[Dis]Affected Democracies

Millette, Holly-Gale (2015) [Dis]Affected Democracies. Artaud Forum: Contested Exchanges: Space, Place and the Performance of Democracy, Brunel University , London, United Kingdom. 27 - 29 Mar 2015. (Submitted)

Abstract

Bernard Steigler coined the term disaffectation to describe the loss of psychic individuation today, and this paper argues that the space and place of the Occupy Movement offers a democratic arena for disaffected individuals across classes to perform this disaffectation. What follows, therefore, considers whether harnessing affect (emotion) and action (occupation) – on its own – can constitute a transformative performance. In this, I am not seeking to replace the Aristotelian concept of performance, nor its transformative aspect, but I do ask how appropriate it is to confine the mimetic acts of protest to an Aristotelian dialectic.

The ‘efficacy debate’ is a central issue for practitioners and scholars of political performance (Kershaw) and I shall not question the truth of such claims that to be a performance the event must transform – in some way – its audience. Rather, I question, as others have (Schlossman, Miller and Román), the ability for the performance of protest to affect any kind of political change. My argument is that Occupy is not, strictly speaking, ‘a performance of politics’. Rather, that its politics emerge out of its performance of disaffected individuals gathering in democratic discourse. Occupy, I argue, exists as a psychosocial communal public place and space for the citizen-less to gather, heal and empower. Stiegler identifies this compulsion to share in the esprit of misère, as both alienating and, paradoxically, intimately unifying. He expresses this as performance of ‘keening’ and is, in part, what is so unifying about Occupy for Occupyists – it offers them a democratic platform of mourning.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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