Performing Democracy

Abstract

Contemporary protests draw on a rich variety of performances to communicate their messages, attract attention to societal problems and display potential solutions. In addition to verbal and textual expressions, protesters employ various forms of nonverbal expression, such as images, sounds, silence as part of their public performances. This article offers a way of making sense of nonverbal protest performances, relying on insights from contemporary democratic theory. It proposes a ‘democratic lens’, which supplements the ‘performative lens’ often used to comprehend performative protests and their effects on diverse audiences. The democratic lens enables us to distinguish between deliberative, agonistic, and antagonistic modes of democratic engagement and examine the ways they are enacted in performative protests. The article illustrates the utility of the democratic lens by focusing on the nonverbal performances of Black Lives Matter in the USA, pot and pan protest in Brazil, and the Knitting Nannas in Australia.

Keywords:

• democracy
• nonverbal
• performativity
• protest
• sound
• visual

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Julia Peetz, Andy Lavender, Maddie Egan and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Work in Progress Forum of the Visual Politics Research Program at the University of Queensland on 4 November 2021. We are also grateful to the conveners and participants of this forum for their valuable feedback and encouragement.

Notes

1 It is important to understand that the no part, in Rancière (1999), is not equivalent to a given oppressed group or minority. It is not a synonym of being marginalized although it can be used to describe marginalization. The no part refers to the appearance of a political subjectivity that demands the reorganization of the society (and the recalculation of its parts). The classic example used by Rancière is the emergence of the demos as a political subject, reconfiguring the possibilities of governance in Athens. The demos had no part, because it did not exist as such. Its emergence is marked by a reconfiguration of the polity.

2 In 2019, they have fulfilled their promise to sing at that symbolic place one day longer than the two-term governor. Some have continued singing through Zoom meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil.