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Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless StateM. Lane Bruner

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To cite this article: M. Lane Bruner (2005): Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State, Text and Performance Quarterl

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Carnivalesque Protest andthe Humorless State

M. Lane Bruner

Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, institutional forms of

oppression have periodically been defeated, transformed, or at least temporarily checked

by carnivalesque forms of public protest. After reviewing the political features of carnival

and the carnivalesque, along with several historical and contemporary examples of

carnivalesque political performances, this essay explores the possibilities for progressive

public transgression and the interrelationships among carnivalesque protest, critical

democratic 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 spectrums

have periodically counteracted repressive forms of government with carnivalesque

forms of protest.1 These protests, history suggests, are particularly prevalent when

those benefiting from rampant political corruption lose their sense of humor, become

ridiculous in their seriousness, but are incapable, for one reason or another, of

silencing their prankster publics. There would appear to be important and ongoing

tensions, then, between the shifting humors of state agents and the productivecapacities of critical citizens, suggesting that a fuller appreciation for the dynamics of

those tensions is an important step in understanding how challenges to power can

result 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 the

doctoral program in Public Communication in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University in

Atlanta, Georgia. Correspondence to: M. Lane Bruner, Department of Communication, Georgia State University,

1052 One Park Place, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA. Tel: 1 404-651-3465; Email: [email protected]

Text and Performance Quarterly

Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2005, pp. 136155


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What, after all, constitutes humor in a state? Guy Debord, in his discussion of the

society of the spectacle, argues that the state neverhas a sense of humor, since the state

is always the ultimately unjust institutional site of law and order in the service of the

corruptly wealthy and powerful. In his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, for

example, Debord claims that it is always a mistake to try to explain something by

opposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals (67).2 However, even a cursory review

of political history reveals that different states at different times display a range of

humors, from sick totalitarian states that suppress critical forms of public

communication to healthy classical republican polities whose citizens enjoy a wide

range of rights and freedoms, particularly of speech and assembly. One could plausibly

argue that a states sense of humor is proportionate to the strength of citizens rights

and freedoms againstthe state, the general openness of government deliberations, thebreadth and depth of political dialogue, and the degree to which state officials are

legally constrained to tolerate public criticism. Rebellious citizenship, in fact, has often

been valorized by political theorists and practitioners as something essential for state

health. Around the time of the American Revolution, for example, it was commonly

claimed among Whig philosophers that mobs and tumults only happen when there

is a scandalous abuse of power, and, when revolts were moderate and not a threat

to constitutional order, Thomas Jefferson famously held that a little rebellion now

and 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 to

manage ambiguity and dissensus, have rich and actively turbulent public spheres, have

flourishing forms of parodic and/or critical public entertainments, and are led by

individuals encouraging critical citizenship. Conversely, sick and humorless states arepopulated by strict conservatives who crave certainty and discourage dissensus, have

anemic and passive public spheres, have bland and diverting forms of public

entertainments, and are led by individuals who repress critical citizenship.

Despite the long and generally humorless history of statecraft, it is nevertheless the

case that institutional forms of oppression have sometimes been defeated,

transformed, or at least temporarily checked by carnivalesque protests, at least when

conditions are favorable. Unfortunately, conditions are rarely favorable. While it is

true that serious protests can sometimes reveal the unjust limits of corrupt states, as

exemplified by the civil rights movement in the United States, it is far more often the

case that direct and confrontational public protest is utterly crushed, as tragically

demonstrated by the massacre of Chinese activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It

would appear, then, that onlycertain kinds of laughter in certain kinds of situations arethe surest sign of state health (for surely there are situations faced by citizens and their

state representatives that demand sincere seriousness). Conversely, only certain kinds

of sober seriousness in certain kinds of situations mark the state in decay (for surely

there are situations in which agents of state power are unnecessarily serious in order to

mask their own incompetence or corruption). If this is true, what, precisely, are the

kinds of laughter and seriousness that tend to make states healthier or sicker? How are

we to understand political performance and the connections among performance,

politics, and humor, and what are some of the possible interrelationships among

Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State 137


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progressive forms of carnivalesque protest, critical democratic citizenship, and state

health?

