammer of the Gods: Apocalyptic Texts for the Criminally Insane, trans. and ed. Stephen Metcalf (London: Creation Books, 1996), 100. 79. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 159. 80. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 505. 81. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). 82. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 149. 83. Jill Dolan, “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative,’” Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 455. 84. Dolan, “Performance, Utopia,” 456. 85. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 110. 86. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 113. 87. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 113. 88. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 150. As I explain in the following chapter with the aid of Ernesto Laclau, different views of representation roughly correspond to

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the differences between metaphor and metonym. A transgressive perspective is suspicious of metaphorical (or “substantial”) representation, because it assumes a relationship between two entities as sharing the same qualities or substance, such that they are reflections of each other. Metonymic representation, in contrast, assumes a relationship of substitution, such that two entities are not considered the same—but are nonetheless in relationship. 89. Amelia Jones, “Acting Unnatural: Interpreting Body Art,” in Decomposition: Post-disciplinary Performance, eds. Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 15. 90. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 87. 91. Jill Dolan, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” Theatre Journal 45, no. 4 (December 1993): 419. 92. Dolan, “Geographies of Learning,” 419. 93. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Commitment to Telos—A Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 50. 94. Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” in SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies, eds. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 364. 95. Foucault, “Preface,” 35.

2 Logics of Hegemony, Degrees of Transgression

Whoever keeps his distance from the trade unions today is an ally of the reformists, not a revolutionary militant. He will be able to produce anarchoid phrases, but he will not shift by a hair’s breadth the iron conditions in which the real struggle is going on.1

Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci composed a rich series of reflections on politics, war, resistance, and revolution during the last eleven years of his life, which he spent in prison at the hands of Mussolini’s Fascist regime.2 The Prison Notebooks were to have a profound influence on the development of British cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Gramsci’s critique of Marxist determinism offered scholars like Stuart Hall tools to grapple with the rise of Thatcherism and youth sub-cultures following World War II. Inviting critical attention to the power of language and culture, Gramsci’s hegemony continues to shape theories of democracy and social movement in global capitalism, especially in the collective and respective works of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, as well as social movement rhetorical theory and criticism. Though they differ in important ways, theories of hegemony share similar assumptions—assumptions which form a kind of “deep structure” or grammar for understanding and evaluating social change. Two major assumptions which I take as a focal point throughout the book concern the centrality of the collective agent and the representational view of rhetoric. Many theories of hegemony take the social subject—not individual citizens or activists—as the proper agent of social change; and they assume that this social subject (known often as a collective will or social movement) is forged, sustained, and coherently heard through rhetoric. Whether a victory of coercion and 31

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consensus; the product of a leader’s vision or activists’ savvy in mobilizing their available resources; the outcome of a somewhat mysterious process which moves one to join “friends against enemies”; or the serendipitous transformation of an empty signifier into a formidable, mobilized resistance; rhetoric builds the social change agent. In this way, theories of hegemony depart from modernist theories of politics, which assumed that some transcendent essence united individuals into a collective consciousness (e.g., Marx’s proletariat, which took up revolutionary struggle through their “working-classness”). But as I trace below, Gramsci does not fully embrace contingency. For Gramsci, the proletarian revolution occurs as language and other superstructural elements (like common sense, common culture, and common symbols) join coercive discipline and a working-class consciousness to forge an alliance lead by the working class. Hegemony, like transgression, is best thought as a matter of degree. As contemporary thinkers of hegemony, Hall, Mouffe, and Laclau represent a spectrum of approaches, offering more or less “concentrated” versions of Gramsci’s influential concept. For instance, in its most deterministic version, “the enemy” appears as a historically oppressive power (e.g., a bourgeoisie which continually threatens the proletariat, but nonetheless unites them in political struggle). In its most transgressive version, the definitional other is an “empty signifier,” devoid of any substantial meaning, but still capable of representing a coalition in struggle. Successive interpretations of Gramsci push hegemony to its limits with transgression: as Hall, Mouffe, and Laclau have construed Gramsci’s work, the linguistic commonality of hegemony is increasingly “stretched” to accommodate singularity or difference, corporeality, and performance—the “uncommon sense” of transgression. The latest treatments of hegemony increasingly permit transgression, but often in ways that aid the formation of a collective agent. Richard J. F. Day argues that theories of hegemony have themselves become hegemonic, such that other modes of theorizing, interpreting, or practicing resistance are either ignored or dismissed out of hand: in his words, there is a common sense “assumption that effective social change can only be achieved simultaneously and en masse, across an entire national or supranational space.”3 Gramsci’s warning to potential revolutionaries, above, reflects the types of boundary-policing, disciplining responses that transgressive resistance incites from a hegemonic perspective. Operating outside a strict basis in friend-enemy subjectivity, transgression does not express the clear commonality necessary to distinguish a “real revolutionary militant” from an “ally of the reformists.” Exceeding an economy of representation, the “anarchoid phrases” of transgression will have no discernible impact on the “real struggle,” for they fail to organize or express the collective will.


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In the U.S. communication studies context (excepting cultural studies), hegemony has most directly played a part in critical organizational communication and media criticism.4 But hegemony’s influence on rhetorical studies, particularly social movement scholarship, has been surprisingly slow in coming—surprising, as I demonstrate in the chapter’s conclusion, because Gramscian assumptions relate so closely to the tenets of classical and contemporary social movement theory. Classical theory’s dialectics of uninstitutionalized collectives battling institutions, of dramatic rhetorical forms constituted as “good” and “evil,” may be interpreted as close cousins to the friend-enemy agents of Gramsci, Hall, and Mouffe. Functionalist theory’s view of rhetoric as the “stuff” which creates and maintains a movement, and the treatment of new social movements (NSMs) and counterpublics as collective identities constituted by rhetoric, may be seen as variations on the representational economy apparent in theories of hegemony. Given its status as the common sense of social change in political and social theory as well as rhetorical scholarship, I turn first to a deep exploration of hegemony, from Gramsci through Laclau. With an appreciation for the diversity and commonality of theories of hegemony, I follow the emergent debates problematizing the concept in rhetorical theory and cultural studies. As these debates reveal, what I have identified as two anchors of hegemonic logic—friend-enemy subjects and the representational economy—are an increasingly unsatisfying means to make sense of contemporary resistance.

HEGEMONY: THE COMMON SENSE OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT Antonio Gramsci brought a decidedly rhetorical sensibility to imagining social change. His writings offer critical distance from Marxist determinism, permitting us to view power as contingent and politics as radiating throughout human social relations (political and cultural, as well as economic). For instance, Gramsci’s productive view of ideology suggests that the most prominent ideas in a culture “are always something more than rationalizations of class interests.”5 Ideologies are never simply veils of false consciousness that stall the impending working-class revolt. If the production of dominant ideologies is not easily determined by the structural terrain of the state and market, and if ruling ideas are not solely of or for the bourgeois or the state, change cannot happen as the realization of an essential class consciousness. Revolution must involve some element of common culture and a power capable of churning, igniting, and rendering coherent, common culture into change. This power is rhetoric.

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However, Gramsci did not completely “rhetoricize” power, or free politics from its Marxist fetters in economic production. Marx’s more deterministic concepts (e.g., ideology as false consciousness, war of movement, coercive power of the state, working-class revolution) remain in Gramsci’s writings, but are joined by more contingent concepts (e.g., ideology as common sense, war of position, persuasive power of civil society, revolution by hegemonic bloc). As Richard Johnson reminds us, Gramsci’s politics was one defined by “moments of coercion,” for he “was fascinated by the warfare metaphor for politics, as well by the politics of the military.”6 For Gramsci, collective consciousness does not come about naturally, but through a combination of persuasion, discipline (which may involve coercion), and good fortune. The remnants of determinism provide enough control to make the formation of a collective agent more attainable, predictable. Gramscian ambivalence invites space for a contingent, constructed view of power, at the same time that it demands critics account for material dominance. Two concepts permit the short Gramscian departure from a determinist Marx: friend-enemy subjectivity and representation. Carl Schmitt’s seminal human relation, the coupling of friend-enemy, permits theorists of hegemony to maintain the class-based antagonism unique to Marx— but with enough space to incorporate antagonisms not solely based on class. An economy of representation allows the assignation of contingent symbols to certain historical agents, such that the rhetorical expression of resistance manifests the friend-enemy antagonism across different, unique contexts. While contemporary theorists of hegemony more fully accept Gramsci’s alternatives to Marxist determinism, they accord varying degrees of contingency to Gramsci’s original theory: Stuart Hall, for instance, emphasizes the real necessity for class leadership, while Ernesto Laclau evacuates nearly all material referents from the rhetoric which creates hegemony. In theories of hegemony, the coupling of materialism-rhetoricity maps onto the related coupling of determinism-contingency, such that the more classically materialist elements (e.g., Hall’s historical relations of oppression and class leadership) are more rigidly determined, while the more rhetorical elements (e.g., Mouffe’s impassioned textual politics or Laclau’s ethereal empty signifiers) are more loosely contingent. The degrees ticked between determinism and contingency, materialism and rhetoricity, help to appreciate the nuances of hegemony’s development, particularly as the more contingent and signifying interpretations of hegemony approach transgression. The further we read from Gramsci (to Hall, Mouffe, then Laclau), the more friend-enemy subjectivity and representation stretch into contingency. The closer we read to Laclau, the greater the potential for a transgressive hegemony (so long as the “rhetoricity” is not divorced from materiality, the body, or concrete presence, as the debates concerning critical rhetoric, below, demonstrate). In spite of these nuances, two anchors


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of hegemonic logic remain, threatening to discipline transgression into a properly effective resistance. Antonio Gramsci and Two Anchors of Hegemonic Logic Gramsci’s contingent view of ideology inaugurated a shift for classical Marxist strategy: The new proletarian society could not be produced by a quick, bloody war of movement and an equally swift war of position. The war of movement (or maneuver) was akin to a military force crushing its enemy and capturing their resources for its own. Gramsci described it as a “sudden incursion” which delivered immediate control over institutions and infrastructure.7 From “the view of iron economic determinism,” Gramsci wrote, the war of movement accorded the production of ruling ideas to the victor, who, “in a flash” would “bring about the necessary ideological concentration” for a new society to realize itself.8 In contrast, Gramsci offered the war of position, a long-term struggle that took place within both literal and metaphorical “trenches.” Combatants defended their position in these strategic spaces to fuel greater support systems and make gains over time. Politically, the war of position is an intricate battle that takes place primarily (though not only) on the terrain, and through the implements, of civil society. As Gramsci writes: “The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. . . . A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organize with lightning speed in time and space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit.”9 The superstructural trenches sustain members of the incumbent army or bloc; at the same time, they permit the incumbent powers an ability to spread their worldview to the whole society. While Gramsci did not advocate for the abandonment of the war of movement, he argued that the war of position was a better strategy for social change in advancing capitalist societies.10 Superstructural trenches were not easily won or maintained, however. The war of position “demand[ed] enormous sacrifices by infinite masses of people” and “require[ed] exceptional qualities of patience and inventiveness.”11 The sacrifices, creativity, and patience demanded for successful trench warfare speak to the challenges Gramsci imagined in molding individuals into a collective consciousness, the agent for social change. In fragments from the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci inscribes a fundamental ambivalence in the process of forming a collective consciousness: it is at once determined through the historical unfolding and resolution of contradiction (as in Marx), and contingent on critically challenging common sense and individualism. For instance, Gramsci writes that workers have two senses of identity: the first, a laboring solidarity, and the second, a discursive common sense, the latter of which appears as an “inherited . . . and

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uncritically absorbed” verbal consciousness.12 Over time, the dissonance between the worker’s dual-identity invites individual transformation. After the worker recognizes he or she is “part of a particular hegemonic force,” he or she progresses toward a unified consciousness, a “real possession of a single and coherent conception of the world.”13 The individual is thus transformed, attaining a critical consciousness that is neither defined by common sense (as inherited from the community) nor selfishness.14 Revisiting Gramsci’s writings, we see that dissonance prods the individual to an ethical, political consciousness: one which refuses to accept common sense and contradiction, and one which integrates the individual into a collective subject. Though Gramsci refutes the deterministic view that transforming consciousness is “a matter of mechanical fact,” the worker’s more contingent identity remains rooted in working-class experience.15 Further, it appears that the friend-enemy relationship provides a sort of “least common denominator” for social change, for it catalyzes the dialectical process of moving an individual to consciousness. The individual transformation of consciousness begins for “the lower classes . . . via a series of negations, via their consciousness of the identity and class limits of their enemy.”16 There is hope that such a “basic negative, polemical attitude” will flower into the more mindful worker who has transcended common sense.17 But Gramsci underscores that the recognition of a political adversary is key to involving all members of society in struggle. In other words, if dissonance between laboring solidarity and common sense does not lead the worker to a politicized, collective consciousness, “the enemy” will. With characteristic ambivalence, Gramsci thus suggests more deterministic strategies of coercion and more contingent tactics of rhetoric, in securing the spoils of collective consciousness. The means and end of the struggle for hegemony is the formation of the social change agent—the “collective man,” as Gramsci often refers to it. Gramsci defines hegemony most clearly as an “attainment of a ‘culturalsocial’ unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim.”18 The more contingent Gramsci sees in language—more so than the consciousness determined through economic relations—the capacity to build a collective man. Gramsci writes that hegemony is created through language, “on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, both general and particular, operating in transitory bursts (in emotional ways) or permanently (where the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated and experienced that it becomes passion[)].”19 Language relates individual to group, group to group, and group to issue; it shapes disparate identities and raw individual energies into “a single cultural ‘climate.’”20 The political dilemmas of Gramsci’s day offer concrete examples of how hegemony works, revealing the ambivalent place of rhetoric in the development of his thought. “The Southern Question” identifies hegemonic


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principles as a way for workers to “conquer certain forms of egoism” which had prevented them from successfully revolting in the past.21 Rhetoric creates the possibility for a political subject (the collective man) by disciplining social actors (e.g., Southern Italian peasants and Northern Italian workers) beyond their current discursive or individualistic selves. Rhetoric also forms an economy of representation, such that the activities of different political actors (peasants and workers) may be read as signs of a larger common agent. While speculating on how Italian workers might forge a new alliance with the middle class (against Fascism), Gramsci claimed that working-class leaders could establish a common ground through the basics of everyday life: “the little daily struggles for wages, for working hours, for industrial discipline, for accommodation, for bread.”22 Party leaders and organic intellectuals helped form the collective man by encouraging people to identify with a common, unifying, hegemonic principle.23 That figures of institutional power or privilege enact a rhetorical leadership is not far from the full contingency of grassroots struggle; but elsewhere, Gramsci advocates the use of contingency to attain coercive leadership. Gramsci encourages the Communist Party to advance into its rightful position by infiltrating the organizational structure of Italian labor at all levels, eventually creating “city-wide proletarian committees” which “can become the strongholds of the general interests of the entire working people.”24 While Gramsci advocates for direct elections to form the committees, he lacks confidence that change at the grassroots level will be enough: only if popularly elected committees are joined by “vanguard elements” can the power of “reformist and maximalist leaders” be held in check.25 Here, the deterministic side of Gramsci’s hegemony is again revealed, for he does not trust the popular committees enough to permit a fully contingent hegemony. Because the workers are too easily swayed by a leadership out of step with the vanguard, Gramsci relies upon an economy of representation to help control the revolutionary workers’ councils: “The whole party, in all its bodies, but especially through its press, must work in a united way to secure the maximum benefit from each comrade’s work.”26 Rhetoric not only integrates individuals and collectives, but it also reflects the united strength of the collective man. From a rhetorical perspective, founding a collective man is not an easy task, for leaders cannot rely solely upon coercion or essentialist appeals to class position. But at the moments in which contingency is too difficult, the vestiges of determinism arrive to ease (or make more likely) the formation of collective man. As Gramsci describes following Italian workers’ failure to strike an insurrection after their promising rebellion in Turin: There must exist a party which puts its national organization at the service of the proletarian revolution and which—through discussion and through iron

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discipline [italics added]—prepares capable [people] who can see ahead, and who do not know hesitation or wavering.27

The party is the disciplining and discursive machine which sets individual workers on their way to a collective consciousness. To help spark the process, the party has friend-enemy subjectivity at its disposal, inviting workers to see past common sense and individualism. Friend-enemy subjectivity may serve the party as a moderately contingent way to strike the workers’ path through alienation, toward revolution. Elsewhere, as I have interpreted Gramsci, friend-enemy subjectivity serves as deterministic assurance that individuals might be moved to collective consciousness. When joined by a fairly transparent economy of representation— one which views alliances as forged through institutional structures and working-class leadership—Gramsci’s theory appears quite deterministic. As a closer look at Gramsci’s writings reveals, his original version of hegemony vacillates between determinism and contingency, with rhetorical representation and friend-enemy subjectivity caught between. British cultural studies scholars like Stuart Hall and political theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have each appropriated hegemony to understand the peculiarities of contemporary politics. Though Hall, Mouffe, and Laclau have largely abandoned the single-minded commonality of Gramsci’s “collective man,” their different interpretations (to different degrees) demonstrate commitments to friend-enemy politics and the economy of representation. Stuart Hall and the “Materialist” Gramsci Stuart Hall turns to Gramsci to explain the seemingly impossible rise of Thatcherism, a politically conservative, neoliberal regime that essentially broke the socialist hegemony in Britain. Hall concludes that the British right’s ability to make free market ideology appealing to ordinary citizens won them not only the State, but also the consciousness of its subjects.28 Hall argues that Marxist theories of ideology—even those “updated” through psychoanalytic or discursive assumptions, as in the works of Lacan and Foucault—cannot explain the rapidity with which the right influenced political struggle at the level of everyday life. Hall concludes that Thatcher’s long-term victory did not result from a false consciousness, a linguisticOedipal identification, or the prevalence of power in all aspects of being: it was the result of the right’s leadership, in a variety of material and symbolic practices. Hall advances the contingent character of Antonio Gramsci’s writings, while maintaining some deterministic materialist traits. If, as Brennon Wood suggests, elements of Hall’s hegemony read as an attempt to locate a


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middle ground between the strict structuralism of sociology and the indeterminacy of Laclau and Mouffe—if Hall “wavers uncertainly between hegemony as either concentrated state power or free-wheeling discourse”29—I would argue that this is because his theory reflects Gramsci’s ambivalent embrace of contingency. Hall’s theory is more materialist than the linguistic or rhetorical theories of Mouffe and Laclau; and, as I elaborate here, it retains some of the more determinist characteristics of Gramsci’s original theory. Adding nuance to Gramsci’s war of position, Hall suggests that competing blocs clash on superstructural terrain, primarily (but not only) through the weapons of signification which produce consent. An ascendant bloc seeks to occupy (literally and discursively) the state’s ready-made institutional trench system (which includes families, schools, sacred and secular institutions), through which it extends its reach to civil society.30 Rather than imposing a false consciousness upon its subjects, the hegemon “tries to frame all competing definitions of the world within its range. It provides the horizon of thought and action within which conflicts are fought through, appropriated (i.e. experienced), obscured (i.e. concealed as a ‘national interest’ which should unite all conflicting parties) or contained (i.e. settled to the profit of the ruling class).”31 Thus, a dominant power appears as such through the constant rhetorical work of maintaining the limits to its subjects’ reality. Hall’s analysis of hegemony often centers around notions of crisis, as in moments where a particular hegemonic formation begins to rupture. Here, hegemony is not a matter of tracking “the absolute victory of this side over that, nor the total incorporation of one set of forces into another. Rather, the analysis is a relational matter—i.e., a question to be resolved relationally, using the idea of ‘unstable balance’ or ‘the continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria.’”32 Hall’s focus on crisis builds upon Gramsci’s insight that within advanced capitalist countries, consensus-building at the superstructural level prohibits revolutionary outbreaks when the economy falters. In other words, when capitalism’s contradictions reveal themselves, the superstructural tools of ideology and common sense may sustain capitalism through economic crises. As Hall and his colleagues write, “Hegemony ultimately secures . . . the long-term social conditions for the continuing reproduction of capital.”33 Given the prevalence of crisis, hegemony is a constant process.34 Hall also understands crisis to reveal the problem with economist treatments, or theoretical interpretations that understand the base as determining of social, political, and economic conditions.35 The determinism of the base cannot explain the resolution of crises, though materialist analysis should not be totally scrapped. Following Althusser, Hall views crises as overdetermined, or resulting from many possible causes (of which means

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of production are a very important one). In Hall’s words: Crises “cannot be ‘read off’ from the economic. They are subject to a variety of possible forms of resolution, depending on how the relations of force develop and combine, in particular national societies, under specific conditions.”36 In Hall’s nuanced war of position, language and other symbolic activities become the terrain, tools, and spoils for various groups competing to lead the larger body politic: “The signification of events is part of what has to be struggled over, for it is the means by which collective social understandings are created—and thus the means by which consent for particular outcomes can be effectively mobilized.”37 Importantly, though, the groups battling to define the parameters of acceptable meaning have definable interests and capacities for reasonable consensus (versus completely undetermined identities). Hall also underscores that more fixed social relations, tied to economic production and material dominance, inflect the interests and capacities of the battling groups. These traits set Hall’s theory apart from more poststructuralist accounts of hegemony. Hall’s determinist-materialist hegemony is a struggle in which the forces of coercion and consensual powers are balanced. Violence or threats (typically as an outcome of ownership over production and its relationship to state, military, and police power) influence social change as much as decision-making and representation, affinity and identification.38 A completely constructed vision of hegemony, argues Hall, would not permit the possibility to identify dominance as a material occurrence; it could not explain the wherewithal of dominant groups, discourses, or institutions. So while hegemony describes the ongoing process of defining reality within the hegemonic formation, it does not completely abandon “Marxist determination and ruling-class dominance.”39 Hall’s materialist reading of Gramsci suggests that once a bloc attains economic power and dominance over civil society, it becomes easier to extend its worldview.40 Ruling classes use their resources to rhetorically fuse their own interests with the interests of subservient groups, thus attaining the latter’s consent: hegemony is maintained as “the interests of the minority and the will of the majority” are “‘squared,’” such that the interests of both dominant and subservient may “be represented as coinciding in the consensus, on which all sides agree.”41 As such, cultural leadership (particularly as dominance) appears as the more determined outcome of contingent rhetorical processes. The more deterministic, materialist character of cultural leadership becomes clearer as we probe into Hall’s assumptions concerning common sense, language, and meaning. Initially, meaning is malleable and not reducible to language; but because of its deep roots in particular communities (with all of their real people, places, institutions, ideas, relations of force, and so on), signification is quite burdened with, and oftentimes


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determined by, materiality. Hall argues that the social order is constructed, symbolically and materially, to maintain a set of interests. This means that consent entails a disciplined conformity to the pre-existing institutions and trajectories “of class, power and authority.”42 When a more powerful force effectively defeats its challenger, it wins “an achieved system of equivalence between language and reality,” implying that not only does meaning appear fixed—but also it is set, impermanently, through the hegemon’s terms.43 Signification appears determined at the point that it becomes common sense. Common sense, or that which we take for granted, sustains and reveals the power of a hegemonic regime. Though common sense is a conservative resource for maintaining power, it is also available to those attempting to take power. Sedimented meanings, accessed through language, permit political actors to frame new events in terms of their worldviews. Thus, victory in hegemonic struggle will not appear as the dawn of a new total world view; but rather as a manipulation of current collective meanings and identities.44 Hall develops the material hegemonic (and counter-hegemonic) capacity of symbols through his theory of articulation, a “form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions.”45 Articulation is key to hegemony, for it permits the formation of a politically charged collective, particularly against other group identities, within particular contexts.46 Though Hall’s articulation is decidedly less deterministic than Gramsci’s oft-transparent representation (by which the party’s identity is clearly proclaimed through a single banner), articulation nonetheless performs a representative function that permits hegemony to spread—for any number of symbols may be linked into friend-enemy antagonisms. As Hall and his colleagues describe, a range of counter-hegemonic efforts are identifiable as such through an economy of representation that links symbolic elements to individual and group identity. For instance, in their study of post-war youth subcultures, Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, and Roberts note that the various artifacts of different groups (e.g., “the stained jeans, swastikas and ornamented motorcycles of the bike-boys”) help “produce an organized group-identity in the form and shape of a coherent and distinctive way of ‘being-in-theworld.’”47 Clothing, language, and ideas come to represent the bike-boys as unique from both the parent working-class culture and the other subcultures that surround them, as well as the dominant culture toward which they are antagonistic. For Hall, articulations can be quite fixed, to the point of appearing determined. In his words, certain “articulations have been historically secured. And they do have effects. The equivalences having been sustained, they are constantly reproduced in other discourses, in social practices and institutions, in ‘free societies,’” and they “exert a powerful traditional force over

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the ways in which subsequent discourses, employing the same elements, can be developed.”48 But as Hall develops through the example of a counter-hegemonic Black identity, a determined articulation is not synonymous with an essential or transcendently realized one: “It was determinate, because it depended on other conditions being fulfilled. ‘Black’ could not be converted into ‘black = beautiful’ simply by wishing it were so. It had to become part of an organized practice of struggles requiring the building up of collective forms of black resistance as well as the development of new forms of black consciousness.”49 Articulations are never fully determined in the classical Marxist sense, for they require the rhetorical work of maintenance amidst different contextual conditions. But in spite of their contingent nature, counter-hegemonic articulations are exceptionally difficult to create or maintain, for they must contend with the stolid, material forces of privilege, access, ideology, and common sense.50 Moreover, for Hall, social standpoints remain rooted in historic realities and material relations: they stand more firmly against the play of signification that comprises Mouffe’s and Laclau’s theories of hegemony. Hall’s hegemony is intimately connected to “the material and economic forces of the base,” for we “are born into” these relations: “They exist independent of our will. They are real in their structure and tendency. We cannot develop a social practice without representing these conditions to ourselves in one way or another; but the representations do not exhaust their effect.”51 There are lines structuring social relations, notably class and race, which cannot be rendered totally fluid or discursive.52 Class and race (along with gender, sexuality, and ability) provide important landmarks for tracking the material effects of dominance. However, Hall seems to ascribe positionality and identity to materialism in such a way that approaches Gramsci’s iron determinism—for, instead of “inventing subjects anew, hegemony repositions ‘people with identities and relations already secured.’”53 Hall’s hegemony unnecessarily reduces collective struggle to a deterministic battle between counter-hegemonies and state institutions, given his insistence on dominant ideologies: “Articulation implies a field of dissimilar ‘elements’ awaiting coordination. As a social logic it grasps solidarity only by asserting the primacy of politics.”54 Wood suggests here that a determinist-materialist hegemony offers a limited explanation of resistance, one which is beholden to classical patterns of the state and capitalism against the (working) classes. In this more deterministic view, social change appears as a resistant bloc’s battle to redefine the limits of permissible reality against the dominant bloc. But as Gramsci and Hall emphasize, a dominant coalition has a greater arsenal through its monopoly on “legitimate” coercion, and its deep institutional trench system. Even if a (working-class) counter-hegemony


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gains enough ground to challenge the dominant (state) bloc’s worldview, the latter’s entrenchment seems to guarantee its ability to maintain power—if not through force, then through reinforcing its superstructural resources over the long term. As Lewis suggests: “Because members of the dominant class largely control the base or material structures and processes of social relations, they have a distinct edge in ideological battles. Thus, always underlying the superstructural over-determination is the determinacy of the base.”55 In summary, Hall focuses on the materialist aspects of Gramsci, interpreting hegemony as the ability of certain groups to lead through consensusbuilding. This consensus-building reflects economic interests and historical relationships, as a dominant group shapes what appears as natural and normal for different groups’ realities. For Hall, as for Gramsci, resistance is a matter of building a counter-hegemony: articulating new worldviews and interests into a representable reality for the bloc. Articulating an effective counter-hegemony (by which a resistant group comes to define the permissible range of reality for the social) is very difficult, as common sense realities are rooted in long-standing relations of dominance (and thus resistant to change). Attempting to invite more space for the potential of resistance, other theorists of hegemony have emphasized the elements of identification over class consciousness, and signification over consensus and leadership. Chantal Mouffe and the “Passionate” Gramsci Chantal Mouffe’s development of hegemony is perhaps best known in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau and their renowned volume, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. But her engagement with Gramsci is unique. Mouffe relies upon hegemony to challenge both essentialism and rationalism, to fight what she considers political theory’s tendency to ignore the “antagonistic dimension” in the political.56 While Hall underscores the materialism of Gramsci, Mouffe elicits from (and contributes to) Gramsci’s hegemony a passion, or “all those things that cannot be reduced to interest or rationality,” including “fantasies, desire,” at the heart of “human subjectivity and identity.”57 Mouffe follows Gramsci’s notion of the political as a field of perpetual antagonisms, wars of position fought between allies linked together as such by rhetoric. Though some hegemonic principles appear to be permanent, natural, and stable, the political is never “fully sutured” or beyond the possibility for change. Like Gramsci, Mouffe conceives of the social subject as not only the agent of change, but also the site and means for disciplining disparate egos into a collective consciousness. By stressing the fluidity of subjectivity and primacy of language and passion in articulating identifications—over

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the consensus-driven materialist politics of collective interests—Mouffe theorizes a less deterministic hegemony.58 Like Hall, Laclau and Mouffe define articulation as a “political construction from dissimilar elements” which forms “concrete social agents.”59 Articulation provides enough coherence to realize or recognize a collective will for change. Through articulation, rhetorically mediated social subjects “appear articulated not like pieces in a clockwork mechanism” as in a modernist collective subject; but as hodgepodges perilously fastened together with the help of certain rhetorical principles or appeals.60 While Laclau develops the theory of articulation into a sophisticated (and more transgressive) account of how rhetoric turns individual consciousness into a new resistant agency, Mouffe concentrates on how identification brings collective agents to life in political struggle. In so doing, she departs from Gramsci’s fairly modernist language concerning “iron discipline,” into a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist view of individuals compelled into a collective consciousness through the impossibility of defining themselves. Distancing herself from rational choice theories, Mouffe argues that individuals do not join social struggles to fill certain needs; rather, social struggles come to define individual identities. In Mouffe’s words, individuals are “an ensemble of subject positions” awaiting agency within a larger collective consciousness.61 The larger collective consciousness is built through volatile and multifarious subject positions.62 The person (as a collection of subjectivities) harbors potential hegemonic principles, making herself or himself available for insertion into the collective agent: she is a teacher concerned that her students will only aspire to production and consumption, he is a farmer who hopes to see his daughter, too, become a steward of the land and local community. Such subject positions form an intersection between the abstract, symbolically designated activity of a social subject (e.g., an anti-capitalist or locavore movement) and the concrete realities of individuals and resistance. Nuancing Gramsci’s theory, Laclau and Mouffe take the end-game of the war of position as winning the power to endow subject positions with meaning: it is through subjectivities that political events, issues, people, and practices may be related together, with greater possibility of forming or maintaining hegemony. So while Hall concentrates upon the leadership forged through real, historical or material relations of production, Mouffe emphasizes the collective consciousness created from subject positions. Subject positions arise from social relations that may be related to stable political, economic, and cultural formations. But Mouffe’s theory stresses the linguistic elements of the battle for signification, over coercive and materialist elements, in forming a collective will. While Mouffe flirts with transgression in so doing,


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she continues to bind resistance to the more deterministic logics of friendenemy subjectivity and relations of representation. Throughout her writings, Mouffe upholds the friend-enemy relationship as the conceptual foundation for political participation, for it allows a nonessentialist, affective treatment of subjectivity. Though the notion of friendenemy antagonism appears in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Mouffe turns to Carl Schmitt to fully develop it. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt demarcates the political as a unique entity whose significance derives from something more than its association with the state. Schmitt asserts that the political is properly characterized by a formal (not substantive), dialectical, social relationship, which he terms the “friend-enemy relation.” Friends and enemies are “empty” subject positions animated by specific struggles: friends and enemies have no pre-determined essence which mediates their presence or expression. In Schmitt’s words, friend-enemy subjectivities “turn into empty and ghostlike abstractions” once the specific conflict that had enjoined them ends.63 As social subjectivities, friends and enemies are conceptual abstractions. But as Schmitt describes, the content of the social subjectivities is expressed “in everyday language.”64 Further, at the level of lived experience, identification with social subjects is powerful. Schmitt attributes the passion emanating from political struggle to the enemy, who is “the other, the stranger,” one who “is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien.”65 Schmitt thus treats the friend-enemy relationship literally, cautioning readers that it does not denote “competitors” or “debating adversaries.”66 Friends and enemies are collectives that, in a very real way, threaten to extinguish each other. Though Mouffe does not dispute the level of passion aroused by friendenemy constructions, she argues that violence is incompatible with democracy. As such, she places Schmitt in conversation with Wittgenstein, suggesting that democratic politics functions like an impassioned language game rather than a literal war. Mouffe writes that adversaries share “some kind of common bond” or a “common symbolic space” which tempers the friend-enemy antagonism into “an agonism,” a state in which “the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents.”67 Participants constantly vie to “fix” the meaning of certain over-determined terms (notably democracy, justice, freedom, and rights).68 At this point, Mouffe’s battles for collective consciousness approach a form of rationalism, as individuals contest various interpretations and priorities for social values and discourse. But her turn to psychoanalytic theory helps explain how, with passion (versus rationality or iron discipline), Schmitt’s “ghostlike abstractions” become animated in political struggle. In

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Freudian psychoanalysis, Mouffe locates “the libidinal investment at work in the creation of collective identities,” the fundamental lack that motivates political antagonisms.69 Individuals seek to fulfill themselves as subjects, and so grasp onto language and other symbols, which offer them an illusory sense of being a unique self. Language and collective symbols allow individuals to invest their energies into the project of individuation, with the outcome of constituting political collectives. Mouffe asserts, in line with the work of Lacan and Zizek, that identification is an extra-symbolic process: “The element which holds together a particular community cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bond linking together its members always implies a shared relation toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated. This relationship toward the Thing structured by means of fantasies is what is at stake when we speak of the menace to our ‘way of life’ presented by the Other.”70 It is through their affective attachments in the face of jouissance that individuals come to reflect shared commitments, values, and styles. But it is through the friends’ “terms” (especially as they appear “against enemies”) that individuals define and express themselves. In other words, the collective consciousness is known to us through symbolic identifications. The ontological project of identification is a fairly mysterious one: “On the basis of different subject positions, suddenly there is some kind of crystallization into an identification and that is what will make people act.”71 But the outcome of this “crystallization” is much clearer, for it propels the individual into the gravitational field of friends and enemies. The threat to one’s identity may lead to several reactions, including the formation of a political antagonism. Identification renders protest coherent: the voices of 100,000 people on the streets of Washington, D.C., for instance, are “heard” as “defending equality” or “promoting justice.” Moreover, the presence of “the enemy” helps critics make sense of how individuals identifying with disparate ideologies—like Seattle’s environmentalists and trade unionists—organize collectively without positive unity. By igniting passion around his or her many subjectivities, identification moves the individual to join a collective will. From this perspective, collective action not only forms as people conform to a positive principle, but may also form when people join against a common adversary. Like Schmitt, Mouffe characterizes the friend-enemy antagonism as the only properly political form of relation. It should be no surprise why this dialectic is viewed as the only or necessary means to organize and express democratic participation, for Carl Schmitt endows friend-enemy subjectivity with a kind of gravitational force that attracts and organizes other discursive elements (e.g., symbols and practices). The political is not defined by generic or spatial boundaries (such as the state, civil society, and private sphere). Rather, the political appears throughout social life, as far as one


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may follow the friend-enemy pairing: “The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses.”72 Friend-enemy subjectivity is a structure par excellence, for it organizes discursive relationships in other social realms, including: morality (good-evil), aesthetics (beautiful-ugly), and economics (profitable-unprofitable). Elsewhere, Schmitt naturalizes the friend-enemy relationship as the only social relationship for understanding struggle, within or outside of what appears to be the political. Friend-enemy subjectivity “is existentially so strong and decisive that the nonpolitical antithesis, at precisely the moment at which it becomes political, pushes aside and subordinates its hitherto purely religious, purely economic, purely cultural criteria and motives to the conditions and conclusions of the political situation at hand.”73 In other words, what appears to be outside of politics or the friend-enemy relationship cannot remain so, for the “existential” pull of friends-andenemies forces it into a political configuration. Finally, and of most importance for rhetorical and cultural critics, Schmitt asserts that once friend-enemy antagonisms begin to organize, they gather such momentum that “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning.”74 At the level of interpretive practice, the gravity of friend-enemy subjectivities draws critics into reading all rhetorical action into the terms of friend-enemy politics. As Mouffe affirms, there is no space for democratic participation, for resistant rhetoric, outside the formation of friend-enemy politics: “Politics always entails an us/them distinction.”75 Without the negative boundary of the enemy, Mouffe argues, collective consciousness (and thus political struggle itself) is impossible. Mouffe is arguing here against “post-political” theorists (e.g., Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), whose ideas are commensurate with the rise of neoliberalism, as Mouffe and others assert. But we may read more into her statement concerning the potential for transgression as a mode of resistance. The relational logic of poststructuralism, combined with the Schmittian primacy of friend-enemy antagonism, ossifies social subjectivity and precludes other resistant relationships. In spite of her claims to contingency, it is necessary to resist hegemony via hegemony. The only way to resist “enemies” is via “friends.” Mouffe’s theory also prescribes a representational theory of mediation, which inserts individual acts of resistance into the orbit of friend-enemy subjectivities. As Mouffe describes, for instance, the loss of a job (and worker subjectivity) may lead one to, for instance, alcoholism, spousal abuse, or suicide. However, a political antagonism occurs when an enemy is named, as when women or unions become the reason why one loses his or her job. The discourse must transition from a simple denial of rights to a link within a chain of larger oppression: “Only if the struggle of the unemployed is

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articulated with the struggle of blacks, of women, of all the oppressed, can we speak of the creation of a democratic struggle.”76 Resistance must reflect the terms of a larger collective in order to register as politics. The representational relationship presumed in hegemonic reading practices assumes commonality, particularly as the outcome of identifications is consubstantiality. In this way, Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification is quite similar to Mouffe’s. Burke describes identification as “one’s material and mental ways of placing oneself as a person in the groups and movements.”77 Rhetorical identification serves as an alternative to persuasion, with the former being an a-rational, unconscious process by which an individual gains a sense of identity through the rhetorical “substance” of a collective.78 Here, “substance” is illusory, a by-product of rhetorical articulations that mediate (organize and express) a collective agent. For Burke, the affectively charged symbols that conjoin individual and collective function as a substance: “friends” represent their political will against “enemies” via language and other signs. Put in less rational or goal-driven terms, subjectivities become aroused and inserted into friend-enemy struggles; and friend-enemy struggles may be traced by the rhetorical “stuff” associated with them. For instance, protestors marching outside the Group-of-Eight (G8) meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland, are recognizable as part of the anti-globalization or global justice movement. Their chants and signs of “This Democracy’s Not for Sale” or “Stop Corporate Greed” become evidence that the rhetorical substance of democracy (against corporate globalization) has sparked a passionate identification between protestors (or, more accurately, their subjectivities) and social subjects. Bodies on the street, words and other symbols emanating from them, and the “ghostlike abstractions” which function as political agents, appear as sharing the same substance. Put differently, the protestors represent the global justice movement, and the global justice movement represents the protestors’ concerns against corporate globalization. Through friend-enemy social subjectivity, and the “substantial” representations which render it coherent, a hegemonic bloc may achieve its goal—ousting the current administrators of the state and occupants of the trench system, so that its coalition may take its power. Thus, while Mouffe stretches Gramsci’s theory away from its original determinism, her version of hegemony relies upon a Gramscian telos for social change. In Mouffe’s words: “Every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices, i.e. practices which will attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install another form of hegemony.”79 Within the concept of hegemony, we may thus view a prescriptive dimension, such that the end-goal of reconstituting political identities is to take state power, or attain a power-over subjects.


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The default presence of friend-enemy subjectivities allows critics to assert the impact or effects of a wide range of rhetorical expression— including today’s multifarious modes of resistance which openly antagonize or performatively exceed symbolic substances. But the inevitability of the we-they dialectic, as instantiated in political theory and maintained in rhetorical criticism, raises questions: Does all rhetorical expression mediate friend-enemy subjectivities? Does rhetorical expression have to mediate friend-enemy subjectivities in order to “count” as effective democratic participation? Ernesto Laclau offers a qualified no—and it is in these qualifications that we may better see the distinctions between hegemony and transgression. Ernesto Laclau and the “Contingent” Gramsci Ernesto Laclau’s development of hegemony was greatly influenced by the rise of NSMs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As NSMs expressed their demands through the particularity of social standpoints (such as race, sexuality, and gender) rather than universality (as in the transcendent class consciousness of traditional Marxist movements), Laclau became inspired by the question of how particularist collectives could be politically effective. The answer, for Laclau, is “a possible mediation between” the categories of universality and particularity.80 For collective action to successfully change the conditions of the broader community, it must somehow come to represent the entire community (its demands, worldviews, logics), through means which will not sacrifice its uniqueness, or the uniqueness of the communities which it comes to represent. The mediation between universality and particularity derives from a highly contingent and rhetorical reading of Gramsci. Laclau emphasizes the abandonment of singular collective agents (classes), in favor of hegemony “as a process of creating identities,”81 a process characterized by rhetorical games between the universal and particular which stave off the forces of determinism—including the determinism of Hall’s materialism, and Mouffe’s passionate attachments (driven by a Schmittian enemy). The “contingent Gramsci” inspiring Laclau moves hegemony further toward transgression, for it derives from an appreciation of agency and rhetorical substitutions (over and against metaphorical representational logic). Laclau nonetheless retains the vestiges of friend-enemy politics and the economy of representation: As I examine through close encounters with several of his writings, a reversion to psychoanalytic assumptions and an undertheorization of the diversity of political antagonisms, as well as a demand for an (impossible) telos of representation, make Laclau’s theory hegemonic.

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Laclau’s first essay in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality offers a useful summary of his conceptualization of hegemony.82 Emerging from a close reading of two passages from Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,”83 Laclau identifies the major differences between hegemony and orthodox conceptions of change. For the orthodox Marx, social change results when capitalism sets in motion the formation of “a homogenous proletarian mass,” the agent who will defeat the bourgeois.84 As Laclau elaborates, the proletariat, as a collective agent, is viewed as a natural, universal, unmediated will whose success is marked by its ability to take back its own essence.85 It is as though the capitalist control of the means of production is the finger which sets the dominoes falling, eventually leading to the proletariat’s reclamation of its own identity, its self-sovereignty (which was, essentially, in no way defined by the bourgeoisie). In contrast, for the Gramscian Marx, the working class’s ability to overcome alienation and oppression hinges upon political struggle with the owners of production, for the opposition relationally (contingently and rhetorically) defines the class’s identity.86 Antagonism with the other is key, as particular rhetorical appeals help place into relationship, or mediate, issues, ideas, and identities, such that the whole social struggle is represented, rather than taken as a given. The telos for Laclau’s rhetorical mediations is the formation of hegemony, variously appearing in his writings as an identifiable collective agent or bloc (e.g., a coalition of farmers, unionists, and anarchists represented by feminists), an arbitrary name or empty signifier which has come to ally and give voice to a struggling group (e.g., “democracy”), or the volatile process of coming to agency (which typically appears as collective agents or the rhetorical names which represent them provide evidence that hegemony is occurring, or will occur). At times, hegemony emerges in Laclau’s writings as an unending game of articulating agency through new issues, ideas, and identities; at other times it reads more as a settled matter of articulating agents, capable of leading and representing resistance (eventually for the whole social field). Toward the former, Laclau writes that the analytic of “practice” is preferable to various units of the subject, notably, “movement or ideology,” which give “ontological priority” to “the agent.”87 Scholars should foreground practice rather than agents, for the former relates to a contingent play of social relationships, while the latter connotes more substantial relationships. For instance, Laclau argues that a populist movement appears as such not because its “actual contents [are] identifiable as populistic,” but because its social relationships are articulated in a populistic way.88 Social change results from articulating practices, rather than as a reflection of some agent’s ideological or rhetorical substance.


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But Laclau also retains various figures of social agents to track the effects of rhetorical mediations. For instance, he suggests the need for some unique group to lead social struggle, as in Gramsci’s call for “the Italian working class . . . to fulfill the tasks of national unification.”89 While this leadership reads as a fully rhetorical one, unencumbered by the imperative to acquire state institutions, it nonetheless appears in the figure of a hegemonic agent (versus agency or articulating process). The Italian workers unite and represent the nation through a movement between universal and particular, but ultimately, the hegemony appears through their unique rhetorical character. Epistemically and politically, we may witness hegemony through the rhetorical mediations of the leading class (in this case, the Italian workers). These rhetorical mediations are never pure, transparent, or “preconstituted”; but they also appear unique and attributable to the leading class, under “an autonomization of the signifier which is decisive to the understanding of the political efficacy of certain symbols.”90 Here, at least, rhetorical mediations appear representational, attributable to an agent. Laclau peers into the conceptual depths of rhetorical mediations, excavating their reliance on logics of difference (rather than commonality) and opacity (rather than transparency). In particular, Laclau emphasizes the play of agency and substitutional logics, contrasting the materialist and relationally fixed agents of Hall and Mouffe. In so doing, Laclau’s theory borders on transgression, as resistance is achieved through the freeing of human potential more so than the subjection of potential to a common identity or collective agent. But as in the above passage, the hegemon’s signifier is autonomous and representing of various social elements aggregating in resistance. That these rhetorical mediations are presumed to extend to the whole society, and represent all involved in struggle, prohibits Laclau’s theory from achieving full transgression. Agency and Substitutional Logics Laclau’s development of agency and substitutional logic begins in radically anti-essentialist assumptions concerning identity (both individual and collective). Like Mouffe, Laclau relies upon the “unfixed character of the signifier/signified relation, that is, of all identity.” This volatile relationship between names and the named borders on an anti-materialist conception of identity: For Laclau, “all identity is more or less a floating signifier.”91 Identity is coherent through political struggle, where politics is assumed to be “the locus of undecidable language games,” in which the outcomes have tangible impacts not necessarily dictated by relations of oppression or production.92 Like Mouffe and Hall, Laclau considers all meaning and identity as determined differentially, through that which something (or someone) is not.

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In the context of collective struggle, relational identity suggests that there must be a threatening, negating other in order for politics to occur. For Laclau, this other may appear like the antagonistic adversary of Mouffe’s theory: without a “second community” to define the limit of the first, the first community would not appear as a unique entity capable of representing the whole social order.93 But in the nuances of Laclau’s writings, the definitional other appears more as an ontological other, something which does not oppose an identified group’s existence or way of life, as much as threaten the very basis for identification itself. This “empty” other results in the most transgressive version of hegemony. For Laclau, successful social change does not occur through the representation of a class’s interests, whether this class is the working class or an amalgamation of the oppressed whose experiences of oppression are grounded in their material experiences, as Hall would have it (or even their passionate attachments with larger discourses, as Mouffe would have it). As Laclau elaborates, “Subject positions lose their systematicity and start decentering instead of reinforcing the identity of the social agent,” particularly by “cut[ting] across class boundaries,” with resistance outside of “production processes.”94 Rather than relying on materialism to mediate social struggle, Laclau relies on diverse forms of rhetorical mediation: representation, articulation, and identification. For Laclau, representational relationships are crucial to both the change and continuity of politics. Hegemonic struggle cannot occur with too strict a representation, or without representation.95 Laclau likens non-mediation (the elimination of all representation) to transparency (the full representation of signifier-signified), as both render totalitarian outcomes: “The elimination of all representation is the illusion accompanying the notion of a total emancipation,” like that imagined by orthodox Marxism, in which an unmediated totality realizes its essence prior to social struggle.96 The totally unmediated society offers no possibility for producing political antagonisms, for no differences may be mediated rhetorically. The growth of chains of equivalence demands an opacity of signifier to signified. Within the totally transparent society, a very limited number of political antagonisms are possible: for instance, the labor unions could resist the Fascists, but would have to go it alone, for their signifiers would only represent their unique struggle (rather than the concerns of the feminists, or the libertarians, or the queer community; or of a Free Society itself). In the unlikely event that they were able to defeat a Fascist dominance, the unions’ victory would, itself, be totalitarian—its discourse transparently representative, its signifiers full (rather than empty), the labor unions’ rule would be Universal, not hegemonic. Representation, for Laclau, is akin to the rhetorical trope of metonymy, particularly when read alongside the trope of metaphor. Metaphor es-


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tablishes a necessary and analogous relationship between two elements, while metonymy creates a contingent and contiguous relationship. Though the distinction between these two rhetorical tropes constantly slips, a metaphoric discourse offers more fixity in forming relationships. Metaphor instantiates relationships of substance, in which two parts are thought to share the same kernel of meaning within a social system. In a simple example, the metaphor “environmentalists are watermelons” (green on the outside, red on the inside) suggests that environmental advocates and communists share a common substance. In contrast, Laclau develops, hegemony invites metonymic relationships: “A trade union or a peasant organization, for instance, can take up political tasks that are not related by necessary links to their own corporative specificity,” in other words, sharing “no relation of analogic necessity existing between task and agent.”97 The steelworkers may take up, as their own, the farmers’ concerns of land development and privatization of agriculture. If the steelworkers were to become the public face of the collective struggle against corporations, the remnants of their particular concerns would remain. The union’s ability to represent the whole collective struggle derives not from the stable substances of metaphor, but the volatile substitutions of metonymy. Laclau further develops and illustrates his version of representation through the zero. Reflecting on the work of Paul de Man, Laclau identifies the zero as the empty but meaningful element which endows an entire set of numbers with significance: “There can be no one without zero, but the zero always appears in the guise of a one, of a (some)thing. The name is the trope of the zero. The zero is always called a one, when the zero is actually nameless, ‘innommable.’”98 That the zero is named is a fiction, a language game which permits classification of the set, but which subverts the possibility that the set will ever attain permanent, fixed classification. The zero is simultaneously meaningless and the most meaningful, for it has no content but is necessary for the set or system of numbers to make sense as such. De Man’s zero permits the logical possibility that a system of social elements may cohere, without the necessity of class, the determinations of material relations of production, or the ideological oppositions of friends and enemies. The social elements cohere into a chain of equivalence, paradoxically, through the meaningful emptiness of the hegemon, the zero. The zero’s appearance in the system is a “distorted representation,” for it is “a nothing that becomes a something.”99 This deception appears as the zero comes to represent the whole system, or, more accurately for Laclau, the systematicity of the system. So while the enemy corrals the hegemonic bloc in Mouffe’s theory (by threatening the identity of the friends), the zero comes to represent Laclau’s system, in an entirely contingent way. To extend the numerical analogy, for Laclau, the zero defines set; for Mouffe,

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the odds define the evens, while for Hall, the sums and products of past equations define the current hegemony. Laclau’s version of representation calls into question the drive to name a common enemy, as it threatens to fix the substitutional play of metonymy into metaphorical substance. He identifies two visions of democracy, the first characterized by the drive to unify the people against an authority (e.g., the state) and/or an other (e.g., the terrorist enemy).100 The metonymic alternative, found in NSMs, constitutes democracy through difference.101 Laclau argues that a metonymic chain sustains itself against metaphorical equations by calling attention to its multiplicity, all the differences which pollute its perfection. Here, enactments which defy capture into substantial relations of representation advance resistance—not the deterministic vestiges of materialism, nor the stabilizing calculus of friends-against-enemies. Like metonymic representation, Laclau’s second form of rhetorical mediation, articulation, is a process by which elements are placed into relationship in a contingent way, resulting in the formation of new social identities. Articulations form chains of equivalence, in which one identity comes to represent several other social elements, while retaining its (and the other elements’) uniqueness. Articulation “eliminates the separation between the demands, but not the demands themselves. If a series of demands— transport, housing, employment and so on . . . are unfulfilled, the equivalence existent between them—and the popular identity resulting from that equivalence—requires very much the persistence of the demands.”102 Like Mouffe, Laclau relies upon identification, which permits us to conceive and witness the vacillation between universal and particular, metaphor and metonymy, as “real” rhetorical battles we may take part in or witness (for embodied human beings may come to identify with the various rhetorical mediations bandied about in political struggle). Individuals attempt to fill the “subject positions within a structure” through identification, as they attach or view themselves in those structures: identification confers “a basic ambiguity at the heart of all identity,” for language is an opaque mediation between the self and the social.103 Just as representation and articulation are polluted means of relating social elements in resistance, identification can never cleanly link signifier with signified. Laclau’s identification is more Lacanian than Burkean, in the sense that Kenneth Burke theorized identification as a relationship of consubstantiality. Laclau dictates that we “do away altogether with the dialectic of incarnation,” which demands “the mediation of a third” to transparently join two elements (as in Christ’s incarnating of God in humanity).104 Individuals identifying with the rhetorical mediations of the group do not transparently present the group’s substance (as in unmediated relations), nor do they represent the essence of the group (as in relations of consubstantiality).


