Laughing with the Yes Men: the Politics of Affirmation

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by an ARC large grant, ‘Geographies of Global Resistance’.

Notes

[1] This is perhaps most evident in the misleading designation of resistance to corporate or neo-liberal globalization as ‘anti-globalization’, which many activists see as the media's refusal to represent the complexity of their position (Graeber, 2004; Ayres, 2004; Klein, 1999; Smith, 2001; Panayotakis, 2001). Many in the movement reject this label, preferring others such as the ‘anti-capitalist/global justice movement’ (Bramble & Minns, 2005, p. 119), the ‘global solidarity movement’ or the ‘globalisation protest movement’ (Podobnik & Reifer, 2004, p. 3).

[2] In a somewhat paradigmatic formulation, Jean Paul Sartre (1976, p. 265) suggests that the individual ‘helps to create an active group by freely determining, with other individuals, the end, the means and the division of tasks’. But this freedom of determination goes hand in hand with the subordination of the individual to the collective as a whole, who bears ‘the practical local presence of the whole, in his own particular action’ (Sartre, 1976, p. 267).

[3] While Metcalfe seeks to redeem larrikin activities, against their dismissal as apolitical and even injurious to the serious political struggles of the day (see Engels, 1973; Ross, 1982), Metcalfe is ultimately reluctant to attribute to larrikinism the status of a political collective. Interestingly, he does so because larrikins fail to demonstrate the political consciousness that would constitute the basis of their unity as a group.

[4] Certainly, many evaluations of the movement assume that increasing convergence of values and goals is essential to the movement's continuing success (see Costello & Smith, 2002) or may even decry its inability to subordinate its actors to the unity of the movement (see especially Ayres, 2004, who calls for greater discipline in order that the movement might pursue its ends in a more sustained and effective manner). Yet many others have seen in the movement a new mode of political resistance, irreducible to the kinds of images of collective consciousness suited to an earlier politic (see McDonald, 2004; Escobar, 2000).

[5] John Hartley (1996) outlines well the manner in which this worked during the French Revolution, where the sexualization of powerful figures served as a potent form of ridicule.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Hynes

Maria Hynes is a visiting fellow and teaches social theory at the School of Social Sciences, ANU. She is writing on resistance to globalization and has published on the relationship of aesthetics and ethics to genetic science.

Scott Sharpe

Scott Sharpe teaches cultural and social geography in the School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, University of New South Wales, at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He researches on strategies of global resistance and the relationship of space and thought.

Bob Fagan

Bob Fagan is Professor of Human Geography, School of Environment and Life Sciences, Macquarie University. He has published widely in the area of economic restructuring and globalization.