By first exploring the political features of carnival and the carnivalesque, and then

reviewing several historical and contemporary examples of carnivalesque protest to

ascertain the conditions required for its success, this essay seeks to address these and

other questions related to progressive public transgression. Ultimately I argue that

political corruption leads state actors to lose their sense of humor (i.e., as self-

interested factions begin to undermine the common interest they simultaneously

begin to stifle public critique and decry the principle of publicity in general), that there

are important civic lessons to draw from the similarities between critical political

theory and the carnivalesque, and that the most effective way of addressing state

corruption, 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 large

measure to the Protestant Reformation, popular notions of carnival, when not

associated with Ferris wheels and stuffed animals, are associated with licentious

festivals such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carnival in Brazil. These diverting

entertainments and bawdy celebrations, however, have lost almost all, if not all, of their

former political character, and this loss of political relevance obscures the fact that the

history of carnival is a rich repository of an effective array of public political

performances.For those interested in civil disobedience and other productive forms of democratic

rebellion, a brief look back into history provides numerous examples of how

carnivalesque protest has been used to oppose, or at least temporarily relieve, various

forms of oppressive political culture.4 In ancient Rome, the festival of Saturnalia, a

direct precursor to carnival festivals in the Early Christian, medieval, and Renaissance

eras, provided a brief window of opportunity when hegemonic social roles were

reversed and usual restrictions on public behavior were officially relaxed, ultimately to

reinforce normal public ordera point to which I will return shortly.5 While early

Christian leaders such as Tertullian and John Chrysostom took themselves a bit too

seriously and condemned laughter as an influence of the Devil, during the Middle

Ages, and later during the Renaissance, itself the consequence of what Bakhtin refers to

as a carnivalization of human consciousness (Rabelais 273), religious and stateinstitutions provided holidays serving a similar carnivalesque function of reinforcing

social order by allowing its temporary subversion. While Protestant reformers did

their best to destroy the carnival tradition, associated as it was with a mixture of

Catholic and pagan rituals, it nevertheless continued to persist across Europe through

the eighteenth century, though less so in the United States.6 And while officially

sanctioned forms of political carnival (ritualized transgression for political purposes)

died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carnivalesque tactics reemerged in

surprising 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 Poland

and the John Lennon Peace Club and the Society for a Merrier Present in the former

Czechoslovakia. More recently the term carnival and carnivalesque protest

techniques have been employed at anticorporate globalization protests in locations

ranging from Seattle, Washington, to Davos, Switzerland, by members of groups such

as Carnival against Capitalism, the Ruckus Society, Reclaim the Streets, and Art and

Revolution.

What are some of the politically consequential features of these various iterations of

political carnival and the carnivalesque? Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in their

review of contemporary scholarship on the topic, point out that the carnivalesque is

characterized by: (1) a potent, populist, critical inversion of all official words and

hierarchies; (2) the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, andprohibitions; (3) positive degradation and humiliation and an attitude of creative

disrespect; and (4) a temporary retextualizing of social formations that exposes their

fictive foundations (126).7

Stallybrass and White also stress the fact that carnival, in spite of its characteristic

role inversions and ambiguities, has often been used less as a means of temporary

social emancipation and progressive political critique than as a means of reinforcing

social control (1314). Lending qualified support to this perspective, Le Roy Ladurie,

citing the Spanish scholar Julio Caro Boroja, maintains that pre-Lenten carnival

festivals in sixteenth-century France were indeed ultimately designed by officials to

maintain local society in working order (311).8 That is, by permitting the temporary

suspension of the rules and norms governing everyday life, state officials assumed that

those 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 political

subjects who used carnival festivities to critique government officials and state

institutions and demand significant political reform. Swiss history, for example, neatly

provides a series of such subversions, for popular carnivals were used to attack the

nobility 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 the

nineteenth century (31112). Carnival, Ladurie concludes, was not simply about

enhancing social control, despite scholarly arguments to the contrary, but about

controlling control itself and modifying the society as a whole in the direction of

social change and possible progress (31316; italics in original).

The carnivalesque also displays temporal features with political ramifications. Thethree main features that mark the temporal dimensions of political carnival and create

temporary windows of opportunity for freedom from political subjection, according

to Edmund Leach, are masquerades, role reversals, and closing formalities: masks

signify a breaking away from ordinary time and entrance into fictive or sacred time via

anonymity and normal role loss; role reversalsor the turning of the world upside

downsignify a divine instance of group fusion as people enter liminal spaces where

normally highly disciplined social roles are temporarily exchanged or discarded; and

closing formalities (e.g., orderly processions, ritual reinstatement of officials) occur



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at the end of the carnival period to signify a return to the normal world of humorless

repression 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, are

brief, and recognizing when the conditions are right is crucial for those seeking to

engage in humorous forms of protest: when the window of opportunity closes

carnivalesque humor, especially political consequential humor, is no longer tolerated

or welcome.

When putting these various features together, one finds that the historical notion of

political carnival looks something like this: pre-Christian festivals, mostly associated

with the agricultural calendar and the mysteries of death and rebirth, and comprised

of events that inverted hierarchies and temporarily suspended normal social rules,were eventually coopted by the Catholic Church. Carnivalesque features were woven

into various Church holidays, for example, and Carnival became a temporary time of

licentiousness before the sobering events of Lent and Easter. These were festive

holidays sanctioned by the state and the Church to allow the common people to let

off a little social steam while hopefully reinforcing the normal order of things. Such a

procedure is actually not so surprising a development from a theoretical perspective,

for, as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Terry Eagleton have each pointed out

in different ways, it is only through transgressions that social limits are revealed.