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In contrast, for Laclau, identification occurs through the Lacanian real, or that which “resists symbolization, and shows itself only through disruptive effects.”105 The Real is akin to the presymbolic reality that we designate as outside the possibility for naming. Laclau interprets the Real as a symbolic presence which prohibits any signification system from reaching totality. It functions as the zero, a nameless placeholder which nonetheless endows an entire relation with meaning.106 For Laclau, as Lacan, the Real helps inspire the passion with which individuals come to identify with symbolic orders, representing themselves through language against the terrifying presence of that which absolutely negates symbolic orders themselves—not an ideological enemy, but reality outside human symbols. The Lacanian Real also helps Laclau avoid the totalizing traps of transparent representation: he asserts that agency (signifier) is never subject to agent (signified), that “the process of representation itself creates retroactively the entity to be represented.”107 Laclau’s theory begins with an embrace of the singularity of social elements, and, as I have reviewed here, stresses the metonymic play of agency over the metaphorical closure of agent. As the logical counterpart to particularism, Laclau assigns two primary functions to universality: Universalism operates as a shared or common realm from which particularities may emerge (as in the shared medium of language, from which unique expressions may flow); and it functions as the telos for articulations, a fictitious and impure totality which nonetheless represents all social elements vying for a new order.108 The first function gives Laclau’s theory a transgressive quality, while the second makes Laclau’s theory properly hegemonic. Universality must exist so that the singularity, particularism, or difference is meaningful as such. But the end-goal of universality, looming behind Laclau’s caveats of impure totalities and contingent, opaque representations, is “to make discursively possible a chain of equivalential effects.”109 Hegemony is hegemonic because of its investment in trumping (if not erasing) difference, in the name of growing commonality (and thus, political power). Hegemonic Agents and Proper Politics Building upon the idea that the zero defines the set, the other which relationally defines the content of a social struggle appears as a logical placeholder which permits the chain of equivalence to commence without the aid of a common substance. But elsewhere in his writings, Laclau’s logical placeholder transforms into the impassioned enemy of Mouffe or the historical oppressor of Hall, inviting the iron discipline of Gramsci. In his more recent discussions of populism, Laclau concludes that all movements will have traces of populism for all constitute an antagonism between “the people” and an enemy.110 We may presume that this enemy is a threat to

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life as we know it due to its imperilment of linguistic meaning, but Laclau’s concrete examples often belie the nuances of his argument. As Laclau describes resistance to Peronist Argentina: “People felt that through the differential particularity of their demands—housing, union rights, level of wages, protection of the national industry, etcetera—something equally present in all of them was expressed, which was opposition to the regime.”111 The Schmittian enemy, as the antagonistic “even” numbers which threaten to negate and simultaneously define the “odds,” connects social actors through commonality. When we see the protests of housing advocates, unionists, and socialists, they appear mediated by a common rhetorical substance—their antagonistic stance toward the state. Though this rhetorical substance differs from “the universality which results from an underlying essence or an unconditioned a priori principle,”112 it nonetheless appears in the name of representing the whole of social struggles. In Laclau’s hegemony, the end goal remains the representation of many by one. Psychoanalytic assumptions also add traces of determinism to Laclau’s hegemony. Like Mouffe, Laclau assumes that individuals are not the proper starting point for analyzing social change, for they are never fully constituted agents.113 Laclau accepts a Freudian assumption that individuals are motivated to social struggle because of a fundamental lack, internal to them and the social structures of which they are a part: “If I need to identify with something, it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification can only be thought of as the result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of that lack.”114 Such a perspective leads to a fairly fatalistic, analogic perspective on social struggles, distanced from the metonymic play and empty signifiers Laclau celebrates elsewhere in his work. By suggesting that the lack radiates from the structure to the individual, Laclau implies that individuals are drawn toward a metaphoric closure for their identities. Like hegemonic collectives seeking to totalize the social, individuals are drawn to political participation through a desire to fully constitute themselves as coherent subjects. From the perspective of transgression, the psychoanalytic assumption that individual identity performances are motivated by a fundamental lack and persistent longing for universality is sterilizing: it overwrites the power of invention and possibilities inherent in human agency (not the human-as-agent). There is little space here for performance, save that the performances of resistance are evidence of the search for identity—a search which is ultimately futile for the individual, but productive for the ghost-like abstractions who are the “real” agents of change. Where the ghost of the deterministic Gramsci haunts Laclau’s writings, there is little space to read political participation in terms of the unstable substitutions which defy arrest by a collective agent, for the performances


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are driven by the telos of totalization rather than immanent play. The telos of totalization appears in a rather homogenous form, as “a particular demand” may gain the “function of universal representation,” lending “coherence to a chain of equivalences and, at the same time, keeping it indefinitely open.”115 Under the theoretical surface, the name expressing social relations results from a series of metonymic exchanges across different antagonisms: this name is the short-lived spawn of contingent couplings. But the on-theground effects assumed for such a name, the end-game of hegemony, is the creation of a substantial metaphor that may subsume all differences in the drive toward a new social order. Such effects cannot happen through necessity and such effects are fictitious (insubstantial); but such effects are still desired by theorists of hegemony. Indeed, while Laclau underscores that articulating agency is more significant than the articulated agent, the telos of hegemony nonetheless remains as the “true North” for tracking social change. Hegemonic agents create and antagonize enemies, carrying out totalizing effects. A collective which exceeds relational identities—particularly those of friends-againstenemies—pushes the boundaries of hegemony, and thus incurs its disciplining. For instance, Laclau concludes that Sorel’s adherence to revolutionary syndicalism was futile, for it never entered into antagonism with the establishment: “Working-class segregationism through violence and the rejection of all participation in democratic institutions . . . was exhausted in being a mechanism endlessly recreating the workers’ separate identity.”116 Here, Laclau evaluates syndicalism as a failure, for it exceeds participation in a mandatory friend-enemy struggle. Echoing Gramsci, syndicalists may master “anarchoid phrases,” but will never change the “iron conditions in which the real struggle is going on.” Emphasizing the agent of hegemony, metonymy appears less as a playful art, and more as a logical means to prevent rhetorical mediation from sliding into totalizing determinism. There are times when reading Laclau’s logical imperatives that the most interesting pieces of contemporary resistance are suffocated.117 What might all of this mean for rhetorical critics and others invested in making sense of social change? Two anchors of hegemony weigh down interpretations of resistant performances. Metonymy requires a reading practice (if not ontological pull) of analogy or metaphor, to make sense as resistance: for if we accept the formation of collective agents as “a field of metonymic displacements” or “an undecided terrain of contingent articulations in which the principle of contiguity prevails over that of analogy,” how are we ever to see the antagonisms which Laclau asserts as necessary?118 Substantial equations of friends-against-enemies are an easy shorthand for interpreting the difficult practices of social struggle: while we may understand them as more complex, multifarious agents, their tendencies toward totalization, universality, metaphoric substances, analogy, and agent, remain.

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Importantly, Laclau encourages other forms of reading practice, ones which might better suit transgression. He advises that it is more useful to explore social relations in the specific contexts in which they form or disperse, rather than track them “through simple designations such as classes, ethnic groups, and so on, which are at best names for transient points of stabilization.”119 But when the telos of hegemonic logic is to establish a universal social order, appearing under a single sign (if empty, displaced, and open), it is difficult to embrace a more complex reading practice. Though Laclau’s writings push toward the vanishing-point where hegemony and transgression blur, his insistence on totalization, universalization, and linguistic mediation permit sharper distinctions between these two modes of resistance. We may question with Laclau the possibility or desirability of pure transgression; but it is important to retain some clear distinctions between the two modes of resistance, in order to avoid the hegemonic tendency to dismiss, ignore, or erase transgressive enactments. As they have become increasingly transgressive, theories of hegemony have come to embrace rhetorical agency and a looser, less substantial view of representation. Though Gramsci’s original theory gave rhetoric an important place in the constitution of social movements (replacing outdated essentialism), from Hall through Laclau, the power of rhetoric as a persuasive art and a tropological trickster has grown. However, as I have argued, two anchors of hegemonic logic have diminished the transgressive potential of social change. Friend-enemy subjectivity and metaphorical representation retain vestiges of determinism which influence our ability to interpret resistance. The commonality of friends—even if loosely defined by common enemies— encourages witnesses to see singular, embodied acts as representing a common collective agent. Representation as a rhetorical “substance” (versus transcendent essence or substitutional metonymy) deflects attention from the autonomous, interruptive effects of resistance, toward the ways in which rhetoric mediates a social force attempting to take state power. Friend-enemy subjectivity and metaphorical representation offer stable landmarks and transparent relationships for interpretative practice, offering more control over the contingent process of social change. Until these two anchors are cut free (or alternative touchstones identified), our ability to interpret transgressive acts will remain hindered, subject to hegemony—not only in social and political theory, but also in rhetorical scholarship.

HEGEMONY IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES Hegemony’s influence on communication scholarship in the United States has been somewhat slow in coming. Much of the mainstream treatment


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of hegemony has equated the concept with ideological dominance, honing in on the state’s ability to contain resistance through accommodation, much more than the ability of resistors to amass counter-hegemony. For instance, in one of the few social movement studies related to hegemony, Murphy explores the ways in which the Kennedy administration ended the Freedom Rides: though the federal government employed “force to coerce states to obey the law” and protect the Civil Rights activists, eventually the administration used the power of rhetoric to channel protestors’ efforts into registering voters.120 As Mumby rightly asserts, from a Gramscian perspective, “hegemony embodies simultaneously processes of dominance and resistance,” for it is the process through which a ruling class (defined as capitalist, proletariat, or otherwise) gains and retains power over other classes.121 Social movement scholarship has mostly avoided direct engagement with the concept of hegemony (outside occasional citations of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). However, most social movement rhetorical theory and criticism accepts friend-enemy subjects and metaphorical representation as the common sense of social change. While theories of hegemony are not limited to these two assumptions, as I have demonstrated thus far in the chapter, these two assumptions are key aspects of hegemonic logic. Moreover, friend-enemy subjects and metaphorical representation allow critics to ignore or contain the transgressive potential of many acts of resistance. However, scholars debating the centrality of agents and representation in social movement scholarship (beginning in the 1980s) join more contemporary critics in rhetorical theory and cultural studies, with implications for the discipline’s reception of both hegemony and transgression as modes of resistance. Hegemonic Logic in Social Movement Rhetorical Theory The maintenance of traditional sociological theories has slowed the influence of hegemony in social movement rhetoric scholarship. Vestiges of rational-actor, resource mobilization, and functionalist protocols have remained in the assumptions and approaches of social movement critics. Though hegemony (particularly the more transgressive it appears, in the work of Laclau) is theoretically very different than these pre-hegemonic protocols, the two main assumptions which permit more deterministic treatments of hegemony are often replicated in the traditional theories’ assumptions. At the bedrock of social movement ontology rests the assumption that the “social movement” (not the individuals comprising it, nor the ideologies and discourses fueling it) is the entity which does the work of social change. Early social movement rhetoric scholars, for instance, demarcated

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the movement as a uniquely rhetorical, collective agent. Critics treated movements as analogous to individuals. They had dramatic life cycles which waxed through acts of “transformation” to bring “salvation” to the old order.122 But movements were decidedly collective, advancing rhetorical study beyond the great orator tradition, into the terrain of dialectical battles between institutions and out-groups. Movements were knowable to critics through their peculiar “pattern[s] of public discussion,” which functioned as a representational economy linking a specific vocabulary to collective agent.123 Scholars took changes in language as a sign of rhetorical effectivity, for language helped transform members’ identities even as they set political demands for the established power: For instance, in the case of Black Power, the terms “Black” and “African American” lent new senses of self to movement constituents.124 By the 1970s, rhetoric scholars joined sociologists in advancing “resource mobilization” and “functional” approaches to the collective agent, concentrating less on the dramas of ideology and discourse, and more on strategies and tactics.125 Here, the individuals who joined movements were “understood in terms of the logic of costs and benefits as well as opportunities for action,” rather than as “under the sway of sentiments, emotions, and ideologies.”126 As Stewart argued in the case of Black Power, civil rights rhetoric evolved “as new generations of leaders” had to adapt “ideologies to members’ rising expectations and demands for the long-promised, perfect social orders.”127 Resource mobilization theories tended to restrict effective action to achieving policy change instead of large-scale cultural change.128 As such, resource mobilization traded the critical consciousness of Marxism for a rational-actor approach to collectivities. In communication studies, the treatment of social movements took a social scientific turn, as critics developed “taxonomies” for movement types, strategies, and functions.129 As Gordon Mitchell writes, early social movement scholarship “exhibited a preoccupation with issues of generic definition and classification” in an effort to make social movement rhetoric a unique scholarly endeavor.130 As proponents of a functional approach argued, rhetoric was the means “through which social movements perform[ed] necessary functions that enable[d] them to come into existence, to meet opposition, and, perhaps, to succeed in bringing about (or resisting) change.”131 Though functional approaches took an instrumental (rather than ideological or hegemonic) view of persuasion, they nonetheless upheld the centrality of collective agent and representational economy for understanding social change. Rhetoric united the voices of followers and the visions of leaders, efficiently organizing and effectively expressing social change agents: for instance, Stewart analyzed reports from the Knights of Labor to illustrate how rhetoric, over time, built a friend-enemy social relationship


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between unions and capitalism.132 Rhetoric functioned representationally to “mobilize the discontented and disaffected of society into action” even as its users tried “to unify and organize members and sympathizers.”133 Sociologists have critiqued rational-actor, resource mobilization, and functional approaches for their tendency to stress the nuts-and-bolts of social change over the broader reasons for it.134 The rigid rationality of resource mobilization has been challenged within rhetoric scholarship, too, as a “hegemonic rhetorical theory of social movement” which “renders invisible many groups and tactics.”135 The weaknesses of traditional sociological theory were realized, in large part, through the rise of movements for gay and lesbian rights, Black Power, and radical feminism, among others. These and other NSMs challenged the social scientific assumption that rational actors employed rhetoric to organize others against the status quo, while they advanced movement theory beyond the Marxist view that ideological contradictions fueled historical progress. Rather than taking collective identity as a given, as both Marxist and traditional sociological theorists had, NSM scholars explored how language, symbols, and performances, constituted new ways of building and expressing individual and collective identities (especially for marginalized groups). Proponents argued that the study of NSMs was attractive because “the passage to a ‘postindustrial’ society” saw conflicts and new identities emerging beyond, or in combination with, class.136 Further, NSMs were thought to be more “segmented, diffuse, and decentralized” in their organizational structure, and more radical or disobedient in their protest, than traditional working-class movements.137 Yet, the characteristics defining the “new” movements or their rhetoric resonate with friends-against-enemies and representational economies. For prolific NSM theorist Alberto Melucci, NSMs are defined by three traits: “actors’ recognition of commonalities and shared identities, objectives, and understandings; adversarial relations with opponents who claim the same goods or values; and actions that exceed the tolerance limits of a social system, thereby pushing it to change.”138 While the third trait suggests a more transgressive quality, friend-enemy dialectics remain to guide NSMs’ “adversarial relations with opponents”; and “commonalities” or shared realities represent diverse actors together in struggle. Communication and cultural studies scholars have joined sociologists in expanding the study of NSMs—and like Melucci, their work is open to new possibilities for theory, even as it tacitly maintains the vestiges of determinism. For instance, the early 1990s saw important scholarship concerning the radical collectives EarthFirst! and Queer Nation. Both collectives employ more transgressive tactics, as critics note, including acts which inventively combine “‘guerilla theater,’ non-violent civil disobedience and confrontation, and[/or] specific acts of private property destruction,” such as

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EarthFirst!ers “chaining themselves to logging equipment, sitting between wilderness and bulldozers, blocking entrances to utility plants, cementing themselves in road blocks.”139 In addition, critics note that both groups affront the moderate, reformist, or mainstream segments of the movements to which they are associated, at the same time they challenge the status quo. For instance, Queer Nation helps to problematize the gay rights movement for excluding women, the poor, and people of color; and for more generally essentializing a gay identity.140 The NSM scholars demonstrate a sensitivity to transgression, as they cue into material-rhetorical tactics and identities not bound to commonality. However, the centrality of agents and metaphorical representations remain in the analysis of transgressive texts. While the “sit-ins, pranks, and threats of ecotage are symbolic on their own merits,” and “not simply a vehicle to draw attention to rational appeals,” EarthFirst! transgressions are placed in the service of friends. EarthFirst! helps other uninstitutionalized voices in environmentalism appear more credible to mainstream audiences, at the same time that it lures the public to environmental advocacy.141 And though Queer Nation reinforces the tendency of queer theory in general to “refus[e] to name what [queer] identity means,” the very subversion of identity and celebration of difference coalesces common interests against a dominant social order.142 The goal of transgression, as suggested by these NSM analyses, is to constitute a hegemonic queer or environmental agent to challenge the capitalist or heteronormative “enemy.” Such an agent becomes the primary means through which resistant rhetoric is evaluated as effective. More recent criticism and theorizing of NSMs has moved toward even more transgressive perspectives, partly through productive partnership with postmodern and performance theory; however, friend-enemy subjectivity and metaphorical representation remain influential in evaluations of resistance.143 In his recent analysis of protestors at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, for instance, Bruner acknowledges the power of identity-bending, carnivalesque performances, but ultimately employs figures of collective agents—protestors (friends) against humorless bureaucracies and violent states (enemies)—to account for their effects.144 Vanderford focuses on the ironic enactments of YaBasta!, whose members playfully confront police while wearing discarded items from consumer culture. The Italian collective’s material performances offer a more compelling resistance than the words of a “more humane democracy.” But again, “the enemy”—mediated through the symbolic “substances” of corporate globalization, consumerism, and police violence, vis-à-vis clever, local protestors—grounds Vanderford’s claims about the power of new forms of material resistance.145 DeLuca and Peeples read the presence and visual representations of the human body as weapons against global capital, for the latter offer powerful


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new forms of argumentation: “If we take image events seriously as visual discourse . . . we cannot simply reduce them to the function of gaining attention for the ‘real’ rhetoric of words.”146 An environmental activist protesting deforestation by burying himself in a road with only his head visible, compels us more than the linguistic appeals of nature’s intrinsic value.147 Here, DeLuca argues that such an image event directly ruptures public consciousness, belying rhetoric’s apparent task of mediating friendsagainst-enemies. However, friend-enemy subjectivity returns as the critical index for understanding new modes of resistance: As DeLuca and Peeples conclude, anarchist property violence in Seattle fulfills “the function of gaining the attention of the distracted media.”148 Embodied performance of resistance represents the power of global justice friends, expanding the appeal of their collective subject by courting the press. In mainstream communication studies literature, NSMs have been joined by a turn toward the study of publics and counterpublics, as the “torchbearers” for social movement scholarship.149 As the research on counterpublics demonstrates, “Social change, protest, and movements . . . especially for marginalized voices and discourses, are central to its project.”150 Indeed, movements (or NSMs at least) seem synonymous with counterpublics, as “nondominant publics” which “voice oppositional needs and values not by appealing to the universality of the bourgeois public sphere but by affirming specificity of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or some other axis of difference.”151 Counterpublics affirm their oppositional identities in a dialectic of retreat and engagement, by which groups relate to dominant publics to meet transformational demands; and turn inward to constitute needs and identities apart from the status quo.152 In spite of more flexible theories and transgressive objects of study within NSM and counterpublic scholarship, the basis for more deterministic interpretations remains. Counterpublics are often positioned in friend-enemy struggles, as in a toxic tour that pits breast cancer survivors against industrial polluters, or the theatrical interventions of AIDS activists against Congress.153 Such interpretations seem logical given the dialectical definition of counterpublics as constrained by dominant publics. Likewise, an economy of representation appears as a natural outcome of the definition of counterpublics as discursive arenas, by which talk and performance constitute (and express) the collective identity of subaltern groups. Lost in the turn to counterpublics is a much-needed debate with the received traditions of social movement rhetoric. The debate began with Malcolm Sillars and Michael Calvin McGee in 1980, when they questioned the centrality of the social movement agent: regardless of whether or not it arises due to structural exigencies or identity needs, and regardless of whether or not it uses rhetoric instrumentally or elusively to constitute itself, does the discrete, empirical figure of “a social movement” exist?154

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Criticizing scholarship rooted in resource mobilization theory, McGee argued: The objective, empirical phenomeon [sic] of human beings angrily parading in front of a fence stays the same despite my choice of one term or another to characterize and conceptualize it. . . . “Movements” are not phenomena, nor does the concept “movement” explain a phenomenon empirically; rather, “movement” is an analogue comparing the flow of social facts to physical movement. It is an interpretation of phenomenal data controlled less by what happens in the real world than by what a particular user of the analogue wants to see in the real world.155

McGee’s hermeneutic view of social change suggests that the idea of a coherent “movement” flows from scholarly critics, journalists, and other political actors who affix the term to various events and texts. To suggest that a social movement is “a set of meanings” rather than a given, empirical phenomenon, loosens rhetorical criticism from its bondage to the agent, inviting more critical attention to the mediating agency of rhetoric. To take McGee’s challenge seriously, one would have to relinquish the assumption that movements are built by rational actors or effective persuaders—but one would also have to relinquish the ability to attribute “constitutive communication” to a coherent, collective agent. McGee’s initial volley calls into question the necessity of friend-enemy agents for social struggle. DeLuca’s work on radical environmental collectives carried on McGee’s challenge. DeLuca embraces the turn toward McGee’s meaning-centered movement, tracing the “changes in human or collective consciousness or changes in the symbolic interpretation of the environment” rather than accepting movements as “empirical things, groups or organizations.”156 Importantly, as part of this move, resistance becomes less a matter of out-groups engaging institutions for recognition, rights, and goods, and more a matter of “contest[ing] social norms, challeng[ing] the logic governing the system, and, in sum, deconstruct[ing] the established naming of the world.”157 NSMs helped build a sense of collective agency through identification. But, as DeLuca illustrates, confrontational direct action from EarthFirst! and others undoes meanings and worldviews.158 By relinquishing the functional imperative to view movement-as-phenomenon, DeLuca invites attention to transgressive tactics that exceed metaphorical economies of representation.159 Unfortunately, the challenge begun by McGee and carried forth by DeLuca has been largely abandoned. Perhaps this is because social movement debates were viewed as tedious definitional quibbles that shamed ordinary (and extraordinary) people’s efforts at social change. In the meantime, it seems that most scholars engaging resistance, counterpublics, and social


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movements have salvaged two classical concepts in their work: those of “dialectical enjoinment” and the “identity constitutive function.”160 These two concepts maintain the vestiges of determinism in social movement rhetorical scholarship, however implicitly. Dialectical enjoinment, translated as institutions versus uninstitutionalized collectivities, anarchists against the state, counterpublics against dominant publics, becomes shorthand for friend-enemy subjectivity. Likewise, to suggest that rhetoric constitutes new collective identity invites a representative correspondence between symbol (queer, Black) and subject (Queer Nation, Black Power Movement, counterpublic, NSM, or otherwise). It remains to be argued whether efforts at social change may occur without friend-enemy subjects and economies of metaphorical representation. But as social movement rhetoric scholars increasingly advocate, there is more to social change than linguistic linkages between bodies on the street and phenomenal movements. The centrality of social-movementagent overwrites the challenges that a more transgressive resistance poses to traditional theories; and even judges transgression for posing “a serious image problem” to the collective agent, as when anarchists fail to represent friends-against-enemies properly.161 While social movement scholars have yet to fully take up the debate with hegemony, within rhetoric and cultural studies scholarship more generally, the debates have begun in earnest. Debating Hegemony in Criticism, Rhetorical Theory, and Cultural Studies In the mid-1990s, Celeste Condit and Dana Cloud offered competing interpretations of Gramsci’s influential concept relative to media (and rhetorical) criticism. Condit claimed that communication scholars had not considered hegemony as a process of rhetorically forming consent, preferring instead an older usage of the term as synonymous with ideological dominance.162 Allying herself explicitly with Laclau and Mouffe (and implicitly with Hall), Condit suggests that hegemony occurs as identification moves subject positions to accord with the range of permissible ideologies. Hegemonic consent is an active process of achieving “social concord,” or “the active or passive acceptance of a given social policy or political framework as the best that can be negotiated under the given conditions.”163 Leaders must appeal to, and gain assent from, a plurality of active audiences in order to achieve hegemony. In contrast, Cloud re-affirmed a more Marxist interpretation of Gramsci, stating that hegemony is “the process by which a social order remains stable by generating consent to its parameters through the production and distribution of ideological texts that define social reality for the majority of the people.”164 While hegemony is not exactly synonymous with dominance

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here, it is a process by which ideological power maintains itself rather than a more “democratic” consensus-building implicit in Condit’s interpretation. For Cloud, “Contradiction, rupture, and multivocality are taken by the hegemony theorist not as signs that a democratic compromise has been achieved, but that a few token voices are allowed to speak within the ‘permissible range of disagreement.’”165 At issue within the Condit-Cloud debate is the purpose of criticism, as well as the definition of material rhetoric. Under Condit’s definition of social concord, the critic’s stance is not one of opposition to dominance per se, but rather, one seeking to grasp how a bloc comes to power through consensus with others.166 For Cloud, reducing hegemony to concordance hampers the critic’s ability to confront oppression: hegemony is better used as part of a “critical project emphasizing the continuing salience of concepts of structure, domination, and class antagonism.”167 Cloud extends her discussion to postmodern criticism, noting that without a (real) basis in Marxist structural analysis, we risk exaggerating the effectiveness of opening new possibilities within a status quo that easily accommodates them.168 In response, Condit identifies the advantages of accounting for a plurality of factors in achieving hegemony: “My theoretical formulations are as sensitive to the problems of racism, sexism, and capitalism as is Cloud’s 19th century Marxism (rather, more so).”169 In expanding the telos of criticism beyond a more deterministic Marxism, Condit begins to inspire an alternative definition of materialism in which “the ideal of ‘economic equality’ is not the only one that must be treasured in order to avoid violence and oppression. Culture, language, and identity are as significant and as real as economics, though they are interwoven with economic structures.”170 I return to the significance of Condit’s call for a new materialism below, in light of Cloud’s challenges to critical rhetoric. In the meantime, it is worth noting in more recent communication scholarship on hegemony the similarities between Condit and Cloud— similarities which are more evident once we understand that, for Gramsci, hegemony indicated both a formation that had achieved power over the social order and a bloc which strove to replace the current hegemony (i.e., “counter-hegemony”). Taking Condit’s position (which is more aligned with that of Chantal Mouffe, reviewed above), hegemony is irreducible to dominance, because its tools of persuasion are more or less available to all members of a democratic plurality. Taking Cloud’s position (which is closest to Stuart Hall’s as reviewed above), hegemony more often results in dominance because counter-hegemony is extremely difficult to attain—particularly given the ability of “hegemonic” powers to coerce, to maintain material monopolies over the tools of persuasion, and to inoculate the social order against resistance. Irreducible to either dominance or


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resistance, Gramsci’s hegemony is a political struggle marked by ebbs and flows, strange and shifting alliances, the power of coercion and persuasion viewable in a contingent moment.171 From this perspective, Condit and Cloud may appear to be different sides of the same coin, as hegemony is available to the oppressor and oppressed. Indeed, as Michelle Holling identifies, counter-hegemonic groups (or those attempting to form an oppositional social concord) may adopt the same norms of the hegemonic order (or social concord) when confronted with internal opposition (or social discord).172 In Holling’s study, the counterhegemonic group attempted “to sanction who may speak within a vernacular space and, more importantly, what may be articulated within those spaces,” demonstrating the limits of hegemony as a mode of resistance.173 In the formation of a counter-hegemony, unity must be maintained for resistance to be effective—and those who transgress it (or create, in Holling’s terms, social discord) must be disciplined. Similarly, Hoerl concludes that oppositional groups make use of the same “tools” as dominant hegemonic groups: “the social order may be challenged both within and against the discourses and forms of dominant ideology . . . counter-hegemonic messages may be inextricable from dominant ideology in popular texts insofar as common sense beliefs and structures open spaces for commercial media to recognize social injustices and re-envision a just and equitable future.”174 Oppositional memories of the civil rights movement—like those dramatized in Spike Lee’s film, Malcolm X—make use of the mythical common sense of dominant white hegemony, and thus gain visibility in the struggle for power. Thus, while respecting the different philosophical bases and critical aspirations of Condit and Cloud, it is important to understand the similarities of their position from a more robust Gramscian reading of hegemony than is typically acknowledged in communication studies. The second debate that problematizes hegemony surrounds the critical rhetoric project, for it has raised questions of how rhetoric might contribute to a non-determinist materialist politics. The twin critical-rhetorical impulses McKerrow named in 1989 resemble the materialist-determinist logics of hegemony, and the elusive-contingent enactments of transgression. Recall that McKerrow’s critique of domination occurs as rhetorical critics locate “the discourse of power which creates and sustains the social practices which control the dominated.”175 This more traditional ideological criticism caused little stir in the scholarly conversations to come, because it was grounded in a firm political end—that of undoing dominance, of emancipating the oppressed. But the critique of domination’s more transgressive companion, the critique of freedom, refuses to privilege any ends, model relations, etc.: inspired by Foucault, it encourages an immanent criticism, such that critics avoid projecting their work “towards a freedom

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for something predetermined . . . the telos that marks the project is one of never-ending skepticism.”176 As Greene notes, the critique of freedom allows the critical rhetoric project to be “open-ended and, hopefully, free from . . . orthodoxy.”177 But such freedom has troubled some materialist critics who desire not only an end for criticism, but also a basis on which to ground judgment. Ono and Sloop argue that the critique of freedom leads to an innocuous stance of distrusting everything, with no basis for evaluating the morality of (oppressive) power structures. The authors advocate positing a telos—not in the sense of “a solid or stationary endpoint” nor as a “final utopia,” but as a fleeting and fictitious truth or purpose—to avoid the potential for the critique of freedom to appear a-political.178 Other rhetoricians are much more committed to a firm basis in determinist materialism, making the turn toward transgression challenging. For instance, Zompetti turns to Gramsci to locate a telos for critical rhetoric. Rhetorical critics, like Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, may help build a collective will to challenge material relations of dominance. Zompetti believes that by unmasking the subjectivities which weave us into dominance, and promoting the “symbols” and “common threads” which “help forge a unity among individuals of a particular community,” rhetorical critics may give the critique of freedom more teeth than it has in McKerrow’s original scheme.179 By using the critique of freedom to amass friend-enemy politics, in other words, it may become effective. More severely, Cloud attacks “anti-realist (relativist) and anti-materialist (idealist)” strains of rhetorical theory not only for their lack of telos or foundation, but also for their ignorance of political realities: “We ought not sacrifice the notions of practical truth, bodily reality, and material oppression to the tendency to render all of experience discursive, as if no one went hungry or died in war. To say that hunger and war are rhetorical is to state the obvious; to suggest that rhetoric is all they are is to leave critique behind.”180 Such a defense of realism (and concomitant attack on critical rhetoric) has implications for theorizing collective action as well as rhetorical criticism. Without (a Marxist) reality, strict materialists argue, we are left with only a “deep skepticism about the possibility of mobilizing people against real oppression.”181 Cloud defends identification based upon class interests as the proper way to mediate individuals and collectives struggling for social change.182 Like the more determinist Gramsci, a strict rhetorical materialism bases such identifications on the realities of class or contradictions between the ideologies of capitalism and one’s class experience. Materiality without a basis in structural relations of production is merely aesthetic, and threatens to support the contemporary capitalist order. Without some account of materiality, criticism risks concluding “that those who are oppressed or exploited need discursive redefinition of their identities, rather than a transformation of their material conditions as a primary


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task.”183 Here, Cloud warns that the more contingent theorists of hegemony (like Laclau and Mouffe) may render discursive all political struggle, by emphasizing language over the excessive materiality and corporeality of protest. But her warning retains a strict bifurcation between reality and discourse, materiality and textuality, “real” politics and “false” constitutive rhetoric, as the basis for material (or materialist) rhetoric. In other words, Cloud’s answer to the de-materializing “rhetorical politics of subjectivity” is to demand an extra-textual Marxist reality as the basis for critical judgments.184 All other critique is too caught up in the ethereal ideals of mind, theory, and language to show discourse’s impact on real bodies, practices, and relationships; or it is too hamstrung by its hesitancy to commit to a (real) politics. But as Greene counters, returning to a strict Marxism “threatens to dematerialize rhetorical practices by restricting our understanding of materiality to the intentions and motives of an ‘always already’ ruling class.”185 Classical Marxism, as the transgressive modes of resistance explored throughout this book repeatedly demonstrate, is not the only way reconsider the materiality of rhetoric (or rhetorical materialism). Cloud’s defense of realism has moderated in more recent work, particularly as it relates to social change. Were it not for the emphasis on class, Cloud’s ideal movement would not be especially far from the collective subjects of Hall, and even Mouffe. Such subjects are collective agents, sharing a common rhetorical substance (at times, a “real” Marxist substance, at other times, a fictitious hegemonic “substance”). Rhetoric forms the collective agent or class consciousness, not by disclosing a necessary relationship, but by constituting a properly political group. Marxist determinism and Gramscian hegemony (particularly the more “hegemonic” politics of class leadership and friend-enemy identification) are allies. The affinity between a determinist and hegemonic position appears stronger in light of transgressive modes of resistance. Cloud asserts that other figures of resistance, such as Hardt and Negri’s multitude, “are haphazard and inarticulate response[s] to discipline” which simply acquiesce to the dominant order. The vestiges of determinism within our theoretical common sense interpret transgression as excessive—it not only fails to register as proper politics, but it also actually sabotages those trying to conduct real change. Greene has countered Cloud’s efforts to reinforce a Marxist materialism on two grounds, both of which relate to the post-hegemonic position of cultural studies (detailed below): he challenges the determinism which rules out contingency and rhetoric in Cloud’s theory; and he accepts the move toward a post-Fordist economy which renders classical Marxism untenable as the foundation for reality and resistance. As noted above, Cloud views rhetoric’s task as instrumental, fostering identifications to produce a class-based movement. Though Cloud’s view of rhetoric is becoming

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more constitutive, this constitution must unveil ideological incongruity to create a collective based on real interests. In mandating that change occur through a class-based agent, Greene concludes, strict materialists “provide the grounds by which political interests can be formed independently of communication and culture.”186 By identifying proper collective agents and appeals, strict materialists are better able to guide social movement—but they also subject rhetoric to determinism, reducing its contingent power.187 In addition, Greene argues that strict materialism fails to address the changing character of capitalism. Like the post-hegemony theorists described below, Greene argues that capitalist production is infusing everyday life, departing from a Fordist model of compartmentalized production. Communication and affect, forms of “immaterial” labor, are “inextricably interwoven into the forces and relations of production.”188 With no pure basis outside of capitalist power from which to launch resistance, a working-class movement (no matter how well-calibrated) cannot be the triumphant figure Marx imagined. Rhetoric scholars may continue analyzing the constitutive rhetoric of traditional change agents (such as parties or unions). But, Greene concludes, the basis for mediating such agents cannot be a class consciousness without returning “a ravenous hydra from Marxism’s past” in the form of “moral fundamentalism and a politics envious of the state’s monopoly of violence.”189 Greene’s development of an alternative rhetorical materialism challenges Cloud’s strict determinism, as well as scholars who take “substantial” representation and friend-enemy politics as natural ingredients for social change. To view social movements as locked into dialectics of domination and oppression suggests that class—and arguably, other collective forms of resistance built upon identifications with common ideologies—is “product” rather than “process.”190 To focus on the product of constitutive rhetoric, its dialectical agent, deflects attention from the power of communication itself, as capable of having an immediate intervention in the world (apart from various forms of agent).191 Rather than subjecting labor to a class-based movement, Greene finds promise in the constitutive power of labor itself as “‘a force that bursts apart, breaks, interrupts, unhinges any preexisting equilibrium of any possible continuity.’”192 Breaking away from Marxist materialism and determinist hegemony, labor is conceived as irreducible to capitalism or a social movement agent, for it “generates a productive excess impossible to calculate and control.”193 This excess has the potential for concrete impacts, irreducible to the production of ethereal subjectivities. For Greene, rhetoric’s materiality (and power) are found in productive labor that surfeits instrumentality and agents sanctioned by authority (notably, the state and capital). The new rhetorical materialism advocated by Greene seems commensurate with cultural studies scholars who advocate a post-hegemonic theory of power and resistance: “Posthegemony signifies the shift from a rhetoric of


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persuasion to a regime in which what counts are the effects produced and orchestrated by affective investment in the social, if by affect we mean the order of bodies rather than the order of signification.”194 The main lines of argument and evidence supporting a post-hegemonic politics are: a turn toward post-industrial capitalism and biopolitics, and the appearance of non- or less-hegemonic forms of resistance and political action. Toward the former, supporters of a post-hegemony argue that the basis of hegemony (that is, disciplinary power or domination and legitimate institutions which reproduce the social order) is giving way. Taking a Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, post-hegemony theorists presume that power “addresses itself simultaneously to the biological, economic and spiritual life of the population—its ways of living, producing, consuming, thinking, feeling, and acting.”195 A post-hegemonic power works through invention, a persistent production of relationships across the whole spectrum of human life.196 While hegemony is useful in revealing the stakes of representations or social relations between agents, it cannot fully explain a biopolitical regime that operates through the immediate transmission of affect (or, a “body’s immaterial capacities to think, feel and understand”).197 While hegemony treats power as that which dominates humans through signification, posthegemony explores power that, at least partially, escapes representation.198 It is a power that inflects all aspects of an individual’s life at once, corporeal as well as cognitive. In sum, then, while hegemonic theories of power concentrate on how symbolic action and meaning represent relationships, posthegemonic theories concern themselves with affective intensity which may influence individual bodies or the body politic in concrete, material ways.199 In addition to questioning hegemony’s capacity to explain biopolitical power, post-hegemony theorists question the concept’s ability to explain resistance. Hegemony concentrates on the formation and expression of a collective will, including its discourse legitimating efforts at social change.200 To understand new modes of resistance, though, we must relinquish the hegemonic desire for collective action to coalesce around identities known and expressible outside of the enactment of resistance itself. As post-hegemony theorists argue, biopolitical power can only be fought on its own terms and ground—not by “contesting domination through discursive argument. Or through symbolic struggles,” as in a hegemonic order.201 The “immediate,” “unreflective,” and performative are the main traits of a post-hegemonic power.202 Post-hegemony theorists advocate for total, bottom-to-top self-organization, in accounting for, or attempting, social change.203 What appears through such self-invention are unorganized collections of singularities, whose power derives from their particularity (rather than commonality).204 While the hegemonic collective organizes and expresses itself through common terms to achieve a new social order, the post-hegemonic collective affects social change in the moment of

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resistance. Through constant invention of singularities, or the creation of unique, fleshy rhetorical performances, a post-hegemonic collective appears as perpetually variable.205 Post-hegemonic resistance thus distinguishes itself from hegemonic resistance which strives for a stable appearance through friend-enemy politics: “The formation of a public is a provisional event that does not exhaust, but multiplies the chances for the re-invention of possible shared worlds. Beyond the binary and polarized publics that contemporary hegemonic tactics attempt to constitute, a public is always an occasion of potential singularization beyond all binary divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them.’”206 The appearance of a post-hegemonic resistance may not differ markedly from the hegemonic struggles imagined in Laclau’s work, for a post-hegemonic collective is completely contingent, and irreducible to the politics of an agent. However, post-hegemonic collectives also distance themselves from representational effects. Through its invention of singularities, a posthegemonic collective avoids being party to economies of representation (unless ascribed by observers). When a post-hegemonic collective appears, it will likely not be focused “into plain view,” as in hegemonic subjects of the past: post-hegemony theorists argue that the labor of resistance is not found in constituting or representing the proletariat (or other “friend”), but in “the work of producing society itself.”207 Just as the immediate labor of rhetoric might invent a new materialism, post-hegemony theorists advocate that the power of resistance is found in the concrete, singular labor of life unbounded by collective subjects. In spite of these marked differences, it is important to recognize the common ground between post-hegemonic theories and less deterministic conceptions of hegemony, as they both seek “to see how the dynamics of capital are constituting subjectivities, relations of exploitation, and forces of political resistance and invention.”208 Such common ground is important to bear in mind, for it reveals a continuum of resistance instead of bifurcating hegemony and transgression. Unfortunately, such common ground is typically forgotten, as defenders of hegemony reaffirm that non-hegemonic resistance is a “fantasy.”209 Because of the pattern of dismissal for transgression, and the immanent danger that hegemony will subsume it within its own theoretical common ground, it is important to view transgression from a more transgressive stance.

CONCLUSION: APPROACHING TRANSGRESSION AS A MODE OF RESISTANCE Hegemony forms today’s common sense of social change, in a variety of academic disciplines and activist discourses. Theories of hegemony share


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a common history in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, who advanced the concept (to a certain degree) against the essentializing tendencies of orthodox Marxism. Theorists cast rhetoric in the role of mediator, an inventional power which builds a collective agent from the “raw materials” of issues, ideas, and individuals and/or their identities. Some view rhetorical mediation as a material process, determined to a large degree by historical relations of power; others see in rhetorical mediation a means to motivate individuals to friend-enemy struggles; and still others transform rhetorical mediation into a highly contingent, substitutional agency. Yet, each variation retains some version of friend-enemy politics and a representational view of rhetoric. Rhetoric and communication studies scholars have tacitly accepted these assumptions as guides for interpreting resistance, from more traditional through NSM actions. But the debates over a new materialism and post-hegemonic theory have begun questioning the voracity of hegemony as a theory of power and social change. As industrial capitalism morphs into new ways of effecting populations, and as new enactments of resistance challenge the representation of friend-enemy politics, scholars call for a new theoretical vocabulary and interpretive practice to make sense of social change. The book’s remaining chapters respond to this call, offering transgressive alternatives to friend-enemy agents and metaphorical representation: the chapters locate, in theory and historical practice, examples of companion subjects and a politics of enactment which illustrate a post-hegemonic politics. The chapters also respond to the objections and questions raised by supporters of hegemony, concerning the traps of transgression: without the ability to locate enemies and friends (in the sense of a common materialist vocabulary), do we concede the basis for naming oppression and fostering solidarity—do we succumb to the privilege of erasing material differences, which is arguably one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of contemporary capitalism? In attempting to escape representation, do transgressive resistors reduce themselves to an apolitical nihilism? Through critical self-reflexivity, a non-dogmatic account and invention of rhetorical materiality, and a move from agent to agency, transgression may become a viable mode of resistance on its own terms.

NOTES 1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 141–42. 2. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, “Introduction,” to Selections from the Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971), xvii–xcvi.

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3. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 8. Elsewhere, Day performs a rich genealogy of hegemony in Marxist, Leninist, Gramscian, and Laclauian thought, concentrating on the coercive and consensual “irradiation effects” (Gramsci’s term) of successful revolutions: they were to be “totalizing in their intent, and rely upon class-based, state centred models of social change” (Richard J. F. Day, “From Hegemony to Affinity: The Political Logic of the Newest Social Movements,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 [2004]: 722). While my critique of hegemony is influenced by Day’s structural critique, I concentrate on what I consider two rhetorical-epistemic anchors of hegemony. I concur with Day that anarchism undermines the logic of hegemony and begs for alternative theoretical resources. I believe that such resources are found not only in conversation with anarchism, but also with performances and theories of transgression more generally. 4. See, for instance, Bonnie J. Dow, “Hegemony, Feminist Criticism, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7, no. 3 (1990): 261–74; Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey’s Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13, no. 2 (1996): 115–37; Jamie Skerski, “From Prime-Time to Daytime: The Domestication of Ellen DeGeneres,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 363–81; and Robin P. Clair, “The Bureaucratization, Commodification, and Privatization of Sexual Harassment through Institutional Discourse: A Study of Big Ten Universities,” Management Communication Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1993): 123–57. 5. Michael Walzer, “Antonio Gramsci’s Commitment,” in The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the 20th Century (New York: Basic, 1988), 86. 6. Richard Johnson, “Post-hegemony? I Don’t Think So,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 99. 7. Gramsci, Selections, 234. 8. Gramsci, Selections, 233. 9. Gramsci, Selections, 235. 10. Gramsci, Selections, 243. 11. Gramsci, Selections, 238; 239. 12. Gramsci, Selections, 333. 13. Gramsci, Selections, 333. 14. Gramsci, Selections, 333–34. 15. Gramsci, Selections, 333–34. 16. Gramsci, Selections, 273. 17. Gramsci, Selections, 273. 18. Gramsci, Selections, 349. 19. Gramsci, Selections, 349. 20. Gramsci, Selections, 349. 21. David Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935 (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 174. 22. Forgacs, Antonio Gramsci, 141. 23. Gramsci’s organic intellectual further establishes the rhetorical basis for revolutionary action, as he or she differed from speculative or metaphysical philosophers


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whose knowledge seemed removed from cultural, political, and economic conditions. In Gramsci’s words: “For a mass of people to be led to think coherently and in the same coherent fashion about the real present world, is a ‘philosophical’ event far more important and ‘original’ than the discovery by some philosophical ‘genius’ of a truth which remains the property of small groups of intellectuals” (Selections, 325). 24. Forgacs, Antonio Gramsci, 141. 25. Forgacs, Antonio Gramsci, 141. 26. Forgacs, Antonio Gramsci, 142. 27. Forgacs, Antonio Gramsci, 106. 28. Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 38. 29. Brennon Wood, “Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies and the Problem of Hegemony,” The British Journal of Sociology 49, no. 3 (1998): 401. 30. John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts, “Subcultures, Cultures and Class,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, 2nd ed., eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Routledge, 2006), 30. 31. Clarke et al., “Subcultures,” 29. 32. Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 5 (1986): 14. 33. Stuart Hall, Chas Chritcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), 218. 34. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), 7. 35. Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance,” 10. 36. Hall, The Hard Road, 128. 37. Stuart Hall, “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies,” in Culture, Society, and the Media, eds. Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott (London: Metheun, 1982), 70. 38. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 274–304. 39. Charles Lewis, “Making Sense of Common Sense: A Framework for Tracking Hegemony,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9, no. 3 (1992): 280, citing Hall, “The Rediscovery.” 40. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 85. 41. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 86–87. 42. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 63. 43. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 78. 44. Hall, The Hard Road, 131–32. 45. Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 141. 46. Clarke et al., “Subcultures,” 44. 47. Clarke et al., “Subcultures,” 42. 48. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 84. 49. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 82. 50. Hall, “The Rediscovery,” 81.

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51. Lewis, “Making Sense,” 280; citing Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, no. 2 (1985): 105. 52. Wood, “Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies,” 405. 53. Wood, “Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies,” 405; citing Hall, “The Toad,” 45. 54. Wood, “Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies,” 408–9. Wood advocates for a return to sociological concepts to rescue hegemony from a constructivism which “has been taken too far” (“Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies,” 411). While I disagree with his conclusion here, his observation concerning the reductive nature of social relations within theories of hegemony is an important contribution to theorizing transgression. 55. Lewis, “Making Sense,” 281. 56. Chantal Mouffe, “The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 51. 57. Mary Zournazi, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau, “Hope, Passion, and Politics: A Conversation with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau,” in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, ed. Mary Zournazi (New York: Routledge, 2003), 124. 58. Mouffe suggests that “identity politics” are more deterministic, for social actors appeal to some inherent or biological characteristic to gain collective agency (as in a lesbian feminist movement based upon oppression unique to lesbians). Such essentialism, Mouffe argues, tends to foreclose possible hegemonic articulations by “fixing” identities: the subject positions available for social struggle become ossified or limited. By contrast, she advocates for a theory of radical democracy which assumes that “all identities, including sexual identities, are forms of identifications and are necessarily precarious and unstable. This precludes any possibility of reaching their essence’” (Chantal Mouffe, “Preface: Democratic Politics Today,” in Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, ed. Chantal Mouffe [London: Verso, 1992], 10). 59. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001), 86; 85. 60. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 104. 61. Mouffe, “Preface,” 10. 62. Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy,” in Readings in Contemporary Political Sociology, ed. Kate Nash (London: Blackwell, 2000), 296. 63. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 30. 64. Schmitt, Concept, 30. 65. Schmitt, Concept, 27. 66. Schmitt, Concept, 28. 67. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 20. 68. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). 69. Mouffe, On the Political, 25. 70. Mouffe, On the Political, 27; referencing Slavoj Zizek, Tarring with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 201.


