by Nena Bisceglia (She/Her)
Final Year BA Anthropology Student at Goldsmiths, University of London.
nbisc001@gold.ac.uk
Anthways, 2021 © Nena Bisceglia
Abstract
This essay merges text and images to investigate the corporeal politics of assembled bodies and the political role of affective relations. Drawing on the theory of Judith Butler and Hanna Arendt, I discuss the relationship between precarity, public space, and political action as encapsulated in the body, and particularly called into question by movements that emerged globally in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. I explore how dispossessed bodies in the square embrace their existential interdependence and become responsive to each other, proposing alternative ways to collectively sustain bodily precariousness. Immersion in these uprisings is guided by three selected audiovisual pieces — ‘Tahrir: Liberation Square’ by Stefano Savona, ‘Gravity Hill Newsreel’ by Jem Cohen, and the anonymous, collaborative ‘Gezi Park Documentary’ — proposing a non-discursive, sensorial narration of what happens in the square that challenges the idea of politics as necessarily made of speech acts. Lastly, I consider the affective power of images to challenge dominant narratives and amplify popular alliances.
THESE SQUARES ARE OUR FLESH
Embodied spaces of appearance
‘Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām!’
A voice shouts.
‘Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām!’
A chorus of voices chants.
‘Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām!’
Repeats a single voice again.
On an autumn night in Zuccotti Park, the words are transported by an ensemble of voices spreading all over the surface of the square where a meeting is held. The echo progressively reaches all the participants.
It’s 9pm in Istanbul. The banging of pots and pans boldly resounds from the street, accompanied by buildings lights alternately switching on and off. The cutting clatter of cookware reminds the city that the people cannot remain silent and still in face of Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime.
From Tahrir Square to Puerta del Sol, Syntagma Square and Zuccotti Park, from Santiago to Gezi Park, from Gaza to Hong Kong and Minneapolis, in the last ten years thousands of bodies have stood side by side against the attacks to conditions making their life possible: food and shelter, the right to work, accessible urban space, clear air, affordable healthcare and education, protection from injury and destruction. If their complexity and the specificity of their aims are by
no means reducible to a single account — the challenge to authoritarian regimes, anti-democratic governments, explicit contestation of neoliberal capitalism and austerity, militarism and dispossession, unequal rights of citizenship, opposition to accelerating precarity — a red thread between the social movements crossing the streets and the squares of the globe can be identified.
In Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler observes the emergence of a politics built around bodies: in a performative manner, people claim material support for the life of their bodies through the physical presence of those very bodies in the square. Bodies expose their vulnerability as a form of resistance and enact dwelling forms of public space that acknowledge interdependence on other bodies.
Cairo’s Tahrir Square in winter 2011, from which the Egyptian revolution spread, the Occupy Wall Street Movement in Zuccotti Park peaking in the autumn of the same year, and the Occupy Gezi one in Istanbul’s Taksim Square held between May 2013 and August 2013 are three of the main events moving her inquiry.
‘Tahrir: Liberation Square’, ‘Gravity Hill Newsreel’ and ‘Gezi Park documentary’ are three audiovisual documentations of these events that will guide an exploration of the performativity of bodies in assembly.
The first is a film by the Italian filmmaker Stefano Savona providing a day-to-day narration of the January revolution in Tahrir Square where no voice is heard but the one of the square.
The second is a series of 12 short films capturing the faces, sounds and spaces of Zuccotti Park and other key sites of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
The third is a nine hour documentary divided in three episodes, consisting of cell phone video footage, snapshots, fragments of TV news collected by an anonymous author to create a collective archive of the uprisings.
Diverse in format, these three audiovisual products provide a narration of uprisings that differs from the discursivity of traditional documentaries and mainstream media, captures political claims from the square and expresses them through sensoriality.
Resonating with notions of corporeal politics of assembled bodies in the streets as conceived by Butler, they also offer an invitation to grasp the affective power of images to broaden popular alliances.
PRECARITY
Through the screams and sweat recorded by Savona in Tahrir Square, a portrait of the protesters is drawn. The ‘people’ define themselves through their needs — bread, freedom, rest, work— and chanting the comprehensive claim that ‘life is too hard’.
