Friday, May 7 2-4pm
Geoffrey Pleyers - Cultural Activism
in the Alter-Globalization Movement
Fifteen hours into the gathering in the remote Zapatista village of Juan Diego, which played host to the “meeting between rebel commandantes, youth and NGOs” in August 2005, speakers continued, one after the other, to take their turn at the stand and exchange local experiences. At three in the morning, it is Tito’s turn, a youth from a suburb of Mexico City suburbs, “I don’t know how to speak well in public. Actually, there are only two things that I know how to do well: graffiti and hip hop. So I am going to sing one of my songs; a rebel, a Zapatista song.” The atmosphere rose a notch and soon people were on their feet. The young singer took the opportunity to launch into a second song, “dedicated to Subcommandante Marcos”. Despite the lateness of the hour, the dozen Zapatista commandantes all remained to listen to this teenager, who expressed in his own way the difficulty of life in the poor suburbs, his disappointed hopes and his desire for a better world. As Tito broke into his third song, a Trotskyite activist, a long-time supporter of the Zapatista cause, came to see me and began to fidget, “This is all very well, but what use is it? What points can be drawn from these successive speeches? What text will come out of them?”
From the point of view of institutional politics, such meetings and actions appear indeed quite limited in their outcome. The multiple Zapatista mobilizations for constitutional reform in Mexico clearly failed at the politico-legal level. So how should these songs at the middle of the night in the remote mountains of Chiapas have any influence and help to improve the rebel indigenous situation? Similar questions arise from activists actions around the world. What is the political impact of tagging advertising in Mexico City, London or New York subways? It would be considered useless - or even counter-productive, in that it impairs the functioning of a public service. In which way could the very convivial “critical wines” meeting organized by Italian social centers (Toscano, 2010) have any political or economical impact? At worst, they see symptoms of declining participation in the mechanisms of political life or attitudes leading to a “dissipation of social movements” (Phelps-Brown, 1990). At best, they regard the characteristics of these movements as indicative of an early phase of the cycle or development of social movements, in which innovations multiply, creating “relatively open spaces for new collective experiments” (Tilly, 2003: 105).
Ethnographic-based research challenges this traditional approach. Ethnographic field research have indeed led social scientists to emphasize the energy and creativity of these activists, suggesting the emergence of a distinct culture of activism than the lack of maturity or strength of a social movement (e.g. McDonald, 2006; Juris, 2008; Osterweil, 2004; Ponniah, 2006; Pleyers, 2005). These actors actually don’t want to take their place as “challengers” in the political arena but, on the contrary, to escape the political sphere and to develop a resistance to corporate globalization centered on subjectivity, lived experience and concrete alternative practices. The ethnographic approach allow indeed to emphasize emerging elements that have been largely ignored by other methods. It is particularly true for feature concerning subjectivity and local practices. Through its lengthy time commitment, it allows “adjustment between hypothesis and evidence, especially in the form of interrogating activists about what they think they are doing” (Jasper, 2007: 97).
After a brief presentation of the main case studies we rely on, this paper explores the way experience and experimentation shape this activist culture. Sections 2 to 5 successively focus on four of its components: the centrality of experience and subjectivity, the conception of concrete alternatives emerging, through concrete experimentation processes, the idea of “spaces of experience” and similar conceptions of learning and knowledge. The last section opens a discussion on some limits and drifts these movements have been confronted to.