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71. Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Rethinking Political Community: Chantal Mouffe’s Liberal Socialism,” in Race, Rhetoric, and the Post-Colonial, eds. G. A. Olson and L. Worsham (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 184. 72. Schmitt, Concept, 38. 73. Schmitt, Concept, 38. 74. Schmitt, Concept, 30. 75. Mouffe, “The ‘End,’” 56. 76. Mouffe, “Hegemony and New Political Subjects,” 304. 77. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 227. 78. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–51. 79. Mouffe, On the Political, 18. 80. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), viii. 81. Ernesto Laclau, “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” in Postmodern Debates, ed. Simon Malpas (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 155. 82. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), 44–89. 83. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,” in Collected Works, vol. 3, by K. Marx and Frederick Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 186–87. 84. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 45. 85. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 46. 86. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 46. 87. Ernesto Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 33. 88. Laclau, “Populism,” 33. 89. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 63. 90. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 69–70. 91. Laclau, “Politics and the Limits,” 158. 92. Ernesto Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrezej Warminiski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 230. 93. Ernesto Laclau, “On Imagined Communities,” in Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, eds. Jonathan Culler and Pheng Cheah (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27. 94. Ernesto Laclau, “Constructing Universality,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 300. 95. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 57. 96. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 57. 97. Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” 237. 98. Paul de Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” in Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 59; quoted in Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” 233.

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99. Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” 235. 100. Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” 250. 101. Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” 250. 102. Laclau, “Populism,” 46. 103. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 58. 104. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 11. 105. Laclau, “Constructing Universality,” 291. 106. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 68. 107. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 66. 108. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 58. 109. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 56. 110. Laclau, “Populism,” 47. 111. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 54. 112. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 55. 113. Laclau, “Populism,” 35. 114. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 92. 115. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 57–58. 116. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 50. 117. For instance, Judith Butler criticizes Laclau for demanding “political mediation and relations of representation,” which, in Butler’s words, require “the role of the intellectual” and “specifies that role as one of logical analysis” (Laclau, “Constructing Universality,” 286; quoting Butler). Though Laclau defends his hegemony on the basis of organic (rather than vanguard) intellectuals, his reduction of performance to language is perhaps the most troubling aspect of this theory of hegemony. Laclau asserts that materiality is inherent within his theory, though his writings seem to stress the linguistic tenor of hegemonic struggle. Laclau argues that discourse, not language, is the ground for society. Discourse prefigures the separation of the material and symbolic, joining them through pragmatic acts: “The concept of discourse is not linguistic but prior to the distinction between the linguistic and the extralinguistic. If I am building a wall and I tell someone ‘hand me a brick’ and then place it on the wall, my first act is linguistic and the second is behavioral, but it is easy to perceive that they are both connected as part of a total operation, namely, the construction of the wall. This relational moment within the total operation is neither linguistic nor extralinguistic, for it includes both types of actions” (Laclau, “Politics and the Limits,” 151). Though Laclau’s advocacy of discourse suggests a material-symbolic perspective toward resistance, his writings offer little acknowledgment of the material, corporeal, or performative—which, as I argue in chapter 5, is critical for understanding transgression as a unique form of resistance. 118. Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” 245. 119. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony,” 53. 120. John M. Murphy, “Domesticating Dissent: The Kennedys and the Freedom Rides,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 73. 121. Dennis K. Mumby, “The Problem of Hegemony: Rereading Gramsci for Organizational Communication Studies,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 4 (1997): 356.


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122. Leland M. Griffin, “A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements,” in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1922–1966, ed. William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 462. 123. Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 2 (1952): 185. 124. Charles J. Stewart, “The Evolution of a Revolution: Stokely Carmichael and the Rhetoric of Black Power,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 4 (1997): 443. 125. Herbert W. Simons, “Requirements, Problems, and Strategies: A Theory of Persuasion for Social Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56, no. 1 (1970): 1–11; Charles J. Stewart, “A Functional Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Movements,” Central States Speech Journal 31, no. 4 (1980): 298–305. 126. Hank Johnston, Enrique Larana, and Joseph R. Gusfield, “Identities, Grievances, and New Social Movements,” in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, eds. E. Larana, H. Johnston, and J. R. Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 5. 127. Stewart, “The Evolution,” 431. 128. Marc Edelman, “Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 290. 129. Robert Cox and Christina R. Foust, “Social Movement Rhetoric: Exploring the Figures, Discourses, and Performances of Social Change,” in The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. Andrea A. Lunsford, Rosa A. Eberly, and Kirt H. Wilson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 605–27. 130. Gordon R. Mitchell, “Public Argument Action Research and the Learning Curve of New Social Movements,” Argumentation & Advocacy 40, no. 4 (2004): 216. 131. Stewart, “A Functional Approach,” 299. 132. Charles J. Stewart, “The Internal Rhetoric of the Knights of Labor,” Communication Studies 42, no. 1 (1991): 70. 133. Stewart, “The Internal Rhetoric,” 67. 134. Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 283. 135. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1999), 27. 136. Edelman, “Social Movements,” 288. 137. Johnston et al., “Identities,” 8. 138. Edelman, “Social Movements,” 288–89. See Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 139. Jonathan I. Lange, “Refusal to Compromise: The Case of Earth First!,” Western Journal of Communication 54, no. 4 (1990): 473; 483. 140. R. Anthony Slagle, “In Defense of Queer Nation: From Identity Politics to a Politics of Difference,” Western Journal of Communication 59, no. 2 (1995): 87. 141. Brant Short, “Earth First! and the Rhetoric of Moral Confrontation,” Communication Studies 42, no. 2 (1991): 185; 183; see also Lange, “Refusal to Compromise,” 486. 142. Slagle, “In Defense,” 97; 92.

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143. Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 9–21; DeLuca, Image Politics; Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (2002): 125–51; Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 263–86. 144. M. Lane Bruner, “Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State,” Text & Performance Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2005): 136–55. 145. Audrey Vanderford, “Ya Basta!—A Mountain of Bodies that Advances, Seeking the Least Harm Possible to Itself,” in Representing Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement, eds. Andy Opel and Donnalyn Pompper (Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2003), 16–26. 146. DeLuca and Peeples, “From Public Sphere,” 144. 147. DeLuca, “Unruly Bodies.” 148. DeLuca and Peeples, “From Public Sphere,” 144. 149. The turn from movements to a study of publics or counterpublics may come as no surprise, for, as Mitchell argues, movements and publics are quite compatible (“Public Argument,” 210). But as Brouwer cautions, “In more cynical moments, one might decide that counterpublic theory is appealing simply because it allows scholars to conduct studies of social movement and social movements without being obligated to slog through the dense accumulation of social movement scholarship,” including “the once robust” (and maddening) scholarly debates that defined movements and their study (Daniel C. Brouwer, “Communication as Counterpublic,” in Communication as . . . Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006], 204). 150. Stacey K. Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “Reconceptualizing Rhetorical Activism in Contemporary Feminist Contexts,” Howard Journal of Communications 17, no. 1 (2006): 59. See, for instance, Daniel C. Brouwer, “Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 5 (2005): 351–71. 151. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, “Introduction: Reconfigurations of the Public Sphere,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. R. Asen and D. C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); 6; 7. 152. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 124. 153. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65; Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and D. C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 87–109. The more flexible performative approach taken by both Pezzullo and Brouwer is open to moments in which resistance exceeds friend-enemy agents, to those embodied performance which enact an “alternative discourse” and a politics of risk and vulnerability (Pezzullo, “Resisting,” 356). 154. Michael Calvin McGee, “‘Social Movement’: Phenomenon or Meaning?,” Central States Speech Journal 31, no. 4 (1980): 233–44; Malcolm O. Sillars, “Defining


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Movements Rhetorically: Casting the Widest Net,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 46, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 17–32. 155. McGee, “‘Social Movement,’” 237. 156. DeLuca, Image Politics, 34; 35. 157. DeLuca, Image Politics, 25. 158. DeLuca, Image Politics, 25. 159. DeLuca ultimately ties the potential of transgression to a politics of hegemony, relying heavily on Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of articulation and antagonism to replace the organizational and instrumental logics of old social movement theory. See Image Politics, 37–44. 160. Mitchell, “Public Argument,” 211. For more development of these two concepts, see Robert S. Cathcart, “New Approaches to the Study of Movements: Defining Movements Rhetorically,” Western Speech 59, no. 2 (1972): 82–88; and Richard B. Gregg, “The Ego-function of the Rhetoric of Protest,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 4, no. 2 (1971): 71–91. 161. Lynn Owens and L. Kendall Palmer, “Making the News: Anarchist Counterpublic Relations on the World Wide Web,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 335. 162. Celeste Michelle Condit, “Hegemony in a Mass-Mediated Society: Concordance about Reproductive Technologies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11, no. 3 (1994): 205. 163. Condit, “Hegemony,” 210. 164. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance?,” 117. 165. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance?,” 118–19. 166. Condit, “Hegemony,” 215. Cloud confronts Condit’s interpretation as useful “only if one is satisfied with the compromises allowed within and by the” status quo (“Hegemony or Concordance?,” 117). She cites several statistics to demonstrate that the United States has not advanced beyond class conflict, which informs racial and gender inequalities as well. Condit later claimed that it was misrepresenting her argument to align her definition of social concord with capitalism (Celeste M. Condit, “Hegemony, Concordance, and Capitalism: Reply to Cloud,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13, no. 4 [1996]: 382–84). 167. Dana L. Cloud, “Concordance, Complexity, and Conservatism: Rejoinder to Condit,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14, no. 2 (1997): 196. 168. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance?,” 119. 169. Condit, “Hegemony, Concordance, and Capitalism,” 383. 170. Celeste M. Condit, “Clouding the Issues? The Ideal and the Material in Human Communication,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14, no. 2 (1997): 199. 171. Lisa A. Flores, Dreama G. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Dynamic Rhetorics of Race: California’s Racial Privacy Initiative and the Shifting Grounds of Racial Politics,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006): 193. 172. Michelle A. Holling, “Forming Oppositional Social Concord to California’s Proposition 187 and Squelching Social Discord in the Vernacular Space of CHICLE,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006): 213. Importantly, in Hollings’s case study, the dissenter raised points which agreed with Proposition 187 defenders—his “argument invoked several problematic assumptions” (213).

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173. Holling, “Forming Oppositional Social Concord,” 214. 174. Kristen Hoerl, “Cinematic Jujitsu: Resisting White Hegemony through the American Dream in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X,” Communication Studies 59, no. 4 (2008): 367. 175. Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56, no. 2 (1989): 92. 176. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric,” 96. 177. Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 28. 178. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “Commitment to Telos—A Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 53. Ono and Sloop exemplify telos in an example of hegemonic politics, by which critics might “choose to find routes by which to move” marginalized groups like gays and lesbians “from a position of ‘they’ to a position of ‘we’” in dominant discourse (Ono and Sloop, “Commitment,” 55). 179. Joseph P. Zompetti, “Toward a Gramscian Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 1 (1997): 79. 180. Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58, no. 3 (1994): 159. 181. Dana L. Cloud, “The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006): 330. 182. Cloud, “The Matrix,” 331. 183. Cloud, “The Materiality,” 157. As Greene articulates this dilemma, “A constitutive materialism sets up the possibility that the only thing that matters for a materialist rhetoric is the conflicts and contradictions associated with the position of the subject in language” (Greene, “Another Materialist,” 26). 184. Greene, “Another Materialist,” 26. 185. Greene, “Another Materialist,” 21. 186. Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 197. 187. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 195; see also 197–98. 188. Ronald Walter Greene, “Orator Communist,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 39, no. 1 (2006): 88. 189. Greene, “Orator Communist,” 94. 190. Greene, “Orator Communist,” 85. 191. Greene, “Orator Communist,” 89. 192. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 10; quoted in Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 198. 193. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 202. 194. Jon Beasley-Murray, “On Posthegemony,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 22, no. 1 (2003): 120. The post-hegemonic perspective summarized here is highly influenced by the French poststructuralist and Italian autonomist thought explored more in chapter 3. 195. Tiziana Terranova, “Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 126.


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196. Scott Lash, “Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 56. 197. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 127; 132; 133. 198. Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 58; 59. 199. Nicholas Thoburn, “Patterns of Production: Cultural Studies after Hegemony,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 83; 84. 200. Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 58. 201. Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 68. 202. Lash, “Power after Hegemony,” 66. 203. Beasley-Murray, “On Posthegemony,” 123. 204. Beasley-Murray, “On Posthegemony,” 124. 205. Beasley-Murray, “On Posthegemony,” 123. 206. Terranova, “Futurepublic,” 142. 207. Beasley-Murray, “On Posthegemony,” 121. 208. Thoburn, “Patterns of Production,” 87. 209. See, for instance, Yuriko Furuhata, “Desiring Resistance in the Age of Globalization,” New Cinemas 2, no. 2 (2004): 91–106; and Richard Johnson, “Posthegemony?”

3 Companions: Transgressing Friend-Enemy Subjects

To those I became entwined with during those historic late summer days—how do I address you or introduce you to others? Not as friends (we hardly knew much about each other) nor acquaintances (we shared something that was not casual). Our time and space was marked by intense outbursts, brief encounters, painful separations, accelerated passions. Some moments shared with the already-familiar, others with those just-met. Some of us will create new tempos together, others will linger in memory only. There are no readily available names for our subjectivities. These names need inventing, just as we invented our collectives on the streets. Let us become affinitos and affinitas.1

Friend-enemy subjectivity is a key assumption within the common sense of social change. In Gramsci’s original theory of hegemony, friend-enemy subjects help inspire the collective consciousness deemed necessary for revolution. Neo-Gramscian theorists—particularly Chantal Mouffe—find in friend-enemy subjectivity a theoretical means for guaranteeing a democratic struggle. The presence of an enemy offers a collective ideological structure which ensures that actions are “political,” rather than narcissistic. Friend-enemy antagonism makes it possible for actions to affect real change, for they are not isolated (or isolatable) to personal fancies (or neuroses). Moreover, friend-enemy subjectivity supports a non-violent, (representatively) democratic view of social change, for it promotes agonism over confrontational politics. If the main goal of political action is the widening of identifications to build a greater discursive will within the 85

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trench system of civil society, it is less likely that politics will cede into terrorism or physical harm. In sum, friend-enemy subjectivity provides a “least common denominator” for tracking rhetorical effects—for, at the very least, protest events affect public perception of the cause, reinforcing the dialectical grounds for debating political issues (and thus, potentially broadening the collective will or movement-as-agent). From the perspective of transgression, the advantages of friend-enemy subjectivity are precisely what render some hegemonic modes of social change deterministic, if not authoritarian. The bourgeois enemy may guarantee, as in some of Gramsci’s writings, that even the least conscious workers can “count” as part of the proletariat—but such results are had at the cost of more radical revolutions in workers’ consciousness, namely, those of being autonomous and creative, in touch with individuality. The relational enemy may reliably move individuals to social struggle, such that all manner of activities appear properly political. But in so doing, the gravity of friend-enemy politics instantiates a substantial relationship (in theory, or in practice) between the individual and collective subject—one which is much easier to track and control. More specifically, advocates for rhetorical materialism suggest that the “politics of subjectivity” threatens to reduce resistance to a matter of identity construction. Assuming that identification is the primary function or telos of social change ignores the immediate, material impacts of all protest, but especially that of direct action—as though the impacts of property damage, confrontation, or forms of direct democracy are limited to their ability to “get attention” for a “greater cause.” By taking friend-enemy agents as the proper (or only) manifestation of political action, we deflect the concrete, often singular presence of bodies-in-resistance, with all of their tangible effects. Likewise, as the post-hegemonic perspective advocates, the friendenemy dialectic reinforces an institutional, representational politics—one which cannot match a post-industrial power which creates subjectivities through affect and communication. In spite of these challenges friend-enemy subjectivity, its defenders have introduced compelling questions of transgressive logics: If not in the form of friends-against-enemies, what would politics “look like?” Without the familiar relations of antagonistic representation between the individual, the collective, and rhetoric, how are we to interpret politics? Without the greater political shorthand of friends-against-enemies, how can we ensure that an individual’s everyday choices or performances are, indeed, acts of resistance? Would a move to a politics without friends and enemies erase the history of oppression, which has repeatedly patterned itself in racism, classism, sexism, and discrimination against minority others? This chapter begins to address these complex and challenging questions. Defending transgression as a unique mode of resistance, I consider diverse

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theories which foretell a new materialism that exceeds the guarantees of friends-against-enemies. Friedrich Nietzsche provides a crucial touchstone for understanding transgression: specifically, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduces a companion subjectivity. The companion subject, or transgressing companion, provides a conceptual shorthand for understanding social change outside the commonality of friend-enemy subjects. Transgressing companions abide by a process of de-subjectivation, of consciously stripping away the normative layers of self peddled by priests and philosophers, or taken for granted by the sleepy members of the community (the herd). Importantly, for Nietzsche, companions do not disarticulate themselves from authoritarian values by forming a counter-authoritarian collective (a “transgressive” friend against a “normative” enemy). As a close reading of Zarathustra reveals, companions’ transgressions derive from enacting new senses of self against authority. Two major schools of thought have developed companion subjectivity in contemporary times. French poststructuralism, particularly the writings of Guilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, defends the conceptual development of companions against psychoanalytic discourses, which would send the “lacking” individual on a constant search for subjection to discourses that would define it. Deleuze and Guattari also place transgression in the context of daily life, a move which advances resistant practice beyond representational politics. Italian autonomist writings develop transgressing companions more in terms of a collective resistance, imagining how sociality may strike resistance without necessarily enjoining friends in dialectical struggle with an enemy. Figures of the multitude and the coming community, as I describe, perform a resistance which is more singular than common, but is nonetheless collective. Companion subjectivity becomes a critical component to understanding the effectivity of transgression. The impact of companions cannot be understood through the terms of friend-enemy politics, for “effective” transgression demands the performative creation of a new subjectivity, one which necessarily dismantles representations rooted in the friend-enemy relation. As I conclude, transgressing companions offer an interpretive tool for appreciating non- or less-hegemonic resistance (like the historic cases explored in chapter 4).

COMPANION SUBJECTIVITY AND NIETZSCHE’S ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche’s most experimental and odd work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, presents several interpretive challenges. It is thickly allegorical, appearing so “unclassifiable that it resists even the broadest sort of category and does not

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itself instruct us, at least not very clearly or very well, about how to read it.”2 The book may be read as part of Nietzsche’s broader advocacy of life beyond good and evil, or life outside the dictates of moralists and nihilists. Throughout his works, Nietzsche suggests that moralists are those authorities who cultivate and maintain transcendent values, and hierarchy and exclusion by extension, while nihilists are those dejected, listless individuals who, in essence, say no to life when they believe life has failed them.3 Parts of Zarathustra are commensurate with Nietzsche’s rhetorical perspective on language, which undermines modernist assumptions that humans communicate transparently or represent the truth through words.4 The book reads as a frustrating, playful account of one prophet/agitator’s journey from isolation to persuasion, constantly facing the power and opacity of language. As Nietzsche’s subtitle decrees, Zarathustra is “A Book for All and None,” speaking to the title character’s paradoxical desire to “inspire and shame without being imitated, without creating disciples.”5 Nietzsche seems to perform the incommunicability of his entire text through Zarathustra, who is often misunderstood or shares his incapacity to express clear, coherent meaning to crowds, or who appears disappointed in others’ apparent inability to immediately “get him.” Zarathustra appears as a failure of mediation, a refusal to play the most basic of language games. Zarathustra undermines, in style and argument, the potential for words to transparently convey truth, values, and identities. The book problematizes transparency as that which integrates individuality into structures of dominance, as the individual subjects to various authorities in order to become “better” or “complete.” Yet, Zarathustra inspires a recovery of individuality and the power of creativity without abandoning social relationships or language entirely. I choose to read Zarathustra in this light, for Nietzsche’s parables inspire rich insights into individual and collective subjects, and rhetorical resistance. The book begins with the title character awakening to a brilliant sunrise. Following ten years alone in the mountains, Zarathustra is inspired to go on a quest: “Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey. I need hands that reach out.”6 Zarathustra’s initial declaration may strike readers as heavy-handed, particularly given today’s sensibility of social construction and rhetorical empowerment. His longing for human sociality is driven by a desire to impart wisdom to a receptive audience, not co-create meaning for justice. Zarathustra’s paternalistic stance is complicated by his first encounter with another, an old man in the woods, who tries to dissuade Zarathustra from spreading love and wisdom to humanity. The old saint declares his disdain for humans who are “imperfect” and distrustful, unlike animals with whom he would rather keep company, and his deity whom he would rather praise.7 The old saint has denied his need

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for human sociality. He has traded in what Zarathustra will soon discover is the maddening muddiness of language, and the contingency of relationships with linguistic beings, for the more satisfying anonymous connection to (or dominion over) bears and birds, and the more mysterious, yet perfect, communion with an ideal, transcendent God. The old man is at once a moralist and a nihilist, two figures of subjectivity which dissatisfy Zarathustra as he continues his journey. After he leaves the old man, Zarathustra reflects on his encounter, speaking the now infamous words “to his heart: ‘could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!’”8 Zarathustra’s words seem to steel him for the difficult journey ahead. He cannot follow the old man’s lead, isolating himself through devotion to transcendence. By refusing to share his wisdom through the “higher meaning” of the divine or of morality, Zarathustra’s advocacy will appear even more dangerous and incoherent to the audiences he encounters. Departing the woods, Zarathustra arrives in a village, where crowds had gathered to await a tightrope walker’s performance. Taking advantage of the ready-made audience, Zarathustra spontaneously preaches of the overman, the advanced human being who might overcome good and evil. Zarathustra chastises the crowd for its uninspired life—specifically, for following priests who would have them abandon their bodies and relationship to the earth.9 Embodiment is not a sin to be transcended. It is instead crucial to the process of self-overcoming, for, Zarathustra argues, the best experience of life occurs in “the hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.”10 Moments which sicken us, which are felt materially as well as conceptually and thus threaten the contentment of happiness, reason, and virtue, are the moments of “true” humanity. In spite (or because) of his profundity, Zarathustra draws the ridicule of the crowd, which demands that the prophet leave and the tightrope walker’s performance begin. Taking the crowd’s desire for the performance as his cue, Zarathustra improvises an analogy, that all humans are like the tightrope walker: “Fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss . . . what is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose.”11 Zarathustra reinforces his conviction that human sociality is not a matter of (un/intentionally) using others to achieve one’s ends, as moralists might. He expounds on the humans he loves, a cast of classical virtuosos, including “the one whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and gives none back: for [she] always gives and does not want to preserve” herself.12 Such individuals (or individualities) resist subjection to the moralists’ morality, taking the first steps on the tightrope to self-overcoming. But once again, the crowd mocks Zarathustra. He muses about what type of agitator they seek, and whether or not he can fulfill what he perceives

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as their desires for a firebrand, a flatterer, or a “stutterer.”13 He is failing to bestow his honeyed wisdom, a failure which Zarathustra attributes to the audience’s “pride.”14 He tries appealing to this pride, warning the crowd that their soil will soon be “poor and tame, and no tall tree will be able to grow from it anymore,” for the crowds have allowed themselves to be seduced by the peddlers of mediocrity surrounding them: “No shepherd and one herd! Each wants the same, each is the same, and whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the insane asylum.”15 Zarathustra’s Aristotelian approach—to speak to the audience’s phronesis—gains him no traction. He declares, defeated: “They do not understand me. I am not the mouth for these ears.”16 Zarathustra’s heavy-hearted departure is halted by the tightrope walker, who had begun his tenuous journey from one building to another. A “colorful fellow resembling a jester leaped forth” from one of the buildings, mocking the tightrope walker at a most inopportune moment. The jester released a devilish cry and jumped over the tightrope walker, causing the acrobat to lose his balance and fall calamitously.17 The crowd ran from the falling body—but Zarathustra remained where the tightrope walker fell. The dying man intimated to Zarathustra that the jester was a devil, arrived to take him to hell. Zarathustra tried to comfort him by refuting transcendence as the basis for a good human life: “By my honor, friend! . . . All that you are talking about does not exist. There is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even sooner than your body—fear no more!”18 Dejected, the acrobat replied: “If you speak the truth . . . then I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than an animal that has been taught to dance by blows and little treats.”19 Zarathustra persisted, intoning that the dying performer’s life is meaningful, even if that meaning is not colored by a divine purpose or ideal essence. But Zarathustra’s words fell short of inspiring the rope-dancer back to life. Not only had he failed to impart wisdom to the crowds, but his rhetoric also brought no comfort to a dying man. Zarathustra again reflected on his rhetorical failure as a matter of subjectivity: “But I am still far away from” the crowd, and “do not make sense to their senses. For mankind I am a midpoint between a fool and a corpse.”20 Zarathustra’s declaration raises questions: Is he unable, or unwilling, to adapt his rhetoric to the senses of the crowd, to move closer to them? Having failed to bestow his knowledge on two different audiences and through three different speeches—and having opened himself to the ridicule and ignorance of the crowd—why would Zarathustra not change his tactics? While Zarathustra attempts identification with the crowd (appealing to their pride, against the “enemies” of mediocrity), he refuses to submit to the tightrope walker’s transcendent worldview; and throughout his remaining journey, he does not try to appeal to the crowd again.

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Transgressing the crowd’s worldviews and expectations risks not even being heard, or appearing incoherent, laughable. But Zarathustra remains true to his avoidance of deterministic tactics. In so doing, he discovers that various figures of friend-enemy subjectivity are incommensurate with his goal of inspiring others to overcome themselves: though he might have quicker and greater success in constituting his listeners through appeals to friend-enemy subjects, such appeals would contradict the very process of self-overcoming (for it would land others in conformity with Zarathustra’s ideal or ideology). Zarathustra must find new ways to relate to others, performing a sociality beyond friends-against-enemies. He left the town and traveled with the tightrope walker’s corpse, until a dream-vision encouraged him to release it. In his revelation, Zarathustra described the new productive ways he may relate, or share meaning, without subjecting others: It dawned on me: I need companions, and living ones—not dead companions and corpses that I carry with me wherever I want. Instead I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves—wherever I want. It dawned on me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people, but instead to companions! Zarathustra should not become the shepherd and dog of a herd!21

Initially, Zarathustra’s call for companions reestablishes the modernist binary of body and mind. The corpse represents the “other side” of the great dualism—a purely corporeal body, capable only of organic functioning, dead to any symbolic engagement. Given Nietzsche’s disdain for the cogito subjects of philosophy, it seems that Zarathustra initially embraces pure physical force as the clay from which to mold a resistant subject. Yet, in so doing, Zarathustra seems no different than the philosophers who forged humans into pure cognition, rendering them ghosts whose capacity for political action derived only from their subjection to herd values. Whether Zarathustra takes a corpse or herd members as the means to his end, he is nonetheless using bodies to carry out his will. Neither the herd nor the corpse has the type of agency that Zarathustra seems to desire: corpses (like the tight-rope walker, or even the saintly old hermit) have denied communicative, collective human life, and thus appear only as physical bodies; herd members have subjected to the logic of conformity for their sense of meaning, identity, and power. Zarathustra had tried meagerly to inspire herd resistance (by appealing to the prideful crowds). He realizes, as his speech continues, that he could incite backlash against the herd’s conformity, inspiring a following of nihilists. But the nihilists would remain a friend-enemy subject, a herd. As Zarathustra continues: “To lure many away from the herd—for that I came. . . . Companions the creative one seeks and not corpses, nor herds and believers.”22

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The resistors Zarathustra seeks are not creative friends, or like-minded and like-worded others who may share a common rhetorical substance. As Pippin interprets, Zarathustra desires a very complicated character in his companions: “On the one hand, ‘whole-heartedness’ and an absorbed or passionate ‘identification’ with one’s higher ideal; on the other hand, a paradoxical capacity to ‘let go’ of such commitments and pursue other ideals when the originals (somehow) cease to serve self-overcoming and self-transcendence, when they lead to complacency and contentment.”23 While subjection to the certainty and value of the collective may strike one’s passion, Zarathustra desires an agency that is outside the herd’s language. The subjects with whom Zarathustra desires relations may not currently recognize themselves as companions. But their passion resonates with Zarathustra’s own desires, making them mutually knowable to each other, without the common linguistic substances or values of the herd. Once joined by companions, Zarathustra declares that they shall “write new values on new tablets. . . . They shall be called annihilators and despisers of good and evil. But they are the harvesters and the celebrators.”24 Herds are bound to misunderstand, or even oust, the companions, for their meaning is scavenged from the symbolic remnants at hand, rather than the patterned values planted and nurtured by the moralists. But affirming the power of companionship, Zarathustra declares that he will avoid deterministic rhetoric for the remainder of his journey: “I shall not be a shepherd, nor a gravedigger. I do not want to even speak again with the people.”25 Though it would be easier to constitute a people by appealing to commonality, Zarathustra opts instead to perform sociality as far outside of his own authority as he might, through happenstance encounters with other impassioned people. Given the prevalence of friend-enemy subjectivity, it is natural to interpret Zarathustra’s companions as just a different herd which despises and destroys the ascetic herd (the enemy). But Nietzsche’s ardent stance against modernist subjects encourages an alternative interpretation. Zarathustra and his companions are not bounded to a substance—whether that substance is conceived as modernity’s metaphysical essence or today’s relational, empty “substance” which loosely unites social actors together as “friends” against a common “enemy.”26 Nietzsche suggests that transgressing companions are motivated to resistance when they feel their agency constrained, as when the herd places its moral burden upon them. Ascetic virtues like “pity, the kind and helping hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, friendliness” quell drives and desires.27 However, individuals do not simply feel these constraining ideals as an assault on the ego or self; they feel imposing discourses as constraining to the organic movements of life, self and body together. In sensing imposition on her or his drives (again, not his or her “self” or “identity”), the individual is acquainted with a will-to-power, the

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dynamic forces of life teeming through him or her, that which reveals the “continual transitoriness and fleetingness of the subject.”28 Against the stabilizing, civilizing forces of subjection, Nietzsche’s transgressing companions do not gain their subject position by identifying with a “transgressing companion” ideology: they gain it by transgressing the herd’s production of subjectivity. Inspired by Zarathustra’s rhetorical lead, companion subjects disrupt the bridges linking individuals and deterministic collectives, rhetorical invention and social movement agents. The remainder of Part I is a series of speeches delivered by Zarathustra on his journey. The speeches seem to inspire or document travel with companions. Like the story which prefaced them, the speeches are thickly allegorical and loosely related to Zarathustra’s advocacy for the overman. Though Zarathustra only obliquely suggests the type of change agent he desires (and nowhere as lucidly as in the dream-vision speech, above), he devotes many words to critiquing various figures of individual or collective subjects— notably, the corpses (who threaten or perform physical violence against each other, or nihilistically disconnect from the community, to advance their goals), the saints (who view social change as a matter of channeling a transcendent essence to humanity), and the herd (whose leadership helps constitute a collective agent through conformity). The speeches provide particular insight into the rhetorical study of resistance, especially as they introduce companionship as an alternative to friend-enemy collectives. Zarathustra’s speeches maintain a suspicion, if not outright attack, on conformity as a strategy for human sociality and social change. Zarathustra speaks, for instance, of encountering “Teachers of Virtue,” including a man who encourages his followers to “honor the authorities and practice obedience, even toward the crooked authorities!”29 The teachers of virtue are like shepherds whose primary charge is to ensure “good sleep.” The shepherd’s followers do not trouble themselves with resisting injustice, succumbing instead to the comfort and security of the virtuous teachings: “Happy the one who lives even near this wise [woman or] man! Such a sleep is infectious, and it infects even through a thick wall.”30 Zarathustra has some pity for the virtuous teachers, whose wisdom is “the sleep without dreams: they knew no better meaning of life.”31 In transgressive style, Zarathustra fails to disclose to his listeners the dreams which inspired him to a better life, the values which might be a means through which they, too, could resist crooked authorities. Such clarity and coherence would only make Zarathustra a good shepherd, even if his shepherding were devoted to revolution instead of grazing in calm pastures. Zarathustra continues to encourage transgression in his speech, “On the Passions of Pleasure and Pain,” where he decries the naming of virtues: “My brother, if you have one virtue, and it is your virtue, then you have it in common with no one. To be sure, you want to call [your virtue] by name.

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. . . And behold! Now you have [its] name in common with the people and have become the people and the herd with your virtue!”32 Note that in translating that which inspires us, or that which we value, into language, we invite the possibility for common values—and in so doing, Zarathustra warns, we threaten to reify into laws or norms, the singular virtues which emerge “out of [our] passions.”33 That which is truly valuable is not decreed as such, leading Zarathustra to suggest that incoherence is one way to avoid the (perhaps inevitable) slide from language and value to conformity and hierarchy: Let your virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if you must speak of it, then do not be ashamed to stammer about it. Then speak and stammer: “This is my good, I love this, thus I like it entirely, thus alone do I want the good. I do not want it as a divine law, I do not want it as a human statute and requirement. It shall be no signpost for me to overearths and paradises.”34

Strikingly, Zarathustra even discourages the naming of values as a means to achieve his own goal, that of inspiring audiences to self-overcoming; while our passions may inspire us, Zarathustra encourages stammering about and even distancing ourselves from the names of our passions. The power of speech should not be used as a bridge to transcendence, the means to utopia. Zarathustra’s path to a new society, his mode of social change, thus refuses the representations common to friend-enemy politics. Without friend-enemy representations to map a trajectory or build a collective agent, communicators place a great burden of interpretation on their audiences. But this burden is necessary to avoid using others as a means to achieve one’s goals: “Grasp me whoever is able to grasp me!,” cries Zarathustra, “But your crutch I am not.”35 Zarathustra’s performance of agitation echoes his denouncements of the virtuous teachers who use clear communication and common values to cohere their flock. Zarathustra’s speech, “On War and Warriors,” returns more directly to the companion subject in the context of political struggle, extending his vision for himself as a rhetorical leader. Zarathustra addresses his listeners as less experienced equals, confusing the substantial relationship between himself, his followers, and their opposites: “I am and I was like you. And I am also your best enemy.”36 He encourages his companions to view themselves as a collective of singularities rather than a platoon of commonality, as they wage their war for knowledge: I see many soldiers: if only I saw many warriors! “Uni-form” one calls what they wear: if only what they conceal with it were not uni-form! You should be the kind of [people] whose eyes always seek an enemy—your enemy. And with some of you there is a hate at first sight. You should seek your enemy, wage your war and for your thoughts! And when your thought is defeated, then your

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honesty should cry out in triumph even for that! You should love peace as the means to new wars.37

As in most versions of hegemony, the means and aims of the warrior’s struggle are a communicative peace (rather than a taking up of physical arms). The soldier’s sociality, like the relationship between more deterministic friends, is one of a uniform consciousness that seeps into the uniform appearance of the collective. But, unlike some collective subjects of hegemony (those bound together via a common enemy), the warrior’s enemy is singular—like a virtue, the enemy is “your enemy.” Zarathustra’s initial travels conclude with the odd prophet enjoining his followers to abandon him and to be distrustful of his teachings: “Indeed, I counsel you to go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you.”38 Zarathustra discredits himself in order to break any consubstantiality with his companions, in order to shake them from any identification with him as friend or virtuous teacher. His tirade continues, suggesting that the stronger the bonds of friend-enemy politics, the less likely the companions are to resist conformity: You revere me, but what if your reverence falls down some day? Beware that you are not killed by a statue! You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra! You are my believers, but what matter all believers! You had not yet sought yourselves, then you found me. All believers do this; that’s why all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.39

In rebuking his followers, Zarathustra turns the advantages of hegemonic logic on their head: disciplining oneself through friend-enemy politics does not guarantee a lasting resistance, but in fact forestalls the resistance to commonality and authority. Perhaps sensing that their companionship was transforming into friendship, or that his oblique teachings were starting to sound virtuous and coherent, Zarathustra refuses to continue leading the few who had followed him. After an arduous rhetorical quest, Zarathustra checks his authority, attempting to stop his and his followers’ mutual slide into conformity with herd politics. Holding oneself accountable to one’s own authority or privilege—a power which Zarathustra demonstrates here—becomes increasingly important as a tactic to subvert the move into friend-enemy subjection. Zarathustra introduces companions as an alternative to friend-enemy subjectivity in the realm of human sociality. Companions transgress “properly political” antagonisms by abiding by their own singular passions and struggles, rather than subjecting to the common virtues and enemies finessed by authorities. Yet, companions’ behavior is not nihilistic. It is neither the

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meaningless motion of corpses and hermits, nor the perfectly meaningful, transcendent communion with saints and deities. Nietzsche refuses to communicate exactly what companions’ behavior is, a move which precludes the drive to transparency, values, and subjection. However, through Zarathustra’s journey, we learn that companions appear incoherent or even violent to herds or the people, figures of sociality which cohere through commonality. Companions are creative, passionate harvesters, who join others because they want to follow themselves—but who, if Zarathustra is any indication, may (definitively) break ties with others if it means maintaining individuality or avoiding subjection to authority.

FINDING COMPANIONS AFTER NIETZSCHE: FRENCH POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND ITALIAN AUTONOMISM Nietzsche’s challenges to modernity—concentrated in the critique of the coherent collective subject and individual agent, as well as the disruption of a transparent relationship between language, truth, and value—influenced social and political theorists writing against the rising power of the capitalist state. From around the 1950s through today, two major currents of Nietzschean thought have become popularized in the American academy: at the risk of invoking nationalism and potentially erroneous labels, these two currents may be identified as French poststructuralism (including the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Guilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau) and Italian autonomism (particularly the work of Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri). My move to explore companion subjectivity within French and Italian thought is not without its difficulties. As David Graeber, Stevphen Shukatis, and Erika Biddle observe, the Northern (and especially American) academy appears infatuated with post-1968 French theory.40 Graeber and his colleagues argue that much of this work developed as a conciliatory gesture following the failure of international student, peace, and anti-racist movements to seriously challenge capitalism and the state. The continued reliance on French poststructuralism prohibits the growth of new social theory, especially work with an eye toward international alliances against contemporary capitalism. Returning to the work of privileged white men threatens to continue patriarchy and liberal values, within and outside the academy. Moreover, tenuous relations persist between activists and academics, particularly from an anarchist(ic) perspective: Critical theory has a long history of appropriating anarchist ideas and colonizing infoshops with “legitimate” thinking, to the betterment of academic careers.41

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These objections not withstanding, the turn to Nietzschean theory here is imperative as an alternative to the “hegemony of hegemony” pervading the critical imaginary. Poststructuralist and autonomist theory advance Nietzsche’s deconstructions of morality and substance-as-truth, further problematizing commonality and linguisticism in the understanding and practice of social change. Though these lines of philosophy are quite diverse and rich, I focus here on their extension of companion subjectivity as an alternative to Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics. Poststructuralist fragments mutate Nietzsche’s companion from its original context in a mystical, somewhat modernist quest into an extraordinary, yet everyday process of becoming. Autonomist writings consider in richer depth how companions may gather into collective subjects, while performing outside the hegemony of negation and commonality. Companionship and the Process of Becoming Much like Zarathustra, Deleuze and Guattari’s most prolific work, A Thousand Plateaus, presents interpretive challenges. The book attempts to perform the non-representative, a-subjective communication it advocates against “the modus operandi” of State philosophy, which “is negation: x = x = not y.”42 In so doing, Plateaus also challenges the basis for friend-enemy subjectivity, dialectical equations that establish antagonisms between collective agents and the rhetoric which represents them. Like other theorists of transgression, Deleuze and Guattari offer alternatives at the same time that they deconstruct authority. Plateaus’ rhizomes, bodies without organs, and packs, figure companion sociality as a process of becoming for embodied beings who relate to each other as multiplicities (rather than masses, crowds, or “the people”). As noted in the first chapter, rhizomes are a non-oppositional alternative to roots. Roots may function rhizomatically, but are fundamentally dichotomous, bound to produce and reproduce hierarchical power structures: “one can never get beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. . . . Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification.”43 Deleuze and Guattari connect rhizomes and roots to language, particularly the substantial connections certain words engender. For instance, “the verb ‘to be’” instantiates a family relationship between the terms it connects, such that one is consubstantial with whatever “to be” connects:44 “I am an academic.” The conformity imposed by the substantial connections of language relates to friend-enemy agents. In its most deterministic versions, hegemony relies upon a root logic in which language links issue, individual and collective identity in antagonism (one-two): “She is a liberal,” “They are awful.”

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Though Zarathustra advises escaping such a representational economy by keeping one’s impassioned value nameless, Deleuze and Guattari suggest disrupting roots with rhizomatic inventions, alliances that form through “the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and . . . ,” a word which “carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’”45 If companions operate rhizomatically, they may create more and more alliances, avoiding the isolation of which Zarathustra warned, as well as the traps of being confined to identity, being. As rhizomes spread from liberals to Independents to girls to hunters to Evangelicals, they disrupt the stability of political substance which grants the state authority over embodied humanity. Just as Zarathustra’s companions appeared, paradoxically, innocuous and hazardous to the herd, rhizomes defy comprehension by root logic. This is because rhizomes (and companions) are not a state of being; they suggest an identity or social relationship in a constant state of becoming. Rhizomes are “defined solely by a circulation of states,” rather than their relationship to what came before them or what is to come after them (being). Companion subjectivity, like rhizomes, thus appears more as a matter of agency than agent: It celebrates the potential or “capacity for words and/ or actions to come to make sense and therefore to create effects,” apart from subject (or rhetorical agent) to whom agency is attributed.46 How might the fairly abstract notions of agency and becoming translate into practices of resistance? Deleuze and Guattari suggest at least two possibilities: The first, the body without organs, is a process of experimentation by which individuals (alone and with others) disarticulate themselves from regimes of the subject. The second, a figure of collective agency (the multiplicity or pack), helps us identify what the process of becoming might look like for groups. Deleuze and Guattari describe the body without organs as a set of practices in which we “sufficiently dismantle our self,” without “significances and subjectifications.”47 It shares with Nietzsche’s companions an avoidance of nihilism and herds. The process of becoming a body without organs involves creatively destroying the self, or the substantial organism that “is,” inviting rhizomatic connections that defy roots.48 Through its desubjectivations, the body without organs says yes to life. But as with other transgressions, there is no means of guaranteeing a “proper” or “friendly” outcome. The body without organs is unpredictable, and may become cancerous and despotic.49 The body without organs defies the predictability of substances, while it affirms the positive agency within human life. By focusing on the process of becoming, rather than the search for being, one sees that an affirmative desire drives life. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, there are no more “acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead, there are colors and sounds, becomings

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and intensities. . . . There is no longer a Self that feels, acts, and recalls”; there is a mindful body/embodied mind “that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.”50 Shifting perspective from roots to rhizomes, from organisms to bodies without organs, from friends-against-enemies to companions, we see the world anew in transgressive ways. The triple threats of “organism, significance, and subjectification” constantly await the body without organs, seeking to re-integrate it into the manageable politics of agents, friends and enemies.51 Various projects of self command us to organize around the coherence of substance, lest we appear degenerate.52 The psychoanalyst demands of us significance, for the unity between referent and reference makes us normal. Finally, the virtuous shepherd desires our subjectification—for if we are a coherent subject, consistent with our body, identity, and words, we are civilized.53 Through persistent “disarticulation” of self, “experimentation” with language, and “nomadism” amidst herd dictates, the body without organs advances its agency.54 It does so, in part, by refusing to succumb to the demand to be an agent, locked into the authority of friend-enemy politics. The practices of the body without organs might manifest in a collective action or politics through the notion of multiplicity. Multiplicities are like a collection of forces.55 Unlike friend-enemy agents, which suggest a unity forged through rhetorical substance, multiplicities are “reducible neither to the One nor the multiple.”56 Just as being a companion implies dodging subjection to the dialectical one-two of the herd, being part of a multiplicity “is not a representative, a substitute, but an I feel.”57 To illustrate a multiplicity, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the mass or crowd, and the pack. Masses and crowds appear to behave like collections of Zarathustra’s corpses, with some herd-like qualities. Crowds are defined by their large numbers, hierarchical organization, and equally anonymous relationships between members.58 An economy of representation runs through the crowd, such that its members become substantially related: the crowd is agent because its members’ agency has aligned with the crowd. Deleuze and Guattari describe the crowd’s agency as “the paranoid position of the mass subject, with all the identifications of the individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group.”59 In contrast to the fairly root-like traits of the mass or crowd, packs are relatively small groups whose membership and movements vary, such that the pack appears noticeably different at every moment of its composition.60 The wolf pack, for instance, moves with a kind of tactical, temporal motion, marking but not maintaining the space as its own.61 To the observer, the wolf pack appears as a chaotic movement across the snow, its tracks so random that it is difficult to discern how many members are traveling (or to where, or why). The member of the crowd disciplines herself in step

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with the masses’ movements, donning the uni-form of the soldier against a common enemy. But the member of the pack finds himself a warrior, a companion: “I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or foot.”62 Deleuze and Guattari advance Nietzsche’s vision for companion subjectivity as a process of becoming. While the nihilist disconnects from sociality, and the virtuous shepherds discipline their followers through a substantial conformity of values, companions form packs to mutually support an arduous journey of self-overcoming. Their resistance to herd conformity and nihilism is not a matter of subjecting to a companion substance, but rather, a continual process of transgressing the herd’s production of substance, and the naysayer’s refusal to live. A second major trajectory of theory resonates with French poststructuralism’s commitment to multiplicities and a politics of agency, influencing the development of transgression as a unique, viable mode of resistance. Gathering Companions, Transgressing Collectives Autonomism is an anarchistic version of Marxism that grew in Italy through the 1960s and 1970s. Autonomism is related to operaismo, a worker’s movement which criticized Marxism for “the reduction of life to work,” and sought not “to re-appropriate work (‘take over the means of production’) but reduce it.”63 Influenced by the Situationists, autonomist actions integrated performative spectacle with a fierce commitment to direct action, and suspicion of resistance through vanguards, parties, or a dictatorship of the state.64 The autonomists’ immediate resistance has been supported by a number of writings from Italian thinkers Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Giorgio Agamben, among others. Like French poststructuralism, Italian autonomist theory is multi-faceted, exceeding the fairly focused treatment I give it here. Autonomist companion subjects (namely, the multitude and the coming community) challenge the centrality of friend-enemy agents, by revoking commonality as the basis for politics, and substantial representation as a necessary condition for political effectiveness. Perhaps the most widely known figure of companion subjectivity is the multitude, which drew a wide readership and debate following the 2000 publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. But prior to Hardt and Negri, Virno had published an extensive essay on the multitude.65 Like other companion subjects, the multitude manifests somewhere between the nihilistic tendency toward isolation and the herd tendency toward conformity. Virno’s multitude refers to the performance of human sociality “for the many, seen as being many,” distinct from the people—a unified collective of sovereign individuals who earn their rights by subjecting to the State.66 The multitude is a collaborative performance of plurality.

