Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State

Carnivalesque Protest andthe Humorless StateM. Lane Bruner

Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, institutional forms ofoppression have periodically been defeated, transformed, or at least temporarily checkedby carnivalesque forms of public protest. After reviewing the political features of carnivaland the carnivalesque, along with several historical and contemporary examples ofcarnivalesque political performances, this essay explores the possibilities for progressivepublic transgression and the interrelationships among carnivalesque protest, criticaldemocratic citizenship, and state health.

Keywords: Carnival; Carnivalesque; Civil Disobedience; Corruption; Critical Theory;Protest; Humor; Globalization

Hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask. (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelaisand His World 95)

Across the centuries, those on the losing ends of the political and economic spectrumshave periodically counteracted repressive forms of government with carnivalesqueforms of protest.1 These protests, history suggests, are particularly prevalent whenthose benefiting from rampant political corruption lose their sense of humor, becomeridiculous in their seriousness, but are incapable, for one reason or another, ofsilencing their prankster publics. There would appear to be important and ongoingtensions, then, between the shifting humors of state agents and the productivecapacities of critical citizens, suggesting that a fuller appreciation for the dynamics ofthose tensions is an important step in understanding how challenges to power canresult in positive political change.

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) q 2005 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10462930500122773

M. Lane Bruner is currently Associate Professor of Critical Political Communication and Graduate Director of thedoctoral program in Public Communication in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University inAtlanta, Georgia. Correspondence to: M. Lane Bruner, Department of Communication, Georgia State University,1052 One Park Place, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. Tel: þ1 404-651-3465; Email: [email protected]

Text and Performance QuarterlyVol. 25, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 136–155

What, after all, constitutes humor in a state? Guy Debord, in his discussion of “thesociety of the spectacle,” argues that the state never has a sense of humor, since the stateis always the ultimately unjust institutional site of “law and order” in the service of thecorruptly wealthy and powerful. In his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, forexample, Debord claims that “it is always a mistake to try to explain something byopposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals” (67).2 However, even a cursory reviewof political history reveals that different states at different times display a range of“humors,” from “sick” totalitarian states that suppress critical forms of publiccommunication to “healthy” classical republican polities whose citizens enjoy a widerange of rights and freedoms, particularly of speech and assembly. One could plausiblyargue that a state’s sense of humor is proportionate to the strength of citizens’ rightsand freedoms against the state, the general openness of government deliberations, thebreadth and depth of political dialogue, and the degree to which state officials arelegally constrained to tolerate public criticism. Rebellious citizenship, in fact, has oftenbeen valorized by political theorists and practitioners as something essential for statehealth. Around the time of the American Revolution, for example, it was commonlyclaimed among Whig philosophers that “mobs and tumults” only happen when thereis “a scandalous abuse of power,” and, when revolts were “moderate” and not a threatto constitutional order, Thomas Jefferson famously held that “a little rebellion nowand then was a good thing” (see Maier). From such a perspective, “healthy” (fun!)states have citizens who are capable of considerable irony, have ways institutionally tomanage ambiguity and dissensus, have rich and actively turbulent public spheres, haveflourishing forms of parodic and/or critical public entertainments, and are led byindividuals encouraging critical citizenship. Conversely, sick and humorless states arepopulated by strict “conservatives” who crave certainty and discourage dissensus, haveanemic and passive public spheres, have bland and diverting forms of publicentertainments, and are led by individuals who repress critical citizenship.

Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, it is nevertheless thecase that institutional forms of oppression have sometimes been defeated,transformed, or at least temporarily checked by carnivalesque protests, at least whenconditions are favorable. Unfortunately, conditions are rarely favorable. While it istrue that “serious” protests can sometimes reveal the unjust limits of corrupt states, asexemplified by the civil rights movement in the United States, it is far more often thecase that direct and confrontational public protest is utterly crushed, as tragicallydemonstrated by the massacre of Chinese activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Itwould appear, then, that only certain kinds of laughter in certain kinds of situations arethe surest sign of state health (for surely there are situations faced by citizens and theirstate representatives that demand sincere seriousness). Conversely, only certain kindsof sober seriousness in certain kinds of situations mark the state in decay (for surelythere are situations in which agents of state power are unnecessarily serious in order tomask their own incompetence or corruption). If this is true, what, precisely, are thekinds of laughter and seriousness that tend to make states healthier or sicker? How arewe to understand “political performance” and the connections among performance,politics, and humor, and what are some of the possible interrelationships among

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progressive forms of carnivalesque protest, critical democratic citizenship, and statehealth?By first exploring the political features of carnival and the carnivalesque, and then

reviewing several historical and contemporary examples of carnivalesque protest toascertain the conditions required for its success, this essay seeks to address these andother questions related to progressive public transgression. Ultimately I argue thatpolitical corruption leads state actors to lose their sense of humor (i.e., as self-interested factions begin to undermine the common interest they simultaneouslybegin to stifle public critique and decry the principle of publicity in general), that thereare important civic lessons to draw from the similarities between critical politicaltheory and the carnivalesque, and that the most effective way of addressing statecorruption, at least under certain circumstances, is through the creative use ofcarnivalesque protest.3

The General Characteristics of Political Carnival

In many parts of the Western world today, for historical reasons related in largemeasure to the Protestant Reformation, popular notions of carnival, when notassociated with Ferris wheels and stuffed animals, are associated with licentiousfestivals such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carnival in Brazil. These divertingentertainments and bawdy celebrations, however, have lost almost all, if not all, of theirformer political character, and this loss of political relevance obscures the fact that thehistory of carnival is a rich repository of an effective array of public politicalperformances.For those interested in civil disobedience and other productive forms of democratic

rebellion, a brief look back into history provides numerous examples of howcarnivalesque protest has been used to oppose, or at least temporarily relieve, variousforms of oppressive political culture.4 In ancient Rome, the festival of Saturnalia, adirect precursor to carnival festivals in the Early Christian, medieval, and Renaissanceeras, provided a brief window of opportunity when hegemonic social roles werereversed and usual restrictions on public behavior were officially relaxed, ultimately toreinforce “normal” public order—a point to which I will return shortly.5 While earlyChristian leaders such as Tertullian and John Chrysostom took themselves a bit tooseriously and condemned laughter as an influence of the Devil, during the MiddleAges, and later during the Renaissance, itself the consequence of what Bakhtin refers toas a “carnivalization of human consciousness” (Rabelais 273), religious and stateinstitutions provided holidays serving a similar carnivalesque function of reinforcingsocial order by allowing its temporary subversion. While Protestant reformers didtheir best to destroy the carnival tradition, associated as it was with a mixture ofCatholic and pagan rituals, it nevertheless continued to persist across Europe throughthe eighteenth century, though less so in the United States.6 And while officiallysanctioned forms of political carnival (ritualized transgression for political purposes)died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carnivalesque tactics reemerged insurprising and dramatic fashion during the collapse of communism in Central

