The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency

The Spectator as Agent: Critical Questions

To theorize these interventions more adequately, then, it is necessary to grapple with an undertheorized feature of citizenship in late modernity: the visual dimension by which citizens consume political events at a distance. The question cannot be conflated with the print culture of bourgeois modernity, where citizens read of movements from places at a geographic remove. Rather, at stake is the medium through which political action is seen via the ubiquitous screen culture of contemporary social practice—whether this be unjustified police violence, bodies massed in the streets, or “shock and awe” military campaigns to be witnessed from the comfort of one’s living room. ¹¹

Perhaps the best-known effort to conceptualize a visual framework of citizenship stems from the work of Hannah Arendt. As she argues, the practice of politics is not reducible to institutions, laws, or treaties. Rather, it is the activity through which citizens appear to one another, through their words and deeds, in a sphere that all work to sustain. In her own terms, the polity “is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.” ¹² This theme of appearance, and differential access to this good, will be treated more fully below. What may be most significant at present is Arendt’s concern for a politicized practice of spectatorship, distilled from Immanuel Kant. For, where Kant is characteristically hostile toward the work of revolution, a late essay holds that the French Revolution exemplifies the moral progress of humankind, so long as one approaches it from the perspective of the onlooker. It is the distant observer who reveals the true moral significance of this event, as she or he is not waylaid by immediate interests in the actions at stake. ¹³ To push the implications further, this means that seeing is not simply the register of actions that happen elsewhere (according to the familiar dichotomy of action and spectatorship); rather, it too might be a kind of political practice. ¹⁴

What distinguishes an important strain of contemporary literature is a willingness to press this insight beyond the extraordinary situations of war or revolution, and instead into the everyday work of citizenship. Jeffrey Green, for instance, has challenged the discursive tendencies of democratic theory in order to privilege the spectator as a model of citizenship appropriate to late modernity. For where the Aristotelian model hinges upon the citizen who engages in the give-and-take of civic debate, contemporary conditions of geographic dispersion and institutional specialization mean that the ekklesia or the “town hall meeting” no longer reflect the root-structure of citizenship. And it is likewise difficult to endorse the coffee-house or the salon as the site of the bourgeois public sphere. ¹⁵ Instead, politics is increasingly engaged at a distance. As Green puts this point, “most citizens most of the time are not decision makers, relating to politics with their voices, but spectators who relate to politics with their eyes.” ¹⁶ The bite of this refashioning, however, does not simply hinge upon a more phenomenologically accurate account of how large-scale politics operates for citizens located far from the halls of power. Nor does it refuse engagement in favor of what Alan Keenan terms “the spectator-citizen”: that is, the one who cynically consumes the messages and images broadcast by cultural and political elites. ¹⁷ Rather, this ocular turn suggests possibilities for agency that are obscured by a hyper-emphasis on linguistic exchange. In Green’s terms, it is the eyes of the people that mandate accountability for those who act in the public trust. The public-as-witness notes the infidelities, slips of the tongue, and broken promises of those who present themselves as the stewards of the public interest. And likewise, the watching public marks when officials present inconsistencies to the different audiences they address, when they exceed the limits of their office, or when they act contrary to their promises. No matter the attention dedicated to planning the spectacles of elite actors (the color of the ties, the military guards and fanfares, the musical cues that open and close these affairs), the eyes of the people mean that such plans are persistently disrupted. Mistakes are made, unexpected questions are raised, and the spectacle of politics operates in excess of elite efforts to master its meaning.