Official periods of sanctioned transgression are capable of magically reinforcing

the normal moral and political order by revealing the limits of that order in more

positive 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, the

mouse chases the cat, the wolf watches the sheep, children spank parents, slaves

become 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 the

constraints of daily roles, to demand progressive political reform). People temporarily

are 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 the

wearing of masksall related in interesting ways, as we shall see, with critical political

theorycan serve to reinforce political order, they are also ultimately capable ofserving a much greater purpose: allowing subjects to enter a liminal realm of freedom

and 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 among

humorless states, public humor, healthy political order, and the requisite political

conditions for progressive (as opposed to repressive) forms of protest, there is one

more crucial feature of the carnivalesque to address: the curious blending of the fictive

140 M. Lane Bruner


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and the real. Briefly stated, during carnival festivities subjects of the realm are given a

certain license to pretend in ways that have real political consequencesand in an

odd parallel to the way that the elite are given license to pretend in ways that have

real political consequences outside of carnival.10 As Bakhtin observes, during carnival

people replace the everyday world with a symbolic/utopian world, and the truth of

that utopian world becomes a real existing force, and he provides the following

example to illustrate his point. During the diableries (i.e., devilish activities) related

to the medieval mystery plays it was customary to permit the devils to run loose

around the streets wearing their costumes; sometimes they were free to do so for

several days before the performance. . . . The actors, disguised as devils . . . considered

themselves exempt from the law . . . and took advantage of their role to rob the

peasants and mend their financial affairs (Rabelais 26566). These poor devils alsowere allowed to take revenge on people in the community who had taken advantage of

poor citizens, especially the corruptly rich and the selfish.11

Goethe, witnessing the carnival festival in Rome firsthand in January 1788, provides

an account of carnival that captures a wide range of its traditional features, including

the 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 universal

good humor (44647).

Goethe also observed that during the carnival mock battles would break out, but

sometimes these mock battles turn[ed] serious. Dealers in plaster bonbons (the

sugar coated almonds were too expensive for many) would run from one combatant to

the other, weighing out as many pounds as they asked for. There is no doubt that many

of these fights would have ended with knives being drawn if not for the instruments

of torture (state instruments placed there by the police) conveniently positioned

along the street to remind revelers not to press their fun too far (459). Here, then, as

with the poor devils, carnivalesque moments were used to act on certain

frustrations (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 the

revelries in your native costume, for example, it was assumed that it was simply that: a

costume. So if a (real) Quaker (in everyday life) showed up at carnival wearing

traditional Quaker clothing, then surely this person was pretending to be Quaker. In

sum, during carnival everyone was considered to be pretending all of the time (as in

some senses we obviously are), and, as Goethe observed, strangers had to resign

themselves to being made fun of. . . for anyone marked down as a target . . . ha[d] no

chance of escape . . . [and to] defend oneself against teasing of this sort would



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[have been] very dangerous, for the maskers [were] considered inviolable, and every

guard 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 before

Goethes observations and some 400 years before the carnivalesque collapse of

communism in Central and Eastern Europe) where the lower and middle classes were

in open political conflict with the upper classes. At the time, in this particular part of

France, 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 classesa

clear example of political corruption, if the proper goal of politics is to protect the

common 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 being

responsible 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 poor

citizens of the city held separate events from the rich, and the symbolism on both sides

was clear enough: the theme for the poor peoples carnival was eat the rich, for the

rich of the town have grown fat at the expense of the poor. In the poor peoples

parades they carried rakes and brooms (symbolizing their desire to sweep away the

rich), they cried flesh of Nobles for six deniers a pound, and they held mock military

parades complete with mock weapons.13 On the better side of town the rich began

their 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, if

only for a few days), that bad food would be expensive and good food would be

cheap (a slam on the poor peoples pretensions to power). However, on Mardi Gras,

February 15, the rich of the town, in their masks, crossed the line between fiction and

fact and massacred the leaders of the poor peoples carnival, and after the official

return of law and order they publicly tortured and hanged the remaining rebel

leaders and massacred thousands of peasants in the nearby countryside: not very

humorous at all (21828).