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and Eastern Europe when employed by groups such as Orange Alternative in Polandand the John Lennon Peace Club and the Society for a Merrier Present in the formerCzechoslovakia. More recently the term “carnival” and carnivalesque protesttechniques have been employed at anticorporate globalization protests in locationsranging from Seattle, Washington, to Davos, Switzerland, by members of groups suchas Carnival against Capitalism, the Ruckus Society, Reclaim the Streets, and Art andRevolution.

What are some of the politically consequential features of these various iterations ofpolitical carnival and the carnivalesque? Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in theirreview of contemporary scholarship on the topic, point out that the carnivalesque ischaracterized by: (1) a potent, populist, critical inversion of all official words andhierarchies; (2) the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, andprohibitions; (3) positive degradation and humiliation and an attitude of creativedisrespect; and (4) a temporary retextualizing of social formations that exposes their“fictive” foundations (1–26).7

Stallybrass and White also stress the fact that carnival, in spite of its characteristicrole inversions and ambiguities, has often been used less as a means of temporarysocial emancipation and progressive political critique than as a means of reinforcingsocial control (13–14). Lending qualified support to this perspective, Le Roy Ladurie,citing the Spanish scholar Julio Caro Boroja, maintains that pre-Lenten carnivalfestivals in sixteenth-century France were indeed ultimately designed by officials to“maintain local society in working order” (311).8 That is, by permitting the temporarysuspension of the rules and norms governing everyday life, state officials assumed thatthose rules and norms would afterwards acquire even greater force. Ladurie is quick toadd, however, that these motives were oftentimes subverted, and the desire to“maintain local society in working order” was periodically transformed by politicalsubjects who used carnival festivities to critique government officials and stateinstitutions and demand significant political reform. Swiss history, for example, neatlyprovides a series of such subversions, for popular carnivals were used to attack thenobility in particular and the corruptly rich in general in the fourteenth century,the Pope and Catholicism at the beginning of the Reformation, and Napoleon in thenineteenth century (311–12). Carnival, Ladurie concludes, was not simply aboutenhancing social control, despite scholarly arguments to the contrary, but about“controlling control” itself and “modifying the society as a whole in the direction ofsocial change and possible progress” (313–16; italics in original).

The carnivalesque also displays temporal features with political ramifications. Thethree main features that mark the temporal dimensions of political carnival and createtemporary windows of opportunity for freedom from political subjection, accordingto Edmund Leach, are masquerades, role reversals, and closing formalities: maskssignify a breaking away from ordinary time and entrance into fictive or sacred time viaanonymity and normal role loss; role reversals—or the turning of the world upsidedown—signify a divine instance of group fusion as people enter liminal spaces wherenormally highly disciplined social roles are temporarily exchanged or discarded; andclosing formalities (e.g., orderly processions, ritual reinstatement of officials) occur


at the end of the carnival period to signify a return to the normal world of humorlessrepression where such politically consequential fictions as “the divine right of kings,”“state sovereignty,” or “free trade” become “real” again. Therefore, opportunities for“controlling control,” rather than simply “living under controlled conditions,” arebrief, and recognizing when the conditions are right is crucial for those seeking toengage in humorous forms of protest: when the window of opportunity closescarnivalesque humor, especially political consequential humor, is no longer toleratedor welcome.When putting these various features together, one finds that the historical notion of

political carnival looks something like this: pre-Christian festivals, mostly associatedwith the agricultural calendar and the mysteries of death and rebirth, and comprisedof events that inverted hierarchies and temporarily suspended normal social rules,were eventually coopted by the Catholic Church. Carnivalesque features were woveninto various Church holidays, for example, and Carnival became a temporary time oflicentiousness before the sobering events of Lent and Easter. These were festiveholidays sanctioned by the state and the Church to allow the common people to “letoff a little social steam” while hopefully reinforcing the normal order of things. Such aprocedure is actually not so surprising a development from a theoretical perspective,for, as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Terry Eagleton have each pointed outin different ways, it is only through transgressions that social limits are revealed.Official periods of “sanctioned transgression” are capable of “magically” reinforcingthe normal moral and political order by revealing the limits of that order in morepositive ways than outright physical and/or ideological repression.9 Political carnival,therefore, is not only about the temporary suspension of the rules of everyday life butthe intentional inversion of normal order (e.g., the cart comes before the horse, themouse chases the cat, the wolf watches the sheep, children spank parents, slavesbecome masters, commoners become kings) for a wide range of potential purposes(e.g., to ritualize and thus pacify “serious” political protest, to release oneself from theconstraints of daily roles, to demand progressive political reform). People temporarilyare freed from their everyday identities by putting on masks and entering large crowds(masquerades, pageants, parades), and, as Goethe points out in his Italian Journey,they often prefer to put on very plain and common masks in order more effectively to“lose themselves” in the crowd or more boldly to make collective political statements(453). Therefore, while the inversion of hierarchies, the reversal of binaries, and thewearing of masks—all related in interesting ways, as we shall see, with critical politicaltheory—can serve to reinforce political order, they are also ultimately capable ofserving a much greater purpose: allowing subjects to enter a liminal realm of freedomand in so doing create a space for critique that would otherwise not be possible in“normal” society.Before leaving this discussion of the political features of carnival and moving on to

discuss examples of carnivalesque protest illuminating the interrelationships amonghumorless states, public humor, healthy political order, and the requisite politicalconditions for progressive (as opposed to repressive) forms of protest, there is onemore crucial feature of the carnivalesque to address: the curious blending of the fictive