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Virno elaborates that individuality flows from a commonality which presages individuation (or the formation of an ego-self). The points of convergence which appear in the multitude’s self-organizing function as a kind of universality which all members hold (notably, “the biological basis of the species, that is, the sensory organs, motor skills apparatus, perception abilities,” “language,” and “the prevailing relation of production”).67 Other collective subjects (like the people, the herd, or more deterministic collective wills) seek to mold individuality into a general consciousness. But Virno’s multitude embraces singularity and maintains differences between individuals.68 Within the multitude, there is space (and even encouragement) for companions to follow their own passions or virtues, as Zarathustra advised, for the energy of individualities only allows the multitude’s power to grow. The multitude is neither fully collective agent, nor collection of individual agents—it is mainly agency, the “productive potential” or “dynamis” of human life for those who perform through or within it.69 It is an agency which does not need to become warped into the gravity of collective agent in order to be visible as a powerful resistance. While Virno does not seem as concerned with the economy of representation as were Deleuze and Guattari, his development of the multitude supports a more performative perspective on communication and resistance. Virno compares the multitude’s creative inventions to virtuosity, as “an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself.”70 Virtuosity demands others’ presence. Eluding or violating the substantial connection of issues, ideas, and identities presumed in the more deterministic versions of hegemony, the multitude does “not produce an end product which is distinguishable from performance” or “even leave behind an end product which could be actualized by means of performance.”71 In other words, its resistance is non-reproducible, more metonymic than metaphorical—in the terms of later chapters, it is a politics of enactment. More particularly, Virno envisions the multitude’s collective action as a non-liberal civil disobedience. The multitude’s performances do not problematize unjust laws or oppressive cultural norms, because such performances would suggest that one’s resistance is underwritten by the state.72 The multitude’s creative, singular enactment of rebellion calls the state’s power into question.73 Thus, the multitude does not perform transgression because its members are excluded from the “reasonable” discourse of democracy—the multitude transgresses the state in ways that disrupt the logics which permit the state’s maintenance of power. For theory influenced by Nietzsche, one of the key logics in maintaining state power is the production of subjectivity. Hardt and Negri take up the significance of subjectivity within their version of the multitude. Following the basic trajectory of autonomist and post-hegemonic thought, Hardt and Negri situate their multitude within a post-industrial terrain increasingly

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permeated (though not totally dominated) by immaterial labor, or the production of “knowledge, information, communication, and affects.”74 However, Hardt and Negri theorize that the multitude resists a hegemonic and biopolitical global sovereignty which represents the most advanced form of capitalist control (Empire). As such, Hardt and Negri’s multitude appears more clearly aligned with the Marxist tradition than Virno’s multitude, for it presumes a “telos, a big narrative” of the proletariat’s final revolutionary victory.75 But Hardt and Negri’s multitude offers insight into transgression, particularly amidst the production of subjectivity. Recall that advocates of a post-hegemonic perspective argue that the nature of sovereignty is changing, growing beyond its traditional capacity as the power to define, maintain, and enforce the rule of law, even (and especially) through coercive means. Following Foucault, Hardt and Negri concur that today’s sovereignty is no longer limited to juridical power; nor is it limited to the disciplinary or regulatory power found in institutions such as the hospital and the prison. Sovereignty becomes biopower, the “production and reproduction of life itself” or a power which penetrates “entirely the consciousnesses and bodies of individuals.”76 From Hardt and Negri’s perspective, today’s imperial sovereignty infests and infuses all aspects of everyday existence—and it does so by teaming with advancing post-industrial capitalism, in the production of subjectivity. Empire materializes as knowledge workers and service industry employees, among others, create immaterial products that fluidly morph into subjectivities: “Who we are, how we view the world, how we interact with each other.”77 As sovereignty more cunningly takes up the production of subjectivities, it is clear that collective action is affected: resistors must acknowledge that a primary weapon at their disposal, the constitution of new identities or senses of self, has been colonized by imperial sovereignty. Whereas capitalist regimes of the past repressively shut down “bottom-up” or grassroots innovations, Hardt and Negri argue that Empire works by “integrating, dominating, and profiting from . . . new practices and forms” of resistance.78 Empire appropriates the creative, constituent energy of its populations through biopolitical production—it becomes a more flexible, dynamic, and thus stronger sovereignty, by hosting on the multitude. Though the multitude’s inventions are primary to Empire’s sovereignty, Empire’s control over the production of subjectivity paralyzes the multitude’s ability to resist by sequestering embodied people away from spaces of possibility: In Hardt and Negri’s words, Empire’s production of biopolitical subjectivities serve as a powerful “smoke screen” that “separates a body and mind from what they can do”79 Empire’s unique sovereignty invites a unique subject of resistance, clearly influenced by transgression and companionship. The multitude is derived from an ontology of immanence in which “Politics is given immediately.”80

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The multitude is neither organized, nor expressed, through the mediating terms of greater social subjectivities, their ideologies, or identifications. As such, Hardt and Negri confront “the modern legacy of mediation that imagines that the multitude needs a nation, a public sphere, or a representative.”81 The multitude’s theoretical revolution consists of undoing and subverting Empire’s divisions between mind and body, people and possibility. Though Hardt and Negri leave open the details of this revolution, their books follow a Marxist-inspired historical progression that re-reads social movement struggles in terms of resistance to Empire’s sovereignty. The multitude’s resistance is “immediate,” a descriptor which helps tune our perception to a new immanent politics on the horizon. With no transcendent engine to drive it, immanent politics (both sovereignty and resistance) will not occur through the modernist mediations of essence or necessity (like “working class-ness”). Moreover, the multitude’s resistance is not organized by any common rhetorical principle, nor can it be recognized as a resistant social subject reflecting or expressing a common commitment, whether positively (“We are defending democracy”) or negatively (“Abolish Banks!”). Its resistance is immediate, insofar as it does not form through rhetorically mediated agents in civil society, such as political parties, nongovernmental organizations, discussion circles, etc. Immediately, the multitude does not necessarily express itself via friend-enemy agents. Hardt and Negri’s re-reading of various social struggles as “immediate” helps to demonstrate the connection of the multitude to companion subjectivity, and transgression as a mode of resistance. The authors identify worker-led class struggles as “a modern model” of the multitude: rather than relying on “the peoples’” grammars of rights to obtain recognition, working class revolutionaries based resistance “solely on their own interests and desires.”82 As Hardt and Negri conclude: “Working-class power resides not in the representative institutions but in the antagonism and autonomy of the workers themselves.”83 In Zarathustra’s terms, workers may name their virtues and enemies in the context of struggle, but such names are not necessary to view their struggle as legitimate—indeed, such names render their struggle representable, and therefore less powerful, from the perspective of autonomist theory. Autonomous, momentary insubordinations—like those associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, such as a college student experimenting with LSD instead of attending class, or a woman refusing marriage—may have diverted energy from real political battles of the time.84 But Hardt and Negri insist that such “‘merely cultural’ experimentation had very profound political and economic effects.”85 The counterculture’s “mobility, flexibility, knowledge, communication, cooperation,” and affect gave rise to a new breed of

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capitalist hegemon.86 People began inventing subjectivity for themselves outside of the disciplining mediations of institutions (notably, the state, school, family, and work). In response, advertising and communication professionals colonized countercultural techniques, reinventing capitalism through the production of biopolitical subjectivity.87 While transgression’s effects cannot be predicted (for they exceed the proper political relationship of friend-enemy), they nonetheless have the potential to move society. Hardt and Negri take the Zapatista struggles in southern Mexico, and the riots in Los Angeles after the 1992 Rodney King verdict, as recent “traces” of the multitude’s resistance. They comprise “one of the central and most urgent political paradoxes in our time: in our much celebrated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable.”88 These seemingly isolated regional or local ruptures defy translation into more hegemonic political forms, such as “international working class revolts” or “a nationwide movement for civil rights.” What is more, their immediate resistance appears “all but” incomprehensible: audiences lack the tools to read the rhetorical acts as resistance, because they exceed, to a certain degree, the markers of friend-enemy politics. As such, the authors claim, these traces fail to “speak” clearly to local communities, “burning out in a flash” once they have begun. But as with Zarathustra’s advice to stammer about our passions, the very illegibility of the multitude’s resistance provides the forcefulness of its challenge to Empire. As Hardt and Negri optimistically conclude: “Perhaps the incommunicability of struggles, the lack of well-structured, communicating tunnels, is in fact a strength rather than a weakness—a strength because all of the movements are immediately subversive in themselves and do not wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their effectiveness.”89 From Hardt and Negri’s multitude, we see that companion subjectivity contrasts friend-enemy subjectivity by embracing immediacy as much as it can. Companions resist even a temporary rhetorical “glue” which joins individuals into antagonistic collectives and expresses their common will. For Hardt and Negri, the multitude’s immediacy (or relative lack of symbolic mediation) derives from its position as a non-representational subject, which nonetheless has political agency. The multitude thus stands somewhere between “the people” and “the masses.” Unlike the masses, the multitude is minimally organized and not “easily manipulated.”90 Unlike the people, the multitude does not rely upon a representative government to gain its agency: its agency derives from the “unformed stuff of life” rather than from sovereign recognition, from combinations of “corporeal” and “intellectual” power rather than as reflections of an abstract or transcendent power.91 As Hardt and Negri’s development of the multitude reveals, because they are hybrid and immanent figures, transgressing companions appear different in their resistance. As Zarathustra prophesied, the transgression of com-

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panions is bound to incite fear or indignation from the hegemonic herd. Hardt and Negri’s multitude is no exception. Their theoretical transgressing subject has drawn a great deal of critical attention, demonstrating the limits of hegemony. Several scholars have taken Hardt and Negri’s development of the multitude as an occasion to re-assert the necessity of hegemonic modes of resistance against transgression. Without some ability to subject rhetorical invention to the common ground of friends-and-enemies, Rustin concludes, we are left with only “various modes of carnival, witness, reparation, and terror. Such actions may be visionary and prefigurative, or largely destructive.”92 Transgression may be the energetic muse for hegemony, but it cannot count as “serious political action.”93 The multitude’s critics argue that one must undergo “subjective transformations” to arrive at an “adequate consciousness,” and thus become part of a social movement.94 As Gramsci and other theorists of hegemony assert, friend-enemy subjects ensure that arriving at such a consciousness (and thus, effecting social change) is more likely. Without dialectical agents, the multitude appears as “a gathering of subjectivities . . . who never actually meet or converse, and who therefore can never be guilty of repressing their political foes or, for that matter, of exercising their political wills.”95 However, the conceptual development of companion subjects reveals that consciousness is not only (or best) a matter of subjecting to friend-enemy politics. Indeed, as the final autonomist companion subject suggests, resistance is not reducible to the terms of representing a common agent, as some theorists of hegemony would have it. Theorist Giorgio Agamben initiates the coming community in a discussion of language not unlike Laclau’s empty signifier: “The coming being is whatever being,” whatever translating simultaneously in Latin as “‘it does not matter which, indifferently’” and “‘being such that it always matters.’”96 The adjective whatever performs a very important linguistic trick, setting up the possibility for a singularity that does not succumb to the power of universality (as a member representative of some set), nor to the nihilism of individualism (as a lone unknowable). In Agamben’s words, whatever or such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging (“there is an x such that it belongs to y”) and which is in no way a real predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that is, lovable.97

Whatever being—so long as witnesses acknowledge its power—defies the drive toward commonality inherent within a friend-enemy politics, for

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it acknowledges, simultaneously, the radical plurality and singularity of being. As in Agamben’s examples, one practicing Islam appears in typical language games as “a Muslim,” one who belongs to the collective Muslim subject and is thus transposable in all the friend-enemy games of which “Muslim” is a part (European immigration, the war on terror, etc.). Agamben explains elsewhere that linguistic being, or naming, “transforms singularities into members of a class, whose meaning is defined by a common property. . . . The comprehension of singular distinct objects m in a whole, M is nothing but the name.”98 But whatever being disrupts or distracts the language games of friend-enemy politics, such that being-Muslim does not import the embodied individual into the linguistic equations. And it does so without reducing being-Muslim to an absolutely unique, isolated corpse (or old virtuous man in the woods). Whatever being connotes belongingness without recourse to transcendence, sociality without a “substantial” representation. The significance of whatever being to the coming community directly lies in its effect on identity. Unlike friends and enemies, whose identities are more or less fixed (even if temporarily) in political struggle, the coming community “has no identity, is not determinate with respect to a concept, but neither is it simply indeterminate; rather it is determined only through its relation to an idea, that is, to the totality of its possibilities. . . . It belongs to a whole, but without this belonging’s being able to be represented by a real condition: Belonging, being-such, is here only the relation to an empty and indeterminate totality.”99 Like Laclau’s empty signifier, the coming community appears through a non-substantial substitution; but unlike the hegemonic collective emergent through the empty signifier, the coming community is “an absolutely unrepresentable community.”100 There is no drive for universality or totality in this more transgressive subject, even if universal representation is treated as fictitious. Whereas the hegemonic subject seeks to represent the whole, the coming community seeks “a zone in which possibility and reality, potentiality and actuality become indistinguishable.”101 Agamben locates such a promising zone in post-industrial capitalism, particularly the pervasive production of communication. However, following the basic trajectory of autonomist and French poststructuralist thought, Agamben argues that communication must be freed from the globalizing consumer capitalism, which converts all life into representations and prevents individuals from sensing agency.102 Agamben concludes that we are facing an abysmal situation, in which the constant spectacle of communication promotes nihilism, a situation which benefits the state and capitalism by cutting language off from its connection to reality.103 As with the multitude, the coming community’s power rests in its incomprehensibility, its agency to exceed the production of communication

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that textualizes and fixes us into friend-enemy politics. Agamben describes this agency as refusing to locate or don a “proper identity,” and instead performing as a singularity through the collective stuff of life.104 Agamben views the democratic protests in China’s Tiananmen Square as a materialization of the coming community, for the protestors did not articulate themselves through specific, goal-oriented demands, but still incurred the State’s violence. As Agamben argues, and most theorists of transgressive resistance confirm, the State cares not about singularities, but identity—for the State’s ability to subsume any act of rhetorical invention into the substance of identities permits it control over that identity.105 States cannot endure the coming community, whatever being, that “which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging.”106 The power of the coming community, the power of Zarathustra’s companions, becoming wolf, and multitudes, is invented in their excess of friend-enemy agents—particularly if we agree that the never-ending turnstiles of affect and identity which lure identification are the modus operandi of consumer globalization.

CONCLUSION The development of transgressing companions offers an alternative means to understand and evaluate social movement and resistance, apart from friend-enemy subjectivity. As Nietzsche and theorists influenced by his work suggest, transgression involves individual and collective processes of de-subjectivation, by which humans reclaim their power of invention against those forces which would try to mediate agency into a collective agent. Because they do not predictably follow the substantial connections of friends-against-enemies—and because they sometimes criticize such social relationships—companions are bound to be misunderstood by the common sense of hegemony. Companion subjectivity augments the understanding of transgression as a mode of resistance beyond Bakhtin’s carnival. Though many of the same dynamics are assumed in carnival and companionship (notably the hybrid dissolution of identity markers, the embodied play of subjectivity outside ordered, hierarchical values), moving transgression beyond the gates of the carnival is critical to appreciating resistance as more than a temporary (and sanctioned) activity. As the French poststructuralists suggest, transgressing subjects exceed the historical festival analogue by deconstructing and recreating identity in non-carnival spaces (such as the workplace, the home, the city street). Companion subjectivity is processural, not limited to the festival’s end—and not

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easily explainable or coherent as “the carnival.” Companion subjectivity is dangerous precisely because it is not limited to any situation or context, it is not easily attributable to an agent. In other words, there is no need for sanction or function to explain companion subjectivity (we do not need the “free speech” of democracy to explain away its radicalism, nor the “free time” of advanced capitalism to explain away its play). Companion subjectivity suggests that politics be interpreted through acts of invention which disarticulate individuals from social agents, including civil society institutions or social movements. However, as Nietzsche and others reiterate, companions must guard against the potential for nihilism, isolation, and the temptation to wield pure corporeal or material force against their “enemies.” Transgressing companions perform politics through creative rhetorical and material inventions, which intervene directly in the world, and not necessarily against an opposition. And, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, companionship is not inherently ethical or good in every case—it may result in noxious weeds, as easily as it results in flowers. Within a transgressive milieu, there is no way to ensure that isolated acts of rebellion, or even collective efforts at change, are properly political: companion subjectivity calls into question the hegemonic drive to guarantee or control (at least partially) the outcomes of identity transformation through the “least common denominator” of friends-against-enemies. Yet, as the case studies in the next chapter demonstrate, historically, companions’ resistance is had as a process of consciously removing oneself from the authority of collective agents, in contingent encounters with others who may or may not share the same consciousness. Such a process invites consideration of historical patterns of oppression, and ways to forestall one’s participation as an oppressor: as such, companions may help reinvent rhetorical materialism outside a strict Marxist foundation.

NOTES 1. Jack Z. Bratich, “Notes from Laboratory NYC: A Neo-activist’s Image-Report from the 2004 Republican National Convention,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 5, no. 3 (2005): 347. 2. Robert Pippin, “Introduction” to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, eds. Adrian Del Caro and R. Pippin, trans. A. Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiii. Though the book is difficult to understand, Pippin counters what he views as common misinterpretations: notably, Zarathustra does not advocate a statist project such as Nazism through the conquering overman (Pippin, “Introduction,” xi). 3. Pippin, “Introduction,” xx. 4. Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (New York: Guilford Press, 1999).

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5. Pippin, “Introduction,” xiv; xviii. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. A. Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3. 7. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 4; 5. 8. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 5. 9. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 6. 10. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 6. 11. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 7. 12. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 8. 13. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 9. 14. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 9. 15. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 9; 10. 16. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 10. 17. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 11. 18. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 11. 19. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 11. 20. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 12. 21. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 14. 22. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 14. 23. Pippin, “Introduction,” xxviii. 24. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 15. 25. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 15. 26. Victor J. Vitanza, Negation, Subjectivity, and the History of Rhetoric (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 197. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. William Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 270. 29. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 17; 18. 30. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 19. 31. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 19. 32. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 24. 33. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 25. 34. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 25. 35. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 27. 36. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 33. 37. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 33. 38. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 59. 39. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 59. 40. David Graeber, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Erika Biddle, eds., Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorizing (Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 2007). 41. Graeber et al., Constituent Imagination. 42. Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Guilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xii.

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43. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 16. 44. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25. 45. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25. 46. Erin J. Rand, “An Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form: Larry Kramer, Polemics, and Rhetorical Agency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 299. 47. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 151. 48. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 160. 49. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 160. 50. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 162. 51. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159. 52. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159. 53. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159. 54. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 159. Deleuze and Guattari caution that dis-articulation of self must be done carefully: “You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality” (A Thousand Plateaus, 160). This echoes Zarathustra’s advice concerning nihilism, as companions must avoid the temptation to completely withdraw from sociality and communication. In addition, as Deleuze and Guattari develop, companion subjectivity is a position of hybridity between the body without organs and organism, between that which is unmediated and mediated—rather than an oppositional take-over of one by the other. This notion of hybridity will become more significant in chapter 5’s discussion of enactment. 55. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8. 56. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. 57. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 32. 58. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33. 59. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 34. 60. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33. 61. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33. 62. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 29. 63. Sylvere Lotringer, “Foreword: We, the Multitude,” in A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, by Paolo Virno, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004), 7–19. 64. Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movement and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006). For instance, Katsiaficas describes new forms of strikes that emerged during the massive unrest of 1969, forms which were more performative than class-driven. Workers developed “hiccup and checkerboard” strikes, in which the production line would be halted every thirty minutes or so before starting up again, or in which different parts of the factory or line would cease working until they were forced to begin again, at which point another part of the factory or line would cease working (The Subversion,

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19). While these new tactics did not completely halt production as would have classic strikes, they posed losses and frustration for management. 65. Like Negri, Virno was imprisoned by the Italian government, following widespread actions by Autonomia in 1977 (Lotringer, “Foreword,” 10). Virno reflects upon his time as an activist, as well as its continuation within his philosophy, as an attempt to locate “a nonreductionist, broadly conceived materialism capable of explaining rationally all that a ‘linguistic animal’ (which is to say, a human being) does, thinks, desires” (Branden W. Joseph, “Interview with Paolo Virno,” trans. Allesia Ricciardi, Grey Room 21 [Fall 2005]: 27). Prior to becoming an academic, Virno also “worked at the most disparate sorts of jobs in the culture industry: cartoon scriptwriter, journalist, editor for publishing houses, and so on” (Joseph, “Interview,” 28). His experiences with the alienation of post-Fordist production, the satisfaction of immaterial labor, along with his operaist activism, are detectable in his development of the multitude. 66. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 21. 67. Virno, A Grammar, 77. 68. Virno, A Grammar, 79. For Virno, as for classical anarchists described in the following chapter, individuation is not synonymous with individualism. The multitude’s purpose is not to cultivate individual subjects who find their true potential, as Virno clarifies: “The individual (with his or her autonomy) is a point of eventful arrival, not an incontrovertible point of departure. He or she is the point of arrival of a complex process of individuation, the individuation of universal productive forces, anonymous structures, preindividual modes of being” (Joseph, “Interview,” 33). 69. Virno, A Grammar, 83. 70. Virno, A Grammar, 52. 71. Virno, A Grammar, 56. 72. Virno, A Grammar, 69. 73. Virno, A Grammar, 69. 74. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 407. Hardt and Negri have come under increasing criticism concerning their theorization of Empire, including the idea that immaterial labor has hegemonized the contemporary economy; and the idea that the nation-state’s sovereignty is becoming less powerful or important than global sovereignty with increased flows of people across national borders (see Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney, “The Debate About Globalization: An Introduction,” in Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, eds. S. Aronowitz and H. Gautney [New York, Basic, 2003], xi–xxx; and Peter Bratsis, “Over, Under, Sideways, Down: Globalization, Spatial Metaphors, and the Question of State Power,” in Implicating Empire). 75. Lotringer, “Foreword,” 16. 76. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24. 77. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 66. 78. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 268. 79. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 396; 390.

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80. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 354. In the Western philosophical tradition, immanence relates to the world as given. It appears as the opposite of transcendence, the latter which is exterior, above, beyond, or independent from this world (Peter Fitzpatrick, “The Immanence of Empire,” in Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, eds. Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean [New York: Routlege, 2004], 31–55). While immanence is an attempt to think outside dualisms, in Hardt and Negri’s work, the concept gains its insurrectionary energy vis-à-vis the logics of transcendence. Transcendence seeks to fix the things that immanence would scatter; transcendence posits functions or cause-effect relationships to organize activity, where immanence would seek to unsettle and disrupt. Where transcendence sees dualistic forms such as man-woman, human-animal, immanence sees hybridity and fluidity (Hardt and Negri, Empire, 39). 81. Ronald Walter Greene, “The Commons and Community: Global Citizenship without Rhetorical Mediation,” in Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement, eds. Gerard A. Hauser and Amy E. Grim (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), 170. 82. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 80. 83. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 269. 84. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 274. See chapter 6 for more discussion of the 1960s counterculture, as associated with the New Left. 85. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 274. 86. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 274. 87. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4. 88. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 54. 89. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 58. 90. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Globalization and Democracy,” in Implicating Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, eds. Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney (New York: Basic, 2003), 114. 91. Hardt and Negri, “Globalization and Democracy,” 119. 92. Michael Rustin, “Empire: A Postmodern Theory of Revolution,” in Debating Empire, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 2003), 14. 93. Rustin, “Empire: A Postmodern Theory,” 14. 94. Ernesto Laclau, “Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?,” in Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, eds. Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean (New York: Routlege: 2004), 28; Stanley Aronowitz, “The New World Order,” in Debating Empire, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 2003), 25. 95. Timothy Brennan, “The Italian Ideology,” in Debating Empire, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 2003), 106. 96. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1. Agamben is not typically associated with autonomist activism (as are Negri and Virno); yet, his development of “the coming community” is an important part of the trajectory of autonomist thought. 97. Agamben, The Coming Community, 1–2. At times, whatever being seems like Laclau’s empty signifier, as “one singularity among others, which, however, stands for each of them and serves for all” (Agamben, The Coming Community, 9). However, as I interpret the coming community, it emphasizes embodiment over language or

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discourse. In addition, I read Agamben as attempting to locate concepts which defy representation, whereas Laclau has defended the necessity of representation in his recent work. 98. Agamben, The Coming Community, 8. 99. Agamben, The Coming Community, 66. 100. Agamben, The Coming Community, 23–24. 101. Agamben, The Coming Community, 55. 102. Agamben, The Coming Community, 78. See also chapter 6’s discussion of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for the basis of Agamben’s argument. 103. Agamben, The Coming Community, 81. 104. Agamben, The Coming Community, 64. 105. Agamben, The Coming Community, 84–85. 106. Agamben, The Coming Community, 86.

4 Flashpoints of Transgression: Considering Companions in Classical Anarchism

I cannot remember, at this moment, and I do not wish to remember, that I have a philosophy, a creed of any kind, to set limits upon what I feel, or to measure my passion with a yardstick. And in speaking now, I speak simply as a human being, not as an Anarchist.1

Some historians trace the anarchistic impulse to ancient China and Egypt, but many consider the movement’s heyday to be in Northern industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century.2 Here, any number of resistant acts stand out as not only anarchistic but also transgressive in character: the Paris Commune of 1872,3 the Pullman Strike in the United States in 1894,4 the Spanish Civil War ending in the 1930s.5 Like so many actions agitating against the expansion of industrial capital, these are remembered as bottom-up, relatively spontaneous moments in which people reclaimed autonomy from factory owners and their government patrons. They may also be considered failures of hegemonic politics, for their immediate impacts never translated into lasting struggles: though the Paris Commune and Spanish Civil War in particular have become mythologized in anarchist writings, they, like other flashpoints of transgression, extinguished shortly after they began. Global capitalism marched on, seemingly impervious to the rhetorical and material force of direct antagonisms which never linked themselves to each other in a “real” political way.6 Yet, the lead-up to and extension of anarchism’s “Golden Age” offers insight into a transgressive politics, one whose effectivity is not measured by a group’s ability to entrench itself into positions of authority, for the sake of spreading its ideology through friend-enemy politics or achieving policy change. I concentrate in this chapter on three historical case studies which 115

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illustrate well the degrees of difference between hegemony and transgression. Beginning in industrializing Europe and stretching to the American Gilded Age, the episodes help figure companion subjectivity in the flesh— or at least in the words remaining from these historic events. They foretell “effective” resistance as a matter of reclaiming the power of singularity and creativity. The legacy of anarchist rhetoric is also one that blends transgression and hegemony as modes of resistance. The anarchists analyzed in this chapter called into question all manners of authority, especially those which portended to maintain themselves in the long-term, against individuality. This same critique of authority often manifested in antagonisms against the state, capitalism, and their attendant institutions (such as the church, patriarchal family, and school). A close reading of anarchist rhetoric demonstrates that anarchy not only relies upon hegemony, but also constitutes an immediate politics which defers (as much as possible) the determinism of friend-enemy subjects. Combined with the theoretical work of chapter 3, the historical case studies here demonstrate transgression’s power in checking the aspiration for universal effects, especially as they are achieved through subjection to a common agent. Rather than originating from an unfulfilled or “lacking” ego, transgression initiates from passion, as individuals seek to dismantle subjectivity through the invention of singularities. Companion subjectivity suggests that resistance is had through a performative creation of new ways of being that exceed the linguistic representation of friend-enemy agents. The singularities invented materially and rhetorically are unpredictable and difficult to interpret, for they do not appeal to common sense; yet, they often inspire the individual to consciously remove herself from positions of authority or privilege which would subject others to her will. Transgression thus sets the tone for a new materialism, a topic to which I turn at the chapter’s conclusion.

DEGREES OF DETERMINISM AND TRANSGRESSIVE HEGEMONY IN THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL The International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) formed alongside European and American industrialization in the 1800s. Well-educated artisan workers performed much of the initial organizing, gathering writers, intellectuals, exiled radicals, and the politically minded to agitate against oppression in industry, politics, and the law.7 As one historian writes, “Were its place in history to be judged solely by the deeds attributed to it by its enemies, the [IWMA] might simply have been the most militant, farreaching, and energetic socialist organization of its century.”8 First seated in

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London in 1864, the IWMA lured a relatively little-known German theorist, Karl Marx, who would attempt to spread his theory of class consciousness through the IWMA as the primary vehicle for revolution.9 But various anarchistic elements would foil Marx’s ability to fully command the International: notably, the followers of French libertarian Pierre Proudhon, allies of Russian socialist-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and the myriad American radicals affiliating with the IWMA, proved too much for Marx’s scientific pursuit of revolution. The deterministic forces of strict materialism battled the more transgressive politics of anarchism in the Eastern and Southern European context, and the more transgressive desires for hegemony in the American context. As this section’s brief historical review of the IWMA demonstrates, hegemony, like transgression, is a matter of degree. The first ideological obstacle for Marx consisted of highly skilled French workers who, in collaboration with British workers, had helped form the First International. At its founding, the IWMA held a broad republican agenda advocating individual freedom as well as social and economic justice.10 Marx was suspicious of the liberalism and idealism pervading the early organization. He viewed the original platform as contradictory, for it embraced “individual liberty, morality, and democracy” as well as “a classbased workers movement”—a vision which seemed perfectly logical to those who held it.11 Many of the French were taken with Pierre Proudhon’s anarchism, which would likely be viewed as a form of libertarian capitalism today. Proudhon’s doctrine consisted of a thick critique of communism as administered by a centralized state.12 Though the Proudhonists were warily welcomed early in the First International, Marx became increasingly hostile toward them, for they challenged a working-class dictatorship as the proper means to revolution. At a separate peace conference held alongside the 1867 IWMA Congress, for instance, the General Council of the First International declared that world peace was only possible through working-class solidarity and capitalist reform.13 From a contingent Gramscian perspective, the League of Peace and Freedom would have been ripe for alliance; but Marx saw the anti-war forces as driven by “middle-class pacifism.”14 With their voices silenced in the IWMA Congress, the Proudhonists transformed the peace conference into their own forum, drawing the ire of Marx. In a letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx referred to the French as “asses” and “chatterboxes,” who nonetheless did not gain control of the IWMA.15 Marx’s battle with the Proudhonists reached its zenith at the Brussels Congress, where the delegates passed a resolution endorsing collective farming. The French contingent was outraged, as their practice of farming was, for the most part, conducted in private, small, family operations antithetical to the “large-scale and mechanized agriculture” supported by

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some Marxists.16 Marx would further alienate the French in his response to the 1870 war between their country and Prussian-Germans: rather than advocating peace for the sake of all workers, Marx desired the Prussians to win, leading to greater power for Germany.17 Perhaps more importantly for Marx, a German-Prussian victory would help suffocate the French allegiance to Proudhon’s ideas, and render the Germans sole leaders of the international labor movement. While Marx began his involvement with the IWMA with a hegemonic approach, the common ground constricted as soon as he perceived a threat to his vision for social change. In this case, a desire for hegemonic resistance (the French drive for inclusivity) revealed the limits of a deterministic politics (held by Marx)—in the same way that transgression as a mode of resistance would come to reveal the limits of hegemony over a century later. Marx refused to expand common ground with the indigenous ideas and practices of French workers. The Proudhonists’ suspicion of centralized state power in all its manifestations (especially through agriculture, industry, and militarism) stood in logical contradiction to the necessary proletarian dictatorship Marx prophesied—therefore, there was no space for them or their ideas in the IWMA. The threat that deviation poses for determinism becomes even clearer in the second anarchistic obstacle Marx faced in the IWMA. Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian-born revolutionary and among the first to self-identify as an anarchist: “As a former pan-Slavist, as an admirer of Proudhon, and as the propounder of a theory of spontaneous revolution based largely on the peasants and the déclassé elements in urban society, Bakunin was triply suspect” to Marx.18 The strife staged in the First International between Marx and Bakunin marked the formation of anarchism as a (hegemonic) social movement, for it created a non-authoritarian center of gravity around which anarchists could identify for socialist change. But some historians dismiss Bakunin as a charismatic gadfly who did little more than produce “a ramshackle organization devoid of significant labour participation.”19 The battle between Marx and Bakunin surpasses a personality conflict between the two great agitators, revealing the deterministic tendency to discredit (or even insult) that which transgresses the proper trajectory of friend-enemy politics. Marx initially encouraged Bakunin’s involvement in the First International. Following Bakunin’s years in prison and exile in Siberia, Marx allied with him in Italy, where they attempted to organize against the conservative government. But the ties between Marx and Bakunin would soon dissolve, both because of Bakunin’s transgressive activities and his deviation from the Marxist program of social change. In Switzerland in 1868, Bakunin formed the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy with seventeen other labor activists suspicious of Marx’s vision for a powerful, centralized


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state.20 The Alliance differed markedly from the IWMA in its strategies and tactics, seeking equality for women as well as workers; a completely decentralized, collaborative economic and agricultural system; and a politics of direct action.21 But Bakunin’s affront to Marx’s power did not stop with the founding of the Alliance. Bakunin filed official documentation with the IWMA, desiring the Alliance’s recognition as a separate but affiliated unit. Marx “reacted with fury. He filled the margins of the documents with biting comments,” such as the infamous declaration that Bakunin was a hermaphrodite for advocating gender equality.22 The IWMA denied the Alliance’s request, but permitted them entry into the First International as a regular chapter of the organization. Bakunin’s side projects continued, some of which appeared as disciplined and deterministic as Marx’s IWMA politics: “The revolutionary organization must be built on the principle of strict discipline, hierarchy, and degrees of secrecy,” Bakunin wrote in Catechism of the Revolutionary.23 He teamed with a young Russian named Alexander Nechaev to create an imaginary secret political society. Nechaev leaked hundreds of names in his correspondences, which were intercepted by the Russian government, leading to widespread arrests and repression.24 Former Bakuninists in the Alliance referred to Bakunin and his ilk as authoritarians and “intellectuals” who used workers for their own gain.25 Bakunin’s actions may be viewed as a form of opportunism, as he supported several factions which were alienated by Marx’s politics—but such opportunism could also be taken as a transgressive alternative to Marx’s determinism. Along with advocating for the French farmers’ rights to their land, Bakunin drew the support of workers in Italy and Spain. He offered clear contrast to Marx, as historian Paul Avrich explains: Bakunin believed that humankind “was not compelled to wait patiently as the fabric of history unfolded in the fullness of time. By teaching the working masses theories, Marx would only succeed in stifling the revolutionary ardor every man [and woman] possessed.”26 Bakunin abided by an immediate view of social change, for all people held the potential to resist through their inherent connections to the common “stuff” of human life—thought, labor, and speech. In many of his writings, Bakunin expressed that individuals were full of possibility, rather than lacking self-definition, or being in need of discipline. Individuals’ potential for resistance, their agency, did not derive from individualism, which Bakunin considered an ideology imposed by Western capitalism: Bakunin believed that autonomy derived from “the collective effort of all the members, past and present, of society.”27 Because individuality (expressed through inventions of thought, labor, and speech) provided the tools of resistance, Bakunin shirked (at times) the least common denominator of friend-enemy politics to encourage social change. As

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the autonomists would later theorize, a new form of sociality is possible when philosophers view individuality (not individualism) as the wellspring of resistance. But trusting the bottom-up, inventional power of the people demands that philosophers relinquish control over the mediation of social change, a difficult prospect for Karl Marx. By 1870, Marx became even more public in his attacks on Bakuninists, who did not advocate properly for, or participate effectively in, political change. Engels joined, suggesting workers needed independence from the “aristocratic” Bakunin.28 Marx composed an address for the General Council which named anarchism as an enemy on par with the capitalists: Bakunin’s Alliance “proclaims anarchy within the ranks of the proletarians as a means by which to break the great and concentrated power, social and political, held by the exploiters. . . . And this is postulated at a time when the old world does everything to destroy the IWMA. Nothing more is desired by the international police.”29 Bakunin’s transgressions reveal the limits of determinism as a mode of resistance. Moreover, this statement presages common Marxist attacks on anarchism, which parallel a hegemonic stance toward transgression. Marx’s initial tactic is to discredit anarchists like Bakunin as unethical and impractical. His second tactic implies that anarchy entails a complete lack of organization, opposed to the superior organization of Marxists. Finally, the Marxist position claims that anarchy will play into the hands of the enemies, and therefore it must be excised from the proper conduct of social change. Later, Marx would praise anarchistic action, appropriating it for his own political ends. Following the bloody end to the Paris Commune (see note 3, above), Marx and Engels praised the martyrs for their expansion of direct representation and sovereignty, as well as their overthrow of private property and the parasitic state.30 Marx sought to equate the Commune with Communism, reinserting the word into the public discourse after it had been nearly erased. He attempted to claim the energy of transgression for his own deterministic efforts, a move which some practitioners of hegemonic resistance would later replicate. In 1872, the IWMA held its fifth Congress at The Hague. It was to be the first and only IWMA Congress which Marx and Engels actually attended. They appealed to their supporters to attend as well, for they feared the Jura Federation of Bakuninists, Paris Communards, and former members or supporters of the Alliance, would take over the IWMA. At the Congress, Marx advocated to strengthen the General Council’s authority, and proposed to move it from London to New York. Those present also voted to expel Bakunin, for his activities in secret societies (which they argued were harmful toward, or redundant with, the International). The First International would dissolve a few years following its move across the Atlantic, and not only because of the battle between Bakunin and Marx.


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Perhaps the most intriguing obstacle to Marx’s success with the IWMA was the American radicals who organized domestically under the banner of the First International. They reveal how an early move from deterministic materialism to the contingency of what we now term hegemony was, at one time, transgressive. In other words, the American IWMA demonstrates what theorists of hegemony have argued persistently: That Gramsci’s resistance based on expanding collective consciousness reveals the limits of a deterministic politics. Marx had planned for the General Council’s move to New York to isolate his organization from the anarchist elements stirred by followers of Proudhon and Bakunin. He had hand-picked a new leader, Friedrich Sorge, who would rally German and Irish immigrants into a vanguard for the American proletariat struggle.31 But Marx’s plans were not sensitive to the unique context of American exceptionalism and republicanism, an ideological stew which had brought together anti-slavery advocates, “communalists, anarchists, spiritualists, feminists, and land reformers (though few defined themselves so exclusively beneath a solitary rubric).”32 Though the German- and English-speaking IWMA found some common ground with the enemy of capitalism, and support for global, economic, and social justice, the two factions could not sustain ties. The Americans used the IWMA to form their own hegemonic ties to each other, creating a progressive coalition that swept various issues and events into the organization. Their rhetoric was informed by contingent ideologies and identities, which meant that the Americans advocated for democracy and justice (rather than a proletarian revolution per se). From the perspective of hegemony, the activist ferment of the American IWMA would have been an important ally in advancing the struggle against capitalism. As Messer-Kruse notes, though, the Marxists in the American IWMA viewed the English-speakers as incapable of fully participating in the revolution because of their non-working-class identity. In contrast, the “Yankee Internationalists, reflecting their long experiences in cross-class coalitions, viewed membership in any cause like an evangelical did—each new member, regardless of his or her background, was a convert to the path of righteousness and moved the great crusade of social salvation one step forward.”33 Any woman or man, regardless of her or his material class position, was welcome to the American IWMA through her or his expressed opposition to capitalism (whether based on patriarchy, land-owning, morality, etc.). Meanwhile, the Marxist faction of the IWMA used issues as wedges to divide its membership from the hegemonic coalition forming in America. For instance, Sorge advocated against women’s equality in order to maintain alliances with German and Irish immigrant workers.34 Marx eventually suspended the membership of Section 12, a portion of the American International which had been increasingly vocal about issues of suffrage and

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free love. The Section attempted to expand its membership by associating a steam-boiler ship explosion (that killed eighty-two people being ferried to the beach for family vacations) with the harms of unregulated capitalism. Marx and his associates feared that the ferry explosion would dilute the IWMA’s membership with too many non-workingmen. Rather than finding common ground with the Yankees, the German Marxists viewed the radicals “as ‘unscientific,’ idealistic, and simply wrongheaded . . . as the greatest obstacle to the success of their revolutionary strategy.”35 In hindsight, the criticisms against American radicals reveal the determinist roots of Marxist struggle, as determinism lashes out against an increasingly transgressive politics. The American radicals practiced a loosely mediated social change, organizing a variety of workers, individualists, and spiritualists, and expressing their concerns as a common struggle against capitalism. Though their mediation still held traces of friend-enemy agents, it cast a net much wider than Marx was able to control, making the Yankee International a threat (rather than ally). By 1873, Marx began to dissociate himself from Friedrich Sorge, the de jure leader of the General Council in New York City, following a scandal in which two advisors were discovered to be police spies or informants. The General Council itself began to dissolve, and Sorge was demoted to secretary. The final congresses of both the official and unofficial Internationals failed to draw much attendance, and the global and U.S. workers’ movement struggled to locate a more effective organization and ideology for itself.36 But as Messer-Kruse concludes, at least in the American context, the labor movement would be chained to Marx’s determinism for the long haul. While the Yankees influenced the formation of the Knights of Labor (a fairly inclusive union for women and people of color), the most powerful force of organized labor came to be the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL and other unions like it followed Sorge’s vision to “subsume ‘superstructural’ issues of race, gender, and social equality beneath the ‘base’ issue of class,” segregating their membership by sex, skin color, and job or skill.37 Though the Americans’ brief experiment in hegemonic organizing ended with the reification of class determinism, it points to a continuum of approaches to resistance, rather than a dichotomy or a single choice. The Yankee International appropriated the vocabulary of labor struggles to mediate (gather and express) the wills of a plurality of interests, transgressing (at the time) Marx’s scientific orthodoxy that only certain workingmen, or a certain type of working consciousness, were capable of overthrowing capitalism. In this case, hegemony was transgressive. The hegemonic coalition violated the proper order of power as Marx had conceived it, frustrating the predictability and control of materialist determinism.


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This is not to suggest that Marx would have overthrown capitalism had he worked hegemonically rather than deterministically. The history of social change reveals that hegemonic struggles are equally unpredictable in terms of their effects, as are transgressive struggles today. However, this review of the IWMA suggests that the deterministic impulse—be it rooted in orthodox Marxism, or trailed through some contemporary writings on hegemony—is no guarantee of successful social change. Indeed, the deterministic impulse may offer its bearer only the illusion of control. It seems that the more “outside” (anarchistic) elements “threatened” his organization, the tighter Marx’s grip around the IWMA became; and the tighter his grip, the more the IWMA suffocated. The less resistance is determined by dialectical change agents, the more it seems to threaten the common sense of scholars and community members. Like other more transgressive resistors, the American IWMA’s excesses made it vulnerable to Marx’s wrath. Even today, historians dismiss the American radicals “as either opportunistic, as ‘bourgeois,’ or as ‘sentimental reformers’”—a distraction which “diverted workers from the task of class organization.”38 In hindsight, the Yankee International frustrated the common substances mandated by Marx, offering valuable insights into the problems with determinism. Though the Yankee International did not invent de-subjectivating performances (as more transgressive companions did), their rhetorically mediated politics advanced the potential for a contingent friend-enemy politics. The American radicals practiced a resistance freed from the authority of commonality, a politics that would appear today as hegemonic (in the sense of Mouffe or Laclau). The deterministic lens of Marxism might view such a politics as destined for failure, inspiring its bearer to “tighten the reigns” over the errant transgressors. But a more contingent perspective, like that held by contemporary theorists of hegemony, would appreciate the American IWMA’s transgressions for their ability to advance the struggle against a common enemy. The practice of a more contingent mode of resistance, which, for the Yankee International, was hegemony, helped open the possibility for companion subjectivity as a contingent alternative to the more determined forms of friend-enemy agents.

ANARCHISM IN THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION The rise of Lenin and the Soviets eclipsed the rich tradition of anarchism in Russia, which included diffuse bands of nihilists, Jewish radicals, syndicalists, students, and intellectuals who broke with the Marxist socialist democrats between 1905 and 1917.39 Though different combinations of

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these factions occasionally joined in common cause, their shared ideologies and oppositions were never strong enough to overcome the rising tide of Bolshevism and Leninism. Historian Paul Avrich’s detailed study of anarchism in Russia demonstrates that Lenin courted anarchist support in 1917, only to revoke it in favor of a totalitarian state. Returning to what little has been written about anarchy in Russia adds to our understanding of transgression, particularly as it reveals determinism’s limits and thus incurs stringent reactions. In early 1905, demonstrations in St. Petersburg arose due to discontent with the war in Japan (and the economic hardship that accompanied it). Peaceful protests resulted in government massacres. Internationally, workers linked the events to a larger pattern that included the American government’s unjust treatment of anarchists in the Haymarket affair (see below), and the French government’s brutality toward the Paris Communards. The revolutionary fervor and outrage found its way throughout the Russian empire, as disgruntled leftists joined anarchist groups, began distributing propaganda to students and workers in each region, and practiced more radical tactics including “agitation, demonstrations, strikes, robberies, and assassinations.”40 However, World War I prevented the first wave of unrest to materialize into revolution—until early in 1917. Tsar Nicholas II’s provisional government was failing following the invasion of Russia in WWI. In February, he sent soldiers to stop the antiwar protests and strikes in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), only to find that the troops had joined the rioters.41 In Moscow and Petrograd, anarchists attempted to implement self-governance along the lines of the Paris Commune, dissolving government institutions, private property, and capitalism, while creating a cooperative community of their own.42 Across Russia, an estimated ten thousand anarchists helped mobilize change. Avrich’s account of the February Revolution is of an immediate event: “It was, as the former director of the Tsar’s police observed, ‘a purely spontaneous phenomenon, and not at all the fruit of party agitation.’ No revolutionary vanguard led the workers and housewives into the streets of Petrograd; political ideologies and radical groups were momentarily lost in the chaotic outbreak of a hungry people testing the lack of bread and the unremitting sufferings of the war.”43 But this lack of organization was somewhat deceptive, as revolutionary syndicalists (and other anarchistic groups) had labored for years in organizing “local factory committees” which were unaffiliated with any political party.44 As such, the committees (and the revolution they helped spur along) appear more in line with the subjectivity of companions than the mediated commonality of deterministic social change. Though the revolution appeared immediate, the agitators had not suddenly realized a working-class consciousness. And judging by Avrich’s


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account, neither had they been motivated to self-organization through appeals toward common values or enemies. Modeled after French syndicates, the committees “were the creation of workers belonging to a variety of leftist parties or to none at all,” and advocated for “a voice in management,” “higher wages and shorter hours.”45 But the committees were to soon split along the lines of moderates and radicals, translating roughly into groups favoring more deterministic or more transgressive forms of resistance. Lenin took advantage of the radical rhetoric of the transgressive syndicates, promoting common cause between anarchists and Bolsheviks against the Provisional Government. Many anarchist groups were swayed by his April Theses, which included ideas anarchists had long advocated, such as converting anti-war sentiment into anti-capitalist revolution and modeling the Russian government after the Paris Commune (which would include dissolving the military and police, and equally distributing the community’s resources).46 Though others believed that the factory committees needed to subject to the trade unions’ mediation, Lenin praised their immediate power of direct action. He also supported a peasant revolution, which struck many faithful Marxists as too aligned with Bakunin.47 Lenin attempted to ease the perception of advocating anarchism, while not advocating liberal socialism. He thus appeared a master at hegemony, appealing to disparate groups by integrating their common sense into the emergent Bolshevik values. Along with integrating anarchists into the Bolshevik’s collective will, Lenin courted the peasantry as disaffected individuals who might (like workers) benefit from social struggle.48 However, when the Provisional Government was overthrown in October of 1917, Lenin reneged on such alliance-building rhetoric. The Communist Party began overtaking the government. They declared it the peoples’ right to constitute a nation-state, abandoning the “internationalist and stateless ideal” that anarchist groups had abided by.49 In the interim, workers throughout the country attempted to enact their own control over factories, leading to economic turmoil at the hands of ineffective management—though the workers had a very short time in which to reach or even adapt the syndicalist ideal they were striving for.50 Lenin capitalized on the situation, instituting a strict regulation of the economy six weeks later: “Mensheviks joined Bolsheviks in upbraiding the anarchists for their premature efforts to inaugurate a stateless society,” and the new government transformed the old factory committees into organs of the union and communist party.51 As Avrich concludes: “The Bolshevik feat lay not in making the revolution, but in slowing it down and diverting it into Communist channels.”52 Anarchists continued to resist (through peaceful and terrorist activities) the oppressive state after it took form as the Bolshevik government. In Moscow, anarchists formed some twenty-five clubs, often by occupying formerly

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bourgeois structures and converting them into communes, as in a former textile mill-turned-cooperative, art studio, and museum.53 The government fought back soon enough, arresting and jailing anarchists of all tactical commitments, including those who wrote or spoke critically about the Bolsheviks.54 Police violently raided the clubs, killing many anarchists or taking them prisoner. Anarchistic elements gathered for one final attempt to strike down the Bolshevik government in March of 1921, following more unrest in Petrograd, as the people rioted for “fuel and bread,” free speech, and “the revival of free soviets and factory committees.”55 As Avrich describes, the 1921 insurrection retained the spirit of the 1905 uprisings, and the 1917 revolution: The immediate, multi-partisan events included all types of radicals who resisted the Bolshevik take-over of factories and committees.56 The government responded with its most brutal crackdown, eliminating anarchist printing presses, and exiling or executing suspected critics of the Bolsheviks (many of whom were anarchists). The exiled anarchist community kept touch with the movement in Russia, but soon fell away, and the history of the Soviet Union was to be written largely without them. Like the anarchistic elements joining the IWMA, anarchists in the Russian revolution invented resistance both within and outside the determinism of friend-enemy subjects. Though ideological and tactical disputes plagued the various anarchist communities throughout the two decades they agitated in Russia, they endured by appealing to a plurality of constituents.57 Russian anarchists performed hegemonically by rallying different constituents against institutional authority (notably, that of “the state, capitalism, colonialism, the school, and the family”).58 They also joined Lenin against common enemies in the hopes that he would follow through on promises to dissolve government as he freed labor. In the case of the Russian anarchists, we see the degrees of hegemony and transgression present in most cases of resistance; but also the battle for rendering the iron determinism of Marxism more “transgressive.” The anarchists’ immediate resistance to all manner of authority appears transgressive in character. Just as Zarathustra’s companions invented their own way of life against the mediations of priests and philosophers, the Russian anarchists did not wait for Lenin or the Bolsheviks to achieve revolution. In factory committees and communes, the anarchists enacted the new society that they desired at the moments in which they desired it. Because their new ways of organizing and living exceeded the subjectivities prescribed by the Bolsheviks, the anarchists threatened the progress of revolution. They could only be treated as allies so long as their transgressive energies advanced the Bolshevik’s totalitarian aims. Furthermore, companions (like the factory committees) may function temporarily as friends (for hegemons like Lenin), in order for a collective will to achieve its ends. But


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once it became clear that the Russian anarchists were able to amass social change outside the party’s proper mediations—once their transgressions rendered hegemony unnecessary for a new social order—they appeared more as adversaries to be eliminated. The authoritarian foundation of determinism holds that achieving state power through any means is ethical and effective: as orthodox Marxism promised, the dictatorship of the proletariat would only be a temporary avenue to a free communal society. But the case of anarchists in the Russian revolution affirms the transgressive response to determinism, in all of its vestiges: the more or less explicit, totalizing ends of revolution will be achieved only at the cost of freedom for those who carry out the revolution.

