Abstract
How are we to make sense of the protest politics that currently spans both the globe and political orientation today? When asked by Çiğdem Çidam, this question has a twofold meaning, as In the Street interrogates the discourses that predominate interpretations of protest and the role of the intellectual in interpreting them. In doing so, Çidam reveals the tenacity of Rousseauian presumptions that mean some of the most famous advocates of protest politics—Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Rancière—still truncate the nature and significance of protest in their accounts.
Çidam reveals a Rousseau who, for all his grounding of a modern democratic theory, remains pointedly antidemocratic when it comes to assembling in public. Rousseau’s delimitation and careful orchestration of opportunities for spontaneous assembly make this clear, as does his account of them as both immediate and unified in their expression of popular will. For Çidam, to conceive of public assembly as Rousseau does fundamentally confuses the spontaneity of protests with lack of mediation, reducing the complexity and dynamism of the collective gathered, activity therein, and ultimate impact to a single note. Within such a reading, the interpreter hunts for what, to Çidam, is simply not present: a singular or unified set of group demands or identity, and a simple, binaric answer to the question of political efficacy based on institutional impacts beyond the event. And when these simple metrics are not forthcoming, intellectuals often conclude that such protests have failed and thus trivialize what occurs within, and because of, protest.
Scholars like Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière challenge Rousseau’s estimation of spontaneous assembly. And yet Çidam rigorously demonstrates that even in these valorizing reconfigurations of protest, core tenets of Rousseau’s account of protest persist. Specifically, though each challenges a key dimension of this position, they all continue to confuse spontaneity with immediacy, wherein the protesting community is reduced to a single, unified expression of political will. With an almost sculptural quality, Çidam traces an as-yet-unacknowledged through-line from Negri to Habermas to Rancière, each unpicking a key Rousseauian claim persisting in the critique of the prior and yet letting others remain.
For Negri, the people as multitude rather than unity of identity and interests in protest is not a weakness, and the political is not merely government or regime but rather a moment enacted. And yet the transience of these insurgent moments remains a failing for Negri as it was for Rousseau, one that must result in a newly organized political community to be successful and, by extension, requires the intellectual to harness this revolutionary energy to produce it. For Habermas, this transience is not a failing but a strength, protecting as it does against centralization, hierarchies, and professionalization within democratic social movements. And yet, to stave off concerns he shares with Rousseau regarding the unpredictability of such movements, he holds they should be accountable constitutional principles and thus led by intellectuals knowledgeable of them. For Rancière, unpredictability is not a fault like it is for Habermas, as it is what enables what is unperceived to stage their “forced-entry into the world of meaning and visibility” (qtd. 3), and this highly theatrical act of rupture and reworking rather than its institutionalization is the enactment of politics. And yet, while acknowledging the complex, unfolding, and mediated nature of protest, Rancière stops short of exploring specific protests in such terms, perhaps because these dynamics necessarily share ground with the organization and bonds that characterize a police order.
Çidam illustrates how this longer and often latent Rousseauian legacy within Negri, Habermas, and Rancière results in “the limiting and limited nature” (190) of debates of democratic action that still prevail in both academic and mainstream interpretations of protest. Construing such moments “as the unmediated expressions of people’s will and/or instantaneous popular eruptions, they reduce spontaneity to immediacy and, in doing so, lose sight of the rich, creative, and varied practices of political actors who manage to create those events against all odds” (4).
For Çidam, protest is itself a site of mediated politics, where diverse actors congregate for various reasons and thus participate in ongoing processes of organization, contestation, and negotiation—what Çidam calls “the working existence of democracy” (185). In an unlikely yet generative turn, Çidam reads Aristotle as agonist to find in “political friendship” a depiction of this complexity of forging relations across difference and disagreement and creating a commons however fleeting. Contra Rousseau and those inheriting his frames, Aristotle did not presume this action “in the street” was unmediated and thus of single, unified meaning, claim, act, or effect, and these intermediating practices through which diverse groups relate and negotiate those differences need not become reconciled nor be permanent in order to be politically significant.
In what is perhaps the most compelling of its chapters, Çidam illustrates this reading of protest and what it opens to our analysis via the case of the Gezi Park protests. Putting aside reductive questions regarding its success or failure, Çidam asks instead what intermediating practices enabled such diverse actors—feminists and football fans, homeless youth and residents, LGBTQ activists and anticapitalist Muslims, far left political parties and anarchists—to sustain a “commons” that occupied Gezi Park for two weeks in the face of police suppression. She explores how the differences within this fleeting community meant complementarity as well as conflict and redress—football fans extended expertise in responding to tear gas and doctors cared for injured protesters, but feminists and LGBTQ activists ran workshops to generate alternatives to sexist and homophobic slogans and chants. She highlights how the protesters contended with nonrecognition and misinterpretation by the media. She investigates how the protests produce impacts far more diffuse and multiform than institutional or legal changes: from shaking Erdoğan’s sense of invulnerability to developing new political habits and imaginaries for those who experienced “a way of living without . . . any form of tyranny” (190), the protests made visible and sensible “the possibility of an alternative world” (184). And she explores how, because of how such direct actions change the conditions of possibility for future resistance, the protests did not “erupt” from nowhere but from “political practices, or habits, of various actors in struggles preceding the Gezi protests . . . that made it possible for thousands of protesters in Gezi to act . . . in such a swift and seamless manner” (165).