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and the real. Briefly stated, during carnival festivities “subjects of the realm” are given acertain license to “pretend” in ways that have real political consequences—and in anodd parallel to the way that “the elite” are given license to “pretend” in ways that havereal political consequences outside of carnival.10 As Bakhtin observes, during carnivalpeople replace the everyday world with a symbolic/utopian world, and the “truth” ofthat utopian world becomes “a real existing force,” and he provides the followingexample to illustrate his point. During the “diableries” (i.e., devilish activities) relatedto the medieval mystery plays “it was customary to permit the devils to run loosearound the streets wearing their costumes; sometimes they were free to do so forseveral days before the performance. . . . The actors, disguised as devils . . . consideredthemselves exempt from the law . . . and took advantage of their role to rob thepeasants and mend their financial affairs (Rabelais 265–66). These “poor devils” alsowere allowed to take revenge on people in the community who had taken advantage ofpoor citizens, especially the corruptly rich and the selfish.11

Goethe, witnessing the carnival festival in Rome firsthand in January 1788, providesan account of carnival that captures a wide range of its traditional features, includingthe blending of the fictive and the real:

The Roman Carnival is not really a festival given for the people but one the peoplegive themselves. The state makes very few preparations for it and contributes next tonothing. . . . All that happens is that, at a given signal, everyone has leave to be asmad and foolish as he likes, and almost everything, except fisticuffs and stabbing, ispermissible. The difference between social orders seems to be abolished for the timebeing; everyone accosts everyone else, all good naturedly accept whatever happens tothem, and the insolence and license of the feast is balanced only by the universalgood humor (446–47).

Goethe also observed that during the carnival “mock battles” would break out, “butsometimes these mock battles turn[ed] serious.” Dealers in “plaster bonbons” (thesugar coated almonds were too expensive for many) would run from one combatant tothe other, weighing out as many pounds as they asked for. There is no doubt that manyof these fights would have ended “with knives being drawn” if not for the “instrumentsof torture” (state instruments placed there by the police) conveniently positionedalong the street to remind revelers not to press their “fun” too far (459). Here, then, aswith the “poor devils,” carnivalesque moments were used to “act” on certainfrustrations (e.g., love affairs gone wrong, revenge for former slights) that could not be“acted upon” in the normal course of life.

Conversely, instead of the fictional eliding into the real, the reverse was also trueduring carnival. If you were a visitor from a foreign land who happened upon therevelries in your native costume, for example, it was assumed that it was simply that: acostume. So if a (real) Quaker (in everyday life) showed up at carnival wearingtraditional Quaker clothing, then surely this person was pretending to be Quaker. Insum, during carnival everyone was considered to be “pretending” all of the time (as insome senses we obviously are), and, as Goethe observed, strangers had to “resignthemselves to being made fun of . . . for anyone marked down as a target . . . ha[d] nochance of escape . . . [and to] defend oneself against teasing of this sort would


[have been] very dangerous, for the maskers [were] considered inviolable, and everyguard ha[d] orders to protect them” (453–54). Thus it was that the “fictional”temporarily took precedence over the “real.”Sometimes such half-real pretending could turn deadly. Ladurie describes in great

detail a particular carnival festival in Romans, France, in 1580 (some 200 years beforeGoethe’s observations and some 400 years before the carnivalesque collapse ofcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe) where the lower and middle classes werein open political conflict with the upper classes. At the time, in this particular part ofFrance, the ruling elite had exempted themselves from paying their fair share of taxes,thereby leaving the vast majority of the tax burden to the middle and lower classes—aclear example of political corruption, if the proper goal of politics is to protect thecommon good.12 As public and personal debts mounted, the wealthy nobles were morethan happy to loan money to the poor, and as a result of the lower classes beingresponsible for funding all public services, while those most able to pay were exempt,the burden slowly became unbearable.During the carnival festivities in 1580 Romans, therefore, and taking advantage of

the temporary suspension of the draconian rules that dominated their lives, the poorcitizens of the city held separate events from the rich, and the symbolism on both sideswas clear enough: the theme for the poor people’s carnival was “eat the rich, for therich of the town have grown fat at the expense of the poor.” In the poor people’sparades they carried rakes and brooms (symbolizing their desire to sweep away therich), they cried “flesh of Nobles for six deniers a pound,” and they held mock militaryparades complete with mock weapons.13 On the “better side of town” the rich begantheir carnival festivities by passing a law, through their carnival King (a mock King,chosen secretly in advance, and given the very real right to pass enforceable laws, ifonly for a few days), that “bad food would be expensive and good food would becheap” (a slam on the poor people’s pretensions to power). However, on Mardi Gras,February 15, the rich of the town, in their masks, crossed the line between fiction andfact and massacred the leaders of the poor people’s carnival, and after the officialreturn of “law and order” they publicly tortured and hanged the remaining rebelleaders and massacred thousands of peasants in the nearby countryside: not veryhumorous at all (218–28).Here we have a clear case of the humorless state in action. Ladurie’s example, distant in

time as it is, provides clear evidence in support of the thesis that corrupt governments,populated by people wanting to use political power to maintain their unjust advantages,have avery limited senseof humor and stiflepublic critique tomaintain their status. It alsosupports the early classical republican theory that “subjects” usually rebel onlywhen thereis a “scandalous abuse of power.” If the nobles had beenwilling to carry their fair share ofthe public burden, then the “common people” would likely never have rebelled or, to bemore precise, would never have performed their mock rebellion. Nevertheless, since thepoor dared “humorously” to challenge the noble’s authority, the nobles decided toretaliate by violently decimating the ranks of the poor.While the nobles used the reversal of hierarchies, masks, and other trappings of

carnival for deadly serious purposes, there were many humorous performances on the

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part of the poor. Ladurie argues that the poor of Romans were not planning a“serious” revolution—if they had it would have been doomed to fail—but insteadsimply wanted to take the opportunity of the carnival festival to voice their very realgrievances over corruption in government through “comic” performances. Forexample, the main rebel leader, the first to be murdered, appeared at a city hall meetingand took the seat of a nobleman right after carnival began wearing nothing but a bearskin. At the time, the bear was symbolically equal to the groundhog that appears todayin late winter to decide if spring will arrive early or not. In making this gesture, therebel leader, according to Ladurie, probably meant to perform his hope that therewould soon be an end to the long winter of corruption in city hall. While otherinstances could be cited, the point here is that the poor used carnival as an opportunityto poke fun at the rich, while the rich used carnival to murder the poor.

