Abstract
What, if anything, do the ‘square’ protests and ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 bring to contemporary democratic theory? And how can we, as political theorists, analyse their discourse and do justice to it? We address these questions through an analysis of the Greek and Spanish protest movements of the spring and summer of 2011, the so-called aganaktismenoi and indignados. We trace the centrality of the critique of representation and politics as usual as well as the ideas about horizontality and autonomy in the protesters’ discourse. These ideas are not only important to their critique of the contemporary liberal democratic regimes in the two countries, but also important to the way in which the protesters organise themselves. Nonetheless, as we shall argue, the protesters are caught within a tension between horizontality and verticality, between autonomy and hegemony, or between moving beyond representation and accepting representational structures. Given this tension, we examine how the protesters negotiate it in three key areas: politics, representation and organisation. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, we further argue that the protesters can be seen as making a claim to equal voice. This is what Rancière refers to as politics proper, and the question is then whether such a politics is possible without falling back into traditional forms of politics.
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Notes
Similarly, see the categorical rejection by members of the working committees on the mass media of the suggestion for the creation of a political party called Real Democracy in Real-democracy.gr, 2011c.
Not least in relation to the flow of information, e.g. from Syntagma to the periphery (Real-democracy.gr, 2011l).
The Long Term Politics working group (e.g. Política a Largo Plazo Acampada Sol, 2011) differs from the General Assembly, the commission dealing with the running of the assemblies (e.g. Comisión de Dinamización de Asamblea de la Acampada de Sol, 2011) and the Short Term Politics working group on the issues of representation, autonomy and horizontality, with the first of these much more critical of representation, centralisation and hierarchy.
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The authors would like to thank Alan Finlayson as well as the reviewers and the editors for their comments on earlier versions of the article.
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Prentoulis, M., Thomassen, L. Political theory in the square: Protest, representation and subjectification. Contemp Polit Theory 12, 166–184 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2012.26