Here we have a clear case of the humorless state in action. Laduries 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 a very limited sense of humor and stifle public critique to maintain their status. It alsosupportsthe early classical republican theory that subjects usually rebel only whenthere

is a scandalous abuse of power. If the nobles had been willing to carry their fair share of

the public burden, then the common people would likely never have rebelled or, to be

more precise, would never have performed their mock rebellion. Nevertheless, since the

poor dared humorously to challenge the nobles authority, the nobles decided to

retaliate 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

142 M. Lane Bruner


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part of the poor. Ladurie argues that the poor of Romans were not planning a

serious revolutionif they had it would have been doomed to failbut instead

simply wanted to take the opportunity of the carnival festival to voice their very real

grievances over corruption in government through comic performances. For

example, the main rebel leader, the first to be murdered, appeared at a city hall meeting

and took the seat of a nobleman right after carnival began wearing nothing but a bear

skin. At the time, the bear was symbolically equal to the groundhog that appears today

in late winter to decide if spring will arrive early or not. In making this gesture, the

rebel leader, according to Ladurie, probably meant to perform his hope that there

would soon be an end to the long winter of corruption in city hall. While other

instances could be cited, the point here is that the poor used carnival as an opportunity

to 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 events

exemplify how humorous public gestures, in certain conditions, prove incapable of

successfully combating state corruption. Fortunately other, more contemporary,

examples of carnivalesque protests against communism in Central and Eastern Europe

in the late 1980s and against corporate globalization at the dawn of the twenty-first

century 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 various

states in Western Europe only when the previously unchecked power of the monarchs

was temporarily offset by the rising power of the merchant classes, it appears thatcarnivalesque protest only succeeds when there are checks and balances in state

power.14 Furthermore, the windows of opportunity for carnivalesque protest quickly

close when either the temporary balance of power is upset (leading to a new round of

oppression), or after the carnivalesque protests are successful and the ridiculous

nature of state pseudoseriousness is replaced with a healthy seriousness, and/or

when pseudodialogue is replaced with more sincere forms of dialogue. Two specific

instances of carnivalesque protest nicely illustrate these points: Orange Alternatives

protest in Wrocaw, Poland, over the course of the 1980s, and Ben Whites turtle

tactics at the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle in late 1999. 15 While scores

of similar events took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and

continue to take place during anticorporate globalization protests, these two instances

are 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 Europe

public protest simply was not allowed: the Soviet Union, for example, used military

force to suppress public protests against communist totalitarianism in East Germany,

Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia. However, by the mid 1980s, due in

large part to economic stagnation in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev initiated

internal liberalization under the slogans of glasnost (openness) and perestroika

(reconstruction). Unfortunately, at least for Gorbachev, instead of solving the problems



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of communism, these reforms opened the way for more open criticisms of the obvious

failures of the Soviet system.16 An even earlier event that brought critical publicity to the

Soviet Union arguably paved the way for these later changes: the Helsinki Accords,

reached in 1975, which contained human rights provisions providing unprecedented

opportunities for Soviet dissidents to report human rights violations to the

international community (Keck and Sikkink 24). Together, these and other changes

created new opportunities for Soviet satellite countries as they struggled to determine

the right amount of reform, but certainly not reform allowing for open protest. The

growing political balance between hard-liners and reformers over the proper pace of

primarily economic reforms, however, created a unique opportunity for carnivalesque

forms of protest, as Padraic Kenney illustrates in his detailed account of the protests that

occurred across Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s (158 91). While openlyserious protest against communist governments continued quickly to lead to beatings

and 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), protests

characterized by carnivalesque featuresthe blending of the fictive and the real, the use

of popular forms of humor, the inversion of hierarchies, and so forthmet with

increasing 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 publicly

protest against corruption in government was through graffiti. When the police would

paint over Solidarity graffiti, they would leave misshapen blobs on the walls, and

members of Orange Alternative, led by Waldemar Fydrych, known comically as Major

Fydrych, would decorate those blobs with hats, arms, and legs, turning them into littleelves. At first, the symbols, in carnivalesque fashion, were both anonymous and

ambiguous, but they were nevertheless publicly visible alterations to otherwise

obvious erasures on the part of the state, for state security forces did not find

Solidarity very funny at all. In 1982, during the May Day celebrations, members of

Orange Alternative dressed up in ridiculous costumes, rented a bus, went to the local

zoo, 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 this

obscure kind of political performance. Additionally, because the government wanted

to take advantage of its newfound ability to distance itself from direct Soviet

intervention 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 with

increasing intensity as the public slowly began to recognize that they could get away

with quite a bit using such tactics. On Childrens Day in 1987, over a thousand young

Polish citizens took to the streets of Wrocaw dressed as elves, embodying the

symbolism of the graffiti from seven years earlier. They handed out candy and sang

childrens songs. Major Frydrych, who had the habit of comically dressing as a Soviet

144 M. Lane Bruner


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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 elves

danced, kissed police officers, then threw candy out of the windows of police vans as

they were driven away (although they were quickly released without penalty), and the

images of these events were later broadcast across the entire country, symbolizing a

kind of surreal immunity from repression through foolishness (Kenney 160).

The comic symbol of protest eventually became the Smurfs. These popular cartoon

characters, blue elves appearing weekly on Polish television (a cultural import from the

United States) performing deeds of brotherly love and bravery to rescue one another

from harm, were ironically identified with the police (blue was the color of their

uniforms and vansthe opposite of orange). Over time, protesters began greeting the

police as Smurfs, and yet, given the carnivalesque nature of these symbols, when MajorFydrych was released from prison and appeared at the Childrens Day festivities the

following year (1988) he was hailed as Papa Smurf: the fool had become the

carnival king.