They scream their demand for support to those they identify as responsible for it. They expect support. The hard lives of people in Tahrir are precarious lives that are inadequately sustained by the institutions and structures external to the individual. Precarisation is a biopolitical process through which social value is differently ascribed to lives: thus the living conditions of certain bodies are systematically neglected through exposure to injury, violence, and progressively, death (Butler 2009, 2015). Induced and reproduced by political and economic institutions, precarisation condemns people to a state of insecurity and hopelessness wherein their lives are made abject and disposable (Mbembe 2011:80). Precarious lives are subject to ‘economies of abandonment’ that institute an ‘unequal distribution of life and death, of hope and harm, and endurance and exhaustion’ (Povinelli 2011:3) according to which lives that are not functional to the order of value can be swept out of existence. The people in the square reclaim the value of their abandoned lives, lives that call for their legitimate needs to be supported against the neoliberal rationality of individual responsibility and self-sufficiency.
Figure 6.3: Gravity Hill Newsreels (Cohen, 2011)
Their claims are performative: the same bodies who need food, employment and labour rights, freedom of speech, protection from police brutality, are the bodies who cover the surface of the square. Bodies are simultaneously the ground and means of protest.
Assemblages of precarious subjects also powerfully put into question the idea of politics as a space of freedom from necessity. In The Human Condition Arendt argues that physical needs are confined to the ‘private realm’ of the household — oikos — where biological necessities like food, shelter, and sex are satisfied. Only once necessity is met, one can enter the public space where freedom is exercised through politics amongst equals: the inability to provide for the needs of the body marks the boundaries of the political sphere. For Arendt bodily survival cannot be a form of political action but only a precondition of it. Observing the people filling Tahrir and other squares Butler criticizes this view. Echoing one of the most popular slogans running through the streets of Egypt during the revolution: ‘Aīsh, huriyya, ‘adāla igtimā’iyya’ (‘bread, freedom, social justice’) she asks: ‘What about the possibility that one might be hungry, angry, free, and reasoning, and that a political movement to overcome inequality in food distribution is a just and fair political movement?’ (Butler 2015: 47).
PRECARIOUSNESS
If precarity is a politically induced condition, it is built upon an existential, ontological state that inherently defines all lives. Human life comes into being as precarious by definition, in a condition of unavoidable finitude and constant risk of destruction by will or by accident. Its persistence is not biologically guaranteed by any means (Butler 2009:25). Lives are subject to precariousness as ‘the condition of being conditioned’ (pp. 23): existence and persistence of lives necessarily depend on conditions that support their ontological finitude. These conditions correspond to institutions and relations of support that need to be created and renewed through social life. When political orders fail to address precariousness, precarity emerges as a maximization of precariousness manifested as starvation, displacement, poverty, arbitrary violence affecting certain lives. If precarity characterizes certain populations, precariousness ‘is not a feature of this or that life’ (pp. 22), it generates all social living as built on the implication to have one’s existence ‘always in some sense in the hands of the other’ (pp. 14). As ontologically precarious and vulnerable, bodies are simultaneously exposed to a potentially destructive externality and reliant on exterior others and infrastructures that can minimize destruction. Acknowledging that one’s life is dependent and interdependent, identifying bodies as discrete and completely distinct from one another becomes questionable. The body ‘contains multitudes’: it is defined by the multitude of relations that make its own life and action possible (Butler 2014: 5). More than an entity, the body appears as a relation that encompasses environment, infrastructures and institutions held by other bodies, bodies that might be distant, anonymous and unknown yet nevertheless essential.
VULNERABILITY AS THREAT AND PROMISE
To be perpetually exposed to others and to have our survival bound up to them does not simply condemn us to a state of living uncertainty.
A body that is vulnerable to exteriority is also one able to enact affective responses to the world. In affect, the possibility to acknowledge interdependence lies carrying a political potential. Through affect, the body ‘is pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed, its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself — webbed in its relations — until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter. (2010, Seigworth and Gregg quoted in Blackman 2012:1).
Being vulnerable allows us to feel pleasure, rage, suffering, hope through encounters with other bodies that ultimately can ‘undo us as bounded being’ (Butler 2015:110). It is in affect that the possibility to address the unequal distribution of precariousness resides: invites to join the square are invites to be responsive, to be affected by the lack of support, unmet needs, suffering that we might not experience but who target the bodies we are tied up to.
Responsiveness is the ability to recognise that ‘we are all fingers of the same hand’, and that ‘if your neighbours are poor, you are poor’, it is the ability to perceive and embrace our condition of interdependence and to turn it into a way of acting, organising and living in concert.
PUBLIC SPACE
In movements against precarity, assembled bodies do not simply employ public space to come together, become visible and make their claims. Public space is not simply entered as a given: it is its very character to be disputed and fought over (Butler 2015:71).