This lead has been pushed further by a body of literature that stresses the spectator as a model of global citizenship—one that is persistently exposed to images of distant suffering or violence, and is therefore forced to respond to these violations broadcast to their screens. As Luc Boltanski has argued, the stakes are significant for liberal-democratic values. Will this agent abide in the position of “mere spectatorship,” to take in these spectacles of suffering along with social media entreaties, the latest television shows, photographs of their meals, or online shopping? ¹⁸ Or will this viewer develop the forms of moral responsiveness necessary to engage in reparative actions? Accordingly, Boltanski proposes that the task of engaged, global citizenship is for the subject to develop moral sentiments sufficiently broad to bring these distant, anonymous sufferers within the range of its moral sympathies—and ultimately, to engage in forms of public speech that would contest these material dynamics of violence. ¹⁹

Although the foregoing represents two disparate approaches in the recent literature, both rest upon a shared premise that bears careful scrutiny: to think the visual axis of politics is to address an agency that is distinct to the spectator. The political questions hinge upon the spectator’s capacity to surveil those in power and maintain their accountability, despite their advantages of office, wealth or class. Or, agentic possibilities stem from the spectator’s ability to extend the bonds of moral commonality toward those populations that appear in images of suffering and misery, no matter their geographic distance. Though there are some obvious differences in starting points, both positions converge upon a shared insistence: emancipatory work is performed by the one who views—the one who takes in these appearances and uses their seeing in order to perform a kind of action. To see is not simply to register or receive ideological content broadcast from elite channels (as in a well-known Situationist model of “the spectacle” ²⁰ ); it is rather to do something.

Such efforts have done salutary work to complicate a standard association of spectatorship with passivity, or the related opposition of the citizen and the spectator—where the former participates in shared practices of governance and the latter “simply watches” social practice unfold in a detached fashion. In symptomatic terms, Benjamin Barber observes: “in states defined by watching rather than doing . . . citizens, like spectators everywhere, may find themselves falling asleep.” ²¹ And yet, critics have charged that the cited approaches nevertheless possess a significant liability that undermines their democratic contributions. More specifically, these appeals to a politics of spectatorship rest upon a structural asymmetry between viewer and sufferer. ²² The work of repair stems from the good will of the viewer and offers a discretionary response, based within their moral sensibilities or choices. This is an extension of goods from the privileged, situated in places of affluence and safety, to the less fortunate. In a word, it is not a matter of justice, negotiated by parties of comparable autonomy, but rather an act of compassion that leaves intact the root structures of hierarchy, privilege and power. ²³ What is lacking from this approach is a moment where the dispossessed demand or enact transformations of these conditions through their own agency—and hold the privileged to account on terms that the latter have not freely chosen. In order to address these concerns more fully, the essay will return to the spectacles of the body with which it began, in order to ask some different questions: most broadly, do these insurgent gestures change the familiar terms of thinking democratic agency? Is there anything that their embodied nature adds to the constellation of themes raised thus far, and if so, what?

Bodies That Act; Bodies That Speak

To engage such questions, the remainder of the essay will invest in a more patient phenomenology of how this bodily theatre operates and enters into the resources of civil society. One place to begin is with some recent amendments to the classic language of political spectacle. In short form, the spectacular terrain of politics is not simply a tool by which elite actors guide a passive citizen-audience, but is rather a field of contestation and instability. As Douglas Kellner comments, “it is preferable to perceive a plurality and heterogeneity of contending spectacles in the contemporary moment and to see spectacle itself as a contested terrain.” ²⁴ Just as spectacle is designed to guide opinion and mobilize feeling, so too can it be mocked or restaged in parodic fashion by its recipients (e.g., détournement, ad-busting, etc.). Just as the visual regime of politics is used by the state, so too is it taken up by the marginal and dispossessed to broadcast competing images and narratives—a counter-spectacle that may, of course, yield its own violence and terror. And yet, the concerns of the essay require more than a recognition of the multiple agents at work in the image-world of politics; rather, they demand attention to how these acts of bodily theater might expand dominant understandings of democratic agency.