Of course, there were serious protests devoid of humor in Poland as well, but usually

they only involved disgruntled and brave labor organizers and university students. Yet

changing the mind of the public, emboldening them to participate in political carnival,

was precisely what Orange Alternative was all about. According to Fydrych, Orange

Alternative happenings were places to learn opposition and to discover more

political forms of protest. He argued, The Wrocaw street slowly ceases to fear, and

through participation in the fun, people learn to support more serious [protest] . . .

[and slowly the] fear of detentionusually for a few hours, without serious

consequencesevaporates (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 and

students in these carnivalesque protests, it soon became clear that the government

could not last for long, especially given the growing tensions and balance between

hard-liners and reformers over liberalization policies both in the Soviet Union and in

Poland, with the latter country being poised to lead the way for other Central and

Eastern European countries due to its relatively democratic past. By 1989 communism

was all but dead in Poland, and suddenly the prankster protests stopped. The corrupt

representatives of the ridiculous puppet state had now been replaced by elected

representatives, and public mobilization began to occur not through carnival but

through 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 protest

suddenly opened again in what for many people was a highly unlikely place: the United

States. By most estimates, over 60,000 citizens representing over 600 national and

international nongovernment organizations flooded the streets of Seattle to disrupt an

international meeting of trade ministers, executive state representatives and corporate

elites. Janet Thomas, in her book on the 1999 protest against the World Trade

Organization (WTO), called it a carnival of cause (12). But what cause? The simple



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and most common answer: creeping global corporate rule, and the insidious

destruction 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 Clinton

administration over the direction of global trade policy, and the state had not yet

developed the wide range of measures it now has at its disposal for stifling public

dissent (e.g., protest free zones, loyalty oaths, homeland security, the surveillance

measures contained in the Patriot Act). Instead, at the time, and given mounting

public pressure against the negative impacts of economic globalization, Clinton had

begun delivering speeches across the country arguing that, while he believed that freer

trade led to greater economic prosperity, the world needed to change course to achieve

globalization with a human face (Council; New York). Clintons discourse,however, failed to stem economic globalizations negative impacts on organized labor,

the environment, and local forms of democracy. When the WTO decided to hold its

international meeting in Seattle, in a section of the United States jokingly referred to as

the Left Coast populated by a wide range of civic activists with considerable

experience in fighting for environmental justice and labor rights, some kind of clash

was 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 part

of both Democrats and Republicans that free markets are good and big

government is bad), this certainly did not mean that any and all forms of peaceful

public protest would be allowed. Officials had already decided that massive public

assemblies 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, and

as the images broadcast across the country showed, the events in Seattle were marked

by considerable vandalism on the part of anarchists and significant violence on the

part of police. Still, in the middle of this sea of political conflict, and located on several

key intersections in downtown Seattle, was a small band of turtle people who

managed to avoid the brunt of the vandalism and violence.

The idea for the turtle people was the brainchild of Ben White of the Animal Welfare

Institute, mainly as a reaction to the fact that the WTO court had overturned a US law

passed in 1996 banning the sale of shrimp caught in nets that killed endangered sea

turtles. The WTO courts reasoning was that the law constituted an unfair barrier to

trade. White thought that a public performance by turtle people could send a

number of important symbolic messages. The ban on certain shrimp nets had beeninitiated through traditional democratic channels in the US by nongovernment

organizations such as the Earth Island Institute, the American Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society of the US, and the Sierra Club

(Thomas 18). However, because unelected courts in newly empowered international

government organizations designed to enforce free trade were (and are) now able to

overturn the laws of nation-states, the turtle people wanted to provide a street theater

spectacle to draw attention to this new and relatively unknown form of corporate

global governance.

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After a week of what turned out to be extremely popular teach-ins organized by the

International Forum on Globalization concerning the negative impacts of globalization,

on Tuesday, November 30, 1999, the opening day of the WTO meetings, White gathered

together 250 individuals who had volunteered to become turtle people. Gathering at a

local church, and having to turn over 100 potential turtle people away, White went over a

number of turtle obligations before handing over the costumes he had prepared. After

noting the characteristics of turtleslong-lived, patient, placid, gentlehe first told the

group that if they encountered any kind of violence whatsoever they were to stop and

surround it withpeaceful turtle power. Second, he announcedthat if anyonedid anything

aggressive they would be de-turtled on the spot, and this included any use of hostile

language. Third, he told the group to comport themselves like turtles: as ancient

repositories 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 the

next days planned civil disobedience actions could proceed as scheduled. Finally, he

announced that their job was quietly to block major downtown intersections leading to

the WTO conference in order to prevent delegates from attending.

