Performance, Politics, and Historiography in and out of Time: American Responses to the Paris Commune

American echoes of the Paris Commune have been muffled by the nation’s obsession with freedom at the expense of solidarity, but performative responses to social upheaval, including drama, parades, and protests, have tested the boundaries of public space and multiple temporalities from 1871 to 2021. This article notes traces of the Commune in the writings and performances of nineteenth century American anarchists but analyzes this legacy primarily in the 2012 performance of Brecht’s The Days of the Commune (1949) at New York sites claimed by the Occupy Movement in 2011. It also uses the argument of Brecht’s contemporary Ernst Bloch for cultural action grounded in an understanding of historical disappointment to anticipates setbacks while maintaining hope for future revolution. The paper delineates five theses on the politics of time: 1) the dramatic appeal of the clean break hides the tension between gradual evolution and a sudden event that ruptures the long span of history (Badiou); 2) historiography, the narrative that turns data into evidence, challenges the illusion of objectivity and thus a simple split between timely intervention and untimely interference with the established order (Nietzsche); 3) ana-chronology, the logic of untimeliness reads contemporaneity as companionship between events and agents across different times and places (Barthes); 4) recollecting history requires acts of forgetting, which shatter the constraints of the past to meet demands of the present (Renan, Nietzsche); 5) the politics of time entails the politics of place and thus requires the analysis of multiple temporalitieslayered on one site as well as political acts and performance in distinct places.

Under the Weight of the Soviet Legacy and Political Repressions: The Radical Left in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

Mass protest movements of the early 2010s, particularly the Occupy movement, stimulated the rise of radical left organizations globally. In Southern Europe, radical left parties celebrated their first electoral successes. In Russia, radical left organizations were also influenced by this upsurge of social protest movements and participated in the Bolotnaya protests in 2011–2012 but were marginalized and disintegrated shortly after, resuming their activities only by 2019. This article explores the radical left movements and groups in Russia and offers projections for their future. The Russian radical left is divided into three sub-groups: fundamentalist communists who identify with Stalin and the Soviet Union, libertarian socialists and communists (subdivided into neo-anarchists, autonomists, and neo-Trotskyists), and hybrid organizations (e.g., the Left Front). These organizations face two major constraints unknown to their Western counterparts. First, Russia’s authoritarian regime blocks opportunities for independent, particularly electoral, politics. This reveals itself in targeted repressions against left radicals and anarchists. Second, the dominance of the CPRF blocks any potential of strong left opposition. Unless these restrictions are lifted, radical left organizations in Russia will not be able to overcome their current crisis.

See you on Wall St. Sept 17. Bring Tent: Occupy Wall Street, Framing, and Mobilisation

<p>The phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has been widely discussed in the academic and popular discourse. Of its many contributions, the language of the Occupy Movement has had a profound influence on contemporary discussions about inequality – contrasting the ‘99%’ with the ‘1%’ is now a permanent part of the conversation. However, despite this discursive shift, the literature has yet to seriously consider how the ideational elements of OWS influenced its mobilisation. While changing the dominant discourse is an important achievement, mobilising collective action around a cause remains an essential task for social movements. To explain social movement mobilisation, this thesis utilises the framing perspective, which seeks to understand why and how certain ideas are able to inspire or inhibit collective action. By using qualitative analysis of movement texts over time, this thesis has constructed the key frames articulated in selected OWS documents over the course of its serious efforts to mobilise. More specifically, it has examined whether changes in the movement’s use of diagnostic, prognostic, motivational, and identity frames can explain the trajectory of mobilisation. The central argument is that the framing perspective can offer a plausible explanation for the mobilisation of OWS; a correlation between changes in framing and expected changes in mobilisation can be observed. However, while the findings of this thesis fill one important part of the puzzle, in order to corroborate the arguments put forward here future research must consider the way the frames proffered by OWS were actually received and acted (or not acted) upon by potential participants. By doing so, we can not only gain a more perceptive insight into this topical phenomenon, but also improve our understanding of the nature and dynamics of contemporary social movements.</p>

See you on Wall St. Sept 17. Bring Tent: Occupy Wall Street, Framing, and Mobilisation

<p>The phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has been widely discussed in the academic and popular discourse. Of its many contributions, the language of the Occupy Movement has had a profound influence on contemporary discussions about inequality – contrasting the ‘99%’ with the ‘1%’ is now a permanent part of the conversation. However, despite this discursive shift, the literature has yet to seriously consider how the ideational elements of OWS influenced its mobilisation. While changing the dominant discourse is an important achievement, mobilising collective action around a cause remains an essential task for social movements. To explain social movement mobilisation, this thesis utilises the framing perspective, which seeks to understand why and how certain ideas are able to inspire or inhibit collective action. By using qualitative analysis of movement texts over time, this thesis has constructed the key frames articulated in selected OWS documents over the course of its serious efforts to mobilise. More specifically, it has examined whether changes in the movement’s use of diagnostic, prognostic, motivational, and identity frames can explain the trajectory of mobilisation. The central argument is that the framing perspective can offer a plausible explanation for the mobilisation of OWS; a correlation between changes in framing and expected changes in mobilisation can be observed. However, while the findings of this thesis fill one important part of the puzzle, in order to corroborate the arguments put forward here future research must consider the way the frames proffered by OWS were actually received and acted (or not acted) upon by potential participants. By doing so, we can not only gain a more perceptive insight into this topical phenomenon, but also improve our understanding of the nature and dynamics of contemporary social movements.</p>

