The Time of Revolt. Donatella Di Cesare
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in Portland or Baghdad, Athens or Beirut, Hong Kong or Algiers, Santiago or Barcelona, what emerges from the pictures is largely an image of disorder. The confusion of a chaotic, elusive event – that is what these portrayals insist on inferring from this disorder. Hence the lack of reflection on the question of revolt, which nonetheless beats the rhythm of our everyday existence.
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.
Revolt is a unique dimension of the global disorder – and offers a key to understanding an ever more indecipherable age. The explosions of anger are not lightning that strikes in a clear blue sky but, rather, a symptom, a wake-up call. If revolt is speaking about today, what does it have to say? How can and should it be interpreted? Modernity’s criteria no longer seem as valid as they once might have done. Cosmogonies on the meaning of history and totalizing dialectics no longer hold; they overlook the new political antagonisms, which remain unfathomed and impenetrable.
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.
When we look at it more closely, contemporary revolt’s relationship with politics is not only a matter of provocation and conflict. The present-day political space is circumscribed by state borders, within which what happens is observed and judged. The modernity of the last two centuries has made the state into the indispensable means and supreme end of all politics. The ruling order is state-centric. The state’s undisputed sovereignty remains the criterion that plots the boundaries and draws the map of the present-day geopolitical topography. This has produced a separation between the internal sphere, which is subject to sovereign power, and the external sphere, which is consigned to anarchy. This commonplace dichotomy has introduced a value judgement that distinguishes an inside from an outside, civilization from barbarism, law from lawlessness, order from chaos. State sovereignty has imposed itself as the sole condition of order and the only alternative to anarchy – itself discredited as a simple lack of government, as the confusion that rages on the boundless outside. Yet, globalization has begun to undermine the dichotomy between sovereignty and anarchy, as it exposes all the limits of a politics anchored in traditional borders. If the state remains the epicentre of the new global disorder, the landscape on the other side of the border is now being populated by different protagonists. New phenomena such as migration are tearing open a gap that affords a glimpse of what is happening outside – obliging us to leave behind this dichotomy and embrace a new perspective.
Likewise, revolt is situated outside of sovereignty, in the open ground that has always been the province of anarchy. This ground should be seen not only as a space between one border and another but also as a fissure, a small opening into the internal landscape. Revolt shows the state as it is seen from the windows of the peripheral neighbourhoods, through the eyes of those who are left out or ruled out. It is obvious why, helped by the media narrative, state politics should seek to make revolt obscure and marginal. For what is at stake is not merely – or not so much – some single demand or contingent grievance.
Revolt ultimately puts the state itself into question. Whether the state is democratic or despotic, secular or religious, revolt shines a light on its violence and strips it of its sovereignty. A characteristic of the revolts of the present era – which, not by accident, first began with the slogan ‘¡Que se vayan todos, que no quede ninguno!’ – is this separation between power and people. Despite the state’s effort to legitimize itself – often by spreading alarm and flaunting its own self-confidence – this separation would now appear to be a definitive fracture. The sovereign and authoritarian reaction, itself the product of a sovereignty that has been bled dry, cannot do anything to alter this process.
In the streets and squares, political governance – an abstract administrative exercise – vaunts its inquisitorial aspect in its bid to confront a mass which it has proven unable to govern. The ungoverned burst on the scene, making their appearance in order to decry the unrepresentativeness of political institutions. This points not only to the crisis of representation, which populism so exploits, but also to a redefinition of the political space itself. The heterogeneous forms and modalities of this conflict pervade and upset the global landscape. This explains why revolt is so eminently political.
Individual demands and contingent motives are unable to offer an exhaustive explanation of this phenomenon. The killing of a demonstrator, a law that restricts democratic freedoms, an unpunished rape, a fuel price hike, a sudden increase in metro fares, the latest corruption scandal, the transformation of a park into a shopping centre, a pension reform, a religious fundamentalist reprisal – these particular causes are all necessary to any analysis of this phenomenon. Yet they are not enough to understand its full complexity. The factors behind any revolt can never be reduced to any single cause. They all originate from a combination and intertwining of different motives, which are not just economic in character but also political and existential.
Revolt expresses an unspecific malaise, demonstrates a vague but nagging unease, and reveals all the expectations that have been disappointed. The world we have before us is quite different from the development that was promised and all the boasts of progress. For this is a world that allows and fosters yawning inequalities, the logic of profit, the plundering of the future, and the spectacular arrogance of a few faced with the impotence of the many.
Notes
1 4 On the need to rethink the kinetics of revolution, see Eric Hazan and Kamo, Premières mesures révolutionnaires. Paris: La Fabrique, 2013, pp. 8ff.; Eric Hazan, La dynamique de la révolte. Paris: La fabrique, 2015, pp. 42ff.
Between Politics and Police
A revolt’s political potential is realized when it manages to highlight injustice within the surveilled confines of the public space and, in so doing, reconfigures this space itself. That is why revolt is above all a practice of irruption – arriving from the margins, it embarrasses government policy and brings its policing function out into the open. This elision is no accident. The etymological link between ‘policy’ and ‘police’ ought to be taken seriously. We can continue along the path that Jacques Rancière indicated as he looked beyond the restrictive meaning usually attributed to the term ‘police’.5 Policing is not simply a matter of truncheons, armoured cars and interrogation rooms, or even just of the state’s repressive apparatus. The so-called public order which the police manage stretches far wider than this apparatus – and, for this reason, the police’s role is decisive, even if it is not always obvious. The police discipline bodies, by allowing them to meet or by banning them from assembling, and also structure space itself, assigning roles, establishing