In 1580 Romans, then, carnivalesque protest obviously did not work, and the eventsexemplify how humorous public gestures, in certain conditions, prove incapable ofsuccessfully combating state corruption. Fortunately other, more contemporary,examples of carnivalesque protests against communism in Central and Eastern Europein the late 1980s and against corporate globalization at the dawn of the twenty-firstcentury help to clarify the conditions in which such protests can succeed.

Carnivalesque Protests and Their Windows of Opportunity

Just as Jurgen Habermas suggests that a critical (bourgeois) public emerged in variousstates in Western Europe only when the previously unchecked power of the monarchswas temporarily offset by the rising power of the merchant classes, it appears thatcarnivalesque protest only succeeds when there are checks and balances in statepower.14 Furthermore, the windows of opportunity for carnivalesque protest quicklyclose when either the temporary balance of power is upset (leading to a new round ofoppression), or after the carnivalesque protests are successful and the ridiculousnature of state pseudoseriousness is replaced with a “healthy” seriousness, and/orwhen pseudodialogue is replaced with more sincere forms of dialogue. Two specificinstances of carnivalesque protest nicely illustrate these points: Orange Alternative’sprotest in WrocŁaw, Poland, over the course of the 1980s, and Ben White’s “turtletactics” at the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in late 1999.15 While scoresof similar events took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s andcontinue to take place during anticorporate globalization protests, these two instancesare typical and usefully exemplify when, where, why, and how carnivalesque protesttactics work and do not work.

As is well known, under the communist governments of Central and Eastern Europepublic protest simply was not allowed: the Soviet Union, for example, used militaryforce to suppress public protests against communist totalitarianism in East Germany,Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia. However, by the mid 1980s, due inlarge part to economic stagnation in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev initiatedinternal liberalization under the slogans of glasnost (openness) and perestroika(reconstruction). Unfortunately, at least for Gorbachev, instead of solving the problems


of communism, these reforms opened the way for more open criticisms of the obviousfailures of the Soviet system.16 An even earlier event that brought critical publicity to theSoviet Union arguably paved the way for these later changes: the Helsinki Accords,reached in 1975, which contained human rights provisions providing unprecedentedopportunities for Soviet dissidents to report human rights violations to theinternational community (Keck and Sikkink 24). Together, these and other changescreated new opportunities for Soviet satellite countries as they struggled to determinethe right amount of reform, but certainly not reform allowing for open protest. Thegrowing political “balance” between hard-liners and reformers over the proper pace ofprimarily economic reforms, however, created a unique opportunity for carnivalesqueforms of protest, as Padraic Kenney illustrates in his detailed account of the protests thatoccurred across Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (158–91). While openlyserious protest against communist governments continued quickly to lead to beatingsand arrests, though not nearly so often or severe as during the height of the Cold War(which technically did not end until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), protestscharacterized by carnivalesque features—the blending of the fictive and the real, the useof popular forms of humor, the inversion of hierarchies, and so forth—met withincreasing success, and the antics of Orange Alternative in Poland exemplify this fact.Beginning in 1981, when state oppression against the labor movement Solidarity

was quite severe (martial law had been imposed), about the only way to publiclyprotest against corruption in government was through graffiti. When the police wouldpaint over Solidarity graffiti, they would leave misshapen blobs on the walls, andmembers of Orange Alternative, led by Waldemar Fydrych, known comically as MajorFydrych, would decorate those blobs with hats, arms, and legs, turning them into littleelves. At first, the symbols, in carnivalesque fashion, were both anonymous andambiguous, but they were nevertheless publicly visible alterations to otherwiseobvious erasures on the part of the state, for state “security” forces did not findSolidarity very funny at all. In 1982, during the May Day celebrations, members ofOrange Alternative dressed up in ridiculous costumes, rented a bus, went to the localzoo, and waved red flags and sang communist songs while ironically demanding“freedom for the bears,” the bear being an obvious Soviet symbol. Although the“protesters” were arrested, they were so ridiculous that the police refused to fine them,particularly because it was difficult to know where to draw the line when it came to thisobscure kind of political performance. Additionally, because the government wantedto take advantage of its newfound ability to distance itself from direct Sovietintervention in local economic and political affairs, officials did not want to be seen asreturning to the more openly brutal political oppression of the past.State authority, particularly in light of its own increasingly liminal position, proved

nearly helpless in the face of such carnivalesque absurdities, which continued withincreasing intensity as the public slowly began to recognize that they could get awaywith quite a bit using such tactics. On Children’s Day in 1987, over a thousand youngPolish citizens took to the streets of WrocŁaw dressed as elves, embodying thesymbolism of the graffiti from seven years earlier. They handed out candy and sangchildren’s songs. Major Frydrych, who had the habit of comically dressing as a Soviet

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military official, was arrested immediately, but as the police also began to arrest elves,the large crowd that had gathered began to chant “Elves are real!” The arrested elvesdanced, kissed police officers, then threw candy out of the windows of police vans asthey were driven away (although they were quickly released without penalty), and theimages of these events were later broadcast across the entire country, “symbolizing akind of surreal immunity from repression through foolishness” (Kenney 160).

The comic symbol of protest eventually became the Smurfs. These popular cartooncharacters, blue elves appearing weekly on Polish television (a cultural import from theUnited States) performing deeds of brotherly love and bravery to rescue one anotherfrom harm, were ironically identified with the police (blue was the color of theiruniforms and vans—the opposite of orange). Over time, protesters began greeting thepolice as Smurfs, and yet, given the carnivalesque nature of these symbols, whenMajorFydrych was released from prison and appeared at the Children’s Day festivities thefollowing year (1988) he was hailed as “Papa Smurf”: the “fool” had become thecarnival “king.”

Of course, there were serious protests devoid of humor in Poland as well, but usuallythey only involved disgruntled and brave labor organizers and university students. Yetchanging the mind of the public, emboldening them to participate in political carnival,was precisely what Orange Alternative was all about. According to Fydrych, OrangeAlternative “happenings” were “places to learn opposition” and to “discover morepolitical forms of protest.” He argued, “The WrocŁaw street slowly ceases to fear, andthrough participation in the fun, people learn to support more serious [protest] . . .[and slowly the] fear of detention—usually for a few hours, without seriousconsequences—evaporates” (Kenney 190). It was, as Kenney remarks, a kind ofsocialist surrealism as sociotherapy.