New Social Movements as Postmodern Challanges To Neoliberalism and Representative Democracy

In this article, the relationship between new social movements, representative democracy and neoliberalism is examined. Starting with student protests in Europe and the United State, the late 1960s have witnessed the emegence of new social movements. Ecological, anti-nuclear, feminist, student, anti-racist, and LGBTI+ protests all have been examined with the scope of the new social movements paradigm. The remarkable protest wave of the 1970s has been followed by contemporary movements in different forms like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Although these movements differ in terms of issues they deal with and goals they seek, they have a lot in common. Unlike the old movements like labour protests, these new movements primarily focus on postmaterial issues. Postmaterial identity demands and rights of these movements conflict with material demands of neoliberal governments. Furthermore, modern democracies fail to address these issues. Representative democracy is seen as an obstacle to political participation. On the other hand, postmodernism is a suitable concept to explain internal discrepancies and dispersion of new social movements. It is argued that (a) the legitimacy crisis of representative democracy and neoliberal response of capitalism to its structural crisis have triggered new social conflicts and movements, (b) these movements differ from old movements in terms of their forms, goals, and demands, (c) new social movements are postmodern.

Resistance and the Radical Imagination: A Reflection on the Role of the Critical Criminologist in Social Movements

At times of global unrest and the emergence of a wide range of protest movements, recent intra-disciplinary criminological debates on the potentials and limits of resistance suggest a paradoxical trend. Critical criminologists—in particular, those associated with the ultra-realist perspective—have become increasingly skeptical of the idea of “resistance,” itself. In the context of these discussions, scholars have resorted to dismissing oppositional activities—including social movements and their different forms of protest—that are both intended and recognized as resistance. In my contribution to this debate, and in response to Jeff Ferrell’s (2019) article, “In Defense of Resistance,” I provide a critical reflection on the analysis of social movements in both ultra-realist and cultural criminological scholarship. Drawing from my ethnographic research with the (post-)Occupy movement in the United States, I argue that the dismissive reading of social movements’ resistance and the calls for stronger political leadership are the result of a narrow analytical lens applied to movements, their temporalities, and their historical context(s). In addition, I contend that the harsh criticism of social movements by ultra-realists connects to the aim of developing an intellectual leadership concerned with informing social movement practice and strategy “from above.” Here, as I maintain, the theory and practice of militant research, or militancia de investigación, as per the Colectivo Situaciones, challenges this understanding of intellectual leadership. The insights provided by radical collective knowledge production in social movements, and their critique of the institutional frameworks of the neoliberal university, allow for a critical reflection on the role of academia in resistance. This critical reflection can generate possibilities for social movements’ knowledge and radical imaginations to influence academic theorizing.

Camping Grounds

Camping appears to be a simple proposition, a time-honored way of getting away from it all. Yet as this book demonstrates, the simplicity of camping is deceptive, its history and meanings far from obvious. Why do some Americans find pleasure in sleeping outside, particularly when so many others, past and present, have had to do so for reasons other than recreation? A closer look at the history of camping since the Civil War reveals unexpected connections between its various forms and its deeper significance as an American tradition linked to core beliefs about nature and national belonging. Never only a vacation choice, camping has been something people do out of dire necessity and as a tactic of political protest. Still, the dominance of recreational camping as a modern ideal and natural idyll has obscured other forms from our collective memory. Camping Grounds rediscovers these unexpected and interwoven histories of sleeping outside. It uses extensive research to trace surprising links between such varied campers as veterans, tramps, John Muir, newly freed African Americans, and early leisure campers in the nineteenth century; federal campground designers, Depression-era transients, family car campers, backpacking enthusiasts, countercultural youth, and political activists in the twentieth century; the crisis of the unsheltered and the tent-based Occupy movement in the twenty-first. These entwined stories show how Americans camp to claim a place in the republic and why public spaces of nature are critical to how we relate to nature, the nation, and each other.

Strategies of (Self-)Empowerment

By drawing on Butler’s concepts of assembly, appearance, and precarity, it is argued that the aesthetic assembly in theatre, quite often, is closely related to various forms of political assemblies, historical and recent, in encouraging self-empowerment of its spectators, and at times also its actors. To make the point, three periods in German theatre history from 1750 until today are considered: First, the theatre of the educated middle class in the eighteenth century. Second, the workers’ mass spectacles in the Weimar Republic. And third, some forms of choric theatre since the 1990s as well as Christoph Schlingensief’s productions featuring different kinds of people in a precarious status. Finally, as regards their capacity to self-empowerment, they are related to the Occupy movement.

Conflict, consent, dissensus: The unfinished as challenge to politics and planning

Public participation in planning politics is a legal right in many countries. Planners often see themselves as the defenders of public interests, whereas planning studies may see public planning as the institutionalization of politics, the politicized management or government of disputes on planning issues. Public participation is ultimately a political decision, and this article focuses on how phrases like planning is ‘a work in progress’ and agonistic consensus is a ‘solution for now’ in fact add a critical issue to planning politics: such statements indicate that planning should be seen as an unfinished process, and decisions as temporary. A ‘solution for now’ literally means a ‘planning for-the-time-being’ and a ‘coming-back-to’, highlighting that there are processual issues unresolved within planning praxis. Politics and planning cannot be separated. Two cases of urban planning conflict—the struggle of the homeless for shelter and the Occupy movement—show this: they are used to discuss how planning politics may benefit from having a temporary resting place and being unfinished.