This aspect emerged with the Gezi Park movement. Soon turning into multiple protests addressing an anti-democratic, authoritarian government, the Occupy Gezi movement began as a reappropriation of one of the few green zones left in central Istanbul threatened by the building plan of a shopping mall. The bodies stood up in the square against the selling off that same square as property for private investors, for their right to fresh air and accessible, common space.
But they did not simply reclaim their right to squares by occupying them: they permeated urban space with their necessities; they transformed it to satisfy them collectively. Bodily assemblies ‘reconfigure the materiality of public space and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment’ (ibidem). In Tahrir, Zuccotti and Taksim, space was made public by sharing free food on a street with whoever stands next to you, by lying tired bodies on the asphalt, by exchanging books, sitting on the ground to teach and learn, by planting trees where a park will be uprooted, by cleaning and taking care of the place that is hosting you. Occupation of public space is also a way to bring into being the world you imagine to live, in a prefigurative manner. It is a laboratory for the organisation of ways of sustaining the precariousness of life alternative to its unequal distribution, and demonstrating that ‘another world’ — one in which interdependent bodies meet and respond to each other — ‘is possible’.
PUBLIC SPACE
In ’Gravity Hill Newsreels’, footage of the city is overlaid with the voices and sounds of the square, the place and the people merge. Many of the newsreels open with images of the architectures of New York City that are gradually brought back to the square through its ambient noise. Shifting the focus from people’s faces and bodies to the buildings that surround them, the bright screens and their messages that take the square, the pavement that is stepped on, Cohen’s camera dwells on space inviting us to reconsider it as a relevant actor of the protest. Movements are ‘dependent on the prior existence of pavement, street and square’ (Butler 2015:71): no acting body can move without infrastructural support. A revaluation of the materiality of political action also includes space — to walk on, gather, stand — as integral part of action.
“On a different planet”: the space of appearance
If space fits into action as street, square, ground, infrastructure sustaining a body, the space of politics is not reduced to physicality. In her theorisation of political action, Hannah Arendt (1958) identifies the political space of the polis as non corresponding to the city-state in its physical location, but the organisation of people arising out of acting and speaking together (pp. 381) as a space lying between people. Political space is not simply the space where political action happens, but one that is produced through political action itself. The space of appearance is where, ‘I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance explicitly’ (pp. 382). Through assemblage, people become conscious of their presence amongst other people and formulate action through this mutual appearance.
Reflecting on the meaning of ‘Occupy Movement’ in Taksim Square, Zeynep Gambetti (2014) observes how the name captures a double relation to space of the resistance, both investing and divesting space:
‘On the one hand, the aim was indeed to ‘occupy’ or to appropriate space, that is, to stay there, to stay put, to settle and inhabit. On the other hand, there was a constant movement between spaces: crossing the Bosphorus that splits Istanbul into two, riding the metro to reach Taksim, going from one neighborhood to the next, following the trajectory of the clashes to help fellow protestors, going back and forth between field hospitals, supply shops and other sites of bodily sustenance.’ (Gambetti 2014:90)
Political space is not fixed and tied to location, it moves wherever the plural action of bodies moves in concert. Wherever people choose to gather, it can be recreated.
NAKED AND DEFENSELESS LIKE A TREE
Contrary to Arendt’s conceptualisation in which the subjects of political life are Greek men in a society excluding women, slaves and foreigners, in uprisings against precarity political space is created not by equal and free men but by those who are often erased by public life.
As the artist Okan Bayülgen asserts on a summer night in Taksim Square included in the Gezi Park documentary, the people are naked and defenseless like a tree. Nakedness and defenselessness, however, are asserted as a revolutionary potential. By assembling, the people use the vulnerability of the body itself as the prerequisite of political exposure and action. Precarious lives are not ‘bare’ lives (Agamben 1998) whom sovereign power has stripped of every right and confined in a passive condition of exclusion. They are lives who ‘mutualize endurance’ (Gambetti 2014) and choose to act through their bodies despite the dispossession and violence systematically acted upon their bodies.
Vulnerability is put into resistance when it challenges police violence with cardboard armour or when bodies become barely visible under a storm of tear gas, yet provocatively call for more.