As ever broader cross sections of the public began to join with the workers andstudents in these carnivalesque protests, it soon became clear that the governmentcould not last for long, especially given the growing tensions and balance betweenhard-liners and reformers over liberalization policies both in the Soviet Union and inPoland, with the latter country being poised to lead the way for other Central andEastern European countries due to its relatively democratic past. By 1989 communismwas all but dead in Poland, and suddenly the prankster protests stopped. The corruptrepresentatives of the ridiculous puppet state had now been replaced by electedrepresentatives, and public mobilization began to occur not through carnival butthrough forms more typical in market democracies (e.g., public relations, advertising,political speech). The window on carnivalesque protest in Poland had briefly openedand now was closed.

Ten years later, however, the window of opportunity for carnivalesque protestsuddenly opened again in what for many people was a highly unlikely place: the UnitedStates. By most estimates, over 60,000 citizens representing over 600 national andinternational nongovernment organizations flooded the streets of Seattle to disrupt aninternational meeting of trade ministers, executive state representatives and corporateelites. Janet Thomas, in her book on the 1999 protest against the World TradeOrganization (WTO), called it “a carnival of cause” (12). But what cause? The simple


and most common answer: creeping global corporate rule, and the insidiousdestruction of global democracy by market fundamentalists.Interestingly enough, and much unlike the situation in the post-9/11 era, there was

growing indecision in the executive branch during the last years of the Clintonadministration over the direction of global trade policy, and the state had not yetdeveloped the wide range of measures it now has at its disposal for stifling publicdissent (e.g., “protest free zones,” “loyalty oaths,” “homeland security,” the surveillancemeasures contained in the “Patriot Act”). Instead, at the time, and given mountingpublic pressure against the negative impacts of economic globalization, Clinton hadbegun delivering speeches across the country arguing that, while he believed that freertrade led to greater economic prosperity, the world needed to change course to achieve“globalization with a human face” (“Council”; “New York”). Clinton’s discourse,however, failed to stem economic globalization’s negative impacts on organized labor,the environment, and local forms of democracy. When the WTO decided to hold itsinternational meeting in Seattle, in a section of the United States jokingly referred to asthe “Left Coast” populated by a wide range of civic activists with considerableexperience in fighting for environmental justice and labor rights, some kind of clashwas inevitable.Despite the slight and apparently temporary erosion of confidence in what has

commonly been referred to as “the Washington Consensus” (i.e., the belief on the partof both Democrats and Republicans that “free markets” are good and “biggovernment” is bad), this certainly did not mean that any and all forms of peacefulpublic protest would be allowed. Officials had already decided that massive publicassemblies blocking the streets and delegate access to the WTO events would not betolerated, although this was precisely the goal of the protest organizers. As a result, andas the images broadcast across the country showed, the events in Seattle were markedby considerable vandalism on the part of anarchists and significant violence on thepart of police. Still, in the middle of this sea of political conflict, and located on severalkey intersections in downtown Seattle, was a small band of “turtle people” whomanaged to avoid the brunt of the vandalism and violence.The idea for the turtle people was the brainchild of BenWhite of the AnimalWelfare

Institute, mainly as a reaction to the fact that the WTO court had overturned a US lawpassed in 1996 banning the sale of shrimp caught in nets that killed endangered seaturtles. The WTO court’s reasoning was that the law constituted “an unfair barrier totrade.” White thought that a public performance by “turtle people” could send anumber of important symbolic messages. The ban on certain shrimp nets had beeninitiated through traditional democratic channels in the US by nongovernmentorganizations such as the Earth Island Institute, the American Society for thePrevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society of the US, and the Sierra Club(Thomas 18). However, because unelected courts in newly empowered internationalgovernment organizations designed to enforce “free trade” were (and are) now able tooverturn the laws of nation-states, the turtle people wanted to provide a “street theaterspectacle” to draw attention to this new and relatively unknown form of corporateglobal governance.

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After a week of what turned out to be extremely popular teach-ins organized by theInternational Forum on Globalization concerning the negative impacts of globalization,on Tuesday, November 30, 1999, the opening day of the WTOmeetings, White gatheredtogether 250 individuals who had volunteered to become turtle people. Gathering at alocal church, and having to turn over 100 potential turtle people away,White went over anumber of “turtle obligations” before handing over the costumes he had prepared. Afternoting the characteristics of turtles—long-lived, patient, placid, gentle—he first told thegroup that if they encountered any kind of violence whatsoever they were “to stop andsurround itwithpeaceful turtle power.” Second, he announced that if anyonedidanythingaggressive they would be “de-turtled on the spot,” and this included any use of hostilelanguage. Third, he told the group to comport themselves like turtles: as ancientrepositories of wisdom they should not fight back if provoked by police protecting theircorporate clients. Fourth, they were asked to return their costumes to the church so thenext day’s planned civil disobedience actions could proceed as scheduled. Finally, heannounced that their job was quietly to block major downtown intersections leading tothe WTO conference in order to prevent delegates from attending.

Throughout the day, the turtle brigade “was the antithesis of an angry, stridentprotest,” and the image of the lowly and peaceful turtles taking on the power ofmultinational corporations and free trade ideologues dominated media images acrossthe country (Thomas 23-28). Not only did they appear on the cover ofNewsweek, theirimages also prominently appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, theLos Angeles Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and on CNN (to name a few).Conversely, a “serious” protest at a downtownMcDonald’s by French farmer Jose Bovewas marked by vandalism and violence, and, while the “serious” protest blocked theturtles’ return to the church, all 250 costumes were duly returned on time.

Needless to say, even though the turtles were relatively safe during the proceedings,other participants, such as those from the Direct Action Network, who invited people tojoin their “Festival ofResistance,”werenot so lucky (Thomas83–87). Even though“directaction” activists claimed they would be engaging in “street theater” and would benonviolent, not be verbally or physically abusive, not carry weapons or drugs, and notdestroy property, when they went to block intersections downtown they were quicklyassaulted by police forces. Themembers of Direct Action Network, although surroundedby “jugglers, drummers, big puppets, the radical cheerleaders, and Santa Clauses, . . . usedchickenwire, duct tape, PCV piping, chains and padlocks to secure themselves together”when taking over the intersection (Thomas 85). As opposed to the intersectionswhere theturtles were, where “people loved it, the cops loved it, bystanders loved it” (Thomas 28), atractor with a scoop turned onto the street and headed for the “serious” protesters. Police“lifted the protective bandanas worn by locked-down protesters who were sitting in thestreet and squirtedpepper spraydirectly into their eyes . . . rubber bullets bruised thebacksof retreating demonstrators [and] cans of tear gas were thrown” (Thomas 86–87).Whilethe various events had successfully thwarted the WTO meetings for the day, thegovernment quickly announced there would be a 7:00 p.m. curfew that night, and thefollowing day there would be a sixty block “protest free zone” around the WTOConference headquarters.


