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ABSTRACT
Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of ‘wish images’ and ‘dialectical images,’ their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women’s Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march’s route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to ‘improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.’
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In their recent analysis of the way that participants in Occupy Oakland/The Oakland Commune drew upon the city’s legacy of struggle, Emily Brissette and Mike Kingpoint in this direction. However, even here, history is cast primarily as a resource rather than as a field of activity.
2. Among other things, The Wretched of the Earth may be read as an instructive tale of competing mythologies. On the side of the oppressor, the principal myth assumes the name ‘humanism.’ Among the oppressed, Fanon observed that competing mythologies were distributed unevenly among the people. For elders, the problems of colonialism are resolved through their displacement onto the more frightening reality of zombies and djinns. For the national bourgeoisie, there is a tendency to recall their people’s great past to undermine the colonizer’s account of their worthlessness. In contrast, the youth recall past fighters, and these recollections throw them into decisive action. Finally, the process of decolonization is animated by the mythic promise associated with the figure of the ‘new Man.’
3. The concept of ‘correspondences’ is derived from Benjamin’s reading of Marx (2003, 461).
4. Source: Smithsonian Institute Research Information System, available at: https://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1560173H179HJ.4656&menu=search&aspect=Keyword&npp=50&ipp=20&spp=20&profile=ariall&ri=2&source=~!siartinventories&index=.NW&term=VA000018.
5. Trump has advanced the slogan and policy of ‘America First’ with little regret that the phrase was first popularized by the Ku Klux Klan. More recently, Melania Trump visited a Texas detention center holding migrant children separated from their parents wearing a jacket bearing the scrawled slogan ‘I really don’t care do u?’ in a none-too-oblique reference to Mussolini’s ‘Ne Me Frego.’
6. It should be clear that my aim here is neither to deride the efforts of Women’s Strike organizers nor to propose that their chosen citation modality was the sole cause for demobilization between 2017 and 2019. Instead, the purpose of emphasizing citation is to develop an understanding of its function in the hope of enriching strategic deliberations. While ‘political opportunities’ tend to be conceived by movement scholars as being extrinsic to movements, developing an orientation to such opportunities through citation nevertheless remains within our control.
7. Although these two registers are normally conceived as being formally discrete, the analysis Benjamin developed following Marx helped to reveal their homology from the standpoint of human aspirations. Indeed, for Benjamin, what makes the past ‘historical’ is its influence on the ‘time of the now’ in which the historian herself lives. In this formulation, the past (whether encoded in cultural artifacts or recounted through the narratives of historicism) becomes historical ‘post-humously’ (Citation1968, p. 263). By shifting the focus from source to effect, the formal distinction between historical citations and pop-cultural ones becomes both less tenable and less necessary.
8. The beloved American folk ballads Hallelujah! I’m a Bum (first recorded in 1928) and Big Rock Candy Mountain (1928) became important reference points for the hobo culture that flourished during the Great Depression. In their lyrics, which are at least implicitly anti-capitalist, they emphasized the utopian promise and pleasures of outsider existence.
9. Wonder Woman’s significance as a historical-political citation was underscored once again when Jim Fitzpatrick, the artist responsible for the canonical rendering of Che Guevara based on Alberto Korda’s equally famous ‘Guerrillo Heroico’ photo portrait, recently professed that incarcerated Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi was ‘the real’ Wonder Woman. Fitzpatrick was contrasting Tamini to actor Gal Gadot, who played Wonder Woman in the Jenkins film and who has been an ardent supporter of the IDF. (Ahmed, Citation2018).
10. Based on a note she found in the Bataille archive containing Benjamin’s papers from his time at the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, Susan Buck-Morss (Citation1992) has pointed out that Benjamin tended to develop his thinking in schematic terms based on intersecting axes (215).
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AK Thompson
AK Thompson got kicked out of high school for publishing an underground newspaper called The Agitator and has been an activist and social theorist ever since. Currently a Visiting Professor of Social Movements and Social Change at Ithaca College, he is the author or editor of numerous books including, most recently, Premonitions: Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt (2018). Between 2005 and 2012, he served on the Editorial Committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.