Throughout the day, the turtle brigade was the antithesis of an angry, strident

protest, and the image of the lowly and peaceful turtles taking on the power of

multinational corporations and free trade ideologues dominated media images across

the country (Thomas 23-28). Not only did they appear on the cover of Newsweek, their

images also prominently appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the

Los Angeles Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and on CNN (to name a few).

Conversely, a serious protest at a downtown McDonalds by French farmer Jose Bove

was 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 to

join their Festival of Resistance, were not so lucky (Thomas83 87). Eventhough direct

action activists claimed they would be engaging in street theater and would be

nonviolent, not be verbally or physically abusive, not carry weapons or drugs, and not

destroy property, when they went to block intersections downtown they were quickly

assaulted by police forces. The members of Direct Action Network, although surrounded

by jugglers, drummers, big puppets, the radical cheerleaders, and Santa Clauses, . . . used

chicken wire, duct tape, PCV piping, chains and padlocks to secure themselves together

whentaking over the intersection (Thomas 85). As opposedto the intersections where the

turtles were, where people lovedit, the cops loved it, bystanders lovedit (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 the

street andsquirtedpepper spray directly into their eyes. . . rubber bulletsbruised the backs

of retreating demonstrators [and] cans of tear gas were thrown (Thomas 86 87). While

the various events had successfully thwarted the WTO meetings for the day, the

government quickly announced there would be a 7:00 p.m. curfew that night, and the

following day there would be a sixty block protest free zone around the WTO

Conference headquarters.



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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 of

the protesters had a sense of humor. Some of the protesters, and most of the police, did

not. There were cops in all-black uniforms, complete with black capes . . . more

science fiction-looking than even the military. This wasnt the clean-cut-looking

National Guard from the 60s (68). On the other side were the puppets, the Raging

Grannies, the Ruckus Society, Santa Clauses, etc., mostly singing, dancing, joking, and

having fun. Strangely enough, perhaps, they were relatively safe, whereas the serious

protesters obviously were not. Sure enough, besides the coverage happily given to the

turtles, the preponderance of coverage in the national media characterized the protest

as an irrational outburst by radicals. The serious protesters had in fact unwittingly

played 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 as

being against trade, per se, not against what they considered to be unfair trade policies.

The important distinction between antiglobalization protest and anticorporate

globalization protest was ignored or overlooked.

While the events in Seattle were certainly dramatic, it was only a matter of timebefore order was restored. Today, in the post-9/11 era, the lessons learned by the

state are now in evidence at every major public protest against corporate global rule:

summits are held at fortified and isolated locations, permits for marches and

gatherings are denied, protesters are sequestered from protest free zones and herded

(often fenced) into protest zones, thereby segregating protesters from the target of

their protests, and police presence is overwhelming. While the window of opportunity

for carnivalesque protest at anticorporate globalization protests has perhaps not closed

completely, it is surely the case that those in support of global corporate rule would like

it to close. Regardless, unlike the situation in Poland (and the rest of Central and

Eastern Europe), where comic protest was eventually successful in contributing to

substantive political reform, the same is certainly not true when it comes to corporate

globalization.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 the

fictive and the realpeople becoming turtles, elves becoming realbut it has much

less trouble violently dealing with more serious forms of protest. And perhaps this

has always been true. Rabelais, the subject of Bahktins book on the carnivalesque, was

well known for masking his critique of the existing political order of his day with

humor and was, therefore, safe from Church oppression. Conversely, other critics of

his 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 singing

communist songs and as turtle people peacefully waddle down the streets, there is a

certain absurdity to violent state reactions. Images of cute little elves being beaten by

police or passive turtles being scooped up by tractors do not make for very good press

if you represent the state. But it makes for excellent press if you are a protester (see

Deluca and Peeples). Conversely, images of serious protesters angrily vandalizing

corporate property or yelling at police make excellent press for the state, displaying as

they do the seriousness of the situation. This is not to suggest that the elves or the

turtle people were fully aware of the media potential of their activities (although they

may have been), but politically progressive activists could nevertheless learn a great

deal 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 and

military personnel are lined up in their riot gear with weapons aimed at you, it is

difficult to dance or sing. The natural human reaction of those oppressed by what they

consider to be unjust forces of order is to fight back: after all, that is what justice is all

about. Or is it? This brings us back to the questions that opened this essay: what specific

kinds of humor and seriousness best reflect the healthy state? Under what specific

conditions does humor help to overcome corruption, and when does it fail? When is it

appropriate and just for the state to get serious, and when is its seriousness

laughable? 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 elf

can simply be taken away at night and dropped into the ocean with weights on his or

her feet, as in 1970s Argentina. However, even in these conditions there might be

certain forms of public protest (on the part of the very elderly or the very young, for

example) available to the oppressed. There must be, to borrow a phrase from social

movement theory, opportunity structures in place in order for public political

performances 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 most

porous, whereas conservative (market) democracies tend to be less porous, and

totalitarian 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 not

being funny at all.