To that end, it will be helpful to begin with Judith Butler’s reflections on the plaza/occupy movements, where she argues for an important link between the politics at stake and the bodies that occupied these spaces. As these encampments sprouted in city after city, they engaged the public eye and raised a set of nagging questions: What are they doing? What do they want? Why won’t they tell us? From the perspective of a representational democracy, it would have been easy to conclude that the massing of bodies was necessary to represent, in visual form, the strength of a shared position. Or, from the perspective of a direct-action politics, there is a significant tradition of using the body to block the regular operations of the body politic. In the well-known words of Bayard Rustin, “Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.” ²⁵ On this account, the bodily encampment is a classic “weapon of the weak.” It is the means available to those who do not have access to the tools or resources of elite parties, and its utility rests in the capacity to gum up the regular workings of economic and social life. Because the body occupies space, because it has a material presence, it can be used to obstruct the movements of commerce and the flows of persons that define the everyday life of the community. Here, it is tempting to think of those activists who connect their limbs to form “living barriers” across bridges or roadways; or, likewise, protesters who shackle themselves to the gates of nuclear plants or construction machinery, so as to bring these industries to a temporary halt. In such cases, the body is used as an encumbrance to bring about a breakdown of the everyday, and the kind of reflection that typically occurs only in moments of perceived social crisis.

If this reading reflects one important feature of these bodily performances, it does not do justice to how they intervene within the image world that structures the democratic imaginary. In her account of the occupy movement, Butler proposes that these unsettling spectacles do at least two significant things. Minimally, these agents “congregate . . . move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space.” ²⁶ And by doing so, such movements represent a “break into the sphere of appearance” by those situated outside the recognized set of political actors. It was not simply the claims these agents shouted—regarding economic inequality, corporate influence, campaign funding, neoliberal policies, etc.—or the placards they carried that mattered. Nor was it even the practice in these spaces (if temporary and fleeting) of a radically democratic decision-making process. Rather, by inhabiting the city in unfamiliar ways—by refusing the traditional grammar of a social movement with a leader, a mouthpiece, and a dedicated program—they offered an unsettling presence for which space must be made in the familiar distribution of social roles, actors and alliances. More broadly, such a “break into appearance” has played an important role in recent efforts to theorize democratic agency. On a line of argument associated with Jacques Rancière, these spectacular acts are thought to disrupt the sensory regime according to which some groups are seen as full members of the polity (and thus as possessing the full speech of citizenship) while others occupy a diminished civic status (they speak only “noise” that can be tuned out, dismissed or ignored). From this vantage point, the deepest work of political agency is not necessarily to present a specific, delimited claim that would give rise to policy outcomes; rather, it is to destabilize the economies of appearance according to which some are viewed as legitimate claimants to social goods and others are not. ²⁷ These insurgent figures might be the proletarianized discards of the neoliberal state; they might be undocumented immigrants who risk deportation to appear on the public stage; or they might be AIDS activists who reframe the person-with-AIDS as an agent who challenges public health protocols, rather than an object to be ministered in the depoliticized space of the home or the clinic.

Many efforts to theorize these disruptive arts of appearance root themselves in the mass movements that have become a staple of direct-action politics—where bodies pour into the plazas and the streets, overspilling the designated areas for polite protest and demonstrating the excess of the demos over administrative efforts to contain or imagine them. ²⁸ Jodi Dean presses the significance of the mass further, to propose that the experience of the gathering undoes the depoliticizing individualism of late capitalism to permit new possibilities for organization and counter-power. ²⁹ And yet, I will pursue the thread in a different direction. For present purposes, it is not the sheer numbers of bodies that must be unpacked or the communicational technologies that permit their decentered organization. Rather, to return to the questions introduced at the outset, it is necessary to ask how these bodies do something in the spectacle they present, how they act upon those who witness them, and how this idiom has increasingly become a tactic for re-structuring civil society.

