The Time of Revolt. Donatella Di Cesare
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power over bodies, examine and experiment with a new form of legality, as they redefine the limits of the possible. If these scenes are the cause of such indignation, if they seem so ‘ignominious’, it is because they are the sign of an authoritarian power, the proof of the undeniable existence of a police state within the state of law (Rechtsstaat).
In this light, just as these acts of violence reveal the true essence of the police, they also shed light on the architecture of a politics which captures and banishes, includes and excludes. This is an architecture in which discrimination is always already latent. Suddenly we can see the borders of immunodemocracy, where the defence reserved for some – the guaranteed, the protected, those who cannot be touched – is denied to the others, the rejects, the exposed, reduced to superfluous, unwelcome bodies who can ultimately be got rid of. Coronavirus has made the immunization of the people within these borders even more exclusive and the exposure of those on the outside even more implacable. The police make this immunopolitics visible in the public space.
The revolt is no accidental response. It would be mistaken to consider it a simple explosion of anger, a directionless reaction against the incumbent suffocation. The scenes that have repeatedly played out in streets and squares, even despite the pandemic, are a direct response to the police’s actions – they are a way of taking back the square, restoring the presence of the excluded, and defending the rights of the undesirables.
The close connection between revolt and public space thus again becomes apparent. We find further confirmation of this in the protests that have targeted statues, especially in US cities. Some vilify these protests as iconoclastic riots; and yet, when we look at them more closely, we see that they express the need not only to reoccupy the urban landscape but also to rearticulate its memory. The struggle projects itself onto a past celebrated in monuments to Confederate generals, slave traders, genocidal kings, architects of white supremacy, and propagandists for fascist colonialism. Why go on living in this suffocating atmosphere, surrounded by these statues? If it is wrong to erase the past, it is no less of an error to reify it. Faced with the honours and glory conferred on butchers and oppressors, asserting the perspective of the conquered is an urgent necessity. This gives rise to a clash over rights and memory.
The pandemic has intensified a process that was already under way. It has aggravated an already latent discord between the disciplining of bodies, the militarization of public space, and struggles that express dissent, contradict existing divisions, and undermine the architecture of order. The preventative policing of relations is a regulated ‘shielding’ measure that culminates in the abolition of contact with the other, who is taken for a possible enemy and source of contagion. This police measure is always already the norm, the marker of immunodemocracy. Thus, the danger of the vibrant, uncontrollable mass, the hazard of the open community, and the spectre of revolt are all kept at bay.
The public space has long been disciplined and controlled. The right to demonstrate can no longer be taken for granted; today, marches, rallies and sit-ins require authorization. If the new revolts are ever more nomadic and transitory, it is no accident that they have taken to any number of sites far beyond the city squares, from the open sea to cross-border spaces and even the decentralized web. Hence the recourse to creative acts and unprecedented means of action. And hence their capacity to reinterpret even biosecurity measures such as antibacterial masks, which are now employed as an outward display of invisibility and openly declared anonymity. The political use of masks sublimates their use as a tool of immunity.
It is, therefore, worth asking whether a politics outside this regimented and surveilled public space is possible. It had become difficult to act in this space even before it was occupied by the sovereign virus. To answer this question, we ought to reconsider the mechanism of public space and turn our gaze to the anarchist extra-politics which is preparing itself through the new revolts.
Notes
1 1 See Donatella Di Cesare, Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia. 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 Constellation of Revolts
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.
When we point to the complicated connections between these revolts – their shifting affinities, their discontinuous movements, their countless correspondences – it may be useful to speak of a ‘constellation’. Distant stars in the night sky, scattered sparks that had earlier been hard to make out, suddenly cluster together. In this unprecedented arrangement, even the minor stars take on new value, as their previously hidden correspondence now stands out for all to see. There is no causal nexus, no linear direction, or even the semblance of a beginning. The constellation has no arché; anarchic and subversive, it is the fluid outcome of an improvised mobilization that has torn through the homogeneous darkness. In their unexpected harmony, the individual lights grow more intense, lighting each other up, seeming to converge on one focal point. Their conjuncture now appears as an allegorical prefiguration.
Unsurprisingly, Walter Benjamin himself turned to the image of the constellation in his efforts to explode the monumental architectonics of the victors. This is the way to recover what has been erased, discredited, spat upon. That which is not granted historical dignity disrupts the flow of historical becoming. But just as stars die out and sink back into the impenetrable blackness of outer space, revolts, too, can dissolve into the abyss-like backdrop of history. This fiery interruption, almost a simultaneous conflagration, is the here and now of a present that risks escaping us unless it is read in good time. We thus need to keep a nocturnal watch over the sky of history – grasping revolts, calling them back to us and redeeming them with all their charge of disruption and salvation.
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
The official news leaves revolt on the sidelines. If revolt does get past the censor, its power to stir sensation is transformed into spectacle and its transgressive obscurity put on display. It reaches our screens only as far as its gravity, urgency and dimensions warrant. Yet even when the revolt is hyper-visible and overexposed, it is condemned as senseless. There are marches, rallies, mobs in the street and, in a rising