Making Sense of the People’s Climate March: Towards an Aesthetic Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Protest

Abstract

This essay contributes to participatory critical rhetoric (PCR) by offering a Rancièrian aesthetic approach to the rhetoric of social protest at the 2014 People’s Climate March (PCM). Although the PCM has been praised for its democratic commitments to social change, I argue that police reinforced a consensual aesthetic order that acquiesced with the status quo by partitioning sensibilities of space and mobility. Demarcating acceptable spaces for protest and requiring marchers to keep moving at all times enforced a hierarchical aesthetic order that limited possibilities of dissensus. However, there was one ephemeral moment of dissensus when all of the protesters stopped and observed a moment of silence. This rhetorical performance temporarily ruptured dominant intelligibilities of police order and consummated new subjectivities, demonstrating the radical possibilities of dissensus through silence for climate change advocacy.

Keywords:

• Global Climate Change
• Jacques Rancière
• Participatory Critical Rhetoric
• People’s Climate March
• Police
• Rhetoric of Social Protest

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1. This essay’s conceptualization of consensus and dissensus is rooted in Rancière’s aesthetic theory, but it is also conversant with extant scholarship in argumentation studies and rhetorical theory that has grappled with the value of dissensus for advancing epistemic and organizational arguments (Willard, 1989, pp. 112–130; Willihnganz, Hart, & Willard, 1993) and critiquing the domination of consensus in public sphere argumentation (Phillips, 1996). What this particular essay brings to the table is an extradiscursive approach to argumentation capable of studying live manifestations of consensus and dissensus during social movements. Said another way, aesthetics offers argumentation a stronger materialism.