These implications will come clearer by attending more closely to the cases of bodily theatre that open the essay. As hinted at the outset, there is an easy way to theorize these interventions within a dialogical framework: what these spectacles represent is a way to amplify the claims raised by the unruly counter-publics of civil society. A patient engagement with these gestures, however, reveals a more complex intersection with the standing concerns of democratic theory. When these agents present their bodies in spectacles of torment—or when they offer themselves up for state violence that will be captured and transmitted to untold others – such acts do something more than add a visual rhetoric to standard acts of political claiming. As Susan Leigh Foster argues, the discursive reduction misses how the body itself is “an articulate signifying agent” that might “speak” in ways irreducible to the discourse that circulates around it. ³⁰ To revisit the case of the “occupy” movement, it was their embodied habitation of these spaces that made a certain kind of claim: that there is a right to the city, so as to counteract ongoing histories of spatial enclosure. Even when areas are blocked by fences, patrolled by guards or made uninhabitable by “defensive architecture,” these bodies reclaimed them for the common (if in temporary and provisional fashion). In Butler’s terms, “they lay claim to a certain space as a public space.” ³¹ More specifically, it is through the presence of these bodies that such spaces shed the meaning acquired through the privatized restructuring of the city: as areas that fill and empty according to the mandates of corporate sponsorship, private ownership, and private forces of security. Instead, these spaces are repurposed to support common life, to bear common needs, to house forums through which these needs could be democratically negotiated, to inaugurate communities that do not obey the imperatives of capital accumulation. And by inhabiting these locations, occupation enacts a claim: these are spaces that belong to the people, as one of the last vestiges of democratic encounter in an increasingly “gated” social landscape. They have not been “occupied” in the sense of a colonization so much as they have been re-opened to the movements and encounters of the demos.

Such a reading can be pressed beyond the specific case of the “occupy” movement. Take the tactic of the “die in,” long associated with the radical work of the ACT-UP organization and recently revived by the activists of the Black Lives Matter movement. These are orchestrated spectacles of death that mimic the violence exerted by social institutions. When these agents occupy public settings to stage the postures of death, the intervention offers rich provocations for thought. Minimally, one could understand these gestures as a proposition like the following:

This (death) is what results from policies of institutional neglect—these bodies that you can no longer ignore or understand in terms of abstract numbers. Instead, you can see them in their materiality, their heft, and their solidity. Stronger yet, you must see them here before you in their material stillness. If you want them gone, you must move them yourselves. You must get your hands dirty; you must feel the flesh that you have abandoned and ignored and left for others to tend and clean and bury.

In this sense, the die-in does something more than attract attention to conventional acts of political discourse; rather, it forces the onlooker to grapple with the materiality of power, violence and abandonment. More specifically, it displaces public deliberation away from the abstract register of legal “persons” or epidemiological statistics, so as to confront the singular body as the target of power. ³² It forces attention to flesh as the site of the reviled virus or as what is broken and violated by police weapons. And this work is redoubled by a related tactic: to mark those bodies dragged off by security forces with the chalk outline familiar from the visual culture of policing. In doing so, the die-in renders material the absences generated by institutional violence—absences that often go unmarked and unmourned in official accounts of loss and social memory. ³³ This is a claim of a sort, but one that could not be articulated outside of its materiality, now expanded to stage the materiality of absence. One way to understand the praxical work of these gestures, then, is to see how they constitute a provocation that must be conveyed through the medium of embodiment. It is essential that these bodies occupy space, that they are handled, that they impinge on the space of others, that they block the regular use of these spaces, that they must be moved and touched and smelled, rather than situated at the distance of discursive abstraction.

Minimally, then, such acts of bodily theatre reveal how the activity of raising political claims is not reducible to the production of discourse. ³⁴ It is not only that these agents present a claim through their physical acts or presence; rather, these bodies may “speak” more effectively than words when authoritative economies of civic speech foreclose or limit certain kinds of political challenges. ³⁵ To recall, the project of the “occupiers” stemmed from an insistence that a civic vocabulary shaped according to neoliberal commitments could not sustain claims for meaningfully public space or common goods—claims that could more effectively be made by enacting a life in common in these spaces. And such a labor reflects how the body has long done important work for groups whose histories and experiences find little purchase within civic vocabularies shaped by hegemonic populations. Sam Durrant argues, for instance, that the mourning of black sociality can be thought along similar lines. It is in the body that black histories of dispossession have been preserved and known, even if they cannot be honored within official (white) narratives of nationhood, guilt, violence, and repair. As he notes, such mourning offers “a memory of the violence inflicted on the racially marked body, that is also a bodily memory, a memory that takes on a bodily form precisely because it exceeds both the individual’s and the community’s capacity for verbalization and mourning.” ³⁶ As the foregoing highlights, however, the political work of the body can be put in more agonistically rich terms. It is not just that the body represents a repository for contents that find no place in official social narratives; rather, these acts of political theatre allow agents to intervene within the public sphere even when accepted civic languages are not fully available to them. In doing so, the stakes reverberate beyond theories of political communication, so as to expand possibilities for critical citizenship.