But how does a state come to possess its particular sense of humor? Is it related to

the 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 states

usually have the most repressive governments, but this is not always true. Nazi

Germany, for example, and Imperial Japan provide obvious antimodels. Is it the

preponderance of military and/or economic power? It is historically the case that states



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with the greatest freedom of expression have usually been wealthy empires with

extensive colonies such as Athens, Rome, Britain, France, and the United States.

From a world systems perspective, one could argue that only the core (rich, capital

acquiring) 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 core

countries, 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 Class

issues 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; Keck

and Sikkink; Kenney). That is, changing the ways people think changes the kinds ofcommunities they create. While this may seem an obvious point to communication

scholars, it is far from self-evident to many so-called realists in international

relations and rationalists in economics. Within this soft power paradigm, it is not

the wealth or power of a state that determines its sense of humor, but the degree to

which that state is either just or corrupt, where a just state is conceived as one that

concerns itself with establishing the rule oflaw in defense of the common good, and a

corrupt state is conceived as one that concerns itself with establishing the rule bylaw in

defense of the self-interest of a fraction of the people. However, it is nevertheless the

case 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 their

own borders, we are doomed to live in a world of relatively humorless and corrupt

states, 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 issues

related to critical political theory that happen to overlap in interesting ways with the

carnivalesque.

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 essentially

metaphorical, and Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are

illusions (250). Nietzsche, however, was far from despairing over this fact, and

believed that Truths are not only politically consequential fictions but absolutely

necessary for human lifethus his notion of the art of living as the art of creating the

best fictions possible. This is a far cry from Platos insistence that ideas are the greatest

reality, 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 rhetorical

dimensions. Bakhtin, like Foucault, politicizes this perspective to show how the

seriousness of correct interpretation and representation (the Certain meaning, the

perfect Representation) is anything but funny: torturers, jailers, the police, military

officials, and others who are certain that what they are doing is right reveal this

every day. Therefore, there is a very interesting and thoroughgoing relationship

between 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 and

nonambiguous identity, especially when that quest is at the expense of an adequate

appreciation for the constitutive role of language, leads to forms of seriousness that by

definition lead to violence.18 Such quests invariably are shipwrecked on their own

false seriousness. While Sigmund Freud argued that civilization itself was built upon

the foundation of psychic repression, critical theorists seek to investigate a politics based

on an incessant interrogation of this false seriousness in order to attain more

democratic, just, and peaceful forms of seriousness. True, open seriousness requires a

critical form of consciousness that embraces what Dana Villa has referred to as Socratic

citizenship,19 Foucault has called a limit attitude (Enlightenment), Debord has

called detournement (Society 144 46), Jacques Derrida has called deconstructive

justice,

20

and what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have called radicaldemocracy. All these concepts relate to the political necessity, if one wants to avoid the

kinds of violence that arise when people valorize the representative features of language

and overlook the constitutive dimensions of language, for creating forms of political

action 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 12223)

Arguably, the carnivalesque is a resource of political action that resonates with the

above-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 of

carnivalesque political performance. First, democracy and humor in a state tend to

develop when there is a persistent and effective balance of powers. As political theorists

across the ages have argued, the principal problem with statecraft is how to maintain

that precarious balance, for when it is upset and power is concentrated in the hands of a

particular faction the health of the state deteriorates rapidly as self-interest overwhelms

the truly popular (general) interest. Second, there also appear to be windows of

opportunity in corrupt states, if opportunity structures are in place for the expression of

popular unrest, for progressive forms of carnivalesque protest or forms of protest that

use 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 when

protests are successful enough to transform government progressively in ways that

reinforce the balance of power (thus making festive humor less necessary). Third, so

long as states are only concerned with their own common good they are inscribing a

humorless limit on the truly common good of the international community; yet

undermining local democratic processes through the forced interventions of

international government organizations designed to protect only a fraction of the

worlds population is not a viable alternative to global democracy either.



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Perhaps a final example might help to summarize the difficulties that surround

putting carnivalesque techniques into practice. Before the attacks on the United States

on 11 September 2001, large numbers of protesters were on the streets to voice their

displeasure over what they believed were the antidemocratic practices involved in

corporate globalization. After those attacks, however, the United States indeed faced a

serious crisis: thousands of innocent people had been murdered, and the risk of

further terrorist attacks on the United States could not be denied. This was, and

remains, a truly serious problem. One result of those attacks, however, was increased

security measures and a reduction of civil liberties in the United States. Other results

stemming from a nondemocratic global governance structure, however, were the

continuing drain of high paying manufacturing jobs overseas, the dilution of the

powers 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 any

republic due to a broader distribution of wealth and opportunity), few serious brakes

