On the ‘Doing’ of ‘Something’: A theoretical defence of ‘performative protest’

Abstract

Starting off from its conflicting range of connotations – from the pejorative to the efficacious – the essay sets out to defend the notion of ‘performative protest’ as more than just ‘playing politics’, or protesting with explicitly performance-like elements. Instead, a more plural model of performativity is proposed, which would equally incorporate the more positive and negative conceptions of active subversion and passive submission, effective doing and theatrical dissimulation. Drawing on Judith Butler but much influenced by the radical theorists David Graeber, Max Haiven, and John Holloway, the proposed dynamic is straightforward enough to be illustrated in a simple figure: people do something, and it begins to look like some thing (think of verbs and nouns). If protest is about ‘doing something’ about some perceived injustice, then the performativity of protest concerns the various ways that doing and that something relate.<br/><br/>On this theoretical basis, the middle section focuses on the plurality of performative protest, or in Haiven’s and Holloway’s terms, of the doing and the done. Beyond typical protest, the section points to the kinds of weak resistance that people already perform in everyday life – the ways that protest persists in resistant environments – as well as to more prefigurative work and the openness of any long-term consequences. The final section then returns to the duality of performative making and maintaining, related now to Graeber’s intriguing take on imagination and violence as the central competing norms for the very performance of social reality. (Incidentally, he would also dub these the core ‘political ontologies’ of the historical Left and Right.) Given the essay’s fairly theoretical nature, the examples remain fleeting and cartoonish, but cover a wide spectrum from anti-maskers and truck convoys to protest clowns and giant puppets; at the end, the themes covered are summed up in another loose figure.