Clearly, the “festival of resistance” of the Direct Action Network was not received,nor covered in the media, at all like the turtle people were. As Thomas notes, “many ofthe protesters had a sense of humor. Some of the protesters, and most of the police, didnot.” There were “cops in all-black uniforms, complete with black capes . . . morescience fiction-looking than even the military. This wasn’t the clean-cut-lookingNational Guard from the ’60s” (68). On the other side were the puppets, the RagingGrannies, the Ruckus Society, Santa Clauses, etc., mostly singing, dancing, joking, andhaving fun. Strangely enough, perhaps, they were relatively safe, whereas the “serious”protesters obviously were not. Sure enough, besides the coverage happily given to theturtles, the preponderance of coverage in the national media characterized the protestas an irrational outburst by “radicals.” The “serious” protesters had in fact unwittinglyplayed directly into the hands of the market logic of the mass media: if it bleeds it leads.As one protester put it:

How can I describe the television news coverage? How would a sports enthusiast feelif he tuned in to see the big game and the entire coverage was focused on the guyselling peanuts? [T]he coverage was a veil that missed or minimized everysubstantive issue, diverting attention to the violence or threat of violence in thestreet. (Thomas 69)

Newspaper coverage did not do much better, generally characterizing the protesters asbeing against trade, per se, not against what they considered to be unfair trade policies.The important distinction between antiglobalization protest and anticorporateglobalization protest was ignored or overlooked.While the events in Seattle were certainly dramatic, it was only a matter of time

before “order” was restored. Today, in the post-9/11 era, the lessons learned by thestate are now in evidence at every major public protest against corporate global rule:summits are held at fortified and isolated locations, permits for marches andgatherings are denied, protesters are sequestered from “protest free zones” and herded(often fenced) into “protest zones,” thereby segregating protesters from the target oftheir protests, and police presence is overwhelming. While the window of opportunityfor carnivalesque protest at anticorporate globalization protests has perhaps not closedcompletely, it is surely the case that those in support of global corporate rule would likeit to close. Regardless, unlike the situation in Poland (and the rest of Central andEastern Europe), where comic protest was eventually successful in contributing tosubstantive political reform, the same is certainly not true when it comes to corporateglobalization.These two examples, limited as they are, suggest that the humorless state has a very

difficult time dealing with absurdity, symbolic protest, and the curious blending of thefictive and the real—people becoming turtles, elves becoming “real”—but it has muchless trouble violently dealing with more “serious” forms of protest. And perhaps thishas always been true. Rabelais, the subject of Bahktin’s book on the carnivalesque, waswell known for masking his critique of the existing political order of his day withhumor and was, therefore, safe from Church oppression. Conversely, other critics ofhis time were burned at the stake for saying less controversial things seriously. Within

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the carnival, as elves are carted away in police vans throwing candy and singingcommunist songs and as turtle people peacefully waddle down the streets, there is acertain absurdity to violent state reactions. Images of cute little elves being beaten bypolice or passive turtles being scooped up by tractors do not make for very good pressif you represent the state. But it makes for excellent press if you are a protester (seeDeluca and Peeples). Conversely, images of “serious” protesters angrily vandalizingcorporate property or yelling at police make excellent press for the state, displaying asthey do the “seriousness” of the situation. This is not to suggest that the elves or theturtle people were fully aware of the media potential of their activities (although theymay have been), but politically progressive activists could nevertheless learn a greatdeal by taking note of this difference.

Humor, Corruption, and Critical Theory

It is of course difficult to laugh in the face of danger. When hundreds of police andmilitary personnel are lined up in their riot gear with weapons aimed at you, it isdifficult to dance or sing. The natural human reaction of those oppressed by what theyconsider to be unjust forces of order is to fight back: after all, that is what justice is allabout. Or is it? This brings us back to the questions that opened this essay: what specifickinds of humor and seriousness best reflect the healthy state? Under what specificconditions does humor help to overcome corruption, and when does it fail? When is itappropriate and just for the state to “get serious,” and when is its seriousnesslaughable? It is the way we approach this last question that helps to answer the rest.

First of all, carnivalesque protest is simply not possible if the state is so oppressivelyhumorless that it utterly eliminates all public opposition. The singing and dancing elfcan simply be taken away at night and dropped into the ocean with weights on his orher feet, as in 1970s Argentina. However, even in these conditions there might becertain forms of public protest (on the part of the very elderly or the very young, forexample) available to the oppressed. There must be, to borrow a phrase from socialmovement theory, “opportunity structures” in place in order for public politicalperformances to occur at all. Put simply, whether or not a state has “open” or “closed”opportunity structures depends on “how porous they are to social organizations”(Khagram, Rikker, and Sikkink 17). Liberal (social) democracies tend to be the mostporous, whereas conservative (market) democracies tend to be less porous, andtotalitarian and fundamentalist regimes tend to be the least porous. Arguably, then,this is perhaps the main criterion for gauging the “sense of humor” of the state: thefirst type being the funniest, the second type being less funny, and the third type notbeing funny at all.