being put on corporate rule, and, therefore, an even greater threat of terrorism. It was

no 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 in

carnivalesque tactics. Therefore, on the one hand, following Jefferson, we could

assume that some scandalous abuse of power continues to take place. On the other

hand, many citizens of the United States are clearly willing to trade some of their civil

liberties for more security. But what constitutes political security? Arguably, political

security today would first require a thoroughgoing and fully public investigation into

the 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, but

arguably the surest way to protect ourselves is to help make the entire worlda safer, a

more just, and a more wealthy place. While the rhetoric of free trade would

(erroneously) suggest that freer trade and fewer constraints on corporations would

automatically lead to greater prosperity for all (the rising tide lifts all boats), a different

ideology might suggest that debt reduction worldwide, less unilateral military action,

tied as it has almost always been in the United States with corporate colonialism, and

other 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 corporate

globalization and terrorism are antidemocratic forces with little interest in promoting

democracy, and the current populist Right forces that currently hold power in the

United States and (some parts of) Europe are primarily concerned to ensure that

anticapitalist critiques and movements toward democratic socialism are effectively

stifled. How, then, to promote the ability of local populations to organize

democratically in the face of corporate globalization and tribal responses to market

fundamentalism 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 the

challenges to statecraft in the twenty-first century, especially the politically

consequential fictions of national identity and sovereignty and the scourges of

market fundamentalism and terrorism (and all the other certainties afflicting world

order), 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 state

constitutes 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 an

excellent bibliography see Ladurie 41326.

[2] Despite his cynicism toward political order, Debord nevertheless has a number of important

things to say about the economic unconscious of market societies and the function of capitalist

spectacle.

[3] My notion of corruption is borrowed from radical Whig philosophies such as those of

Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon. For introductions to these

philosophies 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. In

Ancient Athens, for example, the comic theater was a rich source for political expression, and

political satire has long been a staple of politics in the United States. For useful descriptions of

the relationship between Greek theater and critical political speech, see Stone 13437, 21824.

For a discussion of the history of laughter and the important differences between carnivalesque

humor and satire, see Bakhtin, Rabelais 59-144.

[5] Many features of the pagan festival of Saturnalia were transformed by the Early Church into

holidays such as Christmas (see Laing 62 65).

[6] For a brief discussion of early Protestant attitudes toward the carnival tradition, see Ladurie

3089. Regarding carnival in the United States, Morgan persuasively argues that elections in

early US history served a carnivalesque political function (196208).

[7] Kenneth Burkes work on the comic frame is similar in many ways, though not equivalent, to

the carnivalesque (see Burkes Attitudes and Carlsons Limitations and Ghandi).

[8] Terry Eagleton and others have also focused on the controlling dimensions of officially

ritualized protest.

[9] For useful reviews of Nietzsches and Foucaults theories of transgression and limit, see Simons;

and Foucaults 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 the

fictions are made real through the effects of power.

[11] This example also helps to explain the image on the cover of Stallybrass and Whites The Politics

and Poetics of Transgression, which shows masked devils beating a man with clubs as other

masked revelers look on with obvious enjoyment.

[12] The anticorporate globalization protests are similarly focused on how the elites are becoming

rich by placing the tax and debt burdens on the lower and middle classes of the world (thus

their explicit critiques of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), and the

attacks on communism in Eastern Europe were just as much attacks on the political elites who



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managed information flows and the centralized economies to their own benefit and to the

detriment of everyday people.

[13] Mock battles were also waged by Orange Alternative in Poland in the late 1980s (see Kenney

16064).

[14] While Habermas work has been roundly criticized for failing to account for the marginalizing

tendencies of the bourgeois public spherecomposed as it was by the elite white male

beneficiaries of colonialismit is nevertheless a very useful text for exploring the relationship

between balances of power and the possibilities for critical citizenship. For important critiques

of Habermas theory of the public, see Calhoun. For a concise summary of the history of

theories of checks and balances, see Hirschman.

[15] For detailed descriptions of the activities of Orange Alternative in Wrocklaw, see Kenney. For a

detailed discussion of the turtle people, see Thomas 1730.

[16] For an explorationof the political events surroundingthe collapse of the Soviet Union, see Bruner

and Morozov,especially chapters 1 and 10; and Wedel. Clearly,carnivalesque protests were not theonly factor involved in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and that is not my claim. In

Poland, for example,the work of Pope John Paul II and Solidarity were major 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 Immanuel

Wallerstein.

[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. For

arguments in defense of the former position, see Stewart.

[19] Villas thesis is that Socrates invented a form of dissident citizenship that can be traced to such

disparate thinkers as John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt. This form

of citizenship does not seek to establish truth so much as critique presumed truths to expose

their incoherence.

[20] Derridas basic argument is that deconstruction seeks to reveal the limits of practices of

identification in order to make them available for reflective critique.

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