Çidam offers a beautiful, thorough, original, and important cartography of how Rousseauian inheritance wends its way even through some of those who would seem to hold protest close, and how this inheritance trivializes the complexity and significance of democratic action within social movements today. Against deeply held understandings of the nature and importance of a politics of representation, Çidam persuasively argues that constituent power need not be translated into either intellectual interpretation or institutional form to be meaningful or successful. Its messiness and impurity, its transience, its unpredictability—none of these things negates the instantiations of political action within such events, or their impacts beyond the event. By changing the terms of analysis of protest in these ways, Çidam’s work speaks to praxis as much as theory. It challenges theorists to interrogate the long-held presumption of our role as privileged interpreters, as if our reading from a distanced vantage is both necessary and more comprehensive than those who are acting on the ground. It challenges the interpretive frames that predominate in such analysis, calling for an end to the hunt for simple, unified stories of group identity, claim, or impact. And in raising new and revitalizing questions for making sense of the politics of protest, this work also contributes to the praxis of protest, with implications for how we might enhance and hold accountable the unfolding relations and negotiations therein.
The significance of Çidam’s intervention crystallized as protests “erupted” (“as if . . . out of nowhere” [165]) across Aotearoa New Zealand in early 2022 to protest the various COVID-19-related mandates. Here in the nation’s capital, inspired by the truckers’ protests in Canada, hundreds of people occupied the lawns facing Parliament for more than three weeks. Çidam’s refreshing frames highlighted the absurdity of overly binaric narratives apparent in the media’s scramble to cover unfolding events—protesters “are or are not” coordinated, “can or cannot” make claims, “do or do not” have lasting impacts—and the absurdity of privileging academic voices over and above the community that was occupying the lawns in these accounts. They highlighted how these two habits of conventional interpretation, as Çidam argues, are connected. Çidam’s work prompted me to urge journalists to take their questions instead down to the lawn and to tarry far more than I may have prior with the radically diverse, internally conflictual, and yet “communing” multitude over these weeks.
Here, as Çidam described Gezi Park, was a broad spectrum of political ideologies: libertarians and human rights advocates, white nationalists and Indigenous sovereignty activists, alternative health communities and conspiracy theorists. Coming together did not absorb these differences, either, as messages and atmospheres of “peace, love, unity” shared space with calls to “hang ’em high,” swastikas, and harassment of mask wearers walking by. And yet protesters demonstrated remarkable coordination and collective action, from the rapid digging of trenches in response to torrential rain, to the organization of collective food, a school and medical tent, to the battlefield-like coordination to throw bricks at encroaching police and light fires in the final retreat. Internal differences remained even in these last clashes, when smoke and raging bodies cleared to reveal a few Māori elders still sitting peacefully in their camping chairs.
Çidam’s analysis made undeniable that politics—of organization, contestation, and continual (re)negotiation—were at work within this protest. It raised an eyebrow at efforts to determine univocally either what the protesters wanted or whether it succeeded. Rather, Çidam presented salient new questions to make sense of this politics: How did these otherwise often radically opposed communities form and sustain relationships, make collective decisions, and maintain a community? And—an altogether new metric for analyzing such movements—in this case where alt-right and white supremacists were in the crowds, how did protesters contend with and hold accountable those internal differences that threaten others? Finally, how did these acts affect future terms and habits for subjectivity, communication, and enactment for these and other political actors? But just as importantly, Çidam tempers the intellectual’s impulse to speak with authority on these events—indeed, she reveals how the depiction of protest’s internal diversity, transience, and unpredictability as weakness may be linked to the intellectual desire to serve as full and final interpreter, for these features make such a vantage impossible. Çidam asks us, instead, to have a deeper faith in and commitment to praxis as lived theory, where actors on the ground organize and articulate for themselves, with these rhizomatic acts never fully traceable and yet no less significant.
Given its theorization of the democratic action within social movements, In the Street speaks to a broader scholarship that is not engaged in this book, but for which it already overlaps and will have a ready audience. Most relevant to this study is the social movements literature that theorizes protest as the enactment of both strategic and prefigurative forms of political action, creating “temporary autonomous zones” within these disruptive acts and changing social imaginaries as a result (for example, Chris Dixon or Mark and Paul Engler). Also connected, if only implicitly, is the current scholarship on protest’s politics of reception (such as José Medina, Deva Woodly, or Cristina Beltrán) that explores these dynamics in their complexity. Finally, this project connects with theorizations of horizontal practices of both individuation and “communing” across difference within popular assembly (such as Gilbert Simondon, Jeremy Gilbert, and Jason Frank). Engagement with such scholarship might further nuance this account of how protest continues to exercise strategic pressure and communicative aims, even as politics unfolds among those gathered and even as those demands and efforts to effect change beyond the event remain multiple and unruly.
In the Street sheds new light on how we read protest and some of its most influential proponents. It eloquently argues not only for the value of what is ephemeral, incohesive, and unpredictable in protest, but that our very notions of the temporality and lasting impacts are enriched when we consider the afterlives and intertextuality of such events over time. Finally, it problematizes the overinflation of the intellectual’s role in making sense of such events, even as it demonstrates the significant contribution they have to offer the theory and praxis of protest.