Abstract
Political protests involving clashes with police are often delegitimized by governments for using “uncivil” and “violent” means. Drawing on a creative video clip (“Breaking Billboards”) made by a group of Gezi protestors, this paper theorizes an alternative response, which refuses the dichotomy between peaceful and violent struggles and instead seeks to transform the field of judgement. The protestors in the clip, by echoing a verse originally written by poet Cemal Süreya, reconstruct destructive activity – breaking billboards – playfully and detached from its presumed ends. Placing their performances in conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of mediality – means without end – I argue that the clip reconstructs political action in play-form, corroding the significance of the means-ends relationship. In doing so, it frustrates the usual grounds of judgement within which the meaning and value of protest activities are arbitrated.
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Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to Jill Frank for providing unwavering, generous support and invaluable comments on multiple versions of this article, as well as for our many conversations on politics and poetry, and to Alexander Livingston for his insightful guidance for this article and beyond on protest and refusal. For providing helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I owe thanks to Çiğdem Çıdam, Kevin Attell, Begüm Adalet, Patchen Markell, Inés Valdez, Richard Bensel, Christopher Way, Jimena Valdez; for reading countless iterations of the piece with me, thanks go to Jacob Swanson. This paper benefitted from discussions at the 26th Annual Critical Theory Roundtable and Cornell Political Theory Writing Colloquium. I also thank Karen Zivi and the anonymous reviewers at Contemporary Political Theory.
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