WRITING COMPANIONS IN THE ANARCHISM OF MOTHER EARTH The turn of the nineteenth century represented a golden age of anarchism in the United States, with the practice and development of three anarchist ideologies. Anarchist communism sought the creation of a new equal and popular society (much like a Marxist utopia, but achieved through bottomup social change).59 Anarchist syndicalists attempted to radicalize workers through grassroots union organizing, rather than parties, as a means to revolution.60 Finally, anarchist individualism attacked institutional authority (notably, of capitalists, the state, and clergy) and more generally undermined the possibility for truth and values.61 The various anarchist ideologies supported different tactics, including the anarcho-communist “propaganda by the deed” (which often amounted to forms of terrorism, including “assassinations and bombings that targeted prominent functionaries and institutions”); the anarcho-syndicalist use of direct action and the general strike, by which workers would “take over the means of production, and abolish private property”; and the anarcho-individualist practice of critique (in writing and speech).62 Radical labor activists and self-identified anarchists teamed in major clashes against forces of industrialization and a collusive State. In 1883, the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) convened in Pittsburgh. The state and federal mandates for an eight-hour workday (enacted in 1878) were not being enforced, leading the IWPA to release in 1883 “a proclamation, condemning all indirect political activity as ineffectual and misleading,” along with a statement supporting direct action.63 Three years later, the radical tenor of the IWPA materialized in several strikes across the country. During the first week of May, 1886, more than 200,000 workers went on strike for the eight-hour workday, supported with a resolution from the

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Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, and campaigns maintained by the Knights of Labor.64 Over 60,000 took to the streets in Chicago on Mayday. Two days later, violence broke out at the McCormick Works, as laborers confronted strikebreakers at the harvester factory. Soon, a large police force arrived, firing at unarmed strikers as they tried to disperse.65 Two strikers were killed, and others wounded. Anarchist labor leader August Spies organized a rally at the Haymarket Square for the next day. The rally was “peaceable and orderly” until its end, when nearly two hundred police arrived to disperse the protestors.66 A bomb exploded, killing seven officers and sparking a wave of government repression against the radical community. Eight IWPA leaders were arrested. Four—George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, and Spies—were hanged (with a fifth slated for execution killing himself before the government could) in 1887. None were forensically linked to the bomb that detonated at the conclusion of the Haymarket assembly. As Berkman concluded, for anarchists, the event revealed the true injustice of the state and its cronyism to capital: “The fury of the masters knew no limits. Rebellious labor was to be crushed with an iron hand; the spirit of discontent was to be stifled, its voice drowned in the flood of the most devoted and able men of the people.”67 Three years after the Haymarket affair, the Russian Jewish immigrant Emma Goldman arrived in the United States. Goldman’s frequent lecture tours and the eleven-year run of her journal, Mother Earth, offered a literary and oratorical flair to the radical organizing that had struck the continent. As Glassgold describes, Mother Earth was filled with “impressive” writers: Goldman and Berkman, her long-time companion, were joined by Max Baginski, Peter Kropotkin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Leo Tolstoy, Francisco Ferrer, Errico Malatesta, and Margaret Sanger, among many others.68 Mother Earth offers a written record through which we may explore the transgressions of anarchy more deeply, particularly the individualist anarchism that accompanied syndicalist and communist agitation. Like the other case studies explored in this chapter, Mother Earth materializes transgression as a unique form of resistance, sometimes alongside and sometimes against, hegemony. The publication does so by helping imagine politics outside friend-enemy subjectivity. Mother Earth distinguishes between anarchism, anarchy, and anarchist, foretelling a less hegemonic relationship between political ideas and actions, ontology, and the agent for social change. Mother Earth defines anarchism as a revolutionary philosophy “based on liberty unrestricted by [human-]made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”69 Anarchy, or the “absence of government; disbelief in, and disregard of, invasion and authority based on coercion and force,” is, more positively, “a condition of society regulated by voluntary agreement.”70 The journal thus


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differentiates between ideology (the “-ism”) and a social condition that may be materialized in the lives of individuals (the “-y”). These definitions reflect an anarchist commitment to eschew platforms, programs, agendas, parties, or other documents, bodies, or occasions through which commonality (and thus, a deterministic friend-enemy agent) may form. Granted, a kernel of hegemony appears throughout Mother Earth writings (particularly as writers commit to the common goals of eradicating the authority of the state and capital, anarchism’s “enemies”); but the structure of key definitions suggest that individuals performing as anarchists do not wish to reduce their struggle to an ideological system, let alone constitute dialectical agents as the motor for social change. While Mother Earth acknowledges the importance of revolutionary philosophy, it retains space for something else as a “basis” for anarchist resistance: that is, the excess of anarchy, defined only loosely as the enactment of free community. By definition, an anarchist is “opposed to all forms of coercive government and invasive authority; an advocate of Anarchy or absence of government, as the ideal of political liberty and social harmony.”71 Though anarchists advocate the absence of government, they do not do so on behalf of anarchism as a representative, or reflection of a collective agent. Rather, anarchists are defined as more direct practitioners, evidenced by Mother Earth’s support for direct action.72 Direct action itself enacts anarchy, contrasting those representative mediations (or “-isms”) which link individual to social change agent. Put differently, anarchy has no collective subject, unlike certain versions of hegemony, which demand that individuals represent themselves through common terms, images, and symbols of friends-against-enemies. The subject of hegemony becomes just as much of an authority as other institutions, which condense individuality into commonality. Though direct action may become the representational force to build Anarchism, as some Mother Earth contributors demonstrate, it also positions anarchy as a singular enactment of resistance, one which defies representation into friends-against-enemies. Mother Earth’s anarchism helps figure a companion subjectivity by encouraging individuals to enact new ways of being amidst the capitalist state; and advocating that individuals avoid subjecting to the ready-made subjects of other movements. The non-representable qualities of anarchy are attributable to the quasimetaphysical, materialist conception of individuality found in Mother Earth. Anarchic individuality foretells autonomist thought on singularities, and resonates with Nietzsche’s companions in terms of human sociality. Individuality resists the commonality of Individualism and Communism alike. In a symposium on popular anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin, Mother Earth likens individuality to a form of “energy, the bold and free assertion of right life and all its powers.”73 Individuality is not synonymous with Individualism, an odd ideology that renders human beings commonly

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isolated (and subject to liberal discourses controlled by the government, or the production of subjectivity authorized by capitalism). As Nietzsche argued, individualism ironically encourages the embodied being to become an autonomous, self-fulfilled ego, by subjecting to authoritative discourses. In contrast, for Mother Earth contributors, an individuality “links itself to other individualities,” particularly those which have been limited or oppressed: they form a collective force which “though perhaps hidden, continues and gathers strength by combination, until finally the wrong . . . has to be righted.”74 Each person possesses qualities of “solidarity, common action, and love of justice,” or those attributes “which permit the possibilities of social life, organization, and co-operative work without the application of force.”75 Resonating with Virno’s conception of the multitude, anarchic individuality appears as a singularity which gains resistant power through its relationships with the shared aspects of human life. Because each person already has individuality, and thus the agency for resistance, there is no need to coerce (or baldly inspire) someone into collective consciousness. Though each human being possesses individuality as a quasi-metaphysical energy, it must be protected vigilantly from the authoritarian forces which constantly threaten it. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs, anarchy takes on a processural quality of becoming: through a process of experimentation, those practicing anarchy remove themselves from subjection. As one Mother Earth contributor concludes, anarchists are “always dissatisfied, always struggling, never enjoying rest,”76 as they commit to a process of immanent critique to protect individuality. The state and capital (along with their attendant institutions, such as the law, church, family, factory and market) are the key threats to individuality (if not the ideological enemy which some anarchists argue must be battled through a hegemonic anarchist collective). As Baginski demonstrates in a popular early anarchist argument, the capitalist state fosters social Darwinism, which estranges humans from their individuality: The struggle for the means of existence and for the maintenance of achieved power fill the entire space of the menagerie with an infernal noise. Among the methods which are used to secure this organized bestiality the most prominent ones are the hangman, the judge with his mechanical: “In the name of the king,” or his more hypocritical: “In the name of the people I pass sentence”; the soldier with his training for murder; and the priest with his: “Authority comes from God.”77

Interestingly, as Baginski has it, institutions all maintain themselves by speaking for others, representing others through their “higher” authority. Metaphorical representation is thus crucial for the maintenance of power,


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as the executioner and judge speak words that represent the authority of the king, while the priest is the medium of God’s authority. This relationship of “substantial” representation between a group, words or ideas, and an individual perpetuates authority beyond the state and capital. Here, the “iron discipline” of deterministic hegemony is not only unnecessary, but also harmful to the expression of resistance possible through anarchic individuality. Indeed, Mother Earth contributors express wariness of socialism and communism, particularly as they promote metaphorical representation and commonality. For instance, Berkman concludes that the “social regeneration” sought through anarchy “cannot be achieved by the will or act of any man or party.”78 Rather, “free cooperation and the solidarity of communal effort” will be achieved immanently.79 As Virno described virtuosity, anarchist resistance occurs in the performance of free cooperation and solidarity itself, not as a means to the end of revolution. Following Bakunin, this virtuosity is found in the common weal from which singularities flourish (thought, labor, and speech), not the representative agents of individualism, communism, or even anarchism. The communal solidarity of which Berkman speaks manifests as individuals invent new ways of being together, without necessarily inventing new collective subjects which organize and express their livelihood. In this way, Gilded Age anarchy helps build a companion, rather than friend-enemy, subject. Granted, the rhetoric of revolutionary violence on Mother Earth’s pages sometimes appears like a program for constituting the collective Anarchist agent. Following a dynamite explosion in Harlem, which killed four anarchists allegedly plotting against John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Plunkett declared, “To oppression, to exploitation, to persecution, to police, jails, militia, armies and navies, there is but one answer—DYNAMITE!”80 Criticizing fellow agitators who decried violence as “lip-revolutionists” who “scurried to cover” following the incident, Plunkett praises those who use direct action “while others talked.”81 Like other deterministic rhetors, Plunkett polices the proper way for the revolution to unfold (in this case, through violence). But anarchist historian Max Nettlau evidences again an anarchist critique of representation, which reflects the companion’s autonomous sociality more than the sometimes transparent or metaphorical relationship of friend-enemy agents. Nettlau chastises Individualists and Communists alike for pushing the consistency of their doctrines to the point of uniformity.82 Nettlau acknowledges that the drive for a more predictable resistance guided by collective agents suffocates the agency for social change (found in the variegated stuff of life). Nettlau thus reinforces anarchic individuality against commonality, even if such commonality is affiliated with the pursuit of anarchism: “Whenever a uniform system prevails, Anarchists, if they have their ideas at heart, will go ahead of it and never permit

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themselves to become fossilized upholders of a given system, be it that of the purest Communism.”83 Like Nietzsche, Nettlau finds that commonality and sociality are not synonymous: in other words, there is an option for collective action between isolation and hegemonic herds. For Nettlau, this option is found in a process of moving between engaging and disengaging with others.84 Nettlau’s anarchism relies on the highest degree of contingency, against the laws of social change advocated by its contemporary, Marxism: “I should not like to pledge my own future beforehand, much less that of anybody else. The question remains entirely open for me; experience will show which of the extreme and of the many intermediate possibilities will be the best on each occasion, at each time.”85 Only contingency may promote individuality, the true “engine” of social change. Through their advocacy for contingency, Mother Earth contributors begin constituting a new materialism beyond Marxist determinism. They encourage readers to guard against privilege, forestalling authority through selfreflexivity and a non-programmatic critique of capitalism and government. Anarchy cannot promote individuality without a critique of capitalism, for private profit and property damn individuals to relations of exploitation. Voltairine de Cleyre, for instance, augments her discussion of individual autonomy with a critique of private property and the global expansion of capital: “the commercial interests of America are seeking a world-empire” by creating “bonds between every corner of the earth’s surface and every other corner, to multiply the needs of [humankind], and the desire for material possession and enjoyment.”86 As de Cleyre’s argument implies, individualist anarchism is a richer, more powerful force for social change when it associates with a materialist commitment against oppression: for avoiding the ideology of individualism, and refusing to subject others to one’s own authority, demands a critique of historic forms of domination (such as capitalism and government). Revisiting the pages of Mother Earth, we also discover visions of resistance which are sometimes aligned with, but often divergent from, traditional understandings of social movement rhetoric. Selected Mother Earth writings on anarchism speak to a sentiment of possibility, one which resists capture in the representational economy of Marxist-style social change. As “a better artist than . . . a preacher,” and as one who “denies finalities,” Goldman (like the magazine she founded) opens possibilities with her rhetoric. She inspires more individuality, in lieu of disciplining it into a common consciousness.87 Viewed from the theoretical perspective developed in this book, Mother Earth positions anarchism as an effort to expand individuality amidst those forces which threaten it. Part of this effort is what we might consider today as a self-reflexive account of privilege, as nineteenth-century anarchists


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encouraged readers to avoid performing authority themselves, as much as they sought to free themselves from external authority. Thus, while Mother Earth’s anarchy shared with Communism a thick critique of Fordist production and private property, it refused to support Marx’s revolution by party. By repudiating subjection to the authority of transcendent agents (whether related to the state, capital, or political parties)—and by supporting individuality as the outgrowth of shared resources, to be protected from privilege—Mother Earth contributors penned the possibility for companion subjectivity. The federal government responded to the publication of Mother Earth as other regimes have reacted to the transgressions of anarchism—through repression. Authorities raided the magazine’s office, confiscating the names of subscribers and other documents which implicated Goldman and Berkman in “anti-American activities” during wartime.88 Through the forced searches, authorities located enough evidence to arrest and later deport both. The raids also discouraged people from subscribing to the magazine, for they could be subject to Post Office laws against seditious materials. Perhaps because of its immanent danger to the United States, the transgressions of Mother Earth could not be tolerated, even under the guise of the First Amendment. Though it was met with intense reactions from the state, Mother Earth remains to offer tangible examples as to how one might practice the processes of freedom, becoming, and virtuosity that could spiral into a collective resistance undefined by the identity of agents.

CONCLUSION From an anarchist stance, friend-enemy politics subjects people (their power, freedom, individuality) to the authority of a collective subject (where it is much easier to import their bodies, identities, and efforts into reformist games controlled by the state, capital, or other authorities). Here, the benefits of friend-enemy subjectivity ascribed by hegemony’s defenders appear as liabilities: the ease of organizing resistance, the ability to track (and thus discipline) “real” political behavior, the maintenance of “democratic” protest—all prohibit individuals from realizing their autonomy. The realization of autonomy, anarchists argue, would do real, long-term damage to the state and capitalism. Anarchist(ic) rhetoric has repeatedly identified collective agents as a threat to individuality (e.g., by antagonizing moderates who “should” have been anarchists’ “friends” in common struggle). Anarchists were often right to be wary of “friends” (like the Bolsheviks who took advantage of them during the Russian revolution). As the flashpoints of transgression explored in this chapter suggest, deterministic agent-centered politics may become as destructive as the state and

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capitalism regardless of “who” employs it, for it is a tool of dominance. In other words, from the perspective of transgression, friend-enemy politics takes advantage of people by treating them as the means to an ends. The alternative is a more contingent politics, such as the hegemonic antagonisms mediated loosely by rhetoric, rather than essentialism. Though we take such a politics for granted today, as the American IWMA suggests, the more contingent practices of hegemony were, at one time, transgressive—particularly against the deterministic forces of orthodox Marxism. Yet, a contingent hegemony is not the only means to battle determinism. As foretold in the writings of Mother Earth and the practices of Russian anarchists, and as conceptualized in the works of Nietzsche, French poststructuralism, and Italian autonomism, the transgressive alternative to friend-enemy politics is companion subjectivity. The rhetoric of companions attempts (as much as it might) to foil the production of subjectivity, or at least the more or less transparent production of words-to-ideas-to-identities that drives friend-enemy sociality. Like many of the case studies in this chapter, companion subjectivity challenges the collapse of human potential (agency) into the property of friends against enemies, virtuous priests against deviants, herds against herds, agents against agents. While hegemonic theories based in friend-enemy politics often assume that individuals are motivated to join politics in order to achieve full identity; theories and practices of transgression assume that individuals are not lacking. Bakunin envisioned human potential or agency as accessible to all individuals, through the common storehouse of human thought, labor, and speech. Mother Earth contributors and the Russian anarchists, in various ways, encouraged individuals to cultivate agency, rather than trading it in to be part of an “effective” collective. To foster a process of becoming, a process of promoting individuality (against individualism, communism, or even anarchism), one must guard human potential against the ideological and material forces which would try to subject it to authorities. As the historic practice of anarchism demonstrates, the promotion of freedom and autonomy is not antithetical to materialism. Indeed, when a companion sociality is at its sharpest and most critical, it affiliates de-subjectivating practices (freeing individuality) with material practices that confront oppression (trying to end inequality directly). Transgressing subjects practice a materialism which frees or cultivates agency, and not necessarily through the constitution of collective agents. As theories and practices of transgression suggest, the companion is more a figure of agency, shorthand for a process of becoming, the ability to act politically and ethically. It is difficult to say, though, that the companion totally ceases to be agent—mostly because of the language games premised upon the subject, games of which we are all well aware and in which we


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participate all the time. As Zarathustra prophesied, the herd will attribute value and meaning to companions’ actions—whether such judgments are negative (as when the federal government ousted Goldman and Berkman as threats) or positive (as when Lenin converted the factory committees into Bolshevik representatives). If companions responded by simply retreating into isolation, or moving about as corpses, they would be able to define their own actions fully (outside others’ games); but their actions would have no effect on others. In other words, isolation from others denies us agency—but, simultaneously, it confirms that rhetorical invention is agency. Companions cannot retreat fully into isolation to control their own self-definition as agents, for power breathes in the shared materialsymbolic resources which are the “stuff” of human life and potential. Such shared inventional resources are not accessible to nihilists, but neither are they synonymous with commonality: and to reduce them to metaphorical connections between worker and party, as Marx prescribed of the IWMA, is to evacuate them of their power. Companions are also agents (and not pure agency) in the sense that they perform certain actions (such as reaping and celebrating) in the process of deconstructing subjectivity. As Zarathustra’s parting speech admonishing his companions for their belief in him suggests, it is also not ethical to completely position oneself as agency with no traces to, or responsibility for, the impact of one’s words or deeds. Zarathustra models a self-reflexivity for companions, suggesting that even amidst the agency of becoming, one must at least consider oneself an embodied human being, an agent whose actions may subject others. As essayists of Mother Earth advised, companions must be vigilant guards against authority, agents responsible for themselves and to others. Though Nietzsche’s original formulation may make it seem as though the agent moves from collective (herd) to individual (Zarathustra or a companion), the historical practices of anarchism suggest that companions do not trade collective agent for individual subject, or agency for agent. The direct democracy enacted in the American IWMA and Russian revolution demonstrates that self-identifying anarchists or those influenced by anarchism do not all seek isolation. But because they refuse the terms of friend-enemy subjects, anarchistic activists are often cast as illogical or immature, as a hindrance to the “proper” conduct of politics. The history of the IWMA, Russian anarchists, and Mother Earth contributors reveal the controlling, deterministic impulse that forms so much of the history of social change: demonstrating the limitations of prescribed agents in social struggle (especially the conformist collective and isolated individual), these cases point toward an alternative sociality that exceeds the least common denominator of friend-enemy politics. They re-define resistance as a process of practicing new ways of being against authority,

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without the convenience or legitimacy of agents that transcend resistance. The flashpoints of transgression also point toward the power of a politics that is immediate, one that defies metaphorical representation. Such a politics is taken up in the next two chapters.

NOTES 1. Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Paris Commune,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 64. 2. Robert Graham, ed., Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, vol. 1 (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 2005). This is not to say that anarchist or anarchistic movements have been confined to European or Anglo nations. Revolutions throughout Mexico and Latin America were influenced by, if not overtly begun with, anarchist action; furthermore, the tactics and anti-authoritarian materialism associated with anarchism have sparked revolt from the nineteenth century through today (Graham, Anarchism; Yves Fremion, Orgasms of History: 3000 Years of Spontaneous Insurrection, trans. Paul Sharkey [Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 2002]). I have chosen to concentrate on anarchism within the European context, to permit a richer discussion of companion subjectivity vis-à-vis a manageable cross-section of this complex historical and contemporary movement. 3. French Emperor Napoleon III declared war with Prussia in July 1870, leading to widespread outrage and the eventual move toward a republican government (Alan Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall [Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007], 30–31). Parisians amassed a critical, citywide consciousness through the spring of 1871, angered by “the centralization of state power that the Second Empire epitomized” (Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 153). By mid-February, the national assembly began cutting off money to Paris and other urban centers, after the republican government had moved the capitol to Versailles. In mid-March, defective National Guard elements overtook the French Army, and Parisians declared their own selfgovernment on March 28, 1871. The Commune was born, as Parisians revolted without the guiding frameworks or organizations of social class (Gould, Insurgent Identities, 157). Communards enacted a direct democracy through “the expropriation of workshops and their transfer to worker-owned cooperatives, the requisition of empty buildings for public housing, and paying top government officials the equivalent of a skilled worker’s wage” (Antliff, Anarchy and Art, 32). But Parisians were unsuccessful at swaying the rest of France to communalize. By mid-May, the republican national government quashed the Commune—historians estimate that 20,000 National Guard troops and Communards were killed, with 40,000 taken prisoner (Gould, Insurgent Identities, 165). As I elaborate below, the Paris Commune became a model for revolts in Russia. Communards became martyrs in anarchist rhetoric worldwide. From the perspective of transgression, the Paris Commune is


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an example in which the power of self-organization materialized (however briefly) into a community external to the nation-state’s authority and discourse. 4. The Pullman Strike is one of the more infamous episodes in American labor history, as the first time a federal injunction broke a strike. Following several layoffs and wage cuts, workers at the Pullman Railcar factory went on strike without union authorization in 1894, attempting to gain better housing conditions and lower rents (for the workers had to live in a town essentially owned and run by tycoon George Pullman). Eventually, the American Railway Union (ARU) joined in solidarity with the Pullman workers, creating a national strike by refusing to handle Pullman cars. The federal government issued an injunction against the ARU, and eventually, President Grover Cleveland dispatched troops to disperse striking workers—some of whom had turned to vandalism and property destruction in the South Chicago rail yards. The federal government arrested ARU leaders (including Eugene V. Debs) for violating the injunction. Nearly three months after the Pullman workers had begun the strike, it ended, as neither they nor the ARU could convince other unions to join the strike. Along with at least six lives lost, some estimate that the strike cost the railroads nearly $5 million in expenses and lost revenue (Keith Ladd and Greg Rickman, “The Pullman Strike: Chicago, 1894,” www.kansasheritage.org/ pullman/index.html, March 3, 1998 [accessed March 1, 2010]). The strike is remembered as being a major blow to organized labor: “Aside from the already existing [AFL] and the various railroad brotherhoods, industrial workers’ unions were effectively stamped out and remained so until the Great Depression” (Jim Lehrer, “The Origins of Labor Day,” www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/september96/ labor_day_9-2.html, September 2, 2001 [accessed March 1, 2010]). But the Pullman strike is remarkable from the perspective of transgression, as a moment in which workers began to resist with minimal mediation from authority (including the national union). 5. The Spanish Revolution of the 1930s, like most revolutions, was quite complex. It is perhaps the best example of a durable anarchist self-organization and sacrifice, as anarchistic radicals comprised “the militiamen and women who died by the thousands in the early fighting against the Francoist generals who led the military uprising of July 1936 in behalf of the Spanish landlords, the industrial bourgeoisie, and the Church” (Murray Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936 [Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 1994], 1). In the summer of 1936, fascist elements in the army, led by General Francisco Franco, arose to threaten the leftist-moderate national government. Meanwhile, anarchists and syndicalists transformed communities across the countryside into collectivist communes, ending the monetary system and establishing cooperatives (Fremion, Orgasms of History, 155–56). With the help of national syndicalist unions and anarchist federations, cities also began collectivizing factories and transportation (Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 27). International help was slow in coming, for the anarchist revolution was viewed as a greater threat than fascism—especially to socialist nations, like the Soviet Union (Fremion, Orgasms of History, 156). Indeed, the Spanish Communist Party justified its suppression of the popular anarchist uprising through the guise of fighting fascism (Bookchin, To Remember Spain, 58). While the national government began a steady march of oppression against its citizens,

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communes continued self-governance and collective agriculture (Fremion, Orgasms of History, 157–58). But by May, 1937, a Communist-fortified militia (tacitly supported by the Spanish government) began attacking the anarchists brutally in Barcelona. Eventually, dissidents were killed or imprisoned. The Communists dismantled the self-organization created by the communes, leaving Franco and the fascists an easier route to power (Fremion, Orgasms of History, 160). Though we remember the Spanish Revolution as a battle between fascism and a national democratic sentiment, Bookchin counters that it was “a sweeping social revolution by millions of workers and peasants who were concerned not to rescue a treacherous republican regime but to reconstruct Spanish society” (To Remember Spain, 4). The Spanish Revolution is a remarkable episode of transgression, with a widespread material and ideological revolution that truly grew organically from the people. 6. Questions over the efficacy of transgression are prevalent in the anarchist community as well, and not all who identify as anarchists support transgression. In particular, some Marxist-anarchists charge that without an identifiable enemy like the state, it is more difficult to ensure that one’s actions are part of a political struggle which could effect change. As Murray Bookchin expresses, “post-anarchism” appears as merely a lifestyle choice which does not threaten dominant powers amidst global capitalism (Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm [San Francisco: AK Press, 1995], 8–9). 7. Henryk Katz, The Emancipation of Labor: A History of the First International (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), xii; xi. 8. Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1. 9. Katz, Emancipation, 7; Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 49. 10. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 48. 11. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 49. 12. Katz, Emancipation, 8. 13. Katz, Emancipation, 32. 14. Katz, Emancipation, 32. 15. Katz, Emancipation, 35. 16. Katz, Emancipation, 39. 17. Katz, Emancipation, 71. 18. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 140. 19. Woodford McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles: The Russians in the First International and the Paris Commune (London: Frank Cass, 1979), 47–48. 20. Katz, Emancipation, 53. 21. Katz, Emancipation, 53–54. 22. Katz, Emancipation, 54. Bakunin was not immune from using ad hominem attacks: along with making anti-Semitic remarks against Marx, he chastised him as bourgeois and intellectual. 23. Katz, Emancipation, 58. 24. McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles, 83. 25. Katz, Emancipation, 67. 26. Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 21.


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27. Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom,” in Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 236. 28. Katz, Emancipation, 91; 92. 29. Katz, Emancipation, 98–99. 30. Katz, Emancipation, 83. 31. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 2. 32. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 1. 33. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 129. 34. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 147. 35. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 2. 36. Katz, Emancipation, 143. 37. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 255. 38. Messer-Kruse, Yankee, 3. 39. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 18. Avrich describes three main groups of Russian anarchists: the terrorists, who practiced assassination and property destruction, to the disdain of other anarchist groups (Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 60); the syndicalists—independent, self-organized workers’ collectives whose main aim was “to combat socialist ‘opportunism’ within the existing unions” (Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 78); and the anti-intellectuals, or provincial workers suspicious of the educated elite, especially the Marxists (Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 102). Russia’s anarchists were joined by sympathetic intellectuals and students, who resented the Marxist tradition which viewed them as a class-less element “with no vital role to play in the historical process” of proletarian revolution (Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 22). 40. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 43. 41. Antliff, Anarchy and Art, 71–72. 42. Paul Avrich, “Introduction,” in The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, ed. P. Avrich (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1973), 10. 43. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 123. 44. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 141. 45. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 142; 141; 141. 46. Avrich, “Introduction,” 14; 16. 47. Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 144. 48. Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem, 191. 49. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 160. 50. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 162. 51. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 166–69. 52. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 170. 53. Antliff, Anarchy and Art, 74. 54. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 222. 55. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 228. 56. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 229. 57. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 171. 58. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, 177. 59. Alan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avantgarde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5.

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60. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 5–6. 61. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 7–8. Antliff notes that Nietzsche’s writings, along with those of Leo Tolstoy, Max Stirner, and Oscar Wilde, were great influences for early American individualists. 62. Antliff, Anarchist Modernism, 5–6. 63. Alexander Berkman, “The Causes of the Chicago Martyrdom,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 61. 64. Michael Biggs, “Strikes as Sequences of Interaction: The American Strike Wave of 1886,” Social Science History 26, no. 3 (2002): 585. 65. Dave Roediger, “The Haymarket Incident,” The Lucy Parsons Project, www .lucyparsonsproject.org/haymarket/roediger_haymarket.html, 2003 (accessed March 1, 2010). 66. Roediger, “The Haymarket Incident.” 67. Berkman, “The Causes,” 62. 68. Peter Glassgold, “Introduction: The Life and Death of Mother Earth,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. P. Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), xvii–xviii. 69. “Some Definitions,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 5. 70. “Some Definitions,” 5. 71. “Some Definitions,” 6. 72. “Some Definitions,” 6. 73. “Anarchist Symposium: Kropotkin,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 45. 74. “Anarchist Symposium,” 45. 75. Max Baginski, “Without Government,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 9. 76. Max Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 80. 77. Baginski, “Without Government,” 9. 78. Alexander Berkman, “Violence and Anarchism,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 28. 79. Berkman, “Violence and Anarchism,” 28. 80. Charles Robert Plunkett, “Dynamite!,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 78. 81. Plunkett, “Dynamite!,” 78. 82. In addition, Nettlau’s critique of individualism may be read in response to a common Marxist argument against anarchy. Marxists have criticized anarchists for their belief in individuality, which they claim prohibits them from effectively organizing. Today, this criticism suggests that anarchy is vulnerable to a capitalist market all-too-eager for the innovation of individuals and individualism. However,


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as Nettlau and others argue, individualism is an ideology at the service of authority: it teeters on falling “into bourgeois fallacies,” and does not account for the complexity of individual-social interactions (Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both,” 82). Baginski concurs that capitalism and the state thrive on individualism (as that which fuels their power), while punishing individuality (as the singular “incumbrances” which threaten their authority) (Baginski, “Without Government,” 10). 83. Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both,” 80. 84. Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both,” 81. 85. Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist?—Both,” 82. 86. Voltairine de Cleyre, “Anarchism and American Traditions,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 37; 36. 87. Margaret Anderson, “Emma Goldman in Chicago,” in Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906–1916), ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2001), 86; 88. 88. Glassgold, “Introduction.”

5 Performing Resistance: Transgressing the Hegemony of Representation

The human body, in which the most distant and most recent past of all organic development again becomes living and corporeal, through which and over and beyond which a tremendous inaudible stream seems to flow. . . . In all ages, there has been more faith in the body, as our most personal possession, our most certain being, in short our ego, than in the spirit (or the “soul,” or the subject, as school language now has it instead of soul) . . . even those philosophers and religious teachers who had the most compelling ground in their logic and piety to consider their bodies a deception (and, indeed, as a deception overcome and done with) could not help acknowledging the foolish fact that the body has not gone away.1 The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization. This has nothing to do with the simple affirmation of the social in opposition to the State that has often found expression in the protest movements of recent years. Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity—even that of a State identity within the State. . . . What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition).2

Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book, 1872’s The Birth of Tragedy, attempts to resurrect what he terms a “tragic culture” in response to the rise in industrialization and modernization. Nietzsche locates in classical Greek aesthetics 143

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a “comprehensive” wisdom, which provides alternative sense-making tools to the prescriptions provided by science, religion, philosophy, and government.3 Two different forms of art help Nietzsche develop this deeper way of viewing and interacting with the world: the Apollonian, an aesthetic which inspired beautifully ordered, proportionate images to comfort viewers whose spirits had been blackened by tragedy; and the Dionysian, art which revealed “a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge.”4 Dionysian artists recreated musical, orgiastic revelry, which revealed the primordial state of nature: joyous and intoxicating, the complete unity experienced in Dionysian art also revealed “the terror or the absurdity of existence,” life without the individuation and justice of human communities.5 Some sixty years later, Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin began his own aesthetic recovery amidst Stalinism. Inspired by the novels of Francois Rabelais, Bakhtin returned to the Middle Ages and Renaissance carnival. He concentrated on the unique performances of folk humor that went ignored or misjudged by bourgeois frameworks of interpretation, to designate a quintessentially performative event.6 Carnival was both extraordinary and ordinary, in its theatrical spectacle (which dissolved the wall of difference between spectator and performer) and in its regular appearance in the lives of townspeople.7 It marked a moment in which “there [was] no other life outside it. During carnival time life [was] subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.”8 Carnival challenged, at least implicitly, official culture, laws, and privilege. Bakhtin’s carnival shares in common many traits with Nietzsche’s Dionysian. Like carnival, Dionysian art dissolved the normative identities which constituted community hierarchy (though Nietzsche suggests its performative power may have gone even further, in temporarily banishing individuation itself). The Dionysian, too, had potentially subversive effects, relating to an a-political or even anti-political impulse—particularly in contrast to contemplative culture which sought to render the world explicable, controllable.9 It is no coincidence that both Nietzsche and Bakhtin locate resources for transgression within the permissive realm of aesthetics (which includes theatrical art, ritual, and everyday performance).10 Building upon the basic premise that performance dissolves official identities (as in Bakhtin’s carnival), or senses of self more generally (as in Nietzsche’s Dionysian), contemporary scholars have developed the play of performance into more sophisticated accounts of its transgressive potential. By “making explicit” the body, its immediacy, or corporeal presence, performances of resistance potentially disrupt economies of representation—particularly the more metaphorical or substantive connections which join protest (performance) to protestor (performer) to friend-enemy agent (collective identity). Not only does a performative politics resist representational politics, but it also

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offers a transgressive alternative, a politics of enactment, which helps explain collective action that does not need representation as a condition of belonging or political power (as Agamben suggests, in the epigram above). Importantly, though, transgression cannot undo subjection through ontological claims to a pure power of body-against-language. Rather, as I detail through scholarly debates concerning the liveness of performance, the transgressive quality of some protest derives from its hybrid incarnations of the body-and-language. Such incarnations are contingent, manifest in the peculiar workings of advanced capitalism: an economy circulating subjectivity, communication, and affect as much (if not more) than material goods and necessary services. Transgression re-materializes social movement as a rhetorical agency and invention by exceeding representation through a heightened (but not exclusive) corporeal presence.

EXCEEDING REPRESENTATION THROUGH A POLITICS OF ENACTMENT It is somewhat ironic that scholars have returned to the body to re-conceive ways of being amidst representational politics, for speech and rhetoric have been the traditional realm of the possible—particularly in democracies where free speech is more widely available. Nietzsche and Bakhtin associated mediation (including language or symbolic action) with civilizing and controlling impulses; but mediation has always been an important part of social change. Speech reveals “the unactualizability of the ideal and the imperfections of the actual,” inspiring participants to new senses of how things could be by “underscor[ing] the fluidity, the elusiveness, and the malleability of human experience.”11 Perhaps people are re-asserting their bodies in public spaces to resist the dissociation of mediation and possibility within corporate globalization: communication is being steadily overtaken by consumerism, as free speech is equated with money, and humanity and the environment represented as signifiers devoid of material existence (abetting oppression against both). Regardless of why, protestors are increasingly organizing and expressing themselves politically outside of collective agents: instead, they deploy “the raw material of subjectivity and symbol, preferring poetic utterances to political rhetoric and deploying carnival rather than collectivism.”12 The move from representation and identity to immediacy and the body has inspired new ways of interpreting the latter as a means to open possibility. An umbrella concept for interpreting these new modes of protest, and developing their relationship to transgression, is enactment. Enactments are “material acts and gestures,” forces which “continually endeavour to define the meanings, rules, and values that circulate in the unfolding potential of

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social life.”13 Enactments retain the distinction between the meditational (definition, rules, structure, commonality, stability, language, or that which is representable) and the immediate (processural potential, singularity, movement, materiality, or that which might exceed representation). As imagined in classic aesthetics, the immediate is able to exceed representation, for it hearkens the force of a dense, chaotic, natural world—a world of which human civilization is a part, yet a world that remains (at least minimally) elusive to humanity’s efforts to know it (organize it, and abstract it through language or other symbolic activity). The separation of immediate and meditational remains important to understanding the power of enactments today. Yet, as I elaborate below, it is through the unique combinations of mediation and the immediate (a hybrid “im/mediacy”) that enactment plays tricks with traditional politics. Though they highlight immediacy, enactments gesture toward significance, driven by desire rather than some pre-determined goal or identityrelated trait.14 For instance, rather than preparing a protest performance to achieve the “diversity” of a global justice subject, some protestors might create puppets dramatizing globalization’s effects on the environment, while others march simply to express anger over the war. While we may attribute causes to each enactment, the causes are neither necessary for enactment, nor the most important facet of their presence. Activists do not need friend-enemy identifications to arouse their passions, to move them to enact resistance; nor do they need the metaphorical “substances,” which would connect their resistance to friend-enemy agents, to be heard or to be powerful. A politics of enactment calls attention to the “experience of subjectivity as embodied rather than transcendental, as in process, as engaged with and contingent on others in the world, and as multiply identified rather than reducible to a single, ‘universal’ image of the self.”15 By highlighting the rhetorical body and materiality, enactments attempt to interrupt or undermine representation’s ability to fictitiously unite issues, ideas, and identities. As such, enactments may be sometimes at odds with hegemonic struggles. Those who turn to a politics of enactment typically do not seek out representable goals and identities, or other language games of representational politics. In spite of their departure from representation, enactments have political effects. Just as the Dionysian experience and folk carnival subverted subjection through unique combinations of the body and the symbolic, contemporary enactments have disrupted individualism (and the preferred white male straight body it protected). They have also challenged the closure of stereotypical identities, granting minority voices and bodies power within contemporary politics.16 Enactments are performative, meaning they may include traditionally defined “aesthetic” events (such as theatre, music, or dance), as well as ev-


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eryday activities.17 Performance generates impacts by defying binaries, particularly the various divisions between the immediate (body, materiality, nature, concrete presence) and the mediated (mind, language, civilization, symbolic abstraction). When developed more in terms of performance theory, we may begin to understand how enactment exceeds representation: it disrupts those metaphorical processes which translate live, embodied events into systems of symbols and subjects (whether individual, hegemonic, or counter-hegemonic). The basis for performance’s power is the subject of intense debate, with great relevance for theorizing transgression: in claiming the immediate, material presence of the body as resistant to symbolic reproduction, we may assert one side of modernity’s great dualism (body) against the other (mind). Along with the temptation to re-instantiate binary logic, scholars fear that performance is only as “resistant” as the interpretive tools available to witnesses—so long as audiences only look for hegemonic reality, the resistant effects of performance lay dormant, never manifesting in political projects beyond the fleeting moment of performance. And, just as some materialist rhetoric scholars are wary of relinquishing a Marxist reality as the basis for social movement, some performance scholars argue that the “performative turn” undermines political action as it undercuts representational identity. But by sifting through the claims and objections to performance’s power, the transgressive potential of “explicating” bodies (especially amidst corporate globalization) becomes clearer.18 Creatively combining the linguistic and material, asserting the rhetorical body’s singular presence on the street, interrupts the constant stream of signs identifying individuals as consumers, Democrats, hockey moms, or representatives of other determined political agents. Making bodies explicit, as the anarchistic enactments of chapter 6 attest, not only deconstructs representational economies, but it also inspires new ways of performing and witnessing performances, with potential to spread resistance.

PERFORMANCE, TRANSGRESSION, AND THE POLITICS OF ENACTMENT Theoretically, a politics of enactment initiates from spaces which are rooted in, but somehow exceed, ordinary reality. From ancient through modern and postmodern times, such spaces have been constituted as performative. Though ancient theatre was colonized by hierarchical authority—which, in Augusto Boal’s words, segregated audiences and rendered them “seated, receptive, passive” to the normative values staged before them19—the aesthetic offered a space of fictitious permissiveness. Entering the theatre or

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ritual meant trading, at least partially and temporarily, everyday reality for “something else.” From the perspective of resistance, the “fictitious” boundaries of aesthetics permitted revelers “plausible deniability” for the intentions of their actions. Should a festival-goer’s parody become too offensive to a town official, or should Dionysian revelers become too raucous, they may have mitigated their responsibility through the special circumstances of performance. The transgressive potential of performance increases when the definition of performance includes an aesthetic experience that is both heightened and occurring in everyday life, or, when enactments themselves break down the “fourth wall” between performer and spectator, or otherwise refuse to differentiate the “marked and [the] mundane performance.”20 Such enactments exceed the boundaries of “fiction” which contain their identity- and reality-bending play. By undermining the divisions between conceptual pairings (e.g., an artistic performance and everyday life), performance threatens the hierarchical segregations that sustain social order.21 To view politics performatively, we acknowledge that a political event (such as a protest) is “never pure escape nor pure engagement but instead always partake[s] of both aspects.”22 As Fuoss argued, for instance, depressionera labor strikes were both strategic and excessive: strategic in the sense that the strikers organized and publicized their protests, excessive in the sense that they “leaked” out of the strikers’ strategic efforts for change. So not only were the performances staged and intended to meet certain political ends, but they also encouraged play and escape for those involved. Transgressive enactments, in the context of protests or street performances, break down the division between audience and actor, witness and performer: they lure “people who comprise a contested reality into what its creators hope will be a changing script,” one which reveals the possibility for new ways of being in, or performing, community.23 As part of its peculiar play on fiction and reality, enactment’s political power derives from its explication of the body, which heightens the aesthetic or excessive qualities of banal places or moments. Some performance scholars assert that “the live, palpable, endangered body onstage” or in public, “viewed by the live, palpable, equally endangered audiences” or witnesses, has intense effects on thought, emotion, behavior.24 Being with others in shared, performative moments gives rise to the potential that we are immediately vulnerable to each other. Explicating bodies in performance reveals the incredible complexity of personal, bodily experiences and discourses that comprise the human self; and it does so in ways which defy tidy categorizations of identity, and solid attributions of identities to bodies.25 By explicating the body, a politics of enactment creates de-subjectivating experiences, or at least experiences which call into question subjectivity. There


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is great variability in terms of how much performance de-subjectivates. Some suggest that the immediate power of corporeal presence subverts individuals’ ability to fashion themselves as coherent subjects (through language). Others hold that performance disrupts the ability of certain discourses to constitute individual or collective subjects in their images—especially those discourses which endow certain bodies with privilege while oppressing others. To understand these two positions, it is necessary to understand their roots in two different views on the power of the immediate, body, or nature: for one assumes a pure corporeal power as the engine of subversion, while the other blends im/mediacy into that which defies oppressive subjectivation. Against the modernist move to conquer body through mind, Bakhtin and Nietzsche find in aged aesthetic practices a resistance which asserts body as foundational, mysteriously powerful, and unruly—resistant primarily in its opposition to (rather than its mingling with) mind. Bakhtin’s development of carnival exemplifies the somewhat romantic treatment of corporeality and materiality (the non-mind) as resistant, particularly to the representational hierarchies which sustain authority.26 Recalling the literary genre of grotesque realism, Bakhtin celebrates a primordial human body which predates individuation. Explicating the body rematerializes those things which had become limited to ideas and abstractions in the transition from a rural-folk culture to an urbanized, modern community: in literature, “all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable,” returning that which was lost to individuation, egoism, and official hierarchies.27 This return, however, is done through the strange, dangerous il-logics of materiality, as opposed to the explicable, orderly logics of the symbolic. Bakhtin’s primordial material resistance works through “degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”28 Like “defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth,” the corporeal element simultaneously (and indiscriminately) destroys as it creates.29 Here, Bakhtin figures material resistance as that which opposes and exceeds the forces of mind, civilization, development, individuation, institutionalization, stabilization. The corporeal is defined by its never-ending process of becoming, as it grows beyond or exceeds itself.30 All the while, its degradations disrupt the subjectivating forces of mind, those mediations which would cohere individual-as-citizen, lord-as-noble. Nietzsche, too, revisits an ancient, pure materiality as potential reservoir for resisting the orderly forces of modernity. As introduced above, the life force of tragic culture emanates from the Dionysian, whose ties to the disorderly natural world create the possibility for the Apollonian to appear proportionate and civilized.31 Experiencing Dionysian insight threatens paralysis, for it exposes one to the degrading natural life outside of human community.32 Yet, like Bakhtin, Nietzsche locates the potential for aesthetics

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to translate degradation into a form of resistance, as artists may create an experience that dissolves artist, witnesses, and nature together into a temporary, intoxicating, primordial union. Like carnival, Dionysian art charms the community through “the fundamental knowledge of oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the prime cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the bonds of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness.”33 While performance theory retains the classical aesthetic distinction between immediate and meditational, the effects it assumes from a hybrid im/mediacy are more nuanced than the temporary (and total) disruption of civilization imagined in some of Nietzsche’s and Bakhtin’s work. The immediate differs from the mediated, but it is not a dialectical opposition: Like rhizomes to roots, the body is an alternative to mind, which cannot be transcended by a unity with mind. As such, the body, materiality, and the immediate function as excess—a material remainder whose complexity escapes or eludes the common, substantial, linguistic representation necessary to constitute individuals as subjects. Those performing a politics of enactment rhetorically heighten, or call attention to, the disorderly natural forces still flowing with and through the human body. They temporarily confound the abstract (transcendent) discourses of identity which subject embodied individuals to represent a certain being. Performance scholars have theorized different ways in which rhetorical bodies defy representational economies and subjection, ranging from the dualistic (theatrical liveness opposes mediated spectacle, just as body violates mind), to the hegemonic (performances strengthen community bonds and voice activism), to the transgressive (hybridized bodies and minds escape or elude identification to some degree). In the process, performance scholars suggest how a politics of enactment may translate into resistance, within contexts of consumer capitalism and friend-enemy politics. They conclude that a politics of enactment demands new interpretive practices, attuned to movement, im/mediacy, and imagination. In hailing “the real through the presence of living bodies,” Phelan argues, “Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital.”34 The body’s (or bodies’) immediate, concrete presence undermines the profitable, alienating abstractions of post-industrial media35—just as aesthetically conjuring the degrading forces of nature dissolved the civilizing subjections of language and identity. By highlighting the body, performers disrupt Cartesian dualisms, particularly for women, whose bodies have been rendered objects (and whose minds have been rendered invisible) by patriarchy.36 As Phelan acknowledges, corporeality is highly influenced by mediation: The body is “a consolidated fleshly form and an eroding, decomposing formlessness” which “beckons us and resists our attempts to remake it”


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as we try to remake ourselves.37 Nonetheless, she has been interpreted as constructing “a reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized” which has no place in contemporary culture.38 Auslander argues that, in practice, the mediated and live co-exist all the time. Further, by definition, “The im-mediate is not prior to mediation but derives precisely from the mutually defining relationship between the im-mediate and the mediated.”39 While Auslander’s defense of mediation is somewhat troubling, his thesis that the live and mediated are premised on a “historical and contingent” relationship, not “determined by immutable differences” has merit.40 Performers of all sorts (actors, musicians, artists, activists) have been blending the mediated and immediate, the linguistic and embodied, the digital/ virtual and the concrete, for many years, and in ways which often complicate (if not outright resist) consumer reproduction.41 The unique context in which performative moments occur—not the ontological claim to immediacy—permits an enactment to appear resistant. Resistors have identified the politics of strict dualism (like mind/body) as an exigency, critiqued the consequences of valuing one oppositional term over the other, and invited possibilities for being and doing otherwise, through the contingent situations of daily life. Furthermore, pitting immediate against mediation devalues both, and reduces significantly the range of interpretive work (and thus transformation) possible in experiencing (or witnessing) them together. As Fenske notes, the mediated is often subject to interpretations built on substance.42 Such practices compel attention away from aspects of events which are fleeting or heightened, or limit the immediate to how it mediates substantial meaning.43 Treating the body and materiality as the proverbial other tends to lock the immediate into meanings-as-”excessive,” or alternatively, treats it as “(spiritually, emotionally, experientially) meaningful.”44 The dialectic threatens to situate the body as a vehicle for transcendence, against the forces of mediation,45 even as it continues to segregate mediation from a disorderly politics mingled with the immediate. Scholarship on tattoos illustrates the point: if treated as meaningful, tattoos are “significant only because they are made into signs of social, personal, cultural, or historical meaning. What is lost or erased from these accounts are those occasions where tattoos may mean nothing at all,” or “cannot be reduced to either static meaning or experience.”46 If treated as immediate, scholars conclude of tattooing “that pain is pure experience, or that pain becomes [a] sign of some type of now deeper emotional or spiritual meaning.”47 Note the value Fenske finds in maintaining a distinction between the mediate and immediate, while also conceiving the two as non-oppositional or as hybrid. This contrasts approaches to the immediate (like Auslander’s) which collapse the immediate into mediation (under the logical imperative

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that humans can only come to know the immediate through mediation). My own development of transgression and hegemony mirrors Fenske’s approach: though we may never know pure transgression, it is crucial to maintain it as distinct from the hegemonic impulse to subsume all difference. Perhaps the most important conclusion emerging from the initial debates over performance’s ontological liveness is a caveat concerning the power of the body and materiality: it is less modernist, and more subversive, to consider mind-body in hybridity than in simple substitutions.48 While it is tempting to resist the various forces of representation through the power of pure material presence (just as Zarathustra initially accompanied himself with a corpse instead of a herd), such a substitution only replicates a hierarchical logic which maintains authority. Asserting the power of liveness against reproductive spectacle demands a contingent, hybrid approach, to avoid reifying dualisms. While maintaining an eye toward the hybrid combinations of the immediate and mediate (what I denote as “im/mediate”), some have suggested that performance’s power voices resistance in more hegemonic ways. The liveness of performance may promote identifications and representations through which activists may organize and express themselves.49 Widening the hegemonic economy to include enactments, performance may be seen “as an expressive mode of being heard, seen, encountered, contended with as someone—an artist/scholar/citizen—who has something to say in our current systems of power and representation.”50 Performance becomes an interesting tool for counter-hegemonic politics, those which desire the formation of a collective agent to fight oppression. As Sue-Ellen Case suggests, making the body visible, alive, or present (at theatrical or political performances) has profound political implications for those, like lesbians, whose bodies and experiences have been erased through normative practice.51 But the presence of bodies has more transgressive potential than reappearing (or representing) the under-represented (an effective strategy for hegemonic incorporation into collective agents, for better and worse). Re-asserting material embodiment calls attention to the very real transgressions bodies may perform. Without necessarily building a collective agent, performance materializes (or, at least, asserts materiality against) that which authority seeks to abstract, disappear, manage: “To render the symbolic literal is to disrupt and make apparent the fetishistic prerogatives of the symbol by which a thing, such as a body or a word, stands by for something else.”52 In other words, a hybridized politics of enactment continues to assume that immediacy has some excessive power, though it is not inherently triumphant against mediation. Various examples of aesthetic experiences help demonstrate this idea. Schneider illustrates the transgressive power of im/mediacy through a series of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, which cast female porn


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personalities in sex acts, posed in aesthetically “sound” ways. The photographs’ transgressions were multiple, including representing miscegenation and feminine sexual agency. But perhaps their greatest transgression was the photos’ presentation of “real” acts that violated the division between pornography and art: “Something very different is afoot when a work does not symbolically depict a subject of social degradation, but actually is that degradation, terrorizing the sacrosanct divide between the symbolic and the literal.”53 By mediating the immediate, and rendering the mediated immediate, transgressive acts have the power to defy clean representations which order “proper” art or politics. Through their im/mediate tricks, performances may also break the circuit of symbolic substance which links audiences and performers, disrupting witnesses’ propensity “to identify, to see themselves” in a performance, and inviting them “just to see.”54 As Jones describes of the art installation It’s Alive, aesthetic experiences may lure witnesses into re-presenting meanings through their own terms or selves; but playing on corporeality disturbs the possibility for closure. The installation’s portrait head appeared grotesquely disproportionate (“like a piece of meat hammered by a mallet”), so much so that viewers worked through waves of attraction and repulsion as they stood before the image.55 Such oscillation is more akin to degrading, Dionysian experiences than the semiotic identifications of much psychoanalytic theory. Explicating the body may introduce degrees of transgression into an otherwise metaphorical representation. Similarly, transgressive enactments may prompt recognition that “my own stubborn embodiment is caught up in an exchange of representational identities, in a circuit of identifications, incorporations, and desires,” such that I, and other witnesses, become “deindividualized, marked as particular and ultimately dispersed (in relation to others).”56 Here, the hybrid power of im/mediacy does not completely destroy the materials of identification (embodied individual, symbolic mediation, coherent sense of self, cultural authority). Instead, it calls out the ways in which authorities seek correspondence between performer, witness, performance, social norm. A politics of enactment interrupts subjectivation by calling into question at least one aspect of this circuit of symbolic substance. Because of its capacity for movement, bodily performance is constantly slipping away from, if not openly confronting, those symbols which attempt to arrest it into coherent, and therefore controllable, representations. The moving body is “never one with its fantasmagoric projections: with the identities and significances that are thrust upon its visible and invisible codes from both outside and in.”57 In other words, the movement of performance propels those involved beyond the tentacled reach of subjection (though never fully, if we accept that enactments are hybridized rather than purely corporeal). The movement of performance challenges stabilizing,

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metaphorical representations which seek to arrest performers, witnesses, and even the performance itself as subjects.58 Through its play on the im/mediate, performance “disrupts and destabilizes interpretive processes”59—especially those which rely on metaphorical representation. Just as a politics of enactment may subvert standard identification, the rhetorical body disrupts critics’ ability to maintain distance and objectivity, to treat aesthetic experiences as objects which are measurable, knowable, and evaluate-able through the codes they are supposed to represent.60 To interpret transgression requires a sense of the original, dualistically divided terms of mediation (art, mind, civilization, ordering, abstract symbols) and the immediate (pornography, body, nature, degradation, concrete presence). To experience the transgressive hybridity of enactment also demands a sense of permissiveness. Transgression begs us to view the body as both mediated and immediate, subject to historical materialism and singularly present here-and-now. The analytic and practice of performance thus challenges what Dwight Conquergood identifies as the “text-centrism” which reduces three-dimensional, living, im/mediate enactments to functional texts.61 Performance does so “by reconfiguring texts and [enactments] in horizontal, metonymic tension, not by replacing one hierarchy with another, the romance of performance for the authority of the text.”62 Taking the aesthetic returns of Bakhtin and Nietzsche one step further, acknowledging the hybrid power of body and mind continues to unsettle institutional authority and hierarchy—in part, by inspiring its own interpretive practices. In sum, as performance theorists have developed in the wake of modernism, the body’s relationship to mediation is more a co-presence (and co-motion) than dualistic, or even dialectical. Rhetorical bodies in performance may work hegemonically, but several theorists see transgressive potential in the excessive movements and incomplete identifications introduced in encounters between humans. All the while, the body performs im/mediately as “a mass of orifices and appendages, details and tactile surfaces . . . a site of social markings, physical parts and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, sexuality—all of which bear ghosts of historical meaning, markings delineating social hierarchies of privilege and disprivilege.”63 From the perspective of transgression, the ability of the performing body to disrupt metaphoric representation is perhaps its greatest power—more so than its ability to mediate a collective agent’s messages. Because of its transgressions to representation, the politics of enactment has inspired questions concerning its efficacy and ethics. The arguments leveled against performance-as-resistance mirror many of the critiques brought against critical rhetoric and companion subjectivity, as described in previous chapters. Other criticisms, as I elaborate below, derive from a more transgressive


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perspective, and have the potential to develop transgression further as a unique mode of resistance.

