Play, Politics, & the Practice of Resistance

Daniel Møller Ølgaard
Year of publication: 2015

Abstract

Politics are Fun Again. It is a seductive and influential image of our contemporary world that Jean Baudrillard presents. In the transition from the modern era of manual production to the postmodern age of global information technologies, our world ‘has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse … leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center’ (Massumi 1987: 90). The substitution of reality with the signs and symbols that simulate reality means that everything is essentially empty, passive, and without meaning. Art has become the art of pure reproduction of signs that may tease but never disturb order (Kellner 1989: 109-111). And politics has lost its antagonistic dimension as critique of those-in-power merely ‘dignifies power’s claim on reality’ rendering the practice of resistance ‘an unending, self-regenerating, tautological spiral’ (Fardy 2012: 185). But there is also another image of our world floating around today. During the last decade or so, rather than a state of apathy, we have witnessed the creation of a worldwide movement against neoliberalism [and] a continuous wave of riots, strikes, and occupations across the world, emerging with a frequency and intensity historically unmatched since the last great social movements of the 1960s and 70s (Nail 2013). Alongside this eruption, attention has returned to the role of aesthetics in the study of international politics (Bleiker 2001) and specifically how art ‘comes to situate itself’ in framing the debate on the interplay between ‘art, politics, and resistance’ (Jabri 2006: 819). We might still formulate powerful forms of critique today through aesthetical experience and creative forms of expression (Harrebye 2013). As Zizek (2005) asks: ‘Is not precisely the ‘postmodern’ politics of resistance permeated with aesthetic phenomena’ showing to us ‘the aesthetico-political … at its purest?’ (79). It certainly seems so as movements such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, Occupy Wall Street, and Reclaim the Streets are reconfiguring the face of radical politics in the recent decade, preferring ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’ to ‘guns and sticks’ (Sharpe 2009: 181). They ask how ‘social movements combine live performance with guerrilla tactics in an effort to find agency’ (Shawyer 2007: 153), promoting a form of resistance that utilizes the signs and symbols of art for the very practice of critique Baudrillard claims they pacify. In a sense, it is a revival of Situationism, a political movement founded on Guy Debord’s critique of late capitalist society, one of whose defining members held that to ‘work on the side of delight and authentic festivity can hardly be distinguished from preparing for a general insurrection’ (Vaneigem 1965: 25). More importantly though, this aesthetic move marks an epistemological turn for political resistance by recognizing Rancière’s observation that politics ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak’ (Rancière 2004: 13). Thus, to ‘enter into political exchange, it becomes necessary to invent the scene upon which words may be audible, in which objects may be visible, and individuals themselves may be recognized’ (Rancière & Panagia 2000: 115). The political promise of the aesthetic move of resistance is thus to enable the ability of art and creative expression to invent and embody a space where critique can be spoken, enacted, heard, and seen (Harrebye 2013: 4), allowing politics to become fun again. Based on this simple but central observation, I introduce the concept of play to describe the political potential of aesthetic forms of protest today. I shall illustrate this choice with a brief excerpt from Greenwald’s (2014) first encounter with Edward Snowden: Based on Greenwald’s many years of journalistic experience working with whistle-blowers, Greenwald had expected a seasoned government employee in the autumn of his professional career and thus less afraid to risk it. The man he met did not look a day past 30. To address Greenwald’s embezzlement, Snowden explained that he had mustered the courage to expose the National Security Agency by playing computer games. While often regarded as a meaningless activity, computer games had reminded Snowden that even the most powerless individual can fight injustice. It was in this sense an act of play that would bring Snowden to publish his material and, eventually, force the US administration to address their secret surveillance practices in public. With this story, I seek to highlight the relevance of examining the emancipative, and transformative, potential of playful activities; to make clear the need for an extensive analysis of playful action that moves beyond the traditional accounts of the activity as an act of pure simulation and fantasy. As the story and the earlier mentioned examples show quite clearly, playfulness, like critique, is also a way to intervene in a given reality through the invention of a new scene, and new possibilities for subjects to speak, show, see, and hear. Play is thus an aesthetic practice and should perhaps therefore also be seen as a central element in politics. Rather than being merely a symptom of the victory of the simulacrum, this article puts forward the idea that play may serve as a template for investigating the political potential of creative protest action specifically and the interplay between aesthetics, politics, and resistance more widely. In seeking the answer to this question, this also constitutes an attempt to engage with some of the wider issues in the study of the self, politics, and resistance. Michel Foucault’s work is central to this inquiry as it builds on a careful examination of historic practices and discourses that renders the modern self a docile body, subjected to the control of social institutions under the guise of increased measures of individual freedom and humanism (Foucault 1988; 1991). Yet, while much of Foucault's work shares Baudrillard’s pessimism, one identifies in Foucault also a highly optimistic account of the possibility of autonomous action and self-determination (Foucault 1982, Rabinow 1997: 281-302). There must always be sites of resistance to dominant schemes of power, he argued, and the task at hand was to locate these and to determine the most effective strategies and tactics for their practice. Ultimately, my argument seeks to challenge Baudrillard’s dystopia and replace it with the possibility of a subversive ethics of political play.

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