The Time of Revolt. Donatella Di Cesare
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Название: The Time of Revolt

Автор: Donatella Di Cesare

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

Серия:

isbn: 9781509548408

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2021.

      2  2 Even Foucault tended towards such a view. See Michel Foucault, ‘Omnes et singulatim: Towards a Criticism of “Political Reason” [1979]’, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3. New York: New Press, 2000, pp. 298–325.

      3  3 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Selected Writings, Vol. I: 1913–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 236–52.

      The highly fragmentary character of these revolts is one of their most striking features; it seems difficult even to get an overview of them. While there is no doubt as to their global reach, can we be similarly sure that they are all expressions of the one same phenomenon? Wouldn’t it be a bit of an exaggeration to use the same label for such disparate situations? Not least when we consider that, unlike the uprisings of the past, it is not easy to detect any shared aspiration in these revolts. If the insurgents of 1848 set their sights on liberty and the republic, if the revolutionaries of 1917 were guided by the twentieth-century ideal of communism, and if those who took to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s thought that another world was within reach, what unites the revolts of the twenty-first century?

      One could emphasize the dissimilarities between these revolts and their discordant means of action and objectives. Some are episodic, others recurrent; some timidly raise their heads, whereas others are openly subversive. But to particularize the revolts, refusing to consider them as articulations of a global movement, amounts to taking the defence of the status quo at face value. It’s as if everything was fine – with just a few marginal problems springing up here and there.

      Anyone who wants to ascertain the common traits of the contemporary constellation of revolts, without losing sight of their local tendencies, has to accept a twofold challenge. The first lies in seeking out, if not their common thread, at least the string underlying them, bound together by the fact that so many fibres wrap around each other and form a pattern. The second demands attention to the kinetics of revolution, in which revolt occupies an important place but, equally, an enigmatic one.4

      If the news paints revolt in obfuscated, sinister colours – whipping up public disdain and fostering interpretative amnesia – this is because revolt extends beyond the logic of institutional politics. To be on the ‘outside’ is not to be politically irrelevant; this is precisely where revolt’s potential force resides, as it attempts to break into public space in order to challenge political governance on its own ground. It should come as no surprise that the version portrayed by the media and institutions relegates revolt to the sidelines, lessens its scope, scrubs it off the agenda and reduces it to nothing more than a spectre. Revolt thus appears as a disturbing shadow which haunts the well-surveilled borders of official current affairs.

      For this reason, we need to change our perspective and look at revolt not from the inside – that is, from a stance within the state-centric order – but, rather, from the ‘outside’ in which it situates itself. Revolt is not a negligible phenomenon, nor is it the residue of the archaic, chaotic, turbulent past that linear progress is supposed to have refined and transcended. It is not anachronistic but anachronic, for it is the result of a different experience of time.

      Connected to these questions is the relationship between revolt and politics. Contemporary revolt is generally considered pre-political, if not proto-political, insofar as – partly out of immaturity and partly out of a sort of verbal infantilism – it is unable to formulate authentic demands and hence organize itself into a system of proposals. This would imply that it is unpolitical, if we use this term to refer to its difficulties in entering the institutional political space. But, viewed from the opposite angle, revolt might better be described as hyper-political.