But how does a state come to possess its particular sense of humor? Is it related tothe degree of poverty in a state, the degree of disparity between the rich and the poor,levels of education, or something else? It is historically the case that the poorest statesusually have the most repressive governments, but this is not always true. NaziGermany, for example, and Imperial Japan provide obvious antimodels. Is it thepreponderance of military and/or economic power? It is historically the case that states


with the greatest freedom of expression have usually been wealthy empires withextensive “colonies” such as Athens, Rome, Britain, France, and the United States.From a world systems perspective, one could argue that only the core (rich, capitalacquiring) states can afford the luxury of free speech, while semiperipheral countries,dependent as they are for their “middle class” status on the good will of the corecountries, must repress speech to keep that good will. The peripheral countries, or the“lower class” countries, then, could be expected to have no free speech at all.17 Classissues have certainly played a central role in carnivalesque protest across the centuries,but can state humors be reduced to hard economic and military power?There is a growing body of literature to suggest that soft power, or the power of

persuasion, also plays a major role in the humors of states (Crawford; Florini; Keckand Sikkink; Kenney). That is, changing the ways people think changes the kinds ofcommunities they create. While this may seem an obvious point to communicationscholars, it is far from self-evident to many so-called “realists” in internationalrelations and “rationalists” in economics. Within this soft power paradigm, it is notthe wealth or power of a state that determines its sense of humor, but the degree towhich that state is either just or corrupt, where a just state is conceived as one thatconcerns itself with establishing the rule of law in defense of the common good, and acorrupt state is conceived as one that concerns itself with establishing the rule by law indefense of the self-interest of a fraction of the people. However, it is nevertheless thecase that, from a political-philosophical point of view, since states today are always“self-interested,” insofar as their view of the “common good” generally ends at theirown borders, we are doomed to live in a world of relatively humorless and corruptstates, since an “ideally” humorous and just state would have to be concerned with thetruly common, that is universally common, good. This in turn brings up several issuesrelated to critical political theory that happen to overlap in interesting ways with thecarnivalesque.As Bakhtin and Nietzsche have argued, the quest for certainty and/or perfect

representation is usually a symptom of decline (Bakhtin, Rabelais 115, 258, 426–27;Nietzsche, 246–57). As Nietzsche repeatedly noted, for example, language is essentiallymetaphorical, and Truths “are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they areillusions” (250). Nietzsche, however, was far from despairing over this fact, andbelieved that Truths are not only politically consequential fictions but absolutelynecessary for human life—thus his notion of the art of living as the art of creating thebest fictions possible. This is a far cry from Plato’s insistence that ideas are the greatestreality, followed by the “secondary” reality of things, the “tertiary” reality of words,and the dangerously fictitious “nature” of poetry and rhetoric. Inverting Plato,Nietzsche argues that all language, therefore all knowledge, has poetic and rhetoricaldimensions. Bakhtin, like Foucault, politicizes this perspective to show how the“seriousness” of “correct” interpretation and representation (the Certain meaning, theperfect Representation) is anything but funny: torturers, jailers, the police, militaryofficials, and others who are “certain” that what they are doing is “right” reveal thisevery day. Therefore, there is a very interesting and thoroughgoing relationshipbetween language in use and political formations, both ideational and institutional.

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Many critical theorists have pointed out how the quest for an unquestionable andnonambiguous identity, especially when that quest is at the expense of an adequateappreciation for the constitutive role of language, leads to forms of seriousness that “bydefinition” lead to violence.18 Such quests invariably are shipwrecked on their own“false” seriousness. While Sigmund Freud argued that civilization itself was built uponthe foundation of psychic repression, critical theorists seek to investigate a politics basedon an incessant interrogation of this false seriousness in order to attain moredemocratic, just, and peaceful forms of seriousness. True, open seriousness requires acritical formof consciousness that embraces whatDanaVilla has referred to as “Socraticcitizenship,”19 Foucault has called “a limit attitude” (“Enlightenment”), Debord hascalled detournement (Society 144–46), Jacques Derrida has called “deconstructivejustice,”20 and what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have called “radicaldemocracy”. All these concepts relate to the political necessity, if one wants to avoid thekinds of violence that arise when people valorize the representative features of languageand overlook the constitutive dimensions of language, for creating forms of politicalaction that constitute incessant critiques of essentialism. As expressed by Bakhtin:

True open seriousness fears neither parody, nor irony, nor any other form of reducedlaughter, for it is aware of being part of an uncompleted whole . . . it does not denyseriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, fromthe intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fearand intimidation. (Rabelais 122–23)

Arguably, the carnivalesque is a resource of political action that resonates with theabove-listed notions, most importantly because it destabilizes the kinds of certaintiesthat lead to “political illness,” especially as manifested in forms of the humorless state.

There are several lessons, then, to be drawn from this brief exploration ofcarnivalesque political performance. First, democracy and humor in a state tend todevelop when there is a persistent and effective balance of powers. As political theoristsacross the ages have argued, the principal problem with statecraft is how to maintainthat precarious balance, for when it is upset and power is concentrated in the hands of aparticular faction the health of the state deteriorates rapidly as self-interest overwhelmsthe truly popular (general) interest. Second, there also appear to be windows ofopportunity in corrupt states, if opportunity structures are in place for the expression ofpopular unrest, for progressive forms of carnivalesque protest or forms of protest thatuse ambiguity and humor to undermine the false seriousness of the self-interested.However, those windows quickly close when opportunity structures evaporate (e.g.,when civil liberties are restricted for the purposes of “homeland security”) or whenprotests are successful enough to transform government progressively in ways thatreinforce the balance of power (thus making festive humor less necessary). Third, solong as states are only concerned with their own common good they are inscribing ahumorless limit on the truly common good of the international community; yetundermining local democratic processes through the forced interventions ofinternational government organizations designed to protect only a fraction of theworld’s population is not a viable alternative to global democracy either.


Perhaps a final example might help to summarize the difficulties that surroundputting carnivalesque techniques into practice. Before the attacks on the United Stateson 11 September 2001, large numbers of protesters were on the streets to voice theirdispleasure over what they believed were the antidemocratic practices involved incorporate globalization. After those attacks, however, the United States indeed faced aserious crisis: thousands of innocent people had been murdered, and the risk offurther terrorist attacks on the United States could not be denied. This was, andremains, a truly serious problem. One result of those attacks, however, was increasedsecurity measures and a reduction of civil liberties in the United States. Other resultsstemming from a nondemocratic global governance structure, however, were thecontinuing drain of high paying manufacturing jobs overseas, the dilution of thepowers of organized labor, the further decimation of the middle class (which politicaltheorists of the classic republican stripe have always argued is key to the health of anyrepublic due to a broader distribution of wealth and opportunity), few serious brakesbeing put on corporate rule, and, therefore, an even greater threat of terrorism. It wasno coincidence, after all, that the World Trade Center was attacked.In the wake of these events, political protests have continued. The Republican