On Claiming and Being-Claimed

To make this case, it is necessary to pursue further the challenge these bodily interventions pose for a discursive approach to politics. What these unruly bodies reveal is a style of claiming that cannot be reduced to linguistic interchange—and, more strongly, might lodge challenges that go unsupported by current economies of civic discourse. And yet, to stop here would leave significant issues unaddressed. What remains to be interrogated is the “pragmatic” register, by which these gestures attempt to destabilize the space of citizenship. Here, a shift in perspective will be helpful. For where sympathetic accounts often concentrate on a) what can be “said” through the body, or b) that the body can articulate normative contents, this emphasis can too often elide a question of crucial importance for political agency: how these interventions position (or re-position) the respective poles of producer and recipient, once the communicative act is theorized as a social relation, rather than a thinly cognitivist transmission of contents.

To pose this question highlights an important ambiguity within recent debates. For there are at least two distinct registers contained within the rhetoric of the claim. On the one hand, a claim means a position or challenge raised by one party and presented to others, such that the recipients might come to see and think anew about shared institutions and norms. The claim, in this sense, is a proposition with cognitive and normative content that can be evaluated in terms of its validity (e.g., “a social safety net is the hallmark of a decent society”; “a free society requires a free market”; “immigration is a contribution/threat to national identity”). Such a proposition spurs or continues or changes the direction of a conversation within the forums of civil society, and it requires further discussion in order to restore consensus or arrive at one anew. On the other hand, this language of “claiming” reflects an accusative register of democratic agency: to encounter these bodies that undo themselves in unsettling, public ways is to be claimed—that is, to be addressed in such a way that one cannot simply tune it out or ignore it until a better time. There is a robust tradition of images that have disturbed and haunted their recipients in such a way as to spur ameliorative action. They include “the burning monk” cited at the outset, the infamous “falling man” photograph that was quickly stricken from the publication record surrounding the attacks of 9/11, and the face of Neda Agha-Soltan, killed before the camera by Iranian security forces. Each case suggests the visceral quality of the image to unsettle the self-possession of the recipient and to demand reflection upon the histories, agents and tactics of violence that have generated this body in suffering or distress.

The terms of the formulation are instructive: to be claimed is to be troubled by these visions (e.g., the body burned by napalm, the body set upon by police dogs, the body that sews shut its orifices) in a way that one has not fully chosen. To encounter these images is to face the authority of a provocation that demands something in response; it is to know that one must answer in some way in order to meet the strong vocation of democratic citizenship. This is the element of the image that Roland Barthes terms the “punctum”—“that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” ³⁷ Amidst the formal harmony or composition of the image, it is the detail that seizes the viewer, and will not permit her or him to have done with it. In a different idiom, Davide Panagia suggests that “the force of an appearance and its presentation upon us does not require or expect a justification . . . at best, my response can be one of admission.” ³⁸ And where astute theorists of visual culture have recognized that the body undergoing violence might possess a particular capacity to capture the attention of the onlooker, they have too seldom pursued how the dispossessed have strategically used these sorts of spectacles in order to spur a response to social dynamics of dispossession, abandonment and violence. ³⁹

