What Protest Looks Like

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/opinion/what-protest-looks-like.html

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This is the seventh in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on the question of violence. This conversation is with Nicholas Mirzoeff, a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He is the author of “How to See the World” and other books.

Natasha Lennard: It is common in reports on protests to see or hear the phrase “turned violent” — “events turned violent,” “protesters turned violent,” etc. This usually means some sort of property damage, physical altercations between protesters and cops and the use by police of force. What does the suggestion of a violent “turn” imply? To me, it seems to suggest that the situation being protested — say, police brutality and racism — was not already “violent.”

Nicholas Mirzoeff: Where there is violence, there is a message. Because so many forms of human action can be defined as violent, it is always a key political moment when a particular group or person is identified in this way. Defining violence as a personal choice, as if it were a consumer purchase, hides systemic or structural violence, such as poverty or racism. It presents the state as the only legitimate user of violence, in an implied social contract in which citizens renounce violence in exchange for protection. To be violent, in defiance of the state’s monopoly on violence, is therefore to be a kind of traitor.

This theory of the state underlies media and state reporting of political protest, in which violence is always invoked to disqualify the grievances of protesters. In the 1960s, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was able to to use media coverage of disproportionate violence against nonresisting demonstrators in Birmingham or Selma to convey his message as a form of martyrdom. He wrote: “we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer…we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.”

Today, if police dogs attack demonstrators, it is no longer national news. Ironically, the example of King himself, so often vilified as a traitor and a Communist in his lifetime, is used to berate today’s protesters with the demand for nonviolence, meaning compliance with police instructions. King never intended nonviolence to mean compliance with the state. But when the term violence is used, it now signifies a moral and political failing by the “people,” those not authorized to use force. Whenever Palestinians protest against the occupation of their land, the response in some quarters is always to call it violent, no matter what has happened. So I find myself avoiding the term altogether in relation to protests.

N.L.: In terms of the images that have led to much recent protest: Why do you think we seem to rely on images of broken black and brown bodies in order to recognize the oppression they face? We don’t seem to need video of the deaths of, say, white school shooting victims to evoke similar public anger.

N.M.: When Mamie Till-Mobley insisted that the body of her son Emmett Till be displayed in an open casket in 1954 after his murder in Mississippi by white supremacists, she dramatically broke with convention and insisted people look at what they would rather not see. It was Ferguson residents, outraged by the callous treatment of 18-year-old Michael Brown’s body — in full view of many children — who tweeted the picture of his corpse to social media. A social movement was started through the combination of popular refusal to accept the police account of what happened with the spread of the photographs both of Michael Brown and of the subsequent protests. From the legend of Antigone to Ferguson, and the ongoing Israeli refusal to release Palestinian bodies for burial, there is a strong sense that justice — aside from any law — requires that those meeting untimely death receive proper burial. With the consent of the families and communities concerned, images can help do that work.

What activists then did in the U.S. was to create a performative form of protest that insisted we not look away but consider over and over again what had happened. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” calls our attention to the instant before the definitive violence, a moment where a reasonable person (to use legal phrasing) could and should have decided against shooting, for example, 12-year-old Tamir Rice. By performing this collectively, it also became a challenge to the police, saying in effect, “you don’t dare to shoot, there are too many of us.”

The mass “die-in,” an action appropriated from earlier movements in which protesters mime death as a group, further emphasizes that all are potential targets. Performed death, a visual act, makes each person appear vulnerable, but simultaneously creates a sense of freedom as you rest your body with others in spaces where you never normally are at rest. Both these forms of protest create what I call a “persistent looking,” a repeated return to the place of loss so that it is possible to move past the first shock of violence to an understanding of the systemic violence that brought it about.

By comparison, the pictures of the body of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old drowned Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach, broke through the shield that we all create in what the German philosopher Walter Benjamin called “the optical unconscious.” An outpouring of grief in the West made it seem as if we were seeing refugees die for the first time, although such drownings have been common for decades. The picture of a Turkish policeman carrying his body resonated because of its association (whether conscious or not) with the Christian image known as the pietà, in which the Virgin Mary carries the body of the dead Christ. We looked at Aylan’s body and realized that he had indeed died for our sins.

A few months later, however, Britain voted to leave the European Union, largely because of intense resentment of all immigrants, including refugees. Here, then, is the dilemma. Certain images have the capacity to break through the defenses of our optical unconscious, but precisely because that unconscious is a way of dealing with the intense violence of modern life, it seals over quickly. When these moments occur, change results only if people organize around the general principle that such images convey.

Black Lives Matter has done this. But in the case of Aylan Kurdi, while efforts were made for individual refugees, no general case for immigration and asylum was effectively promoted after his death. Still less did Western media outlets turn to the Kurdish community for understanding.

N.L.: But as far as the outrage that images provoke, sometimes it can be fleeting, and people move on to the next tragedy quickly. Do you think this speaks to the limitations of witnessing from afar and through a screen?