The mobilisation of vulnerability acquires further political power when spaces of appearance are created in spaces of negation. The sites of Occupy Wall Street are part of the financial district of Lower Manhattan: the people occupied the symbolical and effective epicenter of the global financial crisis of 2008 that exacerbated and shed light on the sharp disparity between the ‘1%’ and the ‘99%’. Despite your neoliberal greed attempting to kill us, we are still here, we are still visible and reappropriating our space, say the people in Zuccotti Park, ‘we have not yet been disposed of. We have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life: we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life’ (Butler 2013:196). Through appearing precisely when and where people are effaced, the sphere of appearance breaks and opens in new ways.
POLITICS AS NON
DISCURSIVE
Assembled bodies also challenge the idea of politics as necessarily made of speech acts. If for Arendt politics happens ‘wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action’ (1958:383), in the square ‘the people are not just produced by their vocalized claims’ (Butler 2015:19), but by each of their actions, including non-action. The visual sources I have selected grasp and translate into images this non-discursivity of politics.
Figure 20.2 – 20.6: Tahrir Liberation Square (Savona, 2011)
The camera walks through the crowd and even though some faces might appear more often than others, it does not focus on any main character. Spoken political claims are not the core. When they are present, they are often expressed through forms that involve multiple senses: they are chanted, played with instruments, danced, clapped, they are the banging of pots and pans in the street. They run through snippets of small, casual conversations and encounters. They appear to have the same relevance as the sweat on people’s bodies, their deep gazes, their smiles and laughs in singing, their standing bodies, or their sharp screams coming out of blurred images of a tear gas attack. The voice of the filmmaker is never heard and there are no prepared interviews.Cohen’s Newsreels are ‘small, direct observations’ that express ‘solidarity without propaganda’. 1
In the words of Savona, ‘Tahrir: Liberation Square’ leaves to ‘literature and journalism’ the task of speaking of the ‘details’, capturing ‘something more fleeting and ephemeral that only cinema can fixate and collect’, the moments in which freedom appears in its pure state when a group ‘acts with one voice’.2
APPEARING TO EACH OTHER
‘I’m sure your eyes are getting full while watching the documentary. While I was preparing, the situation was no different. Maybe I have watched it hundreds of times, but each time my eyes filled with tears.’, states the author of the Gezi Park documentary.
Quoting Shouse, Tina Campt argues that ‘given the ubiquity of affect, it is important to take note that the power of many forms of media lies not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning’. Photographs and videos can ‘move us’ to affect and to be affected, shifting us from one intense experiential state to another, arresting us in ways that diminish our capacity to respond or provoking us in ways that augment our capacity to engage (2017:16). Mirzoeff adds a further level to the space of appearance created by allied bodies: next to the embodied, kinetic one, this also has a ‘potential latent form in mediated documentation’ (2017:34). Embracing a wider meaning of ‘seeing’ as the ‘point of intersection between what we know, what we perceive, and what we feel — using all our senses’ — in visual materials lies the potential to multiply responsiveness to others.
A visual medium enlarges the surface of the square, beyond the square: ‘through video it is possible to engage socially, even while not being there in the square, in the flesh… It’s about being with someone with mediation, not despite mediation.’ (Coleman 2013, quoted in Treske 2015). When collective uprisings break out the power of images often emerges through their denial expressed as censorship or mediatic silence. For the first days of the Gezi Park movement, no mediatic channel covered the events. The Turkish filmmaker Andreas Treske describes the first videos of Gezi diffused on social media as creating a ‘ground zero feeling’ (2015:176) simultaneously with ‘a feeling of togetherness with the demonstrators’.
Feelings of togetherness, emotions provoked by images can disturb the alignment of bodies against other bodies as desired by authorities (Ahmed 2014).
Gezi Park Documentary encompasses this potential, proper of images emanating from the space of appearance (Mirzoeff 2017:40), and not simply about it. While President Erdogan and the pro-government press perpetrated the imaginary of the people in Gezi as çapulcus — aggressive looters — images recorded by people with their cellphones and cameras of teargas attacks, beatings and shooting by the police contrasting with portraits of communal life and peaceful demonstration challenged the dominant narrative, widening the call for responsiveness.
Through assemblies, precarious lives stand up for and through their bodies against the uneven distribution of finitude. They appear to and encounter other bodies, and embrace interdependence with them. Together, they shape space to propose alternative modes of dependent living and they refuse to be wiped out of public life by putting vulnerability in resistance. Images can transmit the politics of assembled bodies through sensorial documentations showing how political action does not have to be discursively articulated but can be silent, singing, playing, standing, or staring. By capturing and diffusing what happens in the square, they generate affective experiences that have the potential to enlarge the space of appearance and invite more bodies to responsive unboundedness.
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