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In the Street - Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Hardcover)
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In the Street - Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Hardcover)
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If there is one thing that people agree about concerning the
massive, leaderless, spontaneous protests that have spread across
the globe over the past decade, it's that they were failures. The
protesters, many claim, simply could not organize; nor could they
formulate clear demands. As a result, they failed to bring about
long-lasting change. In the Street challenges this seemingly
forgone conclusion. It argues that when analyses of such events are
confined to a framework of success and failure, they lose sight of
the on-the-ground efforts of political actors who demonstrate, if
for a fleeting moment, that another way of being together is
possible. The conception of democratic action developed here helps
us see that events like Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi uprising, or
the weeks-long protests that took place all around the US after
George Floyd's killing by the police are best understood as
democratic enactments created in and through "intermediating
practices," which include contestation, deliberation, judging,
negotiation, artistic production, and common use. Through these
intermediating practices, people become "political friends"; they
act in ways other than expected of them to reach out to others
unlike themselves, establish relations with strangers, and
constitute a common amidst disagreements. These democratic
enactments are fleeting, but what remains in their aftermath are
new political actors and innovative practices. The book
demonstrates that the current obsession with the "failure" of
spontaneous protests is the outcome of a commonly accepted way of
thinking about democratic action, which casts organization as a
technical matter that precedes politics and moments of spontaneous
popular action as sudden explosions. The origins of this widely
shared understanding lie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of
popular sovereignty, shaped by his rejection of theatricality and
idealization of immediacy. Insofar as contemporary thinkers see
democratic moments as the unmediated expressions of people's will
and/or instantaneous eruptions, they, like Rousseau, reduce
spontaneity to immediacy and erase the rich and creative practices
of political actors. In the Street counters this Rousseauian
influence by appropriating Aristotle's notion of "political
friendship," and developing an alternative conceptualization of
democratic action through a close reading of Antonio Negri, Jurgen
Habermas, and Jacques Ranciere and the global protests of 1968 that
inspired these thinkers and their work.
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