convention in 2004, for instance, attracted over 500,000 activists, many engaging incarnivalesque tactics. Therefore, on the one hand, following Jefferson, we couldassume that some “scandalous abuse of power” continues to take place. On the otherhand, many citizens of the United States are clearly willing to trade some of their civilliberties for more security. But what constitutes political security? Arguably, politicalsecurity today would first require a thoroughgoing and fully public investigation intothe causes of terrorism against the United States and around the world.Second, limiting government to the concerns of “us” versus “them” is clearly no

solution in our increasingly globalized world. Yes, we must protect ourselves, butarguably the surest way to protect ourselves is to help make the entire world a safer, amore just, and a more wealthy place. While the rhetoric of free trade would(erroneously) suggest that freer trade and fewer constraints on corporations wouldautomatically lead to greater prosperity for all (the rising tide lifts all boats), a differentideology might suggest that debt reduction worldwide, less unilateral military action,tied as it has almost always been in the United States with corporate colonialism, andother similar measures would make the world a happier place.Third, obviously all forms of political totalitarianism and fundamentalism cannot

be tolerated, thus a delicate balance must be struck between global democracy and“nation-building,” a much more delicate balance than currently exists. As BenjaminBarber and Slavoj Zizek have both pointed out in different ways, both corporateglobalization and terrorism are antidemocratic forces with little interest in promotingdemocracy, and the current “populist Right” forces that currently hold power in theUnited States and (some parts of) Europe are primarily concerned to ensure thatanticapitalist critiques and movements toward democratic socialism are effectivelystifled. How, then, to promote the ability of local populations to organizedemocratically in the face of corporate globalization and “tribal” responses to marketfundamentalism remains a daunting challenge in the near term.

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How we help to create conditions allowing citizens of the world to meet thechallenges to statecraft in the twenty-first century, especially the politicallyconsequential fictions of national identity and sovereignty and the scourges ofmarket fundamentalism and terrorism (and all the other “certainties” afflicting “worldorder”), is one of the greatest questions, if not the greatest question, of our time.As radical democratic political activists seeking the path to a more just world order,using all the critical techniques at our disposal to unmask the humorless stateconstitutes useful steps toward that goal and equally useful steps away from the“masquerade” of corrupt politics.

Notes

[1] The literature on carnival and the historical importance of the carnivalesque is vast. For anexcellent bibliography see Ladurie 413–26.

[2] Despite his cynicism toward political order, Debord nevertheless has a number of importantthings to say about the economic unconscious of market societies and the function of capitalistspectacle.

[3] My notion of corruption is borrowed from radical Whig philosophies such as those ofAlgernon Sidney, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon. For introductions to thesephilosophies and their impact on British and American political thought, see Jacobson;Pockock 462–552.

[4] There have of course been other types of “humorous protest” that were not carnivalesque. InAncient Athens, for example, the comic theater was a rich source for political expression, andpolitical satire has long been a staple of politics in the United States. For useful descriptions ofthe relationship between Greek theater and critical political speech, see Stone 134–37, 218–24.For a discussion of the history of laughter and the important differences between carnivalesquehumor and satire, see Bakhtin, Rabelais 59-144.

[5] Many features of the pagan festival of Saturnalia were transformed by the Early Church intoholidays such as Christmas (see Laing 62–65).

[6] For a brief discussion of early Protestant attitudes toward the carnival tradition, see Ladurie308–9. Regarding carnival in the United States, Morgan persuasively argues that elections inearly US history served a carnivalesque political function (196–208).

[7] Kenneth Burke’s work on the “comic frame” is similar in many ways, though not equivalent, tothe carnivalesque (see Burke’s Attitudes and Carlson’s “Limitations” and “Ghandi”).

[8] Terry Eagleton and others have also focused on the controlling dimensions of officiallyritualized protest.

[9] For useful reviews of Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s theories of transgression and limit, see Simons;and Foucault’s essays “What is Enlightenment?” and “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

[10] One could plausibly argue that “everyday life” is carnival in reverse: the hierarchies, binaries,pretensions, masks are just as “fictional,” but they take on the quality of the real because thefictions are “made real” through the effects of power.

[11] This example also helps to explain the image on the cover of Stallybrass andWhite’s The Politicsand Poetics of Transgression, which shows masked devils beating a man with clubs as othermasked revelers look on with obvious enjoyment.

[12] The anticorporate globalization protests are similarly focused on how the “elites” are becomingrich by placing the tax and debt burdens on the lower and middle classes of the world (thustheir explicit critiques of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), and theattacks on communism in Eastern Europe were just as much attacks on the political elites who


managed information flows and the centralized economies to their own benefit and to thedetriment of everyday people.

[13] “Mock battles” were also waged by Orange Alternative in Poland in the late 1980s (see Kenney160–64).

[14] While Habermas’ work has been roundly criticized for failing to account for the marginalizingtendencies of the bourgeois public sphere—composed as it was by the elite white malebeneficiaries of colonialism—it is nevertheless a very useful text for exploring the relationshipbetween balances of power and the possibilities for critical citizenship. For important critiquesof Habermas’ theory of the public, see Calhoun. For a concise summary of the history oftheories of checks and balances, see Hirschman.

[15] For detailed descriptions of the activities of Orange Alternative in Wrocklaw, see Kenney. For adetailed discussion of the “turtle people,” see Thomas 17–30.

[16] For an exploration of the political events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union, see BrunerandMorozov, especially chapters 1 and 10; andWedel. Clearly, carnivalesque protests were not theonly factor involved in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and that is not my claim. InPoland, for example, the work of Pope John Paul II and Solidarity weremajor contributing factors.Nevertheless, as Kenney shows, those protests did play a very important role.

[17] World systems theory has been most fully explicated by Etienne Balibar and ImmanuelWallerstein.

[18] Some scholars go so far as to deny that language plays any representative role whatsoever,although I prefer to see language as serving both representative and constitutive functions. Forarguments in defense of the former position, see Stewart.

[19] Villa’s thesis is that Socrates invented a form of dissident citizenship that can be traced to suchdisparate thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt. This formof citizenship does not seek to establish truth so much as critique presumed truths to exposetheir incoherence.

[20] Derrida’s basic argument is that deconstruction seeks to reveal the limits of practices ofidentification in order to make them available for reflective critique.

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Documents

Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State