CRITIQUING A POLITICS OF ENACTMENT, FROM HEGEMONIC PERSPECTIVES Transgressive enactments reveal hegemony’s limits, inspiring some critics to hold fast to hegemony as the only (or only “really” effective) mode of social change. Critics argue, for instance, that the “politics” of enactment entails aesthetic, cultural, or individual acts of rebellion.64 Such acts may (on a charitable read) assist the constitution of “real” politics; but on their own, enactments cannot be considered effective. From a hegemonic perspective, the de-subjectivations inspired by a politics of enactment can never result in real change, for they offer no principles from which to represent collective agents: “The limits to transgression lie in the fact that it is not enough to constantly deconstruct and destabilize.”65 A politics of enactment does not constitute a collective consciousness as its primary task, so it may appear that performative politics is subject to narcissism or worse, unintentional resistance. As Pile explains: “That people can create their own ways of living—their own meanings and capacities— has forced a recognition that resistance can be found in everything. Here, of course, lies a problem: if resistance can be found in the tiniest act—a single look, a scratch on a desk—then how is resistance to be recognised as a distinctive practice?”66 While this basic definitional question is important to theorizing transgression, it also suggests the baseline of disciplining a common, coherent worldview as the standard for evaluating resistance. With no a priori principle (whether existing or attributed), there is no “real” way to judge whether an act of resistance was one of principled consciousness, or simply a way to express emotion or meet personal needs. Auslander claims that the politics of enactment risks associating “any practice” with “being critical, a situation that clearly can produce absurdities,” as when a commodities trader is viewed as emblematic of postmodern resistance.67 The formation of collective agent (a critical consciousness forged through representation) not only helps proponents of hegemony evaluate the voracity of resistance, but it also underwrites the long-term effectiveness of their efforts for social change. Without such anchors, critics argue, a politics of enactment is fleeting and temporary—in other words, there are no guarantees that its resistance might work. A hegemonic perspective also views enactment as being too vulnerable to dominant powers, which may discipline transgression as illegitimate, or accommodate transgression within a post-industrial economy of spectacle. Juris, for instance, suggests that the impacts of performative violence at the

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2001 G8 protests in Italy were limited by the media’s ability to weave the anarchist Black Bloc into a dominant storyline of “dreaded criminal, if not terrorist, deviance.”68 As such, he concludes, transgression “constitutes a double-edged sword”: it “did energize certain movement sectors” and raise “visibility,” but “also contributed to official efforts to criminalize dissent” and even “justify brutal repression” by police.69 There is a sense in which the politics of enactment will never, of its own power, offer “enough” resistance to effectively combat oppression. The apparent impotency of transgression, proponents of hegemony argue, is exacerbated in the contemporary moment. Given the predominance of spectacle and excess in post-industrial capitalism, we may ask: “Is the notion of transgression still a viable one?”70 Mayer’s account of women’s nudity at the New Orleans Mardi Gras parades (and subsequent reproductions in soft-core pornographic videos) suggests the ambivalence that a number of critics feel toward transgression today. By flashing breasts for beads, women in the French Quarter feel exhilarated, even resistant; but their enactments land them in a ritualistically “transgressive” economy controlled by patriarchal norms: The promise of individual self-creation offers them the chance to step outside of acceptable public roles for women in middle-class society. At the same time, they do not step outside the discourses of patriarchy, race, and class that frame the performance . . . nudity offers the opportunity to embrace the embodiment of sameness, as those who express control over their own bodies are celebrated and those that the camera cannot control are marginalized, or, in the case of displaced residents, absolutely excluded. . . . In this way, the videos and rituals together do not reveal any inversion toward perversion in the city, but imply that these perversions are actually the norm.71

Simply because a performance excessively marks the body does not render it immune to economies of representation, let alone historical relations of oppression. Mayer’s conclusion points to the importance of contextually sensitive, hybrid analysis of enactments; but her criticism also echoes supporters of hegemony, who seek to debunk transgression as inherently ineffective, even foolish, within the contemporary economy. When the surrounding context appears heretical, spectacular, or excessive, the effectivity of traditional transgressions appears lost.72 It is as though “late capitalism appropriates, incorporates, and consumes transgression into fashionable chic at such a rapid pace,” Schneider remarks, “that the subversive impact of transgression has become impossible.”73 Along with refuting the current efficacy of transgression, some critics charge that performative politics is anti-materialist, undermining the basis for politics as it disrupts representation. A performative perspective de-


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essentializes identity, “reveal[ing] as fabrications” traits such as gender, race, and sexuality.74 Critics acknowledge that such a perspective offers liberatory potential for people to escape sex, sexuality, and race, but may also lead to the dissolution of identity as the means for politics.75 By embracing the power of performative excess, scholars risk discarding those material standpoints which serve as the basis for resistance as well as oppression—for they are the foundation of identification, networking, and legitimizing oneself as part of a political collective. Moreover, as Reinelt argues, enactment’s turn away from representation has the potential to deny or erase the historical experience of oppression: “If identities are always achieved by delimiting that which they are not, when the notion of identity is given up, the oppressed term tends to drop out of sight.”76 The ability to perform free of historical-material categories belongs to the privileged, for members of historically oppressed groups cannot always, or easily, escape the marks of otherness borne on their bodies. Dolan describes the dilemma of trading in traditional materialism for a politics of enactment, in the move toward a queer politics from gay and lesbian rights movements. This move “has, according to some scholars, meant leaving experience-based strategies of identity politics, with all their risk of essentialism.”77 By converting the very material experiences of female-tofemale desire (and the repression, even violence it may incur) into a performative identity, queer performances risk being appropriated by dominant logics of individualism and capitalism: For they may abandon the material basis of lesbian sexuality, freeing identities to come to symbolize “uniqueness” and “independence.” In sum, the proponents of a hegemonic perspective argue that transgression derails the possibility for real politics, particularly in the postindustrial economy of spectacle or by means of erasing the markers for identity politics. Initially, refuting such claims requires acknowledging that hegemony is not the only (or only truly effective) means for social change. The politics of enactment demonstrates that not all resistance seeks an end in collective, dialectical agents, or those greater ideas which they represent (class, liberty, democracy, etc.). The hegemonic perspective views enactments as fleeting and weak; but the immediate impacts of transgression do not have to be limited strictly to the moment in which they occur. Protest performances require a good deal of organization and invention, which may incubate the carnivalesque spirit before the scheduled protest begins.78 Further, discourses following a performance’s immediate disruptions may perpetuate the effects of transgression.79 Some transgressions may “later be redeployed, even in the case where much of the political function is unintelligibility.”80 If the goal or telos of resistance is widened beyond replacing one institution with another, the infectious nature of transgressive politics may reveal itself.

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From a transgressive perspective, enactment is exactly what is needed to resist post-industrial spectacle. Even if we do not accept that the body has some ontological corporeal excess which escapes representational economies, the explication of the body may still function as a rhetorical trope within the current moment—a moment in which metaphorical representation, if not repetition, is a prevailing norm of communication. Here, the singularity and concreteness of bodies is an unwelcome interruption at the most public and spectacular, as well as mundane, sites of the neoliberal order: trade summits and political conventions, as well as everyday urban settings. Street performances, like those described in the following chapter, iterate the embodied being as singular, at least momentarily non-possessible, or otherwise outside the control of consumer capitalism. Were we to refuse to grant even this rhetorical power to the explicit body, performance theorists have argued, we would have to at least acknowledge its capacity to confound witnesses’ common-sense codes: the explicit body refuses to offer up the closure of identification as it introduces elements of movement into systems of stability. Granted, within post-industrial spectacle, an appreciation of transgression’s power requires a nuanced treatment of each performative enactment. Rapaport’s distinctions between “‘representation,’ which merely restates hegemonic imagery, and ‘miming,’ which restates and deconstructs it,” proves helpful in accounting for the power of different transgressive performances within a post-industrial economy.81 Returning to the various definitions of representation implicit in theories of hegemony, Rapaport’s “representation” would be a more transparent type of symbolic action which substantiates friend-enemy politics; while “miming” would be a more metonymic, im/mediate enactment which disarticulates witnesses from collective agents. Flaunting the concrete, embodied individual as already complete, enactments may break the cycle of desire-subjection-commodity which has come to define contemporary capitalism.82 Though completely abandoning historical “geographical coordinates” (like race and gender) threatens to erase historical relations of power, dominance, and privilege, treating them with more nuance, as in much performance scholarship, invites a new materialist practice.83 The challenge to treating performance as “a heuristic device for theorizing, not dispensing with, experience” is to inspire alternative ways of living or making sense of enactments, outside the traditions of realism and hegemony.84 As I elaborate in the final chapter, a more transgressive politics of enactment entails a new rhetorical materialism—one which self-reflexively acknowledges the importance of historical relations of oppression, but not necessarily or only for the purposes of building a collective agent. The hybrid infestations of the im/mediate shake (without completely dissolving) historical markers of collective identity, realism, and liberal individualism. Here, for instance, “Gender is not about simply seeming to ‘be’ masculine


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or feminine (whether anatomically or otherwise); race is not simply about appearing to ‘be’ a particular color and thus to ‘have’ a particular set of personality characteristics.”85 As part of an im/mediate politics of enactment, materialist markers like gender and race do not denote substance, and thus cannot be relied upon to represent or constitute a collective agent. They remain relevant to transgression, particularly in forestalling authority through self-reflexivity.

CRITIQUING A POLITICS OF ENACTMENT, FROM TRANSGRESSIVE PERSPECTIVES To be a viable, ethical politics, transgression must also account for criticisms that are not based in hegemonic logics. These critiques return us to the significance of hybridizing the im/mediate, and avoiding romantic treatments of transgression. They also inspire transgressive modes of resistance to free themselves further from hegemony, by foregoing even the most basic vocabulary of friend-enemy politics. As suggested above, the politics of enactment may reinscribe modernism by treating the body as fully outside language and mediation. Rather than hybridizing body and mind, such approaches advocate for a simple substitution of body for mind. By articulating performance’s power as pure corporeality, we ignore the modernist treatment of resistance as an embodiment of transcendent autonomy against dominant social norms. Jones describes pure corporeal transcendence through the reception of Jackson Pollock’s performative paintings, which uplifted his body to “a rhetorical function . . . a conduit for the pure being of the action painting genius.”86 Here, the body is wrenched from particularity and contingent materiality to signify “the universalized trope of individualist ‘freedom,’” permitting the artist to transcend his or her own presence by becoming the art in the act of performance.87 To advance a more “transgressive” transgression, critics should be wary of claiming a pure, transcendent corporeal power (or transgression) against mediation (or hegemony). Similarly, transgression and performance may be romanticized, and treated as always or inherently resistant—ignoring the possibility that such resistance may be indiscriminate, even unethical. Critics base this claim on phenomenological, rather than hegemonic, standards for ethics (for transgression, by definition, violates hegemonic standards for propriety). As Lucaites and McDaniel confer, transgression as a mode of resistance must be treated with care: To stress only the element of carnival-as-liberation is to slight the violence, perversities, and impostures of such rhetorics. Indeed it is to neglect the very

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ways in which such ruptures themselves carry the forces of order. As Zizek notes, “Bakhtin’s mistake—or, rather, that of some of his followers—was to present an idealized image of these ‘transgressions,’ while passing in silence over lynching parties, and so on.”88

To treat transgression as “fully” or purely transgressive would necessitate a more sober look at degrading practices, rather than assuming them as in the service of exhilaratingly resistant “friends.” To foster a more ethical transgression, Fenske suggests that performers be held accountable to each other: “In order to achieve answerability, the embodied action must be responsible for its meaning, as well as liable to meaning. Events are not ethical simply because they are embodied; they are ethical when both the body and its sense are united in action dialogically.”89 In other words, an ethical enactment might inspire witnesses to make meaning, even if the hegemonic prompts for dialogue were absent in the performative encounter. For instance, a “die-in” in the middle of a city street (in which protestors lie on the sidewalks as though killed in battle) may occur quickly and without attracting much press attention—but its ability to stir passersby into conversation renders it a responsible transgression. Finally, critics are wary of the materialist impulse to name stable structures as the cause of oppression, but identify the performative as resistantly volatile. In a sense, maintaining the vocabulary of dominance-resistance places transgression into a friend-enemy framework, denying its full potential to defy hegemonic politics. Rose develops this argument with a great deal of complexity, suggesting that the dominance-resistance framework reduces enactments to reactionary politics: “Practices of resistance have no definitive features in and of themselves but are defined through their oppositional relationship to power. Practices become resistant when they respond to a dominant ideology.”90 Nietzsche defines reactive forces as those which accept reality as it is, but also assume that reality derives from pre-existent principles—that all effects have some substantial cause.91 In order to fully embrace transgression, Rose argues, we must approach dominance as processural, rather than structural.92 This entails getting outside a vocabulary of dominance and oppression, at least insofar as the dominant is endowed with “stability, centrality, coherence,” and resistance is treated as “elusive, inconsistent, and malleable”—as resistant through its contrast to the stability of dominance.93 Would embracing a more “transgressive” transgression mean fully foregoing the notion of oppression which has been so crucial to the study of protest, resistance, and social change more generally? Rose implies that it does not. The politics of enactment “does not trust power but recognizes the persistence of practice: how forces always attempt to control a world that always overwhelms their control.”94


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Through non-romantic eyes, enactment is a force—and not an inherently positive force against the inherently negative force of structuration.95 In a Nietzschean sense, the appearance of forces (whether “dominant” or “resistant”) results from the activity of forces available for active appropriation on the part of political actors. The politics of enactment acknowledges the “unequal and multiple power relationships” which constrain individual inventions.96 But it does not begin the study of resistance with an oppressive power. Rather, in transgressive fashion, the politics of enactment conceives resistance as “a mode through which the symptoms of different power relations are diagnosed and ways are sought to get round them, or live through them, or to change them.”97 Such power relations might be ascribed as “dominant,” though their “oppressive nature” is not necessary to interpreting the presence, or impact, of transgression.

CONCLUSION: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A TRANSGRESSIVE INTERPRETIVE PRACTICE Helene Shugart writes, “Very few acts short of coercion or revolution can be cited as directly and exclusively, or even primarily, responsible for material change.”98 The common sense of social movement (hegemony) suggests that rhetoric effectively resists when it represents a collective agent, or will for social change. The move toward accepting transgression as a unique, viable mode of resistance is eased through a transgressive interpretive practice. Here, the qualities that make some enactments powerful come to the fore: they immediately challenge common sense and subjection to authority in a given situation. As I have argued, transgression configures resistance as a problem of interpretation. Transgression implicates senses and sense-making in processes of material dominance. Citing Vivian Patraka’s notion of “binary terror,”99 Schneider explains that interpretive systems directly maintain social orders: “The terror that accompanies the dissolution of a binary habit of sensemaking and self-fashioning is directly proportionate to the social safety insured in the maintenance of such apparatus of sense. The rigidity of our social binaries—male/female, white/black, civilized/primitive, art/porn— are sacred to our Western cultural ways of knowing.”100 Thus, the move toward a more “transgressive” transgression must necessarily be accompanied by its own critical practice. Transgressive enactments demand a great deal from witnesses: they interrupt us, luring us to implicate ourselves in, and free ourselves from, systems of representation, subjection, binaries, and stability. But the power of performance is limited by certain interpretive systems, notably those based in

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realism. A realist interpretive practice assumes the correspondence of agent, action, and meaningful substance—much as some theories of hegemony rely on an economy of metaphorical representation to link, more or less clearly, individual, collective, and rhetoric. As Olbrys illustrates through his analysis of popular Saturday Night Live comedian Chris Farley, standard interpretive practices of realism may permit small doses of excess, but shepherd citizens back to normalcy by disciplining carnival as deviant. Though Farley’s performances entertained audiences, the press re-inscribed normalcy by covering his grotesquely undisciplined body (marked by Farley’s obesity and consumption of alcohol) as the cause of his death (and failure to control himself as a responsible individual).101 Through a realist’s eyes, a transgressive performance must represent a transgressive identity. A realist stance, for instance, may reduce the potential of resistant performance to “spectacle and narcissism.”102 Another powerful example of realist responses to transgression occurred at the “Hippy Convoy,” which has travelled to Stonehenge each summer (beginning in 1986), only to be dispersed (sometimes violently) by a disproportionately large police force.103 The hippies treated the monument as “a spiritual center made to be used rather than looked at,” while others considered it part of the British national identity, and therefore in need of preservation—and protection.104 The press and officials persistently framed the transgressive travelers as mad, diseased, criminal; locals and farmers along the route demanded the hippies be arrested for trespassing on private property and disturbing the peace. As Cresswell concludes, “Representations of deviance are effective and credible because they make some kind of ideological sense out of an apparent crisis; they appeal to people’s ‘common sense.’”105 Thus, the standards of realism—which would attach a “deviant” identity to deviant bodies, or those which exceed social norms (like the hippies at Stonehenge)—help discipline transgressive actions. Others, too, have fingered the press coverage of protests as contributing to dominant (pro-nationalist, pro-capitalist) ideologies. At a deeper level, such coverage may be read as an attempt to discipline transgression into hegemonic modes of resistance—both before, during, and after a protest event. As Juris concludes of Spanish and Italian press coverage of the 2001 G8 protests in Italy: The media played their part by constructing images of destruction carried out by young urban guerrillas, and blaming this “senseless violence” on the Black Bloc. Editorial commentaries used the situation to distinguish between the reasonable majority and the violent minority, reinforcing the sacred status of peaceful protest and constitutional democracy. Although the police dealt with protestors indiscriminately, the press emphasized the need for the movement to break with its violent fringe. Even the images of young Carlo Guiliani’s dead


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corpse were constructed as a morality tale about the tragic consequences of wrongheaded protest violence.106

So long as it is “peaceful” and “democratic”—rather than “wrongheaded” and “violent”—protest is permitted. Following Cresswell’s suggestion that transgression reveals the limits of tolerance for social orders, transgressive protest (like that performed through the Black Bloc’s property destruction and confrontations) cannot be contained within established systems of normalcy (in the ways that hegemonic protest can). Such treatments of transgression offer valuable insight into the ways in which official powers (notably, the press and police) attempt to re-situate excess back into normal sense-making devices. But such interpretations may also reinforce a realist, reproductive economy between individual, collective subject, and rhetorical invention. Each time critics fault the press for misrepresenting the protestors (as violent, deviant, or even simply exercising their rights to freedom of expression), they assume that protestors have some real purpose or identity by which we may judge their enactments of resistance. I do not deny that transgressive protestors are often cast and responded to as deviants (in words and through police violence); but it is important to hold the press and officials responsible based on standards besides realism and hegemony. Realism and hegemony deny the fundamental interpretive challenge posed by transgressive enactments, which are “less like social interests that have to be accommodated, or parties with programmes to be implemented, than signs which society has to interpret to itself.”107 The material dimension of transgressive enactments doubles their challenge—for transgressive enactments literally interrupt the smooth functioning of the social order. Departing from hegemonic interpretive systems means dilating upon those differences which cannot be accounted for through the similarity of metaphorical representation. As Dolan describes in the context of theatrical performance, this means breaking with psychoanalysis, especially as it schools us to look for realism and representation by treating identification as the primary means to achieve sociality.108 When “performers are taught to identify with their characters, and spectators expect to identify with the performers,” the result is a “triangular, closed, hegemonic system of meaning” akin to Freudian psychoanalysis.109 A substantial relationship forms, linking performers, witnesses, and meanings into a hegemonic unit, not unlike Gramsci’s “collective man.” Both interpretive and resistant practices suffocate the potential for singularity and difference. In contrast, a performative approach to politics guides witnesses to those moments in which rhetorical bodies unsettle, work alongside, or exceed representations and representational politics. As Dolan suggests, breaking the hegemonic triangle of identification is facilitated through playing on

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the im/mediate: pornography, for instance, “might inaugurate a theory of reception based very materially—instead of psychoanalytically—on an invitation to participate in the seduction of alternative locations of desire,” for it arouses viewers physically as much as symbolically.110 It inspires im/ mediately. Certain forms of identification may remain relevant to a more transgressive reading practice. As Jones analyzes Latina lesbian performance artist Laura Aguilar, enactments may invite “viewers to make us responsible for the effects of our own perceptions and interpretive judgments.”111 Here, Jones calls attention to a sort of phenomenological identification, one inspired by Aguilar’s excess, and one which fails to result in a substantial closure of I-am-her or I-am-not-her—for Aguilar’s rhetorical body calls attention to the witnesses’ reading practices which might render her an other, an enemy, a not-me, generating a call for a more ethical interpretive engagement. If attuned to dispersion, rather than coherence, identification may find a place within a transgressive critical practice. The key for any transgressive interpretation is fostering a critical practice which moves beyond the basic idea that enactments represent collective agents as the only, or primary, impact of resistance. In conclusion, the politics of enactment does not necessarily translate into a fully transgressive resistance, particularly when bodies are explicated as symbolic, or otherwise dressed primarily for representation. As performance theorists assert, protestors’ live presence can manifest identities that had been erased by dominant regimes, just as they may form a nodal point around which “friends” recognize each other. This confirms that hegemony and transgression are best thought as matters of degree. Yet, maintaining some distinction between representation and enactment is crucial to the conceptual integrity of transgression: without recourse to a vocabulary which acknowledges the power of materiality or the body, we may subsume all modes of social change into linguistic representation. The representational politics of hegemony often operate metaphorically, as language or other symbols organize and express individuals as reflections of a collective agent. A collective agent is known, in other words, as issues, ideas, and identities represent it, or it comes to represent a group of individuals through the shared medium of rhetoric. In contrast, a politics of enactment dismantles or otherwise problematizes the substantial connections between issue, idea, identity. By explicating the body, protest performances may short-circuit the identifications which forge coherent collective agents. As developed beyond modernist aesthetics, the politics of enactment retains a distinction between the immediate and meditational, while asserting the power of im/mediacy to disrupt contemporary economies of “substantial” representation which seek to textualize (and thus render common)


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singularities. Enactments are the preferred means for companions who seek to disarticulate subjects, while representation is the preferred means to constitute friend-enemy subjects. The ambiguous assertion of bodies is more difficult to translate into dialectical agents than articulating oneself through a common sense vocabulary. Anarchistic street protest from the last sixty years, as I turn to in the following chapter, demonstrates how enactments materialize within, for, and against representational politics.

NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. William Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 347–48. 2. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 84–85. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Clifton P. Fadiman (New York: Dover, 1995), 66. 4. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 12. 5. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 23. 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968), 3. 7. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 7. 8. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 7. 9. Nietzsche argues that contemplative culture brought about the ruin of ancient Greece. Combined with the scientific optimism of progress, the Socratic doctrine posits that “it can correct the world by knowledge, guide life by science, and actually confine the individual within a limited sphere of solvable problems, from which [he or she] can cheerfully say to life: ‘I desire thee: it is worth while to know thee’” (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 64). Much of Nietzsche’s remaining work advocates a revaluation of values, precisely because Socratic and scientific values are valueless when it comes to experiencing life as Nietzsche sees it (Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically [New York: Guilford Press, 1999]). 10. Philip Auslander, “General Introduction,” in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 1, ed. P. Auslander (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–24. 11. John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 68. 12. Graeme Chesters and Ian Welsh, “Complexity and Social Movement(s): Process and Emergence in Planetary Action Systems,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 5 (2005): 189. 13. Mitch Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance: Power, Politics, and a Performative Style of Systems,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, no. 4 (2002): 390; 391. 14. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 391. 15. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 197.

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16. Mindy Fenske, “The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance,” Text & Performance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2004): 10. 17. Auslander, “General Introduction,” 1. 18. Performance art may call attention to embodiment or “explicate bodies in social relation” (Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance [London: Routledge, 1997], 2). The roots of such performances derive from “the Latin explicare, which means ‘to unfold.’ Unfolding the body, as if pulling back velvet curtains to expose a stage,” performances may “peel back layers of signification that surround . . . bodies like ghosts at a grave. Peeling at signification, bringing ghosts to visibility, they are interested to expose not an originary, true, or redemptive body, but the sedimented layers of signification themselves” (Schneider, The Explicit Body, 2). As I elaborate below, protests and other enactments may also call attention to embodiment, revealing the multifarious ways in which embodied beings are caught up in subjectivity, and revealing the potential for embodied beings to erode discourses of subjection by highlighting their singularity through the body. 19. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and MariaOdilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), ix. 20. Stephen Gencarella Olbrys, “Disciplining the Carnivalesque: Chris Farley’s Exotic Dance,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (2006): 242. 21. Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, “The Unnatural Performative: Resisting Phenomenal Closure,” Text & Performance Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1997): 123. 22. Kirk W. Fuoss, Striking Performances/Performing Strikes (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 17. 23. Jan Cohen-Cruz, “General Introduction,” in Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, ed. J. Cohen-Cruz, (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. 24. Jill Dolan, Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 152. 25. Amelia Jones, “Acting Unnatural: Interpreting Body Art,” in Decomposition: Post-disciplinary Performance, eds. Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 13. 26. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 18. 27. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19. 28. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19–20. 29. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 21. 30. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 26. 31. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 12. 32. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 23. 33. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 35. While the natural “oneness” is alluring, Nietzsche cautions that the Dionysian experience cannot remain permanent in order for a human community to sustain itself. Dionysian experience may result in a dangerous Promethean quest “to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and on broad shoulders to bear them higher and higher, farther and farther” (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 33). In other words, the Dionysian dissolves all boundaries of individuation, creating a dangerous illusion of a massive subject who devours all life and nature into itself. Rendering the Dionysian a permanent state would dissolve “humanity” entirely into the organic background: presumably, the aesthetic, cultural, rhetorical world would dissolve along with it.


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34. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 148. 35. Jill Dolan, “Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and Civic Engagement in Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Topics 11, no. 1 (2001): 13. 36. Jones, Body Art, 157. 37. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London, Routledge: 1997), 4. 38. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 3. 39. Auslander, Liveness, 54. 40. Auslander, Liveness, 8. While Auslander claims a hybrid view of im/mediacy in his work, at times, it reads as though he privileges the meditational over the immediate. As Trudeau concludes, “Auslander counters Phelan’s essentialist argument with his own” by foregoing “the fact that neither literacy nor technology can ever be divorced from the live voices and bodies that produce them” (Justin Thomas Trudeau, “Stooging the Body, Stooging the Text: Jack Kerouac’s Visions of Cody,” Text & Performance Quarterly 27, no. 4 [2007]: 336). 41. Marcyrose Chvasta, “Remembering Praxis: Performance in the Digital Age,” Text & Performance Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2005): 156–70. 42. Mindy Fenske, “The Movement of Interpretation: Conceptualizing Performative Encounters with Multimediated Performance,” Text & Performance Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2006): 141. 43. Fenske, “The Movement,” 142. 44. Fenske, “The Movement,” 142. 45. Fenske, “The Aesthetic,” 4. 46. Fenske, “The Movement,” 142. 47. Fenske, “The Movement,” 142. 48. There is a case to be made that both Nietzsche and Bakhtin find hybrid im/ mediate resistance in ancient aesthetics. Though both assume that the corporeal resists the symbolic, their treatment of the body includes elements of mediation. Nietzsche especially emphasizes the need for mediations to temper the power of degradation, transforming the Dionysian into an art-experience that is temporary, and one with which we can live (see note 33 above). 49. Dolan, “Rehearsing Democracy,” 13. 50. Dolan, “Rehearsing Democracy,” 13–14. 51. Sue-Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-Feminist Retro Future,” in Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists and the Limits of Alliance, ed. Dana Heller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 215. 52. Schneider, The Explicit Body, 6. 53. Schneider, The Explicit Body, 28. 54. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 143; 142; 143. 55. Jones, “Acting Unnatural,” 13; see also Jones, Body Art, 8. 56. Jones, Body Art, 225; 226. 57. Jones, “Acting Unnatural,” 15. 58. Lynn C. Miller, “‘Polymorphous Perversity’ in Women’s Performance Art: The Case of Holly Hughes,” Text & Performance Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1995): 48.

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59. Fenske, “The Movement,” 141; 145. 60. Jones, Body Art, 5. 61. Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review 45, no. 2 (2002): 147. 62. Conquergood, “Performance Studies,” 151. 63. Schneider, The Explicit Body, 2. 64. Janelle Reinelt, “Staging the Invisible: The Crisis of Visibility in Theatrical Representation,” Text & Performance Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1994): 101. 65. Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 176. 66. Steve Pile, “Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance,” in Geographies of Resistance, eds. S. Pile and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1997), 14–15. 67. Philip Auslander, Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 27. 68. Jeffrey S. Juris, “Violence Performed and Imagined: Militant Action, the Black Bloc and the Mass Media in Genoa,” Critique of Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2005): 428. 69. Juris, “Violence Performed,” 428. 70. Jones, “Acting Unnatural,” 10. 71. Vicki Mayer, “Letting It All Hang Out: Mardi Gras Performances Live and on Video,” The Drama Review 51, no. 2 (2007): 90. 72. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 175. 73. Schneider, The Explicit Body, 3. 74. Reinelt, “Staging the Invisible,” 99. 75. Reinelt, “Staging the Invisible,” 99. 76. Reinelt, “Staging the Invisible,” 100. 77. Jill Dolan, “Geographies of Learning: Theatre Studies, Performance, and the ‘Performative,’” Theatre Journal 45, no. 4 (December 1993): 33. 78. Ruth Laurion Bowman, Melanie Kitchens, and Linda Shkreli, “FEMAture Evacuation: A Parade,” Text & Performance Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2007): 297. 79. Kristina Schriver and Donna Marie Nudd, “Mickee Faust Club’s Performative Protest Events,” Text & Performance Quarterly 22, no. 3 (2002): 213. 80. Melissa Deem, “Disrupting the Nuptials at the Town Hall Debate: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Memory in the USA,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2003): 622. 81. Herman Rapaport, “‘Can You Say Hello?’ Laurie Anderson’s United States,” Theatre Journal 38, no. 3 (1986): 348; quoted in Auslander, Presence and Resistance, 25. 82. Schneider, The Explicit Body, 90. 83. Gingrich-Philbrook, “The Unnatural Performative,” 123. 84. Gingrich-Philbrook, “The Unnatural Performative,” 124. 85. Jones, Body Art, 224. 86. Jones, Body Art, 72. 87. Jones, Body Art, 73. 88. John Louis Lucaites and James P. McDaniel, “Telescopic Mourning/Warring in the Global Village: Decomposing (Japanese) Authority Figures,” Communication


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& Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 23; referencing Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 55–56. 89. Fenske, “The Aesthetic,” 12. 90. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 387. 91. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 388; 388; 389. 92. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 384. 93. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 393; 386. 94. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 397. 95. Rose, “The Seductions of Resistance,” 395. 96. Pile, “Introduction,” 3. 97. Pile, “Introduction,” 3. 98. Helene A. Shugart, “Parody as Subversive Performance: Denaturalising Gender in Ellen,” Text & Performance Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2001): 111. 99. Vivian M. Patraka, “Binary Terror and Feminist Performance: Reading Both Ways,” Discourse 14, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 163. 100. Schneider, The Explicit Body, 13. 101. Olbrys, “Disciplining the Carnivalesque.” 102. Joshua Atkinson, “Conceptualizing Global Justice Audiences of Alternative Media: The Need for Power and Ideology in Performance Paradigms of Audience Research,” Communication Review 8, no. 2 (2005): 146. See also Joshua Atkinson and Debbie S. Dougherty, “Alternative Media and Social Justice Movements: The Development of a Resistance Performance Paradigm of Audience Analysis,” Western Journal of Communication 70, no. 1 (2006): 64–88. 103. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 68; 69. 104. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 76. 105. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 91. 106. Juris, “Violence Performed,” 427. See chapter 6 for more information about Guiliani’s murder. 107. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Ecological Rites: Ritual Action in Environmental Protest Events,” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 3 (2002): 51. 108. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 142. 109. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 138. 110. Dolan, Presence and Desire, 195. The transgressive potential of pornography is heightened when it is homoerotic, for “gay male or lesbian sex is completely out of place—unimaged, unimagined, invisible—in traditional aesthetic contexts,” so “the most transgressive act at this historical moment would be representing it to excess, in dominant and marginalized reception communities” (Dolan, Presence and Desire, 201). 111. Jones, Body Art, 17.

6 Flashpoints of Transgression: Materializing a Politics of Enactment in Resistance to Capitalism

In the face of the total control of the world which the owners of money are exercising, we have only our bodies for protesting and rebelling against injustice.1

Since the end of World War II and the rise of post-Fordist globalization, a politics of enactment has become more pervasive. A wide range of tactics, including organized community theatre, street protest performances, and isolated interpersonal acts of insubordination, have manifest in all corners of the globe.2 While we may interpret “anti-capitalist” actions through the broad umbrella of friend-enemy politics (for many have articulated themselves together through the common adversary of neoliberalism), as I consider through three cases here, the politics of enactment is constantly leaking out of representational economies which would limit its impact to constructing a counter-hegemonic agent.3 The Situationists, New Left, and anti-globalization protestors like the Radical Cheerleaders perform resistance without intending to create, or primarily effecting change through, a collective subject. At times, these cases confirm Agamben’s vision for the coming communities, whose power does not derive from belonging or representing an identity: Driven by desire, the participants create heightened aesthetic experiences in everyday life. Their explications of the body may enact de-subjectivating experiences which interrupt representational logics. At the very least, the anti-capitalist politics of enactment reveals subjectivity as processural, constantly moving, embodied, and multifarious, which slows considerably the circuits of representation helping sustain neoliberal globalization.

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THE SITUATIONISTS AND THE POLITICS OF ENACTMENT People’s creativity and participation can only be awakened by a collective project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience. The only way to “arouse the masses” is to expose the appalling contrast between the potential constructions of life and the present poverty of life. Without a critique of everyday life, a revolutionary organization is a separated milieu, as conventional and ultimately as passive as those holiday camps that are the specialized terrain of modern leisure.4

A politics of enactment was never more apparent than in France between 1957 and 1972, when various artists, students, intellectuals, and professionals from across Europe came together in a host of experimental, cultural-aesthetic activities. Under the guise of the Imaginist Bauhaus, Lettrist International, London Psychogeographical Association, and eventually the Situationist International (SI), the individuals sought to be “the last avantgarde, overturning . . . practices of history, theory, politics, art, architecture, and everyday life” that they believed sustained authority (particularly under capitalism).5 Situationist activities reached a zenith in May 1968 when millions of students and workers from all walks of life participated in a general strike that crippled France. Though the revolutionary moment passed, and the SI dissolved, the Situationists’ analysis of post-industrial capitalism and accompanying tactics for resistance, remain as rhizomatic inspiration for future resistors: As Christine Harold notes in her recent analysis of the SI, the “contemporary surge of interest in a movement that formally dissipated thirty years ago marks an increasing appetite for ways to combat the commodification and mediation of everyday life.”6 Sadie Plant traces the development of the SI to the aesthetics of surrealism and dadaism, movements which challenged every dualistic division that supported authority.7 “Scorning all mediation and representation,” the SI pushed their predecessors’ projects further, in order to forestall capture by capitalist and state authority structures, as well as those hegemonic organizations seeking to resist such authorities.8 Like dada, the Situationists attempted to create communication and experience itself anew.9 But the SI discarded surrealism’s support for the unconscious as a means to revolution, cultivating instead a kind of meditative practice that attended to how various elements within a space (e.g., the city) stoke our passions.10 If each individual got to know her desires—and cultivated an ability to tease out the various inspirations for her desires, particularly the authentic from the authoritarian or capitalist—revolutionary change would follow. The SI developed a resistance motivated by desire or passion, rather than an a priori principle, aligning them with a transgressive politics of enactment.

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To further advance their revolution of aesthetic consciousness (which would translate into a new way of being in the world), the SI sought to merge art and everyday life: such a move could stave off the typical fates of revolutionary aesthetics and common sense, namely, that they become canonized and museum-bound, or tilled into the banality of daily routine.11 The SI’s odd perspectives and tactics risked irrelevancy and elitism, for they refused the representational terms of traditional politics: “Like Bakhtin, situationism emphasized the subversive power of ‘carnivalization’—the opportunity for unofficial and popular elements to playfully invert social and cultural conventions by elevating the everyday and ‘uncrowning’ the elite.”12 Rather than representing a collective, anti-capitalist agent per se, the individual’s new performances and worldview within daily life mounted an immediate challenge to consumer capitalism’s production of subjectivity. Situationist Guy Debord described capitalism as a spectacle that created alienation in all aspects of life—not solely, or primarily, in labor or production.13 The Situationist analysis of capitalism offered a new kind of materialism, one still invested in class analysis and antagonism; but one critical of old left politics as overly invested in centralizing antagonism within the party, in the face of an ever-more sophisticated capitalism.14 For Debord, capitalism as the spectacle entailed evacuating the material referents of reality, and replacing them with a constant reproduction of images. The spectacle stood between individuals and their creative power, separating humanity from ethical social relationships outside of inequality and alienation.15 Through the spectacle, Debord extended the traditional Marxist analysis of class to a new consumerist society. The commodities which alienated workers by extracting their labor in the factory grew to alienate consumers whose daily experiences were mediated by commodities. The spectacle alienates individuals through its promise to increase leisure time, which itself is dictated through capitalist commodities and structured carefully to achieve more productivity when the individual returns to work.16 Consumer capitalism appears as promoting greater choice and freedom for individuals: for instance, by suggesting a higher standard of living for all through free trade, or promoting time-saving convenience through products like coffee-makers and washing machines. The Situationists argued that the spectacle had exactly the opposite effect: “In practice, anything can be chosen except the realm in which choice is possible. One can choose to be, think, and do anything, but as the roles, ideas, and lifestyles possible within capitalist society are allowed to appear only to the extent that they appear as commodities, the equivalence and homogeneity of the commodities is inescapable in the most private aspects of life.”17 To those who live within the spectacle, consumer capitalism appears to be constantly changing, evolving according to new tastes and trends—but from

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an outsider’s viewpoint, it simply reproduces the same thing over and over again in different variations, never changing. The spectacle maintains itself by marketing newer wants and needs which individuals were to fulfill through new or repackaged commodities. As Debord recognized, consumerism implicitly involves the production of subjectivity: marketing creates individuals’ identities (through desires) and commodities complete them (at least temporarily). Central to Debord’s analysis, then, is the problem of mediation, as that which promotes alienation as well as social control. Capitalism “insists that every moment of life must be mediated by the commodity form, a situation which makes it impossible to provide anything for oneself or act without the mediation of commodities.”18 To combat the spectacle, Debord and other Situationists turned to a politics of enactment within daily life, one which would subvert spectacular mediation with its own spectacular im/mediacy. The SI imagined immediacy as a form of freedom from “all separation, hierarchy, and bureaucracy,” cultivating “the poetic and sensual desire to be really in the world, feeling its most intimate reality.”19 True to its value of immediacy, the SI took everyday life as both the battleground and prize for resistance.20 Daily life constitutes a space between the structured realm of work, and the unstructured experiential realm of rest and pleasure.21 Though conservative, the daily routines and gestures practiced unconsciously by individuals matter to politics. Specifically, everyday life has potential to exceed capitalist mediation, and, Debord argued, might reveal oppression in intimate ways.22 By locating resistance in daily life, Debord challenged the strict, hegemonic divisions which traditional materialists assert against a politics of enactment, divisions which assume that “real” politics must seek changes in legal or state power—or that a politicized daily life distracts us from efforts at alleviating oppression. The Situationists’ stand against party mediation is evidenced by their anarchistic graffiti from May of 1968: “Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves. Socialism without freedom is a barracks,” and “We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.”23 While linking to traditional hegemonic projects, the SI believed that revolution began not with the constitution of a collective identity, but with de-subjectivating experiences. SI tactics were designed to “jolt people out of their customary ways of thinking and acting, and ideally, effect a radical change of subject—both the subject/topic under discussion and the subject/agent of the discussion.”24 The tactics were decidedly humanist, celebrating the singularity found in collective, aesthetic practices. The tactics encouraged consumers to exchange their roles as spectators to become participants. Debord and his companions hoped that liberating individual experience from capitalist mediation in the present would enact the politics they sought—both


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in the present, and in the future. The SI practiced three specific political enactments: constructing situations, detournement (detouring), and derive (drifting). Each involves a politics that explicates materiality (the body and physical space) as the primary tools of rhetorical invention. The SI’s main tactic was the constructed situation, which involved transforming an ordinary place (and all those within it) into a performative reality, amalgamating “theatrical experience and ‘real’ experience.”25 The constructed situation created “an ambience” which set participants, their desires, the present moment, and immediate surroundings together in relationship.26 While the SI refused to offer specific guidance for situations (a move which would render situations an authoritarian strategy, rather than resistant tactic), they sought situations that opposed functionalism through play. They valued what Debord called “conscious choices and gambles” against the compromising and unconscious humdrum of consumerism.27 While freeing individuality, situations were to be collective endeavors, organized non-hierarchically and without figureheads. SI members planned, rehearsed, and lead or directed situations, though the director’s position was limited and would dissolve at the performance’s conclusion.28 The SI echoed early anarchist critiques against individualism, attempting to guard their resistance from the temptations of modernist and capitalist agents. Debord argued that “real individual fulfillment . . . entails the collective takeover of the world. Until this happens there will be no real individuals, but only specters haunting things anarchically presented to them by others.”29 Though the constructed situation emerged as the result of conscious collective choices and spontaneity, the SI also viewed situations as de-subjectivating experiences. By cultivating a meditative state, or bringing the body and immediate environment to bear on consciousness, one might find the self through losing the self. Situationist Raoul Vaneigem described situations in terms very close to Nietzsche’s Dionysian artistry: situations materialized “the moment of absolute excess, unity, communion,” along with a sense of loss, “the realisation that oneness with the world entails the loss of the ability to think, experience, criticise, or reflect upon” one’s experience.30 But rather than allow a potential contradiction between immediacy and mediation to hinder their practices of resistance, Situationists turned to a hybrid performance to disarticulate subjectivity from consumerism: In other words, it was not the pure immediacy of situations that resisted capitalist spectacle. The experience of immediacy, invoked through mediation, foiled the representational circuits that linked individual to consumerist (or Communist, or democratic, or other) collective. Situations worked through sensate experience rather than representation alone.31 Along with constructed situations, the SI practiced detournement, an enactment designed to stir up spectacular meaning. Like the situation,

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detournement was an intentional or constructed performance that was also open to fluidity and change. In order to successfully detour the capitalist mediation of experience, the performer analyzed the centers of power, from institutions to their influence in everyday life.32 Detournement entailed hijacking commodities, or transforming the spectacle’s mediations for one’s own pleasure—much like today’s culture jamming. Situations and detours were joined by another major tactic, known as the drift, a practice which Debord advised for navigating the city. Collectives would wander through the city in a semi-organized route, open to improvising experience as they were moved. Drifting differed from tourism, in that it was not confined by class codes of attraction and fear.33 Sometimes, drifts lasted for months, often focused on poor or forgotten urban spaces. Like the constructed situation, the drift was an opportunity for group meditation and individual reflection. Attuned to authority’s reach (as they were in detournement), drifters searched for “images of refusal, nihilism, or freedom that society had taken back into itself, coopted or rehabilitated, isolated or discredited.”34 Along with the enactment of situations, detours, and drifts, the SI advocated for a more radical interpretive practice—for resistance would grow as one altered one’s perspective from within the spectacle. As Lasn argues, “The Situationists maintained that ordinary people have all the tools they need for revolution. The only thing missing is a perceptual shift—a tantalizing glimpse of a new way of being—that suddenly brings everything into focus.”35 The SI turned to theory to offer a conceptual vocabulary through which those practicing freedom could comprehend and continue practicing resistance consciously, amidst the spectacle.36 For instance, the SI identified critical moments of resistance which might inspire others to their politics of enactment, including the Watts riots and Berkeley student protests of the mid-1960s.37 But it was not until May of 1968 that Situationist tactics inspired individuals to perform everyday life anew. As Sadie Plant summarizes, the events of May 1968 “constituted an extraordinary social, political, and cultural crisis involving a sustained—and wildcat—general strike and the practical critique of every aspect of capitalist life in roughly the terms prefigured in a decade of situationist texts.”38 What began on universities inspired (sometimes spontaneously, sometimes aided by student organizing) blue- and white-collar workers to revolt.39 Three weeks of strikes by ten million workers—against the wishes of union and Communist Party bosses—paralyzed France.40 The events materialized through the singular logics of transgression: “Art students demanded the realisation of art; music students called for ‘wild and ephemeral music’; footballers kicked out managers with the slogan: ‘football to the football players’; gravediggers occupied cemeteries; doctors, nurses, and the interns at a psychiatric hospital organised in solidarity with


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the inmates.”41 It is difficult to say whether any one group took on the function of representative hegemon, even as the empty signifier capable of substituting for the whole chain of struggles (as in Laclau’s transgressive hegemony). Instead, the May 1968 participants demonstrated a power beyond representation, beyond identity or belonging. It was an autonomous power driven by an impassioned desire (rather than egoistical lack). The brief revolution enacted the potential of human creativity, with little mediation from friend-enemy agents to organize or express itself. Following the ephemeral events of May 1968, the SI began to dissolve, partly due to its own dogmatism, and partly at the hands of capitalist governance. SI members may have held each other to extreme forms of accountability: their organizational practice was “characterized . . . by a pattern of expulsions” for those who were not deemed radical enough.42 Unfortunately, it appears that the deterministic impulse lead the SI to police its own practice of resistance. Moreover, the practices of hegemony helped to diffuse SI transgressions. For instance, the state granted certain requests of the students and workers, while denouncing the revolution. It also attributed the events to leadership, undermining their spontaneous, autonomous character.43 As it had done with Dadaism and surrealism, the state eventually transformed SI activities into aesthetic relics: twenty years after the May events, France celebrated the spirit of revolt in an anniversary extravaganza.44 Less positively, but no less hegemonically, the Situationists have been invoked as a philosophical influence for terrorism. For instance, one political scientist attributes the lure of terrorism (in the 1970s) to an impulse like that felt by the Situationists. Because the majority of people have been anesthetized by spectacular mass culture, he argued, “the self-appointed intellectuals” in the SI or terrorist groups take it upon themselves to “provoke an overreaction by established authority, and eventually cause such a state of chaos and instability that more and more people will opt out of society and turn to civil disobedience, scavenging and theft.”45 However, Situationists (and terrorists, presumably) can never construct a positive community to replace the one lost through their tactics: “they probably know in their hearts that, faced with such a collapse, the vast majority” of ordinary people “would turn for help from some sort of authoritarian regime.”46 Clutterbuck concludes, as a supporter of hegemony against transgression might, that because the majority “do[es]n’t want either chaos or repression,” the “percentage of any population that responds to situationism is so very small.”47 In spite of such reactions, Debord’s analysis of capitalism continues to influence new generations of activists, particularly amidst anti-globalization activism.48 Coupled with the Situationists’ vast writings and practices of enactment, Debord’s new materialism explains better than any theory of representational politics the presence of protestors in Seattle in November,

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1999, and other major gatherings against neoliberalism throughout the last decade. As Marcus concludes, the Situationists “understood why the smallest incidents can lead, with astonishing speed, to a reopening of all questions,” for they permit people an opportunity to “form a real image of freedom.”49 The Situationists desired not only an image of freedom, but also an immanent practice of autonomy, a desire easier to realize through the politics of enactment than representational politics. Though a dialectic of “capitalist spectacle”–versus–”life unfettered” helped structure their enactments, the SI’s impacts radiated well beyond representing a collective agent. Tactics like the constructed situation helped dismantle (at least for participants and witnesses) the metaphoric processes which build subjects, whether these processes are hegemonic (capitalist) or counter-hegemonic (anti-capitalist). Calling out material spaces and embodiment, the SI delivered ambiguity and incoherence to an increasingly regimented world. Across the ocean, activists sharing a politics of enactment grew from the early organizing of African American civil rights. Like the Situationists, their protests would combine the rhetorical and material to challenge received systems of sense-making, at times deferring the construction of collective agents. Some factions of America’s New Left, however, would organize as the most militantly hegemonic, disciplined organizations to march colorfully against war-mongering, imperialist enemies. The New Left represents another significant flashpoint of transgression, whose rhizomes continue infesting contemporary protest. It also demonstrates that transgression and hegemony are matters of degree, modes of resistance that typically combine in what some see as one movement.

