Daniel Boyarin, “Issues for Further Discussion: A Response,” Semeia, vol. 69-70 (1995): 293–297 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Unruly Carnivalesque Protestival: Refusing to play by the oppressor’s rules
Widely entrenched in modern society, the carnival is a jolly moment of celebration. It is a mistake to assume, however, that the carnivalesque practice is a recent event. In fact, it dates back to medieval times, where profane and sacred traditions overlapped. Through his exploration of the work of French Renaissance Humanist Rabelais, Bakhtin (1968) has arguably been the main scholar to theorise the carnival as a moment of rebellion. Equally important for this essay, the Russian scholar refers to the medieval culture of humour as responsible for enabling a “temporary liberation from prevailing truth and from the established order” where “all were considered equal” (p. 10). On the other hand, if this was true for celebrations of folk culture, it was not the same for official state and ecclesiastic feasts, which would only reinforce existing social structures and values. Completed in a time marked by Stalinism, it is no surprise that the book was only published almost 20 years later. Until today, Bakhtin’s ideas have influenced anarchist groups worldwide (Dentith, 2005). Drawing on influences of youth culture, grassroots experiences and transgressive nonviolent actions, these groups took to the streets targeting symbols of undemocratic and authoritarian forces (e.g. state, corporations, financial institutions etc.). The anti-globalisation movement, as they became known, understood capitalism and neo-liberalism as “the roots of our social and ecological problems” (NFN, 2003, p. 184). In this essay, I want to explore how these groups have introduced a different approach to the activist practice - one which is neither violent nor passive. For the first section, I will briefly describe and analyse examples of protests – or protestival, as I will call them – making use of humour, satiric music and a queer aesthetic to confuse the violent state repression, to provide a glimpse of a desired fairer world and to embolden the movement against oppressive forces. In section two, I will apply two concepts to form a theoretical framework: the “Unruly Politics”, by Khanna et al. (2013), in connection with Bruner’s (2005) ideas of a “Healthy/Fun State” via-à-vis a “Sick/Humourless State”. Thereafter, I argue that, in times of a “cynical state”, the carnivalesque protest emerges as an innovative and more effective citizen action capable of defying social order and ultimately achieve a more just society.
The Carnivalesque and Resistance
Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations, 2019
Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought and advancements thereof in cultural studies, this chapter brings Bakhtin’s seminal concept of the carnivalesque to bear on critical IR theorisations of violence, power and security. Conceived as an ontology of resistance beyond forms aesthetically reminiscent of carnival, the carnivalesque helps detect and locate ever-shifting sites and modes of resistance to the closure of the political. Unlike intellectually-driven deconstruction, the category allows zooming into deconstructions as performed anthropological acts, by the very subjects of security. The peace campaign by Brian Haw and Barbara Tucker carnivalising “war on terror” serves to illustrate and further this approach.
International Journal of Zizek Studies 7:2
in his article Critique of Violence, unpacked three different forms of violence: state-founding (law-founding) mythic violence, state-maintaining (law-maintaining) violence and lastly divine (law/state destroying) violence. It seems obvious to link revolutionary violence to divine violence as it is a state destroying violence, yet in every revolution there is already the desire (revolution seen as a means to a particular envisaged end) to create a new state, and thus there is a very fine line between the divine violence of law/state destroying violence and the mythic state/law founding violence. The question that immediately comes to mind is: when does divine violence (state/law destroying violence) become mythic (state/law founding) violence? Is it perhaps possible that, in understanding this transition from divine to mythic violence, one can understand why so many revolutions fail to really create an alternative state? In an attempt to try and understand this fine line and to understand why so many revolutions fail, the difference between the two needs to be unpacked together with an understanding of what is a truly ethical Act -what is a just Act as an act of divine violence. Why do so many revolutions fail? Why is it that so often the revolutionary victory brings about a worse or at least similar dictatorship than the one the revolution opposed in the first place 1 ? I seek to understand this phenomenon, specifically writing from an African 1 As Susan Buck-Morss argues: "any political movement that attempts to transform the death's dead (the skeletal remains of the victims of history) into an angel's face (history's redeemer) is far more likely to unleash a human hell. Imagination, intending to set the world aright, makes a virtue out of violence against the violator. If enlightened critique stops here, it entrenches itself behind a selfimposed and self-defeating barrier, one that must be dismantled if humanity is to progress beyond the
Semiotica, 1985
Among] the lower class of people [there is] such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority [...] Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty. Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, 1745. Matthew Arnold's famous opposition between Culture and Anarchy can, perhaps, be seen as one way of constructing an opposition between rhetoric and violence. Rhetoric, at least the 'legitimate' rhetoric of the classic text, becomes a machine to overcome time, a transhistorical reason which can rebuke and exorcize the specter of anarchy. For Arnold, that 'Anarchy' was embodied in the crowd which tore down the railings of Hyde Park, thus erasing the boundaries between order and disorder, between a culture enclosed like the park and the limitless horizons of chaos (Arnold 1932). In the twentieth century, though, Arnold's 'Culture' was to be rethought as repression: rhetoric and the regularities of language and discourse were no less than the structure of the dominant social order. For many critics of modernism, linguistic transgression became a privileged form of politics, since it violated the very terrain on which more 'conventional' political activity was always already situated. Kristeva, for instance, suggests that 'there is no equivalence, but rather identity between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law.' Carnivalesque discourse, she argues, in violating 'the laws of a language censored by grammar and semantics' is, at the same time, 'a social and political protest' (Kristeva 1980: 65). Curiously, although Kristeva explicitly defines carnivalesque dialogue as 'transgression giving itself a law' (1980: 71), her argument tends to slide toward the Arnoldian oppositions in which order, rhetoric, and reason confront violence, linguistic transgression, and unreason. Of course, Kristeva's evaluation of these polarities is more or less the opposite of
Urban History Review, 1976
During the late 60Ts and early 70's several articles and mimeographed working papers provided specialists with a glimpse of Charles Tilly's ambitious researches into violence and collective action in modern European history. In this book that research is supplemented by the expertise of his wife, a specialist in Italian social history, and their son, a specialist in German economic history. The Rebellious Century describes and analyzes the incidence and function of collective nongovernmental violence in three nations undergoing the crucial structural changes of modernization. It also puts forward hypotheses about linkages between socio-economic change and political conflict on the one hand and collective action —non-violent as well as violent — on the other.