It is now possible to offer some more pointed insights into what these bodily strategies contribute to the contested work of citizenship. If these theatrical means are routinely taken up and used to throw into question accepted narratives, indict the powers-that-be, or highlight the violence of everyday institutions, then they pose a significant challenge to the model of the sovereign citizen-spectator: the one who takes in these visions and exercises agency through their discretionary acts of compassion or sympathy. What is left unasked by such an approach is a question that is crucial for an emancipatory politics: how marginal groups and agents use these arts of the body to implicate those onlookers who have, to this point, bracketed their claims, dismissed them, or failed to connect their challenges to authoritative civic values (values that have, to this point, been extended in partial, exclusionary forms). Such displays expose how the state protects some, while stunting or threatening others; they render visceral the violence exerted by everyday institutions; they highlight the common fleshliness of both actor and spectator, while throwing into relief how this flesh is unevenly exposed to force, violence or violation. To tweak a formulation from Sharon Krause, it is not just that “our minds are changed when our hearts are engaged”—but also when the eyes are seized and the imagination troubled. ⁴⁰

Such insights offer a more robust contribution to a democratic politics than the pluralist revision engaged above. It is not enough to open the familiar terrain of “the spectacle” to new agents and actors who participate within a social economy of images. The subject of late capitalism, after all, already exists in a surfeit of images, information, and words within a media-saturated public sphere. The question raised by these interventions concerns, instead, an alternate idiom for claiming and what this idiom might do to reposition actor and recipient within the visual field of citizenship. How, in terms suggested by Bargu, do these acts interpellate the viewer into responding in ways that are not fully chosen by the spectator, or based within their charity, pity or generosity? ⁴¹ To pursue this Althusserian language, how is the witness “hailed” to inhabit a position in which the familiar contours of obligation and power are unsettled or rendered unfamiliar? How do these provocations bring into being new or different publics in the contested space of civil society? By asking these questions, the essay aims to challenge any reduction of democratic agency to the spectator’s willingness to extend the bonds of moral solidarity to the marginal or abject. And it likewise seeks to pressure longstanding deliberative commitments to reciprocity as a core ideal for democratic exchange. ⁴² Instead, the argument highlights how these acts of bodily exposure might possess a unique semantic reserve within the visual resources for a democratic politics. Against the abstractive, distancing tendencies of language, these images turn upon the singularity of this violation, attaching to this body. Such spectacles render inescapable what Adriana Cavarero has termed the vulnus: the fundamental injurability of the flesh, the singular site in which each human subject inhabits the world. ⁴³ They offer an undoing, breaking or bruising that opens a somatic commonality between viewer and sufferer, even when linked by the dematerialized medium of the image. And ultimately, what undergirds the pragmatic force of these interventions is not simply their visceral nature, but rather how they restage the authority of contents bracketed by the universalist commitments of a liberal moral grammar—itself predicated upon rights that hold at the abstract level of “the human” or “the citizen.” More specifically, this body politics enacts and memorializes a normativity within flesh that is singular in its suffering, and yet, in that singularity, places a demand upon those who witness. ⁴⁴

At this point, some qualifications are necessary. It would, after all, be easy to drift to the opposing extreme and describe these bodily interventions as the prime mover within the visual sphere of politics—a position that would be just as unsustainable as limiting agency to discursive exchange or the vision of the spectator. To take this step would (a) overburden these interventions with some promethean capacity to mobilize or “awaken” the spectator according to the classic fantasy of avant-garde art and (b) undersell the patient, gritty work (e.g., organization, preparation, rehearsal, negotiation, institutionalization, etc.) that has long characterized a material politics of justice. Likewise, from an Arendtian perspective, any such one-sided reading cannot be sustained in light of the structural features of the public sphere. If the polity is, by definition, shared, then the meaning of one’s acts can never be mastered once they enter into the public—which is dependent upon the varying perspectives of those who witness and respond in ways that cannot be predicted or controlled. ⁴⁵ What was intended as an act of liberation might instead be received as a simple crime. What might have originally seemed a minor gesture of insubordination might be taken up and magnified by innumerable others. Even the most spectacular act of self-sacrifice might go unnoticed or pass into obscurity. In brute terms, these interventions are subject to the same indeterminacy as any other speech act: they might misfire, they might be introduced in a context that undermines their efficacy, and they might fail the felicity conditions necessary to take a social presence. And, to follow the lead of Gillian Rose, even when such images grab and trouble the viewer, they might “attract us, engage us, compel us to look, but to no particular end. . . . We don’t know what to do once we’ve seen them, apart from feel something.” ⁴⁶