TRANSGRESSIVE ENACTMENTS AND HEGEMONIC DISCIPLINE IN THE AMERICAN NEW LEFT The new style refuses to place the need for social change at the mercy of established political customs and hierarchies. The new style means different things to different people in various localities—but everywhere in some degree it denotes a groping to break loose from those clichéd maxims of the past which sanctified the “two party system” and led us to sacrifice our effectiveness at the behest of old-line politicians.50

From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, various strands of activism converged in the United States, and came to be known as “The Movement,” an ambiguous term which changed frequently during the time.51 More specifically, the New Left cohered as a movement “against capitalism, materialism, representative democracy, rationalism and self-reliance,” by


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embodying “socialism; humanism; participatory democracy; community identity; and existentialism.”52 Historians typically divide the New Left into two periods: early non-violent activism, and a sometimes militant, sometimes nihilistic counterculture which lasted into the 1970s. In both phases, students and young people created their own organizations and less formal vehicles for protest; and increasingly undermined or directly opposed representational politics (as embodied in, for instance, the Democratic Party). Though scholars and citizens remember the New Left as an ideological phenomenon, it exemplified moments of transgression as well as hegemony in its resistance—and typically through a politics of enactment over representational politics. Sparked by concerns for civil rights and the Cold War, a well-read population of liberal students began organizing in the late 1950s. In June of 1960, the most well-known early New Left organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), held its first conference. Here, it broke from the Old Left, citing resistant tactics as a main reason, as a statement from president Robert Haber made clear: “‘We have spoken at last, with vigor, idealism and urgency, supporting our words with picket lines, demonstrations, money and even our own bodies. . . . Pessimism and cynicism have given way to direct action.’”53 The next year, the SDS released the Port Huron Statement, a manifesto which concentrated on the alienation of mass society, a critique of Cold War interventionist foreign policy and repressive government activities, and advocacy for social programs to promote equality.54 Tactically, the Statement further distanced the New Left from its predecessors, advocating recruitment in colleges rather than unions; and the use of direct, participatory democracy in lieu of hierarchical organizations.55 It abandoned lines of thought which dictated resistance take place through friend-enemy antagonisms (like “communism versus capitalism, labor versus intellectuals”).56 Like the Situationists, the New Left expanded an analysis of capitalist alienation beyond traditional Marxism, to include consumer experiences and subjectivities: “The key was to ‘liberate’ the individual, or to link the personal and the political. Political changes would have to take place alongside personal ones or even possibly personal changes would have to precede political ones.”57 Though their vocabulary differed from the Situationists’ concerns with everyday life, the New Left nonetheless sought to shift the grounds and spoils of revolution to encompass all aspects of personal, laboring, and political being. SDS and other members of the New Left resisted through marches and occupations, differentiating themselves from the avant-garde performances occurring in France. However, the New Left’s commitment to im/mediate, corporeal, and material resistance in local contexts adds important contributions to our understanding of transgression: rather than attempt to lead or otherwise represent the whole of social

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struggles, much of the New Left (particularly in its later years) performed in ways that disarticulated individuals from collective subjects. By 1964, the early movement began to radicalize, beginning with the university, where it sought to “replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance” with “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”58 Clashes like the one at the University of California–Berkeley spread throughout the country, as university students sought a less draconian approach to education, and greater civil rights for all. In California, conservatives at all levels of governance pressured the flagship university to reduce protests in light of increasingly visible campus actions against the Vietnam War, and clashes in the South.59 Students associated the university’s ban with issues of free speech and authority, resulting in a massive protest that shut down the university. The California governor sent 600 police who arrested 770 students, even as 7,000 students remained occupying the campus.60 The UC–Berkeley protests were remarkable for their im/mediacy, as students enacted their own resistance outside sanctioned, representational channels. Four years later, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the SDS began a notorious protest and occupation at Columbia University. Students charged that Columbia was an imperialist and racist institution, owing to its relationship with the Institute for Defense Analysis and its proposal to build a new gymnasium that would encroach on the Harlem neighborhood it rented out.61 The Columbia actions exemplified SDS’s conversion from a liberal organization whose primary tactic was the interracial campaign (which sometimes appeared as privileged whites helping poor people of color), to a more radical organization practicing a parallel politics of solidarity (in which the SDS “organiz[ed] other whites against racism,” supplementing Black activism).62 The occupation would also exemplify a politics of enactment, against liberal representation or the mediations of authority. After disrupting a memorial service for Dr. King, students occupied buildings and started communes while sequestering themselves from the outside world.63 They issued bombastic statements, such as Mark Rudd’s (the Columbia SDS chapter leader’s) words to the President: “It may sound nihilistic to you, since it is the opening shot in a war of liberation. I’ll use the words of [Black poet] Le Roi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.’”64 The occupation lasted a week before the President called in local police, who forcefully dispersed the crowd and on-lookers with anti-riot weapons.65 Nearly 700 were arrested, but the students had managed to shut the university down, with classes and final exams cancelled. To the standards of representational politics, their actions appear incoherent and even coercive; but viewed as transgressive, the students summoned an im/mediate power to fulfill their


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desires for change. They enacted a new way of being in the moment of the occupation, while simultaneously disrupting cultural representations of themselves as good, obedient students. Through persistent, moderated activism afterwards, Columbia University’s President and Vice President resigned. As the occupations at Berkeley and Columbia suggest, the transition from early to later New Left was characterized by increasingly militant speech and action. McWilliams notes that “during the first half of 1968, nearly 40,000 students participated in 221 major demonstrations at 101 colleges and universities. Although most of them were peaceful and ended without incident, some involved bombings, physical assaults on university officials, and scuffles between students and the police.”66 However, Anderson argues that the New Left’s politics of enactment, which heightened corporeality (and at times coercion), never ceded into terrorism: “No students at Columbia picked up guns and shot at the cops, something true of virtually every student-police confrontation throughout the sixties. . . . This was a Rhetorical Revolution.”67 New Lefters viewed violence as largely symbolic. They also viewed physical confrontation (stopping short of harming another person) and property destruction as legitimate, material tactics for social change. This difference in perception further distanced the New Left from their old labor counterparts. To the New Left, “what counted most was not the destruction of the riots [like those in Watts] themselves but the message of the uprisings, that black Americans were angry and willing to act on their anger.”68 Accepting militancy as an aesthetic or rhetorical tactic, the New Left thus traded in representational politics for enactment: in explicating the body, helping to re-assert the oppressed within spaces of privilege, they failed to capitalize on the organizing and rhetorical arguments of their predecessors. But other New Left organizations would emerge to convert militant enactments into a nearly militarized hegemonic struggle. In 1969, the SDS held its last convention and officially dissolved. Several more radical groups emerged, including the antiwar Maoist May 2nd Movement, the Progressive Labor group seeking a “proletarian dictatorship,” the nihilistic “Up Against the Wall: Motherfuckers,” and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM)—a group of “white radicals” committed to guerilla tactics for fighting imperialism.69 The RYM, which eventually became the Weather Underground, distributed a pamphlet entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” a line from a Bob Dylan song. The pamphlet contained writings from Lenin and Chinese communist Lin Piao, and extended the SDS’s commitment to white, antiracist activism as parallel to Black Power. The group modeled itself after Cuban and Vietnamese guerillas, conducting its business in secret and through armed conflict.70 Its members directly

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challenged their contemporaries’ tactics of civil disobedience and street theatre,71 speaking a language of strict friend-enemy politics: The presence of youth, or youth with long hair, becomes defined as organized political struggle and the pigs react to it as such. More and more everyday activity is politically threatening, so pigs are suddenly more in evidence; this in turn generates political organization and opposition, and so on. Our task will be to catalyze this development, pushing out the conflict with the pig so as to define every struggle—schools (pigs out, pig institutes out), welfare (invading pig-protected office), the streets (curfew and turf fights)—as a struggle against the needs of capitalism and the force of the State.72

The Weathermen reinforced hegemonic tactics in the face of what they perceived as transgression’s failure, offering an intriguing example of discipline amidst the counterculture. The Weathermen’s place in the history of transgressive resistance is complicated. Like SDS’s militant occupation at Columbia, the Weathermen’s activities appeared more as rhetorical enactments of violence. Their tactics included an anarchistic blend of violence against property, threats against powerful people, and a performative challenge to white authority—rarely ceding into physical violence against others. In 1969, they incited a riot with Chicago police; armed “with chains, pies, and clubs,” they injured seventy-five officers, as six rioters were killed.73 Their “message was that no white youth could necessarily be trusted; the nice college student or young factory worker could be a revolutionary,” though whiteness served as cover for Weathermen when they needed it.74 Some Weather groups performed an oppositional identity through countercultural tactics, like practicing free love and smoking marijuana as acts of resistance.75 Others took a more materialist tack, threatening the white power structure through bombing campaigns that targeted imperialist corporations, and representatives of the state, including “the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, police stations, and courthouses.”76 The Weathermen’s disciplined militancy dealt a blow not only to the “pig” enemy. Like the Situationists, many Weathermen held themselves and other activists to strict standards, disciplining those who were not radical enough.77 Berger describes the cumulative effect of the Weathermen’s anarchistic and anarchist actions: “This political threat to white supremacy—not physical damage to government or corporate buildings—is the central tenet of what the Weather Underground means. White activists, mainly from the middle class, rejected what most people of color were never offered, at least not in as meaningful a way.”78 Through direct action, white youth bound themselves to other hegemonic struggles, even as they risked their safety through transgressions against the racialized establishment. Furthermore, the Weather Underground (like its companions in the Black Power move-


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ment) literally threatened the authorities it took as an enemy: Eschewing representational channels, Weather enacted a new politics. Other late New Left groups played with im/mediacy in ways markedly more performative than Weather Underground members. In particular, the Diggers of San Francisco practiced a politics of enactment very close to Situationists.79 Like their namesakes from modern England, the Diggers viewed the earth as a communal storehouse.80 They gave away food that they had culled from local shops which no longer wanted it. Passing through a brightly painted, thirteen-foot “Frame of Reference,” anyone who wanted the food was welcome to it.81 The Diggers also performed mock public funerals for money and hippies, enacting their disdain for privatization and oppression, as well as the spectacular construction of the countercultural identity.82 The Diggers’ tactics exemplify a larger politics of enactment centered around “the happening,” an American version of the constructed situation and harbinger of performance art. The more infamous happenings of the 1960s were love-ins and be-ins, large public gatherings of hippies who took drugs, performed sex acts, danced, chanted—and basically just existed in ways that exceeded citizen, worker, student, daughter, and other institutionally sanctioned subjectivities.83 As part of the larger psychedelic aesthetic, happenings entailed a “systematic questioning of the viewer’s perceptual habits,” creating an “experience which intertwine[d] perception and sight, sensation and imagination.”84 As Medeiros describes, the first be-in (January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park) was designed to gather politicized activists with hippies, performing new community outside of imperialist institutions: “The event consisted in walking around and looking at the display of their fellow human beings.”85 People attended in costume, or in straight clothes; some smoked marijuana or took LSD; others simply enjoyed performers (like The Grateful Dead) and each others’ company. Thousands attended, with little to no police violence. The hippies and activists did not rally around, or for the sake of, representational identities. Though not as confrontational as the Weathermen’s tactics, countercultural happenings nevertheless created a heightened, everyday space in which people could experiment with subjectivity outside of capitalism. Similar spaces appeared at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC), an event which marked another important turning point from early to later New Left. About ten thousand activists converged in Chicago, including the Yippies (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner, Nancy Kurshan), an organization begun to promote confrontational activism at the convention, in lieu of representing ideologies or issues. The Yippies intended to create “a ‘Festival of Life’” against “the Democratic Party’s ‘Convention of Death,’” through non-hierarchical organizing and spontaneous performance.86

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The Yippies spread a number of rumors concerning the enactments Chicagoans and conventioneers could expect, revealing the later New Left’s more playful side: “Yippie potheads in Chicago had been busy all spring growing weed in vacant lots for a giant August smoke-in. . . . Yippie men were doing exercises to get in shape so they could seduce female Humphrey delegates while luscious yippie females were going to pose as hookers and then kidnap male delegates. . . . Yippies dressed like Vietcong would blow up the baseball diamond in Lincoln Park and hijack the Chicago office of Nabisco and distribute free cookies.”87 Though their performances could be interpreted as representing various issues and concerns of The Movement (including peace, racial and economic equality, and reproductive rights for women), Yippies peppered their rhetoric with enough mirth to deny representation. For instance, the Yippies “demanded . . . that ‘people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish,’” while calling for the “abolition of money, ‘pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets.’ The final demand was blank, with the words ‘you can fill in what you want.’”88 The state responded to the Yippie transgressions by issuing no permits or space for protestors who came (Yippie or otherwise). A thousand or so protestors camped illegally in Lincoln Park during the convention. The police violently removed them, a trend to be continued against protestors throughout the 1968 DNC. After the convention, the New Left fully entered its countercultural phase, defined by a politics of “individual transformation” and “liberation,” as distinct from “empowerment.”89 Youth formed a mélange of hippies, seekers, heads, and freaks, whose politics were not limited to a complete nihilistic pursuit of personal pleasure (sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) as they are currently remembered.90 Counterculture members believed that institutions, from the government to the university and family, were failing them—and it was up to themselves to recreate daily life outside the mediations of the state, economy, and culture. Though the counterculture positioned itself against “normality,” it was also defined by explicating the body through such practices as free love and nudity, and the formation of communes as im/mediate social relationships, making it more transgressive than hegemonic. The countercultural phase of the New Left was also defined by contradiction, as many hippies took jobs (sometimes temporary) or started their own businesses while decrying consumerism.91 Indeed, “Hip capitalists” began flooding markets, primarily through magazines and other informational commodities.92 Historians suggest that these contradictions, along with the end of conscription in 1973, may have contributed to the ultimate demise of the New Left in the 1970s.93 While SDS activities worked with, and appealed to, traditional constituencies of the left, the counterculture


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disgusted many in mainstream America: “Having come of age in an era in which poverty was a reality of life, trade unionists were not about to jettison their material gains for some utopian vision of a more fulfilling, less alienating life, especially when the New Left’s utopia transgressed some of the oldest and most sacred sexual and racial taboos.”94 Their collective identity wrought with contradiction, their unwillingness to speak the common sense of a broader constituency, the New Left failed to determine or realize a course to rebuild the left’s hegemony. However, judging by the reaction they incurred from “the establishment,” hippies were at least minimally effective at transgressing citizenship and consumerism. Indeed, very few flashpoints of transgression drew as strong a public outcry as the New Left. Sampling criticisms of the New Left reveals how deep hegemony runs as a grammar for understanding resistance, particularly as it dismisses or contains the power of transgression. A variety of commentators suggested that members of the New Left had various personality disorders, or were “beatniks, kooks . . . and embryonic demagogs” unfit for legitimate politics. Youth were “arrogant, haughty, and obnoxious. They [sat] on the side lines and criticize[d] others, who [were] playing the game.”95 Editorialists argued that campus activists’ claims to fight poverty and war were “pretexts for making trouble,” claims which had “nothing whatever to do with education.”96 Note here, the tendency to personalize transgression, as though performances which fall outside representational politics cannot be read as political. Indeed, prior to the 1968 DNC, the Chicago Tribune suggested that the “bearded, unkempt adolescents who like to regard themselves as iconoclasts” would be wise to “study their candidate” (or properly integrate into representative politics) instead of camping out.97 Critics of the New Left also chided affluent whites for becoming mixed up in transgression, for participating in “a fantasy-wish of revolution.”98 Because the New Left could not represent others in their struggle, established civil rights leaders criticized its ethos: “What gives the disaffected sons and daughters of the middle class the right even symbolically to become the government?”99 Such reactions further demonstrate the common sense tendency to contain transgressive enactments by labeling them failures of representation. Not only was the countercultural New Left considered disorderly—but it also actually threatened “true” efforts for social change by opening activists to derision from the public, and repression from the authorities.100 Because their activism derived from “improvisation” rather than “theory,” the New Left was unable to properly ally with other leftists.101As such, the countercultural New Left was only successful at “getting itself disliked,” while other activists were making good faith efforts at reform.102 Such comments presume that representational politics are more effective, a priori, than a

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politics of enactment; and that transgressors have the burden of integrating into hegemonic modes of resistance, lest they taint the group’s efforts at social change. More positively, some believed that groups like the Yippies deserved attention, for they “set the tone in American music, writing, painting and smoking.”103 Yet, such an interpretation sequesters the impact of the New Left into the cultural sphere. Enactments have no hope for political impact, but can provoke us aesthetically. By implication, representational rhetoric is properly political, and therefore effective. Like analysts of the 1960s, many Americans (regardless of their political affiliation) remember the countercultural performances and militant rhetoric of the Movement’s later years as that which destroyed it.104 Historians suggest that the SDS was a failure of hegemonic politics, unable to achieve concrete goals or represent a public beyond youth: Its members “saw their self-appointed duty to remake America. New Leftists grossly overrated their importance and were too self-delusional in thinking that middle America would find its cause relevant.”105 Even self-identified members of the New Left attribute their flawed actions to their youth, as Weatherman Jeff Jones describes twenty years following the heyday of his organization: the Weather Underground “was based on wrong political ideas, and there was a very limited effectiveness, but how old were we? We were nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one.”106 As Watts argues pointedly, we recall the (late) transgressions of the New Left as a narcissistic revolution which amounted to “nothing at all,” other than “a sort of grand fiesta of bullshit.”107 Not only was resistance of the late 1960s immature and deranged, but it was also ineffective. Following their arrest and trial at the 1968 DNC, the Yippies travelled to the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. Their attempted disruptions were forestalled, as the city allowed them to “camp . . . and commit acts of political theater pretty much as they pleased.”108 Through hegemonic memories, the militant radicalism and political theatre of the late 1960s is remembered somewhat charitably, but as a long-term failure: “The New Left made an impact—no tradition was safe and no custom secure—but it was a protest movement without a coherent program.”109 As its critics responded in the 1960s, and as it is remembered today, the New Left’s enactments violated the boundaries which contain effective politics as representational. Though the New Left is remembered as a failure of hegemonic politics, it is a rhizome of transgression, both for understanding resistance that preceded it, and that came after it. Many New Left groups did not abide by rules for coherence, as an organizing principle or retroactive explanation for their enactments. Foisting the burden of collective agent, the more transgressive groups freed the power of human potential. They found more agency in singular expressions of rhetoric (as in the Columbia University


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occupation, the 1968 DNC, and the happening), rather than in campaigns to organize and express a new status quo. Their explication of the body disrupted the binary divisions represented and policed all around them, such as obedient student-versus-rebellious youth, black-versus-white, citizenversus-pleasurable human being. The New Left demonstrates that it is wrong to assume that once people fail at representational politics, their efforts die with no discernible effects— often, these effects are felt as a reclamation of agency and autonomy in the present, as well as the future.110 Andrew Hunt comments that “Each generation of radicals creates its own new Left,” beginning with turn of the century American radicals, who roughly divided out along anarchist-individualist and Communist lines.111 Hunt speaks to the possibility for transgressive pockets within all hegemonic social movements, which serve as inspiration for future transgression. Given the potential for transgression to infect future activism (albeit it in unpredictable ways), it is a misnomer to refer to the New Left as “new,” just as it is a mischaracterization to suggest that today’s struggle for global justice is a completely novel movement. As some historians argue, contemporary movements against corporate globalization “are impossible to explain without reference to various political currents and alternative cultures that blossomed during the Sixties.”112 The most recent politics of enactment imbricates the everyday avant-garde of the Situationists; the self-reflexive disarticulation of privilege honored by so many in the New Left; and countercultural performances. Antiglobalization protestors perform a unique activism against global consumerism, while invoking new senses of being in the world.

IMMEDIATE RESISTANCE AND THE POLITICS OF ENACTMENT SINCE SEATTLE My warning goes to all citizens that human beings are in an endangered situation that uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO official members are leading an undesirable globalization of inhumane, environmentally degrading, farmer-killing and undemocratic policies. It should be stopped immediately, otherwise the false logic of neo-liberalism will perish the diversities of global agriculture with disastrous consequences to all human beings.

On September 10, 2003, two days after distributing this statement to others gathered in Cancun, Mexico, South Korean farmer Lee Kyung-Hae approached a chain-link fence which had been erected five miles away from the World Trade Organization’s meeting site. Amidst a throng of protestors, Lee climbed the fence and thrust a knife into his chest, holding a sign that read “WTO Kills Farmers.” His suicide horrified and moved those around

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him, as the trade talks collapsed due to Southern nations’ agricultural concerns.113 In July, 2005, over 500 activists were marooned on their way from Edinburgh to Gleneagles, the Scottish resort hosting members of the G8. Police spread false (or at least exaggerated) information to bus operators, persuading them to not pick up the protestors as scheduled: “Edinburgh was closed; you cannot get out of Edinburgh; the march was cancelled, the march was postponed, there was civil disorder across Scotland.”114 So the protestors decided on a new course of action. Linking arms in groups of eight, they marched toward Princes Street, one of the city’s most prominent throughways. As activist Raphie de Santos describes, “Our aim was simple: we wanted to go along the main street in Edinburgh and not be diverted off any side streets. We wished to stay in full view of the public.”115 The police attempted to negotiate with the marchers. When that failed, police tried to physically divert them from Princes Street. The marchers discussed, reached consensus, and pushed past the police line, joining some 300 more protestors in occupying the street for three hours. Though twenty-nine protestors were arrested as riot police closed in, de Santos concludes: “We did not blink at Gleneagles; we did not blink in Edinburgh. We had not only shown our opposition to the G8 but we had won back the right to march.” Since the Battle of Seattle in November, 1999, countless protest narratives like these have come to fill anti-globalization Web sites and global justice anthologies.116 They are personal testimonies, factual reports, and dramatic tales, often accompanied by photographs (with video and audio files on the Internet), quotations, poetry, polemics, and policy analysis. Anarchists detail the spontaneous but purposeful formation of black blocs, which charge police lines and invite property damage. Others recall how they reclaim public space by armoring their bodies with “the detritus of consumer society—cardboard, old mattresses, inner tubes.”117 By turning oneself “into a hilarious hybrid of Michelin-man/woman, clown, and gladiator” a protestor may recover the streets even while police defend the corporatized space.118 These narratives of immediate resistance document the politics of enactment that has come to define the last decade’s worth of protests at trade summits, political conventions, and the doorsteps of governments at war. They are rhizomatic mutations of the Situationists and New Left, materializing transgression amidst the constraints of hegemony. On November 30, 1999, over 70,000 protestors converged at the WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle. In addition to preventing the opening ceremony from taking place (for they had stopped so many delegates from reaching the meeting site), protestors reclaimed Seattle’s streets as public spaces. A few wreaked symbolic property damage on corporate targets like Nike and Starbucks. Police arrested 600. Over the next four days, throughout the world, various solidarity actions took place: thousands of French


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farmers ate locally grown food at the Eiffel Tower, indigenous activists in India caked the World Bank building in New Delhi “with posters graffiti, cow dung, and mud,” while hackers crashed the WTO mainframe in Geneva.119 Ten months later, similar scenes unfolded at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague. Activists forced the meeting to close a day before scheduled, as the police’s repressive presence—drawn out by the persistent direct actions—scared delegates into their hotel rooms.120 Quebec City hosted the FTAA in April, 2001, along with tens of thousands of protestors who created a Carnival Against Capital in the streets.121 Following a wave of strikes throughout Italy, Genoa held the 2001 G8 meetings in July. Police killed twenty-three-year-old protestor Carlo Giuliani during the first day of action, inspiring 300,000 protestors to endure “hours of police attack, culminating in chaotic retreats, street fighting, and many injuries and arrests.”122 Learning the lessons of the previous two years—and armed with a renewed sense of purpose in the “war on terror”—global capital sequestered itself in Doha, Qatar, for the November 2001 WTO ministerial conference. Throughout the world, activists organized, “linking war and neoliberalism”123 through a politics of enactment: street parties in Slovenia accompanied an inaugural anti-globalization rally in Iran, while 10,000 South Korean rice farmers confronted police in the streets. In mid-February, 2003, an estimated six to ten million people across the world participated in the largest day of simultaneous action, protesting the war in Iraq.124 Though most marches did not include property destruction, their blending of street theatre with representational politics was nonetheless impressive—particularly given their numbers. Later that year, ten thousand or so converged on Miami, host to the FTAA. Three days of direct action (and hegemonic tactics) ended with tear gas flying, as a vastly disproportionate police force clamped down on protestors. Smaller, more localized actions followed, including protests at the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions in New York City and Boston, respectively; the 2005 Gleneagles, Scotland meeting of the G8; and the Copenhagen Climate Talks of early 2010. Many question the effectiveness of these demonstrations, illustrating a hegemonic skepticism of transgression. Journalists, for instance, question whether the myriad protestors will “like so many grains of sand blown together, scatter once they make a collective point or achieve individual goals,” or form “the foundation of a new social movement that will apply sustained pressure on national governments and international institutions to rewrite the rules of globalization and limit the power of corporations.”125 Such coverage demonstrates the hegemonic tendency to rule out the power of enactments, or those forms of protest which do not seek to represent ideas or identities.

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It is clear, however, that the global protests of the last decade or so share a commitment to enact a new form of democracy, one that is im/mediate. Through countless localized tactics, the protests since Seattle attempt to re-create daily life amidst and against global capitalism—in the moment of the protests themselves. By reclaiming the streets through such actions as spontaneous (unpermitted) marches, critical mass bicycle convergences, or staged theatrics (such as the die-ins protesting the Iraq war), activists literally and rhetorically transform corporate space into public, autonomous zones. Here, even the more standard tactics of representational politics (like the sanctioned protest march) spawn im/mediate resistance in the form of property damage and direct confrontation with police (on the part of small groups of protestors). As with other examples of enactment, diverse anti-globalization tactics also perform subjectivity as multifarious, embodied, and in process. As a more detailed exploration of one such tactic (radical cheerleading) reveals, a politics of enactment unfolds in spontaneous, ephemeral moments of resistance. We may attribute such moments to the formation of a collective agent: But like the Situationists and some New Left collectives, radical cheerleading uses im/mediacy to disrupt the chains of identification that link protest, protestor, and cause. As such, radical cheerleading strains, if not outright eludes, common sense—particularly the common sense of consumerism. A Closer Look at Today’s Politics of Enactment: The Case of Radical Cheerleading On the morning of November 20, 2003, eclectic bands of people (about five hundred total) gathered at Miami’s Government Square light-rail station to commence an illegal march through downtown.126 I followed the parade of chanters, puppetistas, five-gallon-bucket drummers, and graffiti painters (among others) through the city grid, as the Miami Police Department systematically tightened control over the route. I had paused to record the activity in an intersection between four well-known corporate chains, which I came to call the “corporate quadrangle”: a Starbucks, Bank of America, Union Planters Bank, and Ross Clothing Store comprised the block’s corners. The festive mood began to give way as police lines advanced, forcing all in their path to move forward. Protestors looked on anxiously. The police’s public safety façade was dissolving quickly. I ducked away, heading for what seemed a quieter side street. I walked with a few other loners, growing more nervous as this street had felt like a trap days before when I had first walked it: buildings with no alleys, stoops, or stairwells, just flat planes of metal to force travel on the street. My anxiety eased a bit as I saw familiar protestors, some bearing flags,


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others puppets and bucket-drums, all of whom I had followed previously. Then, small groups of youths trotted away from the end of the street, their faces sheepish. Worried words entered my camera: “You guys, they’re not letting anyone in down. . . .” Something’s going on. The sidewalk and street were emptying. I turned to find the focus of everyone’s attention: a wall of black, stenciled MPD or SHERIFF letters blurring into white rectangles on torsos and shields. Above the chopping racket of a hovering police helicopter, the line advanced, officers clicking their plastic shin guards with wooden batons. An officer draped in black lead the awful parade, filming the street with a small silver camcorder. The line grew more sinister as it paced merely three car-lengths away. I walked backward toward a group of urgently chanting protestors, standing even with them. It seemed as though the impending showdown was about to take place. Then, new voices began filling the block. A woman I’d seen dancing at the corporate quadrangle bobbed into the middle of the street, wearing a red tulle skirt over black pleats. As she penetrated the compressed space between the police line and the protestors, the tension in the air released: the lead officer actually turned back toward the line, halting its progression. Eight or nine other young women enthusiastically, sloppily entered the space. They streaked past each other, wearing mismatched knee socks, black skirts, and various tops of spearmint, sky blue, and red. Some waved, with their torn trash bag pom-poms, a “hello” gesture to the cops; some skipped, one bounded into a side cartwheel, re-adjusting her neon green baseball cap and kicking her leg back as she returned to “her spot” with the rest of the troupe. One raised a fist into the air, shouting, “Yeah!” After the radical cheerleaders’ grand entrance, a strange quiet fell. Standing with legs in a wide triangle below her, the fist-raiser thrust her fist into the air again like a teen at a pep rally. Failing to arouse her colleagues into a cheer, she bent her arm backward, smoothing her hand over her hair, apparently trying to save face. Silence. . . . A few police officers began pacing behind their line: were they preparing to launch tear gas to clear us out now that we had re-occupied the street? Were the officers following their own “pep rally” script, impatiently awaiting the performance that the women’s entrance had set up? A gal on one end of the line curtsied, her white knee socks separating and then returning to vertical. Another said, awkwardly, “Such a captive audience . . .” as though an excuse for why they were unable to end the anticipation with a cheer. Finally, a more authoritative voice shouted out, with all eventually joining in. They spelled the letters, “F-U-K.” The cheerleaders’ voices were high and scattered; occasionally, their volume would increase, as though they had arrived at a section of the cheer that they enjoyed more. Clapping and swaying their hips, they shouted in sassy voices: “Not the way to go . . . ooh . . . ahh . . . ooooh . . . aahh.”

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Their girlish voices fell practically inaudible against the loud racket of helicopters, clicking batons, pounding hearts, and Miami winds. Though they dressed in black and red, their pale, exposed skin and high-kicks did not fit the Seattle-inspired profile of anarchists “smashing the state.” The awkward pause in which the troupe searched for “the right cheer,” the sloppy, spontaneous fist-pumping, were “all but incommunicable” to the standards which dictate that rhetoric represents collective identity. But adorned in their fraying skirts and hand-me-down tube socks, lacking disciplined poise and bodies, the radical cheerleaders cleared space in which they could perform new ways of being. Remarkably, their amateur spectacle (or, at least, their girlish presence) halted the police’s advance on that Miami street. For nearly ten years, radical cheerleader affinity groups have joined various protests, including global justice events, feminist and reproductive rights rallies, and actions for the environment, peace, and civil rights.127 Centered in cities across the United States and the world, radical cheer squads are typically made up of young women, though groups are open to anyone wishing to join. As their name implies, the cheerleaders perform chants, dance routines, and various gymnastic stunts to protest and energize other protestors.128 Yet, as the “official” radical cheerleading Web site attests, the practice relies heavily on anarchy (here, figured in a playful irony): “Radical Cheerleading is Protest + Performance. It’s activism with pom poms and middle fingers extended. It’s screaming FUCK CAPITALISM while doing a split.”129 This ironic juxtaposition of radicalism and cheerleading creates a corporeal, anarchic, and feminine spectacle that is transgressive in a number of ways. As a politics of enactment, radical cheerleading dismantles the symbolic production of subjectivity—and not by inventing a new collective agent to battle the “normal” herd. Materialized through obscenity, irony, perversion, and corporeality, radical cheerleading has the capacity to elude or unsettle the natural or normal. Resonating with Situationist tactics, radical cheerleading helps recreate daily life outside norms of consumer subjectivity and alienation. Radical cheerleaders’ rhetoric foregrounds the human body as a charged site, historically vulnerable to gendered violence and patriarchal disciplining, yet rich with inventional possibilities for resistance. For instance, cheers speak out against rape, sexual harassment, and other abuses against women in explicitly physical terms: This is harassment I know what your ass meant And that’s harassment p-u-s-s-y forget what’s between my thighs t-i-t-t-y that ain’t no alibi


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you ugly you ugly mr. harasser you ugly and you better fuckin stop!130

Here, radical cheerleaders juxtapose a well-known parody cheer (“U-G-L-Y. You ain’t got no alibi, you ugly! Uh-huh, you ugly!”) with commonly used, but no less obscene, euphemisms for female body parts. The odd combination of girlish play and a threatening tone violates historic norms of public discourse, namely, rationality, and civility. Through its excessive play on obscenity, it literally interrupts the silence surrounding violence and harassment against women. Other cheers similarly advocate an excessively physical or direct resistance, further explicating the body and an obscene feminine-masculine agency for battling gendered violence: Hey Ladies! Yeah? Hey Ladies! Yeah? Are you ready? For what??? TO SHOOT THAT RAPIST! Hell Yeah!!! You point your .38 Up in the sky And shoot That dick Between his thighs! Shoot that Rapist, Shoot Shoot that Rapist! Shoot that Rapist, Shoot Shoot that Rapist!131

This cheer does not rely on representational politics, for instance, by encouraging women to lobby politicians or join local advocacy groups to prevent rape. In the tradition of direct action, it articulates an immediate, physical threat to rapists’ genitalia (and lives). Anarchist direct action, particularly as practiced in anti-globalization protests, also includes drawing police into violent confrontations, in order to dramatize the illegitimacy of the state. Such confrontations can appear as a “ratcheting up” of machismo, as black-clad police officers and selfrepresenting anarchists attempt to intimidate each other, sometimes ending in direct physical assault or contact through “non-lethal” weapons (e.g., police tasers and pepper spray, or anarchist projectiles). However, the cheer’s playful call-and-response opening, and the repetitive rhythm of the concluding lines (which beg for hand-clapping

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and stutter steps), exceed contemporary anarchist practice, fully defying herd subjectivity (such as an “anarchist collective will”) through feminine play. The anti-rape cheer encourages mischievousness, violating a hypermasculine “anarchist” identity. That the cheer reverberates ambivalently between a violent, macho solution to rape, and a silly, girlish parody of macho violence, makes it difficult to represent a stable, collective change agent. The multivalenced meanings possible in radical cheerleading subvert any privileged reading: Like the Situationists and the New Left before them, contemporary activists’ transgressions challenge the standards of clear, coherent communication which might represent issues, ideas, and identities through protest. Radical cheerleaders’ challenge to representation appears even more compelling at protests, where the activists’ presence is defined more by hesitation than assertiveness, more by a girlish vulnerability than a tough anonymity. Their trots into the tension-filled street, their awkward pause in front of a fully armed and threatening Miami police line, their nearly inaudible highpitched cheer, defy traditional conceptions of the social change agent— whether figured as the eloquent, dignified orator or the disciplined solidarity of the collective. In explicating their bodies as feminine and anarchist, radical cheerleaders reveal alternative ways of being amidst the air-brushed, surveilled, insatiable, construction of “women” in global consumerism. As a figure of discipline, desire, submission, and self-confidence, the cheerleader in many ways embodies today’s consumerist subjectivity. At American primary and secondary schools, universities, and professional football and basketball venues, cheerleading has become a sport overwrought with feminine norms of display and poise. Cheerleaders are taught “how to control the body,” while being “constantly reminded . . . of their traditional role as supporter of others’ wants and needs.”132 Squad members are disciplined into uniformity, through not only their matching movements, words, and uniforms, but also their beauty standards for body type, hairstyle, and cosmetics. The cheerleader is an American icon for femininity, no less a stock character of adolescent male sexual fantasy and pornography, “a woman who is both a virgin and a vamp.”133 By juxtaposing a spectacularly feminine icon with anarchy, radical cheerleaders enact a bricoleur radicalism which exceeds cheerleading and consumerism in dynamic ways. Though cheer squads typically have some aesthetic element in common (such as their general agreement to wear anarchy’s colors of black and red or “grrl power” pink), each individual member wears something distinct (such as a different top, skirt or sweats, and socks). In addition to promoting singularity amidst affinity groups, individuals’ outfits appear second-hand, mismatched, or unstylish. For instance, one protestor in Miami paired graying tube socks (which are rarely, if ever, worn up to the knee) with a very short, recently shorn and


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fraying piece of black spandex. Her companion pulled off a pair of metallic silver pants, revealing somewhat baggy knee-length red gym shorts over his burlesque black fishnet stockings. While some radical cheer squads define themselves through more overtly transgressive (e.g., queer) aesthetics, the point is that individuals identifying with the practice dress with whatever artifacts are at hand.134 Radical cheerleaders also transgress cheerleaders’ disciplined poise. In Miami, though they performed cartwheels and held jazz-hands or pompoms overhead while yelling, radical cheerleaders’ bodies failed to meet the norms of precision, fitness, and erectness which define cheerleading as a sport. Unlike iconic cheerleaders, whose style makes themselves and their bodies visible at all times, some radical cheerleaders seemed to hide or obscure physical “perfection” (e.g., by layering shirts and heavy socks over their thin frames). Others revealed and even highlighted what consumerism would take as physical “imperfections” for women’s bodies (e.g., “flabby” bellies and arms, large legs, or small breasts) by wearing shorter skirts and tank tops. Cheerleaders’ appearance also exceeded norms for hairstyle and cosmetics, as they arrived at the Miami protest with short, greasy, or unkempt hair and no visible make-up on their faces. Playing on the power of im/mediacy, radical cheerleaders’ words also resist consumerism’s disciplining of the female body: “Rad-Ass womyn who don’t take shit high-kicking it to, lick my clit. Hairy legs and arm pits too, refusing to shave and smelling natural, woo-hoo!”135 Other cheers challenge discourses that encourage women to diet and use tampons for a “cleaner” appearance during menstruation. Radical cheerleaders’ rhetorical bodies sharply contrast the exceedingly polished, “vamped up” spectacle of the female body which is increasingly common in cheerleading, as well as in advertising and media (e.g., Bring It On). Pop stars such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera perform a spectacle which “is typically rendered in such a way as to reify and reinforce dominant discourses of femininity and female sexuality”—particularly by positioning women as objects for the male gaze.136 But radical cheerleaders distance themselves from becoming part of a mainstream sexual fantasy through their physical appearance, as well as the more general strategies of layering the profane, obscene, and amateur into their feminine spectacle. For instance, the cover of the Radical Cheerleading Handbook #3 perverts the virgin-vamp cheerleader icon: A sketch depicts a woman raising a bent leg high, hiking up her skirt to reveal her genitalia. She grasps in one hand the string of what appears to be a tampon embossed with an outline of the United States and a man wearing a tie. As she removes the tampon, blood drips from it and her exposed vagina—the word “oops . . . “ appears near her pointy black lips. It is difficult to imagine consumerism putting this excessive “radical cheerleader” to work selling its products and lifestyles.

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The radical cheerleaders’ bodies will eventually disappear from the city streets, their traces forgotten, erased or perhaps used as evidence of anarchist “delinquency.” More charitably, radical cheerleading may appear to perform vital functions for the global justice movement. In an interview with the Associated Press, Todd Gitlin explained that the radical cheerleaders imbue the movement with a positive message: “Often people who organize demonstrations want to do more than apply their presence to political ends. They want to project a presence that seems like an embodiment of their values. Cheerfulness says, ‘we are having a better time than they are.’ It promises recruits, ‘stick around, you’ll have more fun.’”137 Similarly, as Adams and Bettis interpret, radical cheerleaders’ “job is to enliven a protest, to keep the momentum going, and, in some cases, to diffuse some of the raw emotions that transpire at many protests.”138 Hegemonically, radical cheerleading may draw the press to the global justice agent; or further the agent’s reputation as diverse, postmodern, and spectacular, all traits which have contributed positively, according to activists, to the motley coalition’s apparent ability to work together. Though radical cheerleading may accomplish all of these functions, from the perspective of transgression, the power of such enactments lies in a non-functionalist view of play. Play is a crucial part of the French poststructuralist and Situationist idea that daily life is the site and spoils of resistance to consumer capitalism: As Henri Lefebvre argued, “Play recalls forgotten depths and summons them up to the light of day. . . . It uses appearances and illusions which—for one marvelous moment—become more real than real. And with play another reality is born, not a separate one, but one which is ‘lived’ in the everyday, alongside the functional.”139 As people enact new ways of being or doing, with no necessary reason, goal, or purpose to guide them, they resist the strategic drive to claim spaces of daily life as property of subjects. Authorities would seek to analyze or calculate the benefits of play in the interest of rendering daily life more efficient; but a tactical approach considers play a fleeting fancy, one which “can only use, manipulate, and divert” that which appears in the enclaves of daily life.140 So while playfulness (materialized in radical cheerleading or elsewhere) may contribute to a representational politics (by building a common agent), this is not its primary function. Indeed, a functional reading of their im/mediate, playful performances dilutes the cheerleaders’ radicalism. Foregrounding the “positive” contributions radical cheerleaders make to the global justice “we” overwrites the blatant obscenity and creative irony in their rhetoric. Moreover, such an interpretation helps us avoid the challenge that transgressions like radical cheerleading pose to hegemonic logic itself: from an anarchistic perspective, the same logics which discipline women’s bodies into objects of desire


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are similar to the logics which fashion protestors and their rhetorical inventions into a collective agent. In its more deterministic form, hegemony seeks to fix, naturalize, normalize, and order a collective (whether it is a hierarchical community structured to privilege men and profit, or a “progressive” bloc seeking to dismantle patriarchal privilege). Radical cheerleaders’ excessive femininity, profanity, and corporeality, evades such logics, enacting resistance as “an indefinite possibility that things could be different.”141 The power of possibility eludes our attempts to calculate it as part of “proper” resistance. It creates a space of rhetorical invention, not for the sake of the agent, nor for the sake of meeting theorists’ goals for long-term, “effective” change. As with the Situationists and New Left, the appearance of radical cheerleaders on the streets may not only deconstruct established meanings within the spectacle. The politics of enactment creates new ways of “doing everyday life,” here amidst a patriarchal and heteronormative culture.142 By pushing radical aesthetics out of the museum and other generic spaces (like the “performance art” house), ordinary people may challenge the presence of dominance and oppression in their daily lives—directly, if not in the form of an agent which will eventually create daily life anew. Their transgressions may inspire future transgressions, though in ways unknowable by the representational substances of social movement. As Dick Hebdige described of spectacular youth subcultures in post-war Britain, resistant enactments are an “actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation.”143 Read as a political enactment, radical cheerleading highlights the human body’s abundance of contradictory forces and drives, unsettling the consumerist idea that we can “really” be a satisfied subject through the representations of marketing and commodities. Hegemonic principles (e.g., “independent” women) can be caught up in global systems of consumption, production, and profit—but one’s physical body remains a productive excess for resistance.

CONCLUSION The transgressive protestors considered in this chapter performed resistance in ways that defiled or defied representational politics. Rather than use rhetoric to organize and express a coalition against consumerism, for instance, the Situationists attempted to heighten witnesses’ and their own consciousness amidst capitalist alienation. Situationists hoped to reinvent daily life in the moment of resistance, as well as for the future. They may have failed at amassing institutional power, or signifying an ever-expanding collective

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consciousness, as the means of defeating capitalism. But they succeeded at inspiring others to reclaim autonomy, as they were doing themselves, through hybrid im/mediate performances. Like the Situationists, the New Left is remembered as a failure, in large part because it stopped short of representing a broad constituency. The enactments of many New Left organizations were a transgressive hybrid of persuasion and coercion that was irreducible to either—they were “incoherent” and thus “ineffective.” Traditional views of rhetoric would judge the Columbia University occupation, for instance, as falling on one side of the violence-rhetoric continuum, as “protestors clearly were not offering, nor encouraging the exploration of, real alternatives.”144 Their occupation could not have “counted” as a movement, let alone rational persuasion, for it only sought to destroy rather than build through appeals to common sense. A more hegemonic perspective may read the occupation charitably, as students used confrontational rhetoric to align “the individual ideologically and actively with the radical movement, the radical leadership, and the radical interpretation of the situation.”145 The SDS may have been successful at polarizing the immediate audience, garnering student support against the “evil” administration. But hegemony views radical or transgressive tactics with suspicion, for there is always a long-term risk—movements “must expand and broaden their base to succeed,” a process aided (if not necessitated) by representational appeals.146 The politics of enactment is potentially useful, but its utility is limited to the enactment’s ability to represent a collective agent. In contrast, from a transgressive perspective, the New Left’s “deviancy” was powerful because it exceeded attempts to capture agency within games of friend-enemy agents. The SDS’s actions immediately confronted what students took as an urgent problem, the imperialist and racist actions of the administration. The students unleashed their own singular, corporealrhetorical powers of invention in the form of a frightening, largely nonviolent take-over of the campus space (at least non-violent before the police entered, per historians’ accounts). The SDS’s enactment was a spontaneous, autonomous event that permitted students to recreate campus life outside the subjectivating authority of institutions. The cases of radical aesthetic resistance considered in this chapter challenge the ethic of hitching one’s rhetorical expression to deterministic agents. Economies of representation, like those determined through Old Left politics or global consumerism, deliver our most intimate, inventive power to the hands of authority. Representation also disappears one of the clearest sources of singularity: the rhetorical body. As radical cheerleaders demonstrate, explicating the body is a powerful means to reclaim autonomy against consumerism’s abstracting tendencies, which reduce women


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to two-dimensional objects of desire, destined to consume commodities to become more desirable. The politics of enactment does not reduce three-dimensional acts to text or language. Even the most transgressive versions of hegemony tend to be suspicious of distinguishing between the immediate (embodied performance) and meditational (symbolic), a move which is critical to appreciating transgression from outside hegemony. For instance, Ernesto Laclau denies the potential for performativity as an attempt to “move from the purely linguistic side of social practices,” to escape text-centrism.147 Responding to Judith Butler’s concern that his theory erases corporeality, Laclau implies that performativity is inherent in discourse, and transgression another form of a (hegemonic) language game that belongs to all discourses: “The coherence that a discursive formation can have is only a hegemonic coherence and it is, indeed, on the level of the discursive formations that hegemonic logics are fully operative.”148 Though Laclau’s hegemony makes more space for transgressions, they are in the form of language games which perform alongside other struggles for coherence (or hegemony). Transgressions thus may never escape the attributions of hegemony, for they are permitted no unique material presence or autonomy. By assuming the body is inherent in language, hegemonic approaches to resistance may reduce the vivid, three-dimensional liveliness of protest to a textual game. As a textual game—or, more specifically, a game of linguistic representation—all manners of resistance are easier to control: for the isolated interpersonal actions, spontaneous protests, and sanctioned movement activities are explicable as representing (organizing and expressing) a collective subject. The radical singularity of radical cheerleading, may “make sense” if it gains attention for global justice, or performs in other ways to represent the collective agent. Though explicable and thus “effective,” radical cheerleading loses its autonomous status as a direct, embodied intervention in consumerist daily life once taken up in metaphoric language games. In conclusion, the Situationists believed that capitalism was so integrated into the rhythms of the everyday that enactments had to be joined by conceptual vocabularies to appear as more than momentary disruptions of routine. Such theory could inspire new interpretive perspectives and practices, which would help witnesses feel the impact of im/mediate resistance. Likewise, the vestiges of determinism are so instantiated within the common sense of social change, new theoretical touchstones are needed to see, appreciate, and evaluate the broad spectrum of resistance. In the final chapter, I consider how companion subjectivity and a politics of enactment may inspire a new critical practice, particularly in the context of social movement.

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NOTES 1. Italian priest and activist Don Vitaliano, quoted in We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, eds. Notes from Nowhere (London: Verso, 2003), 202. 2. Jan Cohen-Cruz, ed., Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (London: Routledge, 1998). 3. Just as with the flashpoints of transgression considered in chapter 4, several other examples of a politics of enactment stand out as worthy of exploration— particularly those in non-European or white contexts. For instance, the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico, which began in the late 1980s, materialized against the Mexican government and imperialistic forces of global capital. The largely indigenous, poor population of Chiapas organized through the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), lead by Subcomandante Marcos: what began as a fairly traditional Marxist movement adapted to its local context, and took on an anarchistic flair for material, performative protest (Ziga Vodovnik, “The Struggle Continues . . .,” in Ya Basta! Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising, ed. Z. Vodovnik [Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004], 35). The Zapatistas have attempted to live completely autonomous lives in resistance to Mexico’s neoliberal regime (rather than attempting to overtake the government); they typically wear masks to obscure their identities and arm themselves with weapons that are never (or very rarely) fired (Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 23). Their concerns with the exploitation of the earth and the people, the violence waged against individuals in the name of capitalist democracy, and the standardization of human life under consumerism may represent others’ concerns with corporate globalization; yet, Marcos and other members of the EZLN claim to represent no one and everyone simultaneously, fooling the determinist representation that would be necessary to render them a hegemonic vanguard for anti-globalization (Vodovnik, “The Struggle Continues . . .,” 42). 4. Guy Debord, “Instructions for an Insurrection,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 85. 5. Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 1. 6. Christine Harold, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4. 7. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 2002), 3. The movements questioned “the separation of art and poetry from everyday life” and the division between “reason and the imagination” (Plant, The Most Radical, 3). Dadaism confronted what it viewed as the bourgeois, liberal values which lead to World War I, calling into question language and eventually meaning itself (Plant, The Most Radical, 41). Following Dadaists, the surrealists promoted a movement of aesthetic immediacy; but instead of courting nihilism (as dada arguably had), they embraced the play between reason/meaning and irrational or illogical realms, such as fantasy and dreams (Plant, The Most Radical, 48). 8. Plant, The Most Radical, 4. 9. Plant, The Most Radical, 56. 10. Plant, The Most Radical, 59.


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11. Greil Marcus, “The Long Walk of the Situationist International,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 5. 12. Sadler, The Situationist City, 34. 13. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1994). 14. Sadler, The Situationist City, 43. 15. Sadler, The Situationist City, 11. 16. Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 2. 17. Plant, The Most Radical, 24. 18. Plant, The Most Radical, 10; summarizing Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. 19. Plant, The Most Radical, 38; 39. 20. Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 92. 21. T. McDonough, “Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), xvi. 22. Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes,” 94–95. 23. “Graffiti,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 447; 446. 24. Elizabeth Ervin, “Rhetorical Situations and the Straits of Inappropriateness: Teaching Feminist Activism,” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 3 (2006): 319. 25. Sadler, The Situationist City, 105. 26. “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 49. 27. Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes,” 98. 28. “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation,” 50. 29. “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation,” 50–51. 30. Plant, The Most Radical, 39. 31. S. Michael Halloran, “Text and Experience in a Historical Pageant: Toward a Rhetoric of Spectacle,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2001): 6. Though situations were immediate, they did not rely on primitivism: the SI viewed technology as part of its project (Plant, The Most Radical, 38). 32. Plant, The Most Radical, 131. 33. Sadler, The Situationist City, 78; 91. 34. Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 5. 35. Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America (New York: Eagle Brook, 1999), 109. 36. Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 14. 37. Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 13. 38. Plant, The Most Radical, 96. 39. Plant, The Most Radical, 97. 40. Plant, The Most Radical, 97. 41. Plant, The Most Radical, 98–99. 42. Sadler, The Situationist City, 157.

