Precarious privilege: Indignad@s, daily disidentifications, and cultural (re)production

ABSTRACT

In this article, I develop the notion of precarious privilege to investigate dialectics of cultural (re)production, in relation to both specific discursive practices and broader discursive formations. Using the Indignad@s social movement as an example, I locate, interpret, and critique a series of disidentification dynamics shaping the movement as a whole, as well as the rhetoric of specific participants. Regarding the rise and development of Indignad@s, precarious privilege illuminates a conflicted social position enabled by disidentification from the current crisis of neoliberalism in Western Europe—a conjuncture that the movement strives to both expose and exploit. As for the views expressed by specific activists, precarious privilege helps explain the discursively enacted disidentification from the imagined aspects of their and others’ (supra)national cultural identities. Grounded in this analysis, I emphasize the potentiality but also the limitations of this generalized tension between residual and emergent dynamics shaping Indignad@s’ political practices.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural (re)production
• discursive practices
• discursive formations
• Indignad@s
• precarious privilege
• social movements

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the participants in this study for selflessly sharing their time and thoughts, and Barry Pennock for agreeing to moderate the discussion in the focus group. She also thanks the Editor and the anonymous reviewers for their incisive and generous feedback, and Marco Briziarelli for his thoughtful suggestions on the (many) previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martínez Guillem, Reviving Gramsci: Crisis, Comunication, and Change (London: Routledge, 2016); INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística), Encuesta de Población Activa, April 2, 2012, http://www.ine.es/inebmenu/mnu_mercalab.htm.

2. Ernesto Castañeda, “The Indignados of Spain: A Precedent to Occupy Wall Street,” Social Movement Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2012): 309–19; Sarah Kerton, “Tahrir, Here? The Influence of the Arab Uprisings on the Emergence of Occupy,” Social Movement Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2012): 302–8.

3. Íñigo Errejón, “We the People. El 15M, ¿un populismo indignado?,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 1 (2005): 124–56; Salvador Martí i Puig, “Pienso, Luego Estorbo. España: Crisis e Indignación,” Nueva Sociedad 236 (2001): 4–15.

4. Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1982). [1975, Les Vérités de La Palice. Paris: Maspero]. For a relocation of the notion of disidentification to inform queer of color theory and performance, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

5. See for example, Michael Billig, “From Codes to Utterances: Cultural Studies, Discourse and Psychology,” in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding (London: Sage, 1997), 205–26; W. Johann, “The Interdisciplinarity of Critical Discourse Studies Research,” Palgrave Communications (2016): 1–4; Lawrence Grossberg, “Interview with Lawrence Grossberg,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2013): 59–97; Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989); Martin Montgomery and Stuart Allan, “Ideology, Discourse, and Cultural Studies: The Contribution of Michel Pêcheux,” Canadian Journal of Communication 17, no. 2 (1992); Terry Threadgold, “Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis: Histories, Remembering and Futures,” Linguistik Online 14 (2003): 1–33; Benno Herzog, “Discourse Analysis as Immanent Critique: Possibilities and Limits of Normative Critique in Empirical Discourse Studies,” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 278–92; Friederich Macgilchrist, “Fissures in the Discourse-scape: Critique, Rationality and Validity in Post-foundational Approaches to CDS,” Discourse & Society 27, no. 3 (2016): 262–77.

6. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology; Michel Pêcheux, “Ideology: Fortress or Paradoxical Space,” in Rethinking Ideology: A Marxist Debate, ed. Sakari Hanninen and Leena Paldan (New York: International General, 1988), 31–5; Michel Pêcheux, “Discourse: Structure or Event?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 633–50.

7. Raymond Williams, Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980).

8. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 158.

9. Ibid., 166.

10. Stephan Hessel, Indignaos! (Barcelona: Destino, 2011).

11. Movimiento 15M (n.d.), Movimiento 15M, http://movimiento15m.org/.

12. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 195.

13. Ibid., 159.

14. Ibid., 195.

15. Ibid., 215.

16. “Europe's Most Earnest Protesters,” The Economist, April 14, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18959259.

17. Movimiento 15M (n.d.), “Movimiento 15M,” http://movimiento15m.org/.

18. Luisa Martín Rojo, Occupy: The Spatial Dynamics of Discourse in Global Protest Movements (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2014), 633.

19. 15Mpedia (n.d.), https://15mpedia.org/wiki/Portada.

20. Ibid.

21. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 96.

22. Martín Rojo, Occupy, 11.

23. Ibid., 626; Bryan Cameron, “Spain in Crisis: 15-M and the Culture of Indignation,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 15, no. 1–2 (2014): 1–11; Ignacia Perugorría and Benjamín Tejerina, “Politics of the Encounter: Cognition, Emotions, and Networks in the Spanish 15M,” Current Sociology 61, no. 4 (2013): 424–42.

24. Raka Shome, “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space,” Communication Theory 13, no. 1 (2003): 47.

25. Martín Rojo, Occupy, 624.

26. Briziarelli and Martínez Guillem, Reviving Gramsci; Óscar García Agustín and Marco Briziarelli, Podemos and the New Political Cycle (London: Palgrave-McMillan, forthcoming).

27. Briziarelli and Martínez Guillem, Reviving Gramsci.

28. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 10, original emphasis.

29. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Giambattista Vico and Thomas Goddard Bergin, The New Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948); Lev Semenovich Vygotski, Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Valentin N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973).

30. Lawrence Grossberg, Roman Horak, and Monika Seidl, About Raymond Williams (London: Routledge, 2010); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21.

31. The materials for such inquiry come from two different sources: First, a series of anonymous responses to a written questionnaire by participants in the “Indignad@s” movement; second, a guided focus group discussion where, with the help of a moderator, a group of Indignad@s addressed the same set of questions.

32. Anita Pomerantz, “Extreme Case Formulations: A Way of Legitimizing Claims,” Human Studies 9, no. 2/3 (1986).

33. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006); Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2001).

34. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 157.

35. Ibid., 159.

36. Ibid., 166.

37. Ibid., 8.

38. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hector Grad Fuchsel and Luisa Martín Rojo, “‘Civic’ and ‘ethnic’ Nationalist Discourses in Spanish Parliamentary Debates,” Journal of Language and Politics 2, no. 1 (2002): 31–70; Susana Martínez Guillem, “Constructing Contexts, (Re)defining Immigrants: Mental Models and Social Representations in Immigration Policy Defense,” Discourse & Society 24 (2013): 208–28; van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse; Wodak and Reisgl, Discourse and Racism.

39. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 165.

40. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

41. Condor, Pride and Prejudice, 193.

42. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology.

43. Andrea Smith, “Unsettling the Privilege of Self-Reflexivity,” in Geographies of Privilege, ed. France Windance Twine and Bradley Gardener (New York: Routledge, 2012), 264.

44. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 162.

45. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).

46. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 159.

47. Williams, Materialism and Culture, 39.

48. Ibid., 39.

49. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology.

50. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Briziarelli and Martínez Guillem, Reviving Gramsci.

51. “La Lucha sin Fronteras Es el Único Camino,” http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/2016/05/15/la-lucha-sin-fronteras-es-el-unico-camino/.

52. Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (London, Sage: 2015).