To give substance to these conditions, it is useful to attend to the technologies of transmission, circulation and distribution through which these images find social presence. On the one hand, advances in recording technologies have made it possible for everyday citizens to record events, disseminate footage and promote narratives to complicate official accounts of nationhood or belonging. And yet, as a variety of media theorists have argued, what is often presented as an unvarnished access to the real nonetheless rests upon a careful work of selection and editing—in what is shown, how it is shown, and what is (just as importantly) not shown. ⁴⁷ What is significant here is not simply a familiar point from the politics of media: that the spectator never has an unmediated access to distant events. Rather, these apparatuses of distribution, selection, and commentary can significantly inflect the politics of positioning detailed to this point. For a helpful example, consider a figure that has haunted the article: the spectacle of the body within the civil rights movement of the United States. It would be difficult to overstate the historical importance of these images or the effect they had upon public sentiment and discourse. And yet, nuanced critics have detailed how this economy of images worked along racialized lines, with implications for how they entered social conversations. Where black newspapers often highlighted the agency of black protesters—captured in moments of anger, insubordination or refusal—white newspapers systematically displayed images of passivity, docility and suffering at the hands of white agents. As Martin Berger helpfully argues, this curatorial work significantly affected the “location” of reparative agency: “by placing blacks in the timeworn positions of victim and supplicant, the photographs presented story lines that allowed magnanimous and sympathetic whites to imagine themselves bestowing rights on blacks, given that the dignified and suffering blacks of the photographic record appeared in no position to take anything from white America.” ⁴⁸ There is much to be said about how these representational strategies reflected significant anxieties over race, power and nationhood. Even this brief engagement, however, demonstrates that it is necessary to avoid a naïve realism of the image that carries its own meaning and guarantees its own effects. Where these spectacles of the body are often presented as an immediate “truth” from the street, their reception is nevertheless shaped by curators of the social image world. Or, in broader terms: if this politics of the body is rooted within what is most intimate to the actor, she or he cannot assert full, authorial mastery over what the gestures will come to mean.

Rather than drift into such abstractions, then, the task of the essay has been to offer two more specific complications for prominent approaches to democratic agency. To take seriously these strategies of bodily theatre reveals their excess over standard accounts of democratic politics. Minimally, dominant schools of democratic theory must be expanded in a more richly sensuous direction if they are to recognize the full range of ways that claims are raised and circulate in civil society—and how groups and agents forge means to “speak” when public economies of speech (or who counts as a speaker) are not fully available to all. If dynamics of closure define the everyday languages of citizenship, then an alternate medium for claiming might be found in a domain that is routinely undertheorized within the literature: the visual domain by which citizens appear in public and, in this appearance, unsettle the conversations of civil society. Such interventions do not simply add new contents to public conversations; further yet, they expose the limits, gaps and silences built into existing political languages. In a broader sense, however, the essay has addressed a kind of agency that stems from a different “body politic” than is customary. This is the body that is the site of agency rather than the mystical body of the sovereign or the object of protections enforced by the state. But where the tradition of democratic theory privileges the strong body that does or builds or fights—and a recent strain of literature has stressed the body that feels—the foregoing reveals an agency in bodies that are undone. Or, rather, these are bodies that do something in their undoing that is captured and seen and thus enters the image world of the democratic imaginary. At stake is not just a fuller account of agency in the media age but one that is more sensitive to democratic energies. These forms of bodily theatre do more than speak in ways irreducible to discursive translation; rather, they implicate those who watch at a distance. Such claims demand a response that cannot be reduced to the empathy, charity or compassion of the privileged. And by so doing, they disrupt the existing co-ordinates of citizenship and power.