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43. Plant, The Most Radical, 102–5. 44. Plant, The Most Radical, 79. 45. Richard Clutterbuck, “How Do the Terrorists Get That Way?,” Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1977, F7. 46. Clutterbuck, “How Do the Terrorists,” F7. 47. Clutterbuck, “How Do the Terrorists,” F7. 48. Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 456. 49. Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 16. 50. Michael Shute, “The Case for a New Politics,” in The New Left of the Sixties, ed. Michael Friedman (Berkeley, CA: Independent Socialist Press, 1972), 35. 51. Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), xvi. 52. James W. Chesebro, “Rhetorical Strategies of the Radical-Revolutionary,” Today’s Speech (Winter 1972): 38; 39. 53. Anderson, The Movement, 61. 54. Anderson, The Movement, 62–63. 55. John C. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 30. 56. Anderson, The Movement, 64. 57. Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 87. 58. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 30. 59. Anderson, The Movement, 88. 60. Anderson, The Movement, 103. 61. Anderson, The Movement, 195. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 35. 62. Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 33. 63. Anderson, The Movement, 196. 64. Anderson, The Movement, 196. 65. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 35. 66. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 34. 67. Anderson, The Movement, 202. 68. Levy, The New Left and Labor, 68. 69. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 36; 36; 37. 70. Berger, Outlaws of America, 5. 71. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 37. 72. Karin Ashley, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, and Steve Tappis, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” in Weatherman, ed. Harold Jacobs (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970), 85. 73. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 37. 74. Berger, Outlaws of America, 274. 75. Berger, Outlaws of America, 106. 76. Berger, Outlaws of America, 200. In March of 1970, an explosion wracked Greenwich Village: three had died, with two women injured, in an accident involv-


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ing explosives the Weathermen had amassed, some “to be used against human targets” (Berger, Outlaws of America, 129). The group quickly went underground, and various manifestations of the Weathermen and Weather Underground eventually dissolved in 1977. 77. Berger, Outlaws of America, 104–5. 78. Berger, Outlaws of America, 151. 79. David Farber, “The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation: Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (London: Routledge, 2002), 30. 80. The Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, were a group of English radicals who challenged the religious monarchy of modern England. Their vision of an ideal society included Christian, proto-anarchist and early communist justifications for abolishing private property and cultivating common agriculture. They believed that the earth was a common resource that should be available to everyone; and that sovereignty alienated people from this communal relationship with the earth. In 1649–1650, upwards of fifty people accompanied Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley to St. George’s Hill and later the Cobham Heath, setting up clandestine colonies on common grazing areas or unusable land. They were eventually run out by angry neighbors who viewed them as delusional anarchists. See Andrew Bradstock, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649–1999 (London: Frank Cass, 2000). 81. Farber, “The Intoxicated State,” 30. Farber notes that after they left San Francisco, various members of the Diggers established communes across America, practicing a separatist version of their politics. Individuals associated with the San Francisco counterculture helped produce The Whole Earth Catalog, which inspired the local and organic farming movement that has grown in popularity from the early 1970s through today. 82. Farber, “The Intoxicated State,” 36; McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 70. 83. Walter Medieros, “Mapping San Francisco 1965–1967: Roots and Florescence of the San Francisco Counterculture,” in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, eds. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 343–44. The love-in transitioned into a common tactic in 1980s gay rights activism, the kiss-in. Performed by ACT UP activists in particular, these demonstrations involved participants (regardless of their orientation or identification, and regardless of their relationship to partners) kissing participants of the same sex: “Kissing is here enacted not as an expression of romantic intimacy but as a public performance of same-sex visibility” (Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 230). 84. Matthieu Poirier, “Hyper-optical and Kinetic Stimulation, ‘Happenings’ and Films in France” in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, eds. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 281; 282. 85. Medieros, “Mapping San Francisco,” 341; 343; Catherine Sadler, “Happenings: Psychedelic People and Places 1938–1972,” in Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, ed. Christoph Grunenberg (London: Tate, 2005), 209–19.

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86. William L. O’Neill, The New Left: A History (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2001), 52. 87. Anderson, The Movement, 219. 88. Abbie Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (New York: Putnam, 1980), 144–47; Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 2005), 37; and Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of a Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970); quoted in Anderson, The Movement, 219. 89. Anderson, The Movement, 241. 90. Anderson, The Movement, 241–42. 91. Anderson, The Movement, 265. 92. Anderson, The Movement, 275. 93. O’Neill, The New Left, 44. 94. Levy, The New Left and Labor, 87. 95. Walter Trohan, “New Left,” Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1967, H51. 96. Editorial, “Black and White Campus Reds,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1968, 12. 97. Editorial, “Yippie, Soo-eee!,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1968, 14. 98. Irving Howe, “The New ‘Confrontation Politics’ is a Dangerous Game,” New York Times, October 20, 1968, 29. 99. John Corry, “‘We Must Say Yes to Our Souls’—Staughton Lynd Spokesman for the New Left,” New York Times, January 23, 1966, 12. 100. See, for instance, Irving Howe, “Political Terrorism: Hysteria on the Left,” New York Times, April 12, 1970, 124; Warren Duffee, “Hoover Says Reds in U.S. Woo Negroes,” Washington Post, August 1, 1966, A3. 101. Howe, “The New ‘Confrontation Politics,’” 33. 102. Editorial, “New Left Disruption,” Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 1968, 20. 103. Nicholas von Hoffman, “Yippies Unveil ‘Politics of Ecstasy,’” Washington Post, March 20, 1968, A3. 104. O’Neill, The New Left, xi. 105. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 38. 106. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 41. 107. Michael Watts, “1968 and All That . . .,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 166. 108. O’Neill, The New Left, 58; 59. 109. McWilliams, The 1960s Cultural Revolution, 42. 110. It is possible to interpret more specific effects from transgressive resistance. For instance, the self-reflexive forestalling of authority practiced by anarchists in the Gilded Age appears to have been carried through by the militant, anti-racist activism of the Weathermen: “What does it mean to be a white person opposing racism and imperialism? What does it mean to be born of privilege in a world defined by oppression? How can those with such unearned social benefits work in a way to undermine and ultimately dismantle systems of injustice?” (Berger, Outlaws of America, 272). Such questions continue to inspire activists from privileged backgrounds, as they attempt to ally against racial oppression. 111. Andrew Hunt, “How New Was the New Left?,” in The New Left Revisited, eds. John McMillan and Paul Buhle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 142.


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112. Richard Moser, “Was It the End or Just a Beginning? American Storytelling and the History of the Sixties,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, eds. Van Gosse and Richard Moser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 38. 113. Eamon Martin, “WTO Talks Collapse amidst Protest in Cancun,” Asheville Global Report, September 18–24, 2003, www.theglobalreport.org/issues/244/index .html#1. 114. Raphie de Santos, “Twenty-nine Arrested in Anti-G8 Protest in Edinburgh,” International Viewpoint, July 2005, www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip .php?article843. 115. Raphie de Santos, “Twenty-nine Arrested.” 116. Several anthologies contain testimonies from individuals and collectives who identify as anarchists, or perform anarchistic acts: David and X, eds., The Black Bloc Papers: An Anthology of Primary Texts from the North American Anarchist Black Bloc 1999–2001 (Baltimore, MD: Black Clover Press, 2002); Neva Welton and Linda Wolf, Global Uprising: Confronting the Tyrannies from the 21st Century: Stories from a New Generation of Activists (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001); Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere; and Eddie Yuen, Daniel Burton-Rose, and George Katsiaficas, eds., Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2004). In addition, www.indymedia.org serves as the hub for several sites linked to the grassroots independent media movement, for searchable activist testimonies from global justice and affiliated protests. 117. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 203. 118. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 203. 119. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 205. 120. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 289. 121. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 338. 122. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 356. 123. Notes from Nowhere, We Are Everywhere, 419. 124. “Millions Join Global Anti-war Protest,” BBC News, February 17, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2765215.stm. 125. Joseph Kahn, “Globalization Unifies Its Many-Striped Foes,” New York Times, April 15, 2000, A7. 126. Just days before the FTAA protests were to commence, the Miami City Commission passed ordinances that made “a public gathering of more than seven people unlawful if assembled for more than one-half hour outside a structure for a ‘common purpose’” (Kris Hermes and Andrea Costello, “Lawsuit Filed Attacking Miami Ordinance Used during FTAA Protests,” www.commondreams.org/ news2004/0204-13.htm; para. 4). 127. Barbara Kantrowitz, “We’re Here! We Cheer! Get Used to It!,” Newsweek, September 19, 2003, www.newsweek.com/id/60250?tid=relatedcl. 128. Though it is a spectacular and spirited practice, radical cheerleading was not solely designed as a tactic to attract media attention. After attending the 1996 Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, Aimee Jennings and her sister Cara (largely credited as co-founding radical cheerleading) sought a new form of protest to give women voice in political rallies: “The people who had the bullhorn got to state the message, and most them were boys” (Kate Feld, “Radical

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Cheerleaders Raise Ruckus,” CBS News, November 14, 2003, www.cbsnews.com/ stories/2003/11/14/national/main583821.shtml). 129. “Radical Cheerleaders,” http://radcheers.tripod.com/RC (accessed March 1, 2010). 130. “RC Cheers/Revolution Cheers,” www.nycradicalcheerleaders.org/index .php?name=RCCheers (accessed March 1, 2010). 131. Radical Cheerleader Handbook #3 (Distributed by AK Press, 2003), 34. 132. Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela J. Bettis, Cheerleader! An American Icon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 62; 63. 133. Adams and Bettis, Cheerleader!, 71. 134. For instance, a group of performance artists in Chicago, Illinois, named the Lickety Split Radicals (formerly Lickety Split Radical Cheerleaders) relied on an excessively queer aesthetic to challenge norms of gender and sexuality. Their members included “Queefer Southerland,” described as the group’s “Creator, Founder, Writer, & Daddy” and “cunt a licious,” who appeared topless with star pasties on her breasts holding a green pom-pom and a beer (Lickity Split Radical Cheerleading Homepage, www.freewebs.com/lickitysplit/splitpersonalities.htm, accessed March 1, 2010). 135. Radical Cheerleader Handbook #3, 4. 136. Helene A. Shugart and Catherine Egley Waggoner, “A Bit Much: Spectacle as Discursive Resistance,” Feminist Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 72. 137. Feld, “Radical Cheerleaders Raise Ruckus.” 138. Adams and Bettis, Cheerleader!, 37. 139. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2002), 203. 140. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 29–30. 141. David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-critique (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 10. 142. Radical cheer squads typically form bonds between girls and women, reasserting youthful feminine norms of play and frivolity, while explicating bodily “imperfections” and direct political involvement as completely acceptable for girls and women. Radical cheerleading, like the “riot grrl” subculture of the late 1980s and 1990s, appears as a response to patriarchal constraints on girlhood. Riot grrls created alternate realities to such exigencies as eating disorders, misogyny in media, and consumerism. They did so through a do-it-yourself aesthetic and media, living as much as possible “outside the corporations which support[ed] mainstream culture by creating the music, zines, and other creative products” (Mary Celeste Kearney, “‘Don’t Need You’: Rethinking Identity Politics and Separatism from a Grrrl Perspective,” in Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, ed. Jonathon Epstein [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998], 157). Like radical cheerleaders, riot grrls explicated the body with a girlish profanity, writing euphemisms and derogatory words on their body and ironically combining second-hand, masculine clothing and feminine artifacts. 143. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Metheun, 1979), 90. 144. James R. Andrews, “Confrontation at Columbia: A Case Study in Coercive Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55, no. 1 (1969): 11.


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145. James F. Klumpp, “Challenge of Radical Rhetoric: Radicalization at Columbia,” Western Speech 37, no. 3 (1974): 146. 146. Klumpp, “Challenge of Radical Rhetoric,” 147. 147. Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), 77. However, Laclau acknowledges that the performative is useful in inspiring non- or a-rational interpretations. Performance renders “more visible an aspect of meaningful action that a purely logicist notion of language could otherwise have kept in the dark: it is the fact that a strict enactment of a rule via an institutionalized performance is ultimately impossible. The application of a rule already involves its own subversion” (“Identity and Hegemony,” 77). For instance, Laclau reads Butler’s notion of parodic performance as especially productive, as it may be a way to explain any social action which disrupts standard meanings. 148. Ernesto Laclau, “Constructing Universality,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), 284.

7 Conclusion

The main ideal of criticism, as I conceive it, is to use all that is there to use.1

While hegemony has formed the common sense of social movement, a second major paradigm for theorizing and practicing social change has emerged. Transgression operates primarily through de-subjectivation, or the dismantling of social subjects beholden to authority. While deterministic modes of resistance would discipline (or put to work) individuals’ singular, creative energies in the constitution of collective agents; transgression seeks ways to free human individuality from the bonds of representation which would contain it. Key to the theories and historical case studies of transgression, then, are alternative figures of subjectivity and mediation. Companion subjects and a politics of enactment, as I elaborate in this final chapter, join efforts to create a new rhetorical materialism which emphasizes rhetorical agency as immanent. Transgression moves social movement rhetoric past its bondage to the transcendent or abstract collective agent, while inviting new practices of rhetorical criticism—ones which might inspire future acts of transgression.

REVISITING HEGEMONY AND TRANSGRESSION: TOWARD A NEW RHETORICAL MATERIALISM Most hegemonic subjects manifest in friend-enemy antagonisms. These dialectical agents help integrate a whole range of rhetoric into politics proper. Transgressing subjects are better explained as companions, happenstance 209

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(but nonetheless) socially related figures whose encounters are neither organized nor expressed through common traits (including shared adversaries). Most hegemonic subjects mediate efforts at social change through an economy of representation, as rhetoric joins issues, ideas, and identities into a coherent (if sometimes disorganized and temporary) formation. In contrast, transgressing subjects perform a politics of enactment, inventing tactics which might foil the language games of friend-enemy politics. By explicating the body, or using im/mediate rhetoric to re-establish concrete, material impacts amidst the abstract production of subjectivities, transgressing subjects undo representational politics. Throughout the preceding chapters, I have attempted to balance two admittedly contradictory purposes: The first, to conceive hegemony and transgression as matters of degree, acknowledges that there have rarely (if ever) been purely hegemonic or transgressive acts of resistance. The second, to maintain the conceptual integrity of transgression as unique, acknowledges the hegemonic tendency to discipline, erase, or obscure transgressive resistance. The historical case studies in chapters 4 and 6 affirm the need to conceive resistance as a continuum between hegemony and transgression, one which moves from the more deterministic to the more contingent, the more transparent to the more opaque, and the more divisively materialimmaterial to the more hybrid im/mediate, while the history of transgressive thought and action considered throughout the book supports the need to think of transgression as unique from hegemony. The history of the IWMA, for instance, demonstrates how hegemony itself was once transgressive: French anarchists, the followers of Bakunin, and American radicals practiced a more contingent politics which frustrated Marx’s attempts to mold the organization as the vehicle for class struggle. Mother Earth contributors supported resistance that clouded the relationship between individuals (workers), their efforts at social change (strikes, protests, essays, organizing, etc.), and a proper collective consciousness (the proletariat). Their writings reveal attempts to escape commonality and subjection to authority, regardless of the ends proposed for such tools. At the same time, their writings support the hegemonic use of commonality (especially adversaries like the state) to foster social change. Likewise, more contemporary protests against capitalism demonstrate the lack of clean divisions between hegemony and transgression. The Situationists’ tactics appear “resistant” primarily against the alienation of consumerism. However, the use of detournement, the drift, and constructed situations were more attempts to dismantle commodified senses of self in daily life than strictly hegemonic attempts to build a counter-agent. The Weather Underground used transgressive performances in the service of hegemonic discipline, while other members of the New Left used tactics to undermine representational politics: the SDS, for instance, failed to coalesce a last-

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ing movement following its Columbia University occupation, preferring an im/mediate politics to representing a constituency. The impacts of im/mediate enactments like radical cheerleading are not limited to the constitution of a collective agent, for their odd combinations of amateurishness, bodily spectacle, anarcha-feminism, and girlish play, exceed coherence. By acknowledging transgression as a unique, viable mode of resistance, we are better able to understand the ways in which it has, at times, brought out the deterministic impulse or limits of hegemony, and how it has, at other times, amplified hegemonic energies to produce social change. Though transgression has accompanied or blended into hegemony in the history of anarchist(ic) resistance, it has also advanced its own unique materialist politics—one which departs significantly from the determinism lying (more or less) dormant in some theories of hegemony. Strict materialism separates immediate resistance and collective consciousness, such that some type of representation is needed to connect a concrete protest action (workplace sabotage) and the broader agent (Anarcho-syndicalist Movement). For less deterministic versions of hegemony, rhetoric articulates concrete action and consciousness or change agent, such that the effects of concrete action can be viewed as less fleeting, individualistic, and properly political. Though it is not mediating a transcendent class per se, the vestiges of transcendence remain as rhetoric represents a collective agent or other abstract figure assumed to be that which moves the social. In the process, representation dilutes the potential effects of concrete action, at least as envisioned by a transgressive perspective: dismantling top-down production of subjectivity and inspiring autonomy. Transgressive theory and anti-capitalist resistance of the last six decades suggest an important shift from dividing mind and body (thus necessitating representation), to hybridizing im/mediacy (leading to a politics of enactment). Here, rhetoric’s task is not bridging embodied beings and a transcendent subject or abstract social change agent. Rhetorical invention invites witnesses to immanence, the “sphere of conscious life, the sphere of the given insofar as it is given.”2 In an immanent materialism, protestors combine materiality (body) and the symbolic (mind) in contingent ways, with direct interventions on witnesses and the surrounding materialrhetorical context. As the Situationists attempted through their performative tactics, rhetorical invention may alter the perspectives and practices of daily life. The constructed situation invited witnesses to a close consciousness of the present moment and their place within it, in an effort to free individuals from rote consumption (and the “newer, better, fuller” identities promised therein). Through de-subjectivating, full-bodied enactments, Situationist tactics created an immanent moment, in which “each thing [was] conceived . . . as implicated in a ceaseless process of becoming something else.”3

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Similarly, the playful intervention of radical cheerleaders on the streets of Miami rendered the fixity of representations more fluid, inviting new ways of being feminine, anarchist, confrontational. Importantly, though, in the immanent plane of transgression, the deconstructive impacts of rhetorical invention (which might foster new identity performances) are inseparable from the immediate interventions of rhetoric in the context in which it is performed. Not only did the radical cheerleaders constitute a girlish, resistant collective subject—but their spontaneous enactment also literally stopped the police’s procession, to the relief of tense protestors and observers. Likewise, the militant bravado of groups like the Weather Underground, or the nonsensical play of the Yippies, prompted fear, confusion, laughter, and disdain from witnesses, even as such tactics invited others to consider new possibilities for an anti-racist white social movement, or to widen their perspectives toward what everyday life could be. The new materialism, as practiced in rhizomes of transgression, skews more toward immanence than the old materialism’s transcendence: Rather than promoting rhetoric as representational, it promotes rhetoric as an im/mediate intervention and inspiration in the present moment. In moving toward an immanent materialism, theorists and practitioners of resistance have called for alternative perspectives from which to see the power of hybridity (particularly im/mediacy). The historical development of transgression reveals that resistance is a problem of interpretation, rooted in the desires and experiences of the witness: as the Situationists argued, and the American counterculture practiced, daily life could be transformed through shifts in worldview and the practices that accompanied it. Unfortunately, hegemonic theories tend to fortify their interpretive perspectives with the force of reality or proper politics—particularly when their limits are tested by transgression. So while we might explore social change in terms of its hybrid combinations of hegemony and transgression, it is important to maintain an “integrity” for transgression. However, transgression cannot be blindly celebrated. Such a move which would risk uplifting it to a transcendent status (like the performance artist whose body risks hailing a pure corporeality as an absolute power against the civilizing forces of language). Romanticizing transgression would also ignore the privileged position from which one might declare herself or himself “above” material domination (untouchable by the forces of racism, sexism, etc.). Such a view might also ignore the potential ethical consequences of transgressing subjects, in the form of degrading enactments which not only subvert authority, but also potentially destroy others indiscriminately. To avoid transgression’s most harmful tendencies, transgressive resistance must be tempered with self-reflexivity and a phenomenological (or other non-hegemonic) ethics.

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Certain transgressive movements, like anarchism, have been criticized for their lack of attention to privilege, particularly as they have drawn more whites than people of color; and more men or macho tactics than women or feminine and androgynous tactics.4 Yet, self-identifying anarchists have historically expressed concern for using one’s authority to subject others. For instance, Mother Earth contributors implied a self-reflexive ethic, inspiring readers to refuse the privilege of individualism as it was spread by industrial capitalism and the liberal state. The self-reflexive forestalling of authority grew during the 1960s, as white New Left activists eschewed their racialized, gendered, and propertied privilege to work alongside minorities and the poor. For every case study considered in this book, resistance through immanence maintains a critique of domination. For a new materialism to avoid sliding into a position of authority, advocates must take the next step in holding themselves accountable to their own privilege, as it may be used to dominate others or prevent themselves from realizing a more autonomous being. Similarly, the degradations of resistance must be held in check (as much as possible) through a non-hegemonic ethics. It may seem like a contradiction to call for “ethical” transgressions; but just as the self-reflexive forestalling of authority helps prevent one’s actions from subjecting others, dialogic ethics may preclude the nihilistic destruction possible when unleashing “pure” transgressive power. Dialogic ethics suggests that one’s resistant actions are held accountable by immediate others, those witnesses whom are directly impacted by an enactment. If transgression inspires meaning-making activity, extending an encounter between participants, it is less likely to degrade. As Fenske advances: “In order to achieve answerability, the embodied action must be responsible for its meaning, as well as liable to meaning. Events are not ethical simply because they are embodied; they are ethical when both the body and its sense are united in action dialogically.”5 Importantly, the standards from which an “ethical” transgression is judged are more phenomenological than hegemonic. An enactment, such as an anti-sexual harassment “radical cheer,” may offend witnesses, for its profanity is unbecoming of young women and its political contribution is unclear. But its obscenity does not render it unethical. Instead, the cheer might be deemed ethical should it prompt conversation between radical cheerleaders and male passersby who express defensiveness because they are not harassers. An unethical transgression would shut down the immanent process of meaning-making for immediate participants, through physical harm or subjecting others to one’s authority. As transgressive resistance becomes more prevalent, I suspect that its practitioners will add to self-reflexivity and phenomenological ethics as ways to

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temper transgression’s degrading tendencies. Having revisited transgression and hegemony as unique, but interconnected modes of resistance—as well as the prospects of a new, immanent materialism—we may consider transgression’s effects more specifically on social movement rhetoric. How might taking companion subjectivity and a politics of enactment as interpretive resources affect the understanding and practice of social movement today? As emerging from the diverse theories and case studies of transgression in this book, one key change for social movement rhetoric is in the move from agent to agency.

TRANSGRESSION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT RHETORIC An agent-centered approach has dominated our understanding of social change. Scholars tend to treat both the social movement and hegemonic collective will as phenomenal subjects: the former appears as an empirically existent “thing” to which we attribute effects (like constituting new identities or changing policy), the latter as an identifiable subject that becomes a reference point in political struggle.6 The agent-centered approach reduces rhetoric’s contribution to constituting a collective (or mediating an abstract agent), rather than creating powerful impacts on its own. Through the gravity of friend-enemy subjectivity, and interpretive schemes based on metaphorical representation, almost any communication can be said to constitute or contribute to the cause. Whether masked, property-damaging anarchists gain the press’s attention, or radical cheerleaders help diffuse tension between police and protestors in the street, the phenomenon of the global justice movement overshadows the possible impacts of embodied rhetorical inventions. In less charitable readings, agent-centered theories fail to account for the diverse range of resistance: As DeLuca argued, “unorthodox” protest (like the radical environmental collectives of EarthFirst! and the queer politics of ACT UP) either fails to register as worthy of study, or is dismissed as ineffective because it fails to aid the movement agent.7 Some theories of hegemony obscure the resistance of activists who do not intend to, and often wish to avoid, inserting themselves into movements or other abstract collective subjects. Alternatively, transgression helps figure resistance as a problematic of agency. Often thought as the means, capacity, or possibility for action, agency connotes an elusive, fluid energy.8 Like the tidal forces of the moon, we cannot know agency directly, but can only follow its traces, as whitecaps that wash along the shore. In other words, agency demands interpretation. By contrast, as the actor or protagonist on a political stage, the agent appears more concrete, stable, and visible. The agent beckons us to predict its actions, to attribute effects to its movements as though they were motivated

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by its substance. From a Nietzschean perspective, agents are a fictitious source of power for resistance. Through its ties to transcendence, the collective agent (e.g., social movement) is a subjectivating authority which denies the power of individuality: “As soon as we imagine someone who is responsible for our being thus and thus, etc. (God, nature), and therefore attribute to him [or her] the intention that we should exist and be happy or wretched, we corrupt for ourselves the innocence of becoming. We then have someone who wants to achieve something through us and with us.”9 For Nietzsche, once subjects and substance fade from theoretical focus, a new force teeming through all existence will appear: “One acquires degrees of being, one loses that which has being. . . . The degree to which we feel life and power (logic and coherence of experience) gives us our measure of ‘being,’ ‘reality,’ not—appearance.”10 The analytic of transgression draws our attention away from the subject as a static body resting somewhere in theory or reality, and toward rhetorical forces opening new possibilities for dynamic social “beings.” It moves social movement rhetoric scholarship from agent to agency. Companion subjectivity refuses (as much as it might) to join the language game of social movements-as-agents, whether this is a functional game (in which words serve the leader’s ability to lure followers, or they serve the followers’ needs to become different selves), or a game of identification (in which words inflame listeners’ passions, moving them to friend-enemy configurations or uniting their consciousness through rhetorical substances). For companions, rhetorical invention is more a matter of agency, the capacity of humans to influence their surroundings, or the power to effect change directly. Refusing to grant their values names, and attempting to battle their own unique adversaries (rather than the “enemies” of others), companions fail to channel their unique rhetorical energies into the formation of herd-like collective agents. Yet, particularly as developed in the decades after Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, companions do not isolate their rhetorical interventions, or pursue a nihilistic politics. Gathering with others in packs, multitudes, or coming communities, companions help inspire creative singularities (rather than substantial commonalities, as in the case of the more deterministic friends and enemies). Through embodied rhetorical performances, companions dismantle the representational relationships needed to cohere collective agents. Focused more on a “doing,” than the “doer behind the deed,” a politics of enactment views rhetorical invention as a direct intervention.11 As such, it offers a theoretical touchstone to interpret the vibrant, im/mediate actions of protestors which might appear as coercive, corporeal, or “deviant” under some lenses of hegemony. Granting the possibility that explicating the body exceeds representation (for it refuses to mediate a transcendence), the politics of enactment also grants autonomy to rhetorical agency.

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The shift from rhetorical agent to agency may help reinvigorate the study of social movement rhetoric to include resistance in all its guises: sanctioned and spontaneous, organizational and individual, mediated and immediate, hegemonic and transgressive. It would almost certainly alter the notion of rhetorical effectivity in social change, beyond the identity constitutive function. The rhetoric of social movement, outside the province of constituting phenomenal agents, would be more akin to the changes in public consciousness, knowable, for instance, through the witnessing of im/mediate events or long-term changes in public discourse.12 Yet, if taken seriously, a shift from agent to agency would also necessitate acknowledging the direct, material or concrete impacts of resistance. Following the idea that a new materialist rhetoric would operate immanently, rather than as mediation for (the remnants of) transcendence, we might appreciate the potential of transgression amidst corporate globalization. As witnessed in the Russian Revolution, the demise of the IWMA, and on the pages of Mother Earth, anarchists have historically decried resistance via party politics, and even social movement collectives. Many anarchists argue that abstract collectives subject individuality to commonality, delivering autonomous beings to authorities. In other words, even counter-hegemonic agents subject others, denying human freedom. In light of rhetorical agency and immanence, the anarchist argument against collective agents gains greater nuance. Anarchists do not simply desire a return to modernity, in which individuals were free to do whatever they pleased against the bondage of civilization and authority. Instead, the promotion of individuality helps cultivate singularities, a powerful weapon against those forces which seek to divide people from possibility—including contemporary capitalism. As Greene advances, an immanent materialism acknowledges rhetoric’s place “beyond commodity production per se, to include [its] role in building social networks of all kinds.”13 When freed from its task of building collective agents, rhetoric is a “life-affirming constitutive power that embodies creativity and cooperation.”14 At the practical level, autonomous and direct actions (like those practiced on the streets of San Francisco in the 1960s) help render capitalism and the state redundant and unnecessary.15 There is no need to overtake state power, or await a revolution-to-come through hegemonic organizing, when individuals practice new ways of being in everyday life (in the hereand-now). From an immanent materialist perspective, rhetoric’s role is in direct interventions which perpetually invite the possibility for new ways of doing (experiencing, performing) daily life. But in order to become acquainted with effectivity outside of collective agents, a shift in perspective is required. The scattered voices theorizing and enacting transgressive resistance emphasize that interpretation perpetuates hegemonic dominance (or the

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dominance of hegemony). As Jones argues, “The performative . . . has a particular and profound efficacy in throwing into question conventional models of interpretation.”16 Transgression demands new interpretive resources which do not seek out systems that substantiate social subjects. As I conclude, rhetorical critics have a special place in inspiring others to a fuller resistance which may effect change, through alternative interpretive and writing practices.

TOWARD A NEW CRITICISM OF SOCIAL MOVEMENT Interpretations and criticism matter greatly to the prospects of present and future resistance. The memories of movements and protests past continue to limit today’s transgressive activism, because witnesses’ resources are primarily hegemonic—they guide us to read a radical politics of enactment as it contributes to a social movement agent, foregoing enactments’ immediate impacts. As Deem argues: “Cultural memory for largely ephemeral feminist and queer practice is dauntingly limited. . . . The field of reference for feminism must be expanded in such a way that the complexity of feminism’s contextual political practices and its future possibilities are not constrained by dominant conceptions of its past.”17 Watts makes a similar observation, following a survey of recent books on the 1960s. Stagnant interpretive practices render the New Left’s transgressions inert, hindering the possibility that today’s transgressions will appear effective: “It is a measure of the conservatism of our era and the capacity to silence the past that [democratic activist] innovations are now seen to be so retrograde as to be almost an embarrassment to articulate in public.”18 By practicing a transgressive interpretive practice, or at least one which acknowledges resistance outside hegemony, rhetorical critics may help others attend to and practice an immanent politics of the possible. Transgressive perspectives move rhetorical critics to the role of witness, attuned to the subtleties of everyday politics. Here, critics may advance the broader revolution of daily life, practiced and envisioned in the streets of Paris, Berkeley, and Miami—for they might encourage the change in consciousness needed for others to release themselves from subjection to hegemonic authority. In contrast, hegemonic perspectives tend to place rhetorical critics in the role of administrators who account for rhetoric as functional mediator.19 The remnants of determinism compel critics to position rhetoric as the “stuff” which adheres issues, ideas, and identities into recognizable agents. An alternative criticism begins by taking transgression as a unique mode of resistance, using, as Kenneth Burke advised, all that there is to use when interpreting rhetorical enactments, texts, or artifacts.

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But how might a transgressive criticism work, particularly at the level of interpretation and writing? Throughout the book, I have performed a fairly standard critical practice, locating alternative reference points in transgressive theory to come to terms with transgressive practices. Treating transgression through a representational relationship, as when an act of resistance represents transgressive assumptions, allows us to name it and debate its efficacy. More traditional interpretive and writing practices might prepare others to accept transgression as an alternative, unique, and viable enactment of social change. Along with integrating companion subjectivity and the politics of enactment into scholarship on social change, a number of critics are experimenting with interpretation which bends the referent-reference correspondence. Others are finding voice in alternative writing practices which move readers beyond academic subjectivities, resonating with the disarticulating enactments of transgressing subjects. Both foretell a new critical practice which moves witnesses to their own meaning-making production, amidst the economies of communicative consumption which circulate in contemporary capitalism. Though “withdrawing from representation” is extremely difficult, as Phelan encourages, we must nonetheless endeavor “to make counterfeit the currency of our representational economy.”20 Rhetorical critics may become inspired by the interpretive work of performance scholars, who tend to gravitate toward those moments in which bodies unsettle, blend, or exceed, representations and representational politics. The performative perspective attunes to events which defy “finalization or representational closure at the hands of the oppressive other,” while nonetheless allowing space for responsibility and response-ability.21 Here, criticism is a matter of attending to possibilities, as they are created through embodied-symbolic events of resistance (which may or may not represent a collective agent). Furthermore, a new critical practice appears markedly rhizomatic, created through serial fragments of corporeality and language. Performance scholar Mindy Fenske’s recent discussion of hypertextual criticism suggests the potential for criticism itself to be a moving, enacted experience, which is revealed between critics and readers. While traditional interpretation is geared toward “knowledge and self-reflexive understanding,” a hypertextual criticism seeks “change and transformation” through the play “of textual signification, semiotic codes, and meaning with notions of speed and intensity.”22 The hypertext analogue permits critics to move beyond the goal of elucidating the meaning or content inherent in rhetorical events. Reading (or experiencing) a rhetorical event hypertextually promotes a layering of signification, in which all genres and gestures resonate between participants in the event.

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This experiential layering of signification is akin to the subversions of im/ mediacy in a politics of enactment: It hinders the opportunity for meaning to become fixed or identified with a referent, and not because it brings a pure corporeality to bear on the civilizing processes of meaning. As Fenske concludes, hypertext “asks for a consideration of something other than a linear ‘inter’-connection between the signifier and the signified that can either be playfully interrupted or severed.”23 A hypertextual criticism would spotlight the activity or performance of meaning-making itself, over the meaning of a text. It would reveal the critic’s choices or desires when experiencing significations, which would reveal the movement, direction, speed, and force of significations (in the “text” and “subject”).24 Along with the hypertextual analogue, Fenske suggests a viral metaphor for understanding how a new transgressive criticism might manifest. Rather than reproduce accurate descriptions and meanings of rhetorical events, critics are party to “the process of infection, merging or passing through and into performance events in order to effect transformation.”25 Criticism would prompt mutations of meaning or signification—not to annihilate meaning, but to expand the potential for meaning-making, in part by calling attention to it as an embodied, intersubjective process.26 Christine Harold’s analysis of culture jamming also inspires a new, transgressive practice of interpretation. Jamming not only implies the disruption of transmission or production of dominant meanings. As Harold describes, jamming has connotations in music, where it involves a spontaneous, embodied, collective (or resonating) interpretation of a musical text. In more formal musical settings, one would seek representation between score and performance. Likewise, when performing traditional criticism, one attempts “to make one word correspond directly to its equivalent as one does when translating a text from one language to another, where the interpreter is obliged to make the translation as correct as possible.”27 But the looser context of jamming permits musicians to “appropriate” music, rendering new interpretations of the score while maintaining “familiar textual residues.”28 If a rhetorical critic were to jam with a text or set of texts, the meanings produced would have some relationship with the original rhetorical events, but would extend far beyond them. The jamming and hypertext analogues imply an invested, embodied experience for the rhetorical critic. They offer an alternative to the more neutral, disembodied criticism practiced in traditional readings of rhetorical artifacts. By igniting pleasure, for the critic and the audience, criticism might inspire more meaning-making, rhizomatically growing the initial rhetorical event into new events. As Ott advances, “a truly alternative mode of criticism—a criticism as pleasure—would shift the concern from signification to significance. It would teach people how to produce (write) texts,

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rather than consume (read) them. It would model a mode of reading rather than operating in the mode of model reading.”29 Rather than encouraging critics to administrate social change, a transgressive criticism would seek to inspire “readers” to become witnesses to the power of possibility around them, response-able through the creation of their own transgressive texts. Whether inciting pleasure, viral infestations, hypertextual wanderings, or jam sessions, rhetorical critics might enact their own Situationist ethic of altering perspectives in order to change daily life. Though rhetorical critics have begun offering metaphorical insight into new interpretive practices, it is difficult to imagine what a transgressive criticism would “look like” without an accompanying change in expression. The conventions of academic writing, particularly as carried out in rhetorical criticism, maintain the representational way of thinking or seeing the world. Theory becomes a reference point through which critics make evaluations about a rhetorical act or text. While the conventions of representation offer clarity and efficiency for both readers and writers, they may also perpetuate hegemonic perspectives (both within and beyond the rhetoric of social movement). Along with transgressive interpretive practices, social movement scholars may be inspired by performative writing’s contributions to opening new possibilities for perception, experience, and being in daily life. There are many different techniques possible through performative writing, but most share in common a commitment to exposing the writing process as fraught with tensions, progression, interruption, and multifarious meaning and sensation.30 As Pelias explains, performative writing techniques “evoke rather than duplicate experience,” at the same time that they “elicit feelings with thought.”31 As such, performative writing is committed to expressing the enacted character of writing, such that readers might experience and be inspired by it. This may be accomplished through narrative or other structures which cohere meaning; but performative writing “is drawn to and seeks its own edges—the threshold of expression itself.”32 Performative writing thus marks the edge of reality (in the same way that transgressing subjects dance near the boundary of subjectivity), while moving us in the immediate moment. Like a transgressive protest, or transgressive criticism, performative writing pushes the academic standards which seek to render it common, controllable. It considers “scholarship as an activity of aesthetic engagement.”33 If written performatively, a piece of criticism would thus be closer to a constructed situation than scholarly article. It would document and enact a process of experimentation in the hopes of inspiring future experimentations, moving readers to heightened consciousness. As Bryant Alexander demonstrates, performative writing may also advance the self-reflexive forestalling of authority, encouraging an embodied process for moving between the particularities of the person and her or his entanglements in racialized,

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sexualized, gendered history.34 In the context of social movement, a transgressive, performative criticism may become another rhizome within the expansion of public and personal consciousness.35

CONCLUSION Through this book, I have attempted to promote new ways of understanding social change, inspired by the challenges that historic and contemporary anarchist(ic) practice has leveled at hegemony. Following their highly visible return to the world political stage in Seattle in 1999, self-identified anarchists have challenged what it means to be part of a social movement, even as they have called into question everyday practices in corporate globalization. Anarchist and anarchistic protest has baffled both those who would consider themselves sympathetic to anarchy (such as folks identifying with the global justice movement), and those who view anarchists as an enemy. The materialist tactics of property destruction, police confrontation, and verbal threats of violence—as well as the more performative tactics of street occupations and theatrical enactments—exceed the common sense of social change, from both practical and theoretical perspectives. The theories and practices of transgression help appreciate anarchy’s contribution beyond its (dis)service to dialectical agents and representational politics. Anarchy offers a glimpse of how people may resist together in fully autonomous, or anti-authoritarian relationships and tactics: guided by passion, desire, and the unique spiraling out of a common human creativity, transgressing subjects elude (at least temporarily) the metaphorical “substances” which would bind them to friends-against-enemies. Today’s resurgence of anarchy is remarkable: it is a rare moment in which rhetorical practice breaks the molds which attempt to contain it as vile cookery, frivolous play, or symptoms of a revolution. Anarchy invites us to a new (non-) horizon, where the symbolic mingles with the material, rhetorical mediation mixes with rhetorical invention, and the collective will encounters a transgressing companion. Rather than treating anarchy’s signals as incoherent or interesting ripples in the rhetorical cosmos, we may engage anarchy in a productive debate over what it means to be a resistant subject, an ethical citizen, a rhetorical inventor, an embodied human being. Understanding transgression as a unique mode of resistance is the beginning to such an engagement.

NOTES 1. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 23.

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2. Martin C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 2nd ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 36. 3. Moira Gatens, “Feminism as ‘Password’: Re-thinking the ‘Possible’ with Spinoza and Deleuze,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 61. 4. See, for instance, Elaine Leeder’s discussion of how Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre helped lessen the masculinist culture of modern anarchism. Elaine Leeder, “Let Our Mothers Show the Way,” in Reinventing Anarchy, Again, ed. Howard J. Erlich (Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 1996), 142–55. 5. Mindy Fenske, “The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance,” Text & Performance Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2004): 12. 6. Michael Calvin McGee, “‘Social Movement’: Phenomenon or Meaning?,” Central States Speech Journal 31, no. 4 (1980): 237; Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000). 7. Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1999); Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36, no. 1 (1999): 9–21. 8. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. William Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 299. 10. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 268. 11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 181. 12. McGee, “Social Movement,” 237; Leland M. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Historical Movements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38, no. 2 (1952): 185; DeLuca, Image Politics, 34–35. 13. Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 201. 14. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 201. 15. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2005). 16. Amelia Jones, “Acting Unnatural: Interpreting Body Art,” in Decomposition: Post-disciplinary Performance, eds. Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 12. 17. Melissa Deem, “Disrupting the Nuptials at the Town Hall Debate: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Memory in the USA,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2003): 617. 18. Michael Watts, “1968 and All That . . .,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001): 182–83. 19. Raymie McKerrow, “Corporeality and Cultural Rhetoric: A Site for Rhetoric’s Future,” Southern Communication Journal 63, no. 4 (1998): 315–28. 20. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 164. 21. Mindy Fenske, “The Aesthetic,” 10. I am also beholden to Kelly Oliver’s notion of responsibility as response-ability here (Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001], 18).

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22. Mindy Fenske, “The Movement of Interpretation: Conceptualizing Performative Encounters with Multimediated Performance,” Text & Performance Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2006): 141. 23. Fenske, “The Movement,” 146. 24. Fenske, “The Movement,” 146–49. 25. Fenske, “The Movement,” 153. 26. Fenske, “The Movement,” 156. 27. Christine Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 3 (2004): 197–98. 28. Harold, “Culture Jamming,” 197–98. 29. Brian L. Ott, “Television as Lover, Part I: Writing Dirty Theory,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 7, no. 1 (2007): 39. 30. Della Pollock, “Performative Writing,” in The Ends of Performance, eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 73–103. 31. Ronald J. Pelias, “Performative Writing as Scholarship: An Apology, an Argument, an Anecdote,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 5, no. 4 (2005): 421. 32. Zali Gurevitch, “Writing Through: The Poetics of Transfiguration,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 2, no. 3 (2002): 405. 33. Fenske, “The Movement,” 139. 34. Bryant Keith Alexander, “Racializing Identity: Performance, Pedagogy, and Regret,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 4, no. 1 (2004): 12–27. 35. Bratich’s poetic reflections on his participation in the 2004 Republican National Convention protests in New York City offer one such example (Jack Z. Bratich, “Notes from Laboratory NYC: A Neo-activist’s Image-Report from the 2004 Republican National Convention,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 5, no. 3 [2005]: 346–49). I have also explored many of the themes from this book through performative writing—see Christina R. Foust, “Meditations on Immediate Resistance,” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies (in press).

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Index

aesthetics, 144, 146, 148–49, 152–54, 172–74, 197 affect, 45–46, 70–71, 145 Agamben, Giorgio, 105–7, 143, 171 agency, 3, 5, 49–50, 64, 70, 98, 101, 134–35, 186, 198, 214 agent, 3, 5, 18, 55, 214. See also collective subjects anarchism, 2, 22, 115–16, 128–29, 132, 216, 221; and anti-globalization movement, 2, 156, 188, 192–93, 221; as a challenge to hegemony, 2, 5, 129, 221; and criticisms of Marxism, 131, 173, 179; as a hegemonic social movement, 130– 31; in Russian Revolution, 123–27; in Spanish Civil War, 137n5; in United States Gilded Age, 127–33, 210, 213. See also Paris Commune anti-globalization movement, 11, 145, 158, 162–63, 171, 177–78, 187–97; and challenges to social movement theory, 1–2 Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics, 144, 149–50, 153, 166n33, 175 articulation, 41–42, 44, 48, 54. See also rhetoric autonomism, 87, 96, 100

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9–10, 19, 144–45, 149, 167n48, 173 Bakunin, Mikhail, 118–20, 125, 131, 134 becoming, 98, 100, 130, 134 Black Power Movement, 181–82 body, the, 10, 19–20, 34, 91, 143–45, 148–55; as challenge to representation, 150, 152–54, 171, 184 Burke, Kenneth, 48, 209, 217 carnival, 5, 9–16, 107, 144, 149, 173 Civil Rights Movement, 3–4 civil society, 35, 39–40, 46, 103 collective subjects, 6, 35–36, 43–44, 69. See also friend-enemy subjectivity communism. See Marxism companion subjectivity, 7, 87, 91, 93– 95, 97, 100, 104, 107, 129, 133–35, 215 corporate globalization, 1, 25n3, 48, 70–72, 101–2, 145, 187; as constraining or enabling transgressive protest, 12–14, 145, 150, 155–58, 171, 216–17; and consumerism, 145, 194–97; as spectacle, 156, 173–74 241

242

Index

corporeality. See the body counterculture. See the New Left critical rhetoric, 67–69 Debord, Guy, 173–77. See also Situationist International Deleuze, Guilles, 16–17, 97–100, 130 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, 183–86 determinism, 8, 34, 122, 125–26, 132, 135, 217 Dionysian. See Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetics direct action, 86, 110, 119, 127, 129, 179, 182, 189–90, 193 dualism. See mind-body dualism feminism, 192, 195, 217 First International. See International Workingman’s Association Foucault, Michel, 3, 23, 71, 102 friend-enemy subjectivity, 36–38, 45–49, 56, 60–61, 85–86; as part of hegemonic logic, 4, 8, 18, 31–32, 34, 58, 135, 209, 214–15; transgression’s criticisms of, 86, 133 global justice movement. See antiglobalization movement Goldman, Emma, 5, 128, 132–33 Gramsci, Antonio, 31, 33, 35–38 Guattari, Felix, 16–17, 97–100, 130 Hall, Stuart, 38–43, 52, 54 Hardt, Michael, 69, 101–5 Haymarket affair, 128 hegemony, 4, 31–33, 36, 39, 48, 50, 58, 66, 152; as challenge to Marxist determinism, 31, 33–36, 39, 42–43, 49–50, 52; in communication and cultural studies scholarship, 58–70; as containing transgression, 12, 105, 120, 127, 162, 177, 185–87, 189, 196, 199, 210, 214; and counterhegemony, 14; as grammar for social change, 6–8, 31, 185–87; as related to transgression, 8–9;

and relationship to common sense, 4, 12, 33, 37, 41; vestiges of determinism within, 33–37, 39, 42–43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 217. See also post-hegemony herd, the, 18–19, 87, 90–91, 94, 135, 152 hierarchy, 10–11, 15–16, 154 hybridity, 10, 110n54, 145, 150–54, 175, 187 ideology, 33–34 identification, 44, 46, 48, 52, 54, 99, 153, 157, 163–64, 215. See also friend-enemy subjectivity identity, 51, 54, 60, 68–69, 107, 143, 157. See also identification immanence, 3, 16, 102–3, 112n80, 209, 211, 216–17 immediacy, 20–21, 94, 98, 146–55; as challenge to sense-making, 152–54, 163, 217; and/as resistance, 102–4, 106–7, 115, 124, 152–55, 173–74, 180, 188, 199; and violence, 8, 131, 155–56, 162–63, 180–82, 198 International Workingman’s Association, 116–23, 210 interpretation. See sense-making Laclau, Ernesto, 49–58, 105–6, 177, 199 Marx, Karl, 117–23, 135. See also International Workingman’s Association Marxism, 8, 50, 52, 68–69, 125–27, 132, 134 materialism, 34, 66–71, 173, 209; deterministic, 39–42, 68–70; immanent or rhetorical, 68–70, 86, 134, 158–59, 173, 211–13, 216. See also the body materiality. See materialism May 1968 protests in France, 172, 176–77 mediation, 21, 47, 54, 151–52, 154, 174; the failure of, as related to

Index resistance, 88, 90–92, 104, 180–81, 194, 198. See also rhetoric metaphor. See representation metonymy. See representation mind-body dualism, 10–12, 17, 91, 149, 152. See also sense-making Mouffe, Chantal, 43–48, 52–53 multiplicity, 97–99, 101 multitude, 69, 100–105, 130, 215 Negri, Antonio, 69, 101–5 neoliberal globalization. See corporate globalization New Left, the, 5, 176, 178–87, 198, 210–13 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16–19, 87–88, 132, 143–45, 149–50, 160, 167n48 organic intellectual, 74–75n23 Paris Commune, 124–25, 136n3 performance, 8, 144, 146–55, 175, 190–92, 199, 218; as hegemonic, 152; and liveness, 148–55, 164, 199; as resistance, 8, 19–22, 71, 78n117, 101, 148–54, 183; as transgressive, 20–22, 152–54 performative writing, 220–21 play, 196, 219 politics of enactment, 7, 145–47, 154– 57, 164–65, 171–72, 180–81, 183, 188, 197–99. See also performance post-hegemony, 69–72 post-industrial capitalism. See corporate globalization poststructuralism, 87, 96 protest violence. See immediacy and violence psychoanalysis, 46, 55–56, 99, 153, 163–64 radical cheerleaders, 190–97, 198–99, 211–12 representation, 41, 47, 52, 60; as part of hegemonic logic, 4, 8, 34, 37, 58; metaphorical, 54, 57–58, 130–31, 158; metonymic, 52–54, 106, 158;

243

refusal to use in social change, 91–92, 155, 161, 164, 172–73, 179, 183–85, 195; transgression’s challenges to, 130–32, 146, 150, 153–54, 162–64, 218. See also mediation resistance, 6, 8, 161, 216 rhetoric, 6, 33; and the body, 145–55, 175, 192, 195, 197, 199, 211; as mediation, 36, 44, 48, 50–52, 73, 122, 199 rhetorical criticism, 8–9, 16, 47, 57–58, 64, 66, 161–65, 199, 217–21. See also sense-making Schmitt, Carl, 45–47 self-reflexivity, 22–23, 95, 132–33, 135, 158–59, 213, 220–21 sense-making, 6, 8–9, 10–11, 20–21, 144, 154, 161–65, 178 singularity, 71–72, 89, 94–95, 101, 106, 116, 119, 129–30, 143, 158, 174, 199, 215 Situationist International, 100, 171–79, 183, 187, 192, 197–98, 210–11, 220 social movements, 6, 49, 59–65, 103– 4, 179, 198, 214–17 spectacle. See corporate globalization Students for a Democratic Society. See the New Left subject, the, 17, 29n75, 44, 50, 75, 143, 215. See also agent subjectivity, 17, 43, 46, 52, 56, 85, 101–2, 174, 190. See also identity tactics, 196 Tilly, Charles, 8–9 Touraine, Alain, 7–8 transcendence, 3, 89–90, 93–94, 112n80, 212, 215 transgression, 3–5, 7–9, 17–19, 108, 116, 145, 154, 160–61, 179–80, 196, 209; as blending with hegemony, 32, 34, 58, 72, 116, 121–22, 126, 178–79, 181–82, 187, 210; as a challenge to corporate

244

Index

globalization, 7, 134, 173, 194–95; as contained by hegemony, 9, 12, 32, 58; efficacy of, as a mode of resistance, 5, 12–13, 15, 21, 73, 138n6, 154–61, 185–86, 189; ethics of, 15, 159–60, 212–14; as illuminating the limits of hegemony, 7–8, 13–14, 69, 92, 105, 118, 126–27, 155, 163; as incurring state violence, 125–26, 133, 162, 180, 184, 188–89; and sense-

making, 161–65, 176, 216–17. See also carnival Virno, Paolo, 100–101, 130, 131 war of movement, 35, 40, 43–44 war of position, 35, 40, 43–44 Weathermen. See the New Left will-to-power, 92–93, 215 Zapatistas, 200n3

About the Author

Christina R. Foust is an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Denver. Her research and teaching engage rhetoric, power, and social change in a variety of contexts, including social movements, political discourse, and pop culture.

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Transgression As a Mode of Resistance: Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization

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Transgression As a Mode of Resistance: Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization

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Management Consultancy and Banking in an Era of Globalization

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The Globalization of Corporate Governance

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New Knowledge in a New Era of Globalization

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