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directly engaging with these concepts, putting them at the center of our understanding of
democracy, rather than obscuring them and placing them at the margins. Like Young’s analysis
above, Ranciere is not wrong. His view is simply partial.
It is for this reason, that Piven’s analysis is critical. She explicitly argues that the primary
objective of disruptive protest, is not to communicate one’s opinion, but to exercise collective
power.
Protest movements do try to communicate their grievances, of course, with
slogans, banners, antics, rallies, marches, and so on…The reverberations of
disruptive actions, the shutdowns or highway blockages
or property destruction,
are inevitably also communicative. But
while disruption thus usually gives the
protesters voice, voice alone does not give the protesters much power
…
In fact,
the response of authorities to disruptive protests is frequently to profess to allow
voice while preventing the disruption itself
. Thus the picket line, originally a
strategy to physically obstruct the scabs who interfered with the shutdown of
production, has been turned by the courts into an informational activity… (Piven
2006, 23-24; emphasis added).
While Piven is clear that communication and voice are certainly elements of even
disruptive actions, that is not their exclusive, or even, principal goal.
On this view, the “right to
free speech,” so often invoked as an example of liberties accorded American citizens, is actually
used to transform and limit protest to “being heard” rather than exercising power. For example,
during my participation in Occupy Denver, the police allowed sign-holding, marching and
chanting so long as it remained on the sidewalk (a move that, sadly, some influential individuals
within Occupy enforced) and thus did not block roads and potentially disrupt the activities of
state and capital. In any case, the essential point from this analysis is
that the activation of
disruptive power – a phenomenon very closely related to, if not identical with disruptive direct
action – is, for Piven, oriented toward the withdrawal of cooperation, with communication being
only a secondary aim. Disruption is “a
power strategy
that rests on withdrawing cooperation in
social relations” (
ibid
. 23; emphasis added). Thus, I contend that disruptive direct action is
not
136
only
about communication.
27
To characterize direct action as an effort to “having one’s voice
heard” or “expressing one’s opinion” or “exchanging ideas” or “making political claims” –
phrases that are often be associated with protest more generally – is to
miss what is unique about
direct action. It is about taking action, not talking, enacting power, rather than engaging in
conversation.
Disruptive direct action is rightly considered democratic when it is an expression of what
May (2008) has called “active equality.” On May’s view, Ranciere’s work highlights the active
creation of equality through collective action.
28
Utilizing Ranciere’s work, May (
ibid
. 53)
contends: “A democratic politics is a type of action. It is a collective action that starts from the
presupposition of equality. It is…a form of active…equality.” On this view, the actions
themselves express the equality. No amount of talking expresses the power that people have.
Rather,
it is what people do, rather than what they say, that creates equality. To put this
differently, disruptive direct actions reconfigure power. If one measure of power is control over
physical space or territory, as it surely is, then direct actions that occupy and repurpose spaces
are a concrete (if only temporary) reconfiguration of power. For every Oakland street that the
Black Panthers made inhospitable to the police, for every occupied foreclosed home that banks
cannot resell, for every guerilla garden that inhibits a new gentrifying real estate development,
power is reconfigured. The way that Ranciere and Piven theorize disruptive actions yields a
particular logic
as to when such actions are, in fact, democratic: disruptive power has democratic
potential when it is mobilized by those lower on the power hierarchy in opposition to those
27
One aim of most direct actions is, without question, communication. However, the communicative function of
direct action is generally to: a) communicate with others (who are already in basic political agreement about the
goal) that one need not wait to start accomplishing the goal in question, and/or b) to actualize a threat to authorities.
In either case, the point of such communication is not a Habermasian dialogue that promotes mutual understanding.
28
Ranciere’s review on the back of May’s book expressly endorses this view, saying: “Equality is not something
that we must expect from state institutions. It is something that we must both presuppose and create through
collective action.”
137
higher on the power hierarchy. Said differently, disruptive direct action is democratic to the
extent to which it reconfigures
power in ways that
expose, upset, or reduce a power inequality.
A disruptive direct action would not be democratic to the extent that it serves to perpetuate,
reinforce or establish a power inequality. In the chapter’s concluding section, I discuss ways to
amplify the democratic potential of direct actions in more detail. For the time being, let me say
that, in contrast to both Habermas and Young, Ranciere and Piven theorize disruptive actions in
ways that help expose these as not mere efforts to communicate, but also, and more importantly,
as
efforts to enact and, in doing so, reconfigure power.
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