N.M.: Your question speaks to the difference between click-tivism and activism. To click the “angry” icon on Facebook or retweet in outrage can be useful. But it is clearly not enough. There are differences to be noticed within online activism. For example, finding people with whom you might be able to associate and become an activist via a hashtag, like #BlackLivesMatter, leads to the possibility of new communities being created and new ways of acting. This relies on a co-presence between online association and physical assembly. Sometimes this co-presence is simultaneous, as when people watch events on livestream. Other times the digital connection sets the stage for a physical assembly, whether that might be a meeting, a march, a protest, and so on.

Within these activist communities online, people often speak of being connected by love. This love is not romantic love between individuals but the collective bond that Dr. King called “the beloved community.” For his colleague and friend Grace Lee Boggs, the result was what she called “visionary organizing.” Such organizing thinks about how to make a life, not make a living. These exchanges are horizontal, requiring a good deal of time and energy to sustain. But they can make change.

The negative alternative is simply following. Nine million people now follow @realdonaldtrump, and the primary emotion of his supporters is indeed outrage, channeled via the iconic figure of Trump, who even refers to himself in the third person. In the medieval period, an icon was not distinct from the form it depicted, it was equivalent to that person or thing. An icon today, a figure like Trump’s persona, is without content of any kind, taking on the shape and form that the person who believes in it wishes it to be. Whereas the religious icon was given meaning by faith, today’s avatar expresses anger.

These are times for visionary organizing, not outraged reposting.

N.L.: We find ourselves in the moment of the protest vote or the protest candidate — the Sanders and Trump campaigns, populist parties from the right and left gaining ground throughout Europe, and, of course Brexit. What are your thoughts on the way the idea of a “protest” option gets invoked in these sorts of political circumstances?

N.M.: Here I want to distinguish between two figures: the protester and the reactionary (meant literally, not pejoratively). Both respond to events in what political theory sometimes calls the “public square,” the place where the political gets debated and decided that is now coextensive with both media and social media spaces. The philosopher Hannah Arendt further defined this space as what she called “the space of appearance.” Who can and cannot appear in this space and on what terms is both the properly political question and the key to understanding the importance of the visible in globalized societies. What matters is not that there are many new forms of visual materials, interesting though that is to some of us. It is the question of appearance that is literally and metaphorically vital, because when a person deemed black, Palestinian or any number of other designations appears in public, they may be killed.

However, it is becoming apparent that present-day politics cannot easily be configured around the demand for what Judith Butler has called “the right to appear.” Protest is a form of appearance that makes a wrong visible and seeks to have it set right. Often that demand is aimed at authority, whether the government or some other body. In 2003, an estimated 15 million people worldwide protested the predetermined decision to go to war in Iraq. President George W. Bush dismissed them as a “focus group.” As the Chilcot report has made clear, war was already the policy. This was not just a bad decision. It was exemplary of how appearance in the public sphere has lately lost its ability to have political impact.

There have been two notable responses to the breakdown of the space of appearance. Former protesters and the disillusioned have either set out to create a new politics of appearance or they have reacted by looking for groups to blame.

From the Zapatistas to the global Occupy project and today’s Nuit Debout movement in France, the politics of appearance is no longer about submitting a petition to power, but instead organizing so that people can appear to each other. That means suspending the regulation of the space of appearance by norms, above all the norms of racial hierarchy, and then refusing to move on out of that space. I believe that is why Black Lives Matter has acted to disrupt all the major presidential campaigns in 2016. It is seeking to form a new manner of being “political,” a new way to see and be seen in the world.

But the other possibility, the blaming of other groups, is a reaction to a sense of powerlessness. As we have seen in the past, these reactions are not correlated to factual evidence or even specific local experience. The Brexit vote was above all motivated by a hostility to immigration. But those voting on these grounds often live in places with low immigration, just as anti-Semitism in the past did not result from proximity to Jewish people.

“Take back control” in Britain and “Make America great again” are, then, calls for a re-regulation of the space of appearance to exclude certain groups.

When Trump speaks of a wall, his followers understand this to mean both a physical structure (which may or may not actually be constructed) and, more importantly, a conceptual exclusion from participation.

There is no “common ground” between the politics of appearance and those of exclusion. In the United States, as the Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza has noted, “when black people get free, everybody gets free.” Which means that unless black people get free, nobody gets free. Until and unless there is a politics of recognition that might form a new space of appearance that is not structured on exclusion, there will be no liberation.

But the resurgent politics of exclusion sometimes overwhelms our sense of that necessity. We seek expedient solutions and look to established leaders. Brexit showed that the defense of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the psychological “wage” of whiteness, its relative privileges, was more important to the majority population than actual economics. If Hillary Clinton fails to realize that it is no longer “the economy, stupid,” a second reactionary victory might occur.

Talk of tolerance and diversity has failed. The urgent task at hand, especially for people who are not themselves black, is to construct an anti-racist politics that is a common good. As Dr. King long ago realized, such politics can only work in tandem with anti-poverty and antiwar strategies. In the end, it comes down to this: When we see another person, do we see them as another human being, not just equal to us in law, but someone that we can listen to, learn from and fall in love with? Or not?