Tragedy Since 911 by Jennifer Wallace;

Tragedy Since 911 by Jennifer Wallace;

Author:Jennifer Wallace;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK


Protest as theatre, theatre as protest

One of the many criticisms that the 2011 uprisings incurred, particularly Occupy Wall Street, was that they did not know what they wanted. There was no simple demand, no clear-cut vision of an alternative future. They had no leaders. Typical of the critics was commentator Anne Applebaum who pointed out that the protesters in Zuccotti Park, New York, or outside St Paul’s in London, by directly occupying central spaces rather than lobbying their senators or members of parliament, were – ironically – rejecting the conventional democratic, constitutional processes for which the crowds in Tahrir Square were calling.43 There was nothing, she said, to unify them all; rather they seemed to be in direct contradiction with another.44 Certainly many of the protesters were motivated by what was perceived to be the unjust response to the 2008 financial crisis, the bailout of the banks and the policy of austerity for everyone else, while others were concerned about the crisis of climate change. Gender, race and class were other motivating issues, as well as a general protest against inequality and frustration at not being heard. There was criticism of the way that corporations and big business had taken over elected government, with the insight that ‘no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power’.45 This was not one big movement organized along class lines, like resistance movements in the past, but rather a disparate collection of various political and social identities. Many of the protesters came from what has been termed the precariat, those whose lives are ‘dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation’ and who ‘knew what they were against but not yet quite what was wanted instead’.46

The loose coalition of people in Occupy was matched by a lack of leadership. Those in the movement spoke about the advantage of decentralization. Hydra-like, they were more challenging to pin down, more difficult to crush. By contrast, we might think of various tragic dramas of revolution, from Julius Caesar, to Buchner’s Danton’s Death to Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean, in which the individual flaws of the leaders of rebellion result in the failure of their original revolutionary aims.47 Charismatic leaders stir the masses but then get enamoured of their charisma itself; rebellions which depend upon a few individuals falter when those individuals prove fallible. Instead, decisions in the Occupy camps were made by committee, and the connection between one camp and the next was loose and undefined. Contrary to the demands both from some of the protesters and from reporters and critics wanting to characterize the uprising, there was no slogan. Or if there were slogans, they were rather ones that drew attention to the process, rather than to the end goal: ‘We are the 99%’ or ‘This is what democracy looks like.’

And it was the attention to the process that particularly marked the performative quality of the 2011 occupations. The uprisings in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere were improvised as they went along and became, as



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