When the radical is ordinary: ridicule, performance and the everyday in Bulgaria’s protests of 2013

Abstract

This article examines the performances of the #DANSwithme protests in Bulgaria in the summer and early autumn of 2013, and asks questions about the role of carnival and the everyday as a resource for the elaboration of protest idiom for popular movements. I complement the implications of recent work on carnivalesque protests and politics and argue that in appropriating the sites, tropes, and practices of the everyday and the ordinary in order to parade daily discontent with the political establishment in Bulgaria, the political message of the protest can also lose its exceptionality and become too routine to make a difference.

Keywords:

• Political protests
• carnival
• Bulgaria

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Marc Herzog and Leo Karakatsanis for inviting me to their panel on Radicalization and Transformation in South-Eastern Europe: Prospects and Predicaments at the PSA 2014 in Manchester; for putting together this special issue; and for their comments on earlier drafts. I am very grateful for the generosity of time and the invigorating critique of my two anonymous reviewers. The article benefited from their careful reading, and their feedback improved not only this work, but my thinking about protests in Bulgaria in ways which will no doubt resonate in future work as well.

Funding

The insights into this article are drawn from research spanning several subject matters and conducted during a long period of time, during which the author was associated, firstly, with Northwestern University (USA) and, subsequently, with the University College London (UK), where she was the recipient of a Northwestern Doctoral Research Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, respectively.

Notes

1. A more apt translation of this term would be ‘campaign,’ but I use ‘action’ throughout because it preserves the reminder of the fact that these protests are political acts, and also because of the term's affinity with performative practices.

2. Here, I follow Lahiri’s definition of ‘political idiom’: ‘a current paradigm of political communication within a state [which] covers multiple types of communication, including verbal, visual, metaphorical, figurative and symbolic forms of speech and praxis’ (2014, 21).

3. Indeed, the concept of network – and the ‘net’ work it does – was central to the protest, which soon saw the rise of a Protest Network (Protestna Mreja – mreja being the word for both the World Wide Web, where a lot of the organizing was taking place, and a more figurative expression for connectivity). As of the time of this writing, their Facebook page is still active, although with a lot less activity going on. The movement was networked also in another sense: it was the first time in which protests in Bulgaria sparked smaller scale, but similar in language, protests of Bulgarian expats abroad, thus underscoring not only how the net connects people locally, but also transnationally. Thus, there were #DANSwithme protests in Munich, London, New York and other global cities.

4. ^”Resignation” being the literal translation of the key cry of the protest Ostavka! – which I am translating in English with the verb form ‘Resign’ rather than the noun, because resignation in English may also be taken to signal a state of mind rather than a demand.

5. A direct reference to the politically provocative work of visual artist David Černý, a Czech, who is famous for painting a Soviet Monument to Soviet Tank Crews in Prague pink. The tank itself is a controversial symbol in the Czech Republic, where Prague Spring, which arguably gave the season its political connotation and usage, was cut short by invading Soviet tanks. Černý himself was arrested as a result of repainting the tank, and the monument was painted back to its original green. It has been repainted pink and green several times subsequently, with pink signalling protest against the militaristic and arguably repressive legacy of the Soviet period.

6. See ‘Bulgaria’s Middle Class Rebels Press for a “Normal” EU State’ at www.euractive.com (02 August 2013). Also see The Economist’s 06 July 2013 article ‘NOresharski! NOligarchy!’ and TIME magazine’s article by Katie Harris ‘A Bulgarian Spring? Entrenched protests Challenge Eastern Europe’s Status Quo.’  For the student protests which followed #DANSwithme, French newspaper Le Monde conceptualized them as the ‘moral revolution:’ ‘Les Estudiants Ce Lanceent dans La Revolution Morale’ (30 October 2013).

7. In the ongoing coverage of Deutsche Welle, it was a popular conceptualization both by Bulgarian commentators writing for the media and by others. For example, in a satirical piece from 26 June 2013, Ivan Kulekov suggests that chaos is a national ideal for Bulgarians, whereas a few days earlier, on the 24 June 2013, N. Tsankov asked how Bulgaria can save itself from chaos (see Bulgarian Strongmen and How Can Bulgaria Save Itself From Chaos?). Also see Spiegel Online ‘Massenproteste in Sofia: Chaos im EU-Armenhaus’ and Hannover Allgemeine Zeitung ‘Politisches Chaos im Bulgarien.’

8. Mummering, or kukerstvo, is a folklore tradition in Bulgaria which takes places usually around Christmas and New Year and Lent in order to drive away evil spirits.

9. On normalcy in socialism and postsocialism, see for example, Galbraith (2003), Greenberg (2011), Fehérváry (2002). In relation to carnival and protest especially, Padraic Kenney has insightfully discussed how potentially revolutionary carnival was diffused by the Soviet-dictated regimes in East-Central Europe (2002). He notes the often duplicitous ways in which 'the normal' as a state to be desired in and for society is deployed in diffusing protest: ‘Regime leaders papered over each major confrontation with society with what they called normalization; a combination of repression of recalcitrants plus rewards […] for those who conformed. […]The regimes built  new democratic facades so they could affirm to the people and to the world that they had listened to the criticisms raised during the earlier unrest – and would […] now address them in proper, civilized fashion’ (2002, 26).

10. Tsoneva, Antoaneta. 2013. Fifteen Things in Which the Protest Succeeded Already. [in Bulgarian]. Accessed November 20, 2015 www.svobodata.com. http://www.svobodata.com/page.php?pid=12549&rid.

11. For Bulgaria, I have shown that chaos is a popular trope through which a variety of everyday experiences are conceptualized, from food consumption to – especially saliently in the case of #DANSwithme – urban space (2012). Although in this work I theorize chaos as a form of contingent social order which is both empowering and dis-empowering to the subject, and I discuss more the question of individual agency vis-a-vis such contingencies through everyday practices, the everyday in chaos is as much about the recognition of the absurd and the paradoxical as a political and social condition, as it is about the inability to read social relationships, institutions, and actors in a consistent manner where contingency plays a limited role ( e.g. Koycheva 2013; on illegibility see Das 2004).