Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
Protest Now and Again
by Rebecca Schneider
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
—Howard Zinn (2007:11-12)
These are queer times indeed.
—Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages (2008: 204)
Thirty-six years after he delivered a speech on the Boston Commons to protest the war in Vietnam, Howard Zinn published a commentary on history as "creative." The promise for the future, Zinn writes in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, is in the past's "fugitive moments."
The Port Huron Project takes the promise of fugitive time quite literally. Orchestrating the live reenactment of six protest speeches delivered between 1965 and 1971 by a variety of anti-war activists, the project disperses or circulates one time (1960s) across or within another time (2000s), and then further disperses or circulates that laminated time across multiple media at multiple and shifting sites. Arguably, the sense of multiple sites gives a kind of credential twist to the aspect of multiple or fugitive time that is the politic of temporal play at the project's base.
What are fugitive moments? And when is fugitive time? Could such moments be, perhaps, past moments on the run in the present? Moments when the past flashes up now to present us with its own alternative futures—futures we might chose to realize differently? Might the past's "fugitive moments" be leaky, syncopated, and errant moments—moments stitched through with repetition and manipulated to recur in works of performance, works of ritual, works of art, works of reenactment that play with time as malleable material? As malleable political material? Might the past's fugitive moments not only remind us of yesterday's sense of tomorrow, but compose the sense again and offer, without expiration date, a politic of possibility?
How to effectively protest government and multinational corporate actions under neoliberal global capital is a question that has flummoxed the Left across the Bush era. We must add complexity to the issue by not only asking how to protest, but by interrogating the when of protest—by not reductively to say that now is simply not the right time, but to suggest that now is material, has duration, and, like a medium, can be mixed and recombined. Think of it this way: must protest always only happen in a "now" considered distinct from prior nows or future nows? In another of his many spurs to action, Zinn wrote: "We are not starting from scratch" (1990:7). That is, we are not starting now—or, our "now" is not only now.
Of course, when playing in the cross-fire of time, letting anachronism do its creative work, things can feel a little uncanny, or dislocated, unsettling, or queer. The questions that arise can be mind-boggling: what happens to history if nothing is ever fully over nor discretely begun? When does a call to action, cast into the future, fully take place? Only in the moment of the call? Or can a call to action be resonant in the varied and reverberant cross-temporal spaces where an echo might encounter response—even years and years later? When does that which has sounded—deferred as an invocation or an appeal, a plea or a prod for future action now—ultimately occur? What are the limits of this future? What are the limits of this Now? 1
"Revolution seems impossible, at least for now." The Port Huron Project touches another temporal register, bringing an alternative Now into play and using seeming anachronism, suggestive deferral, and explicit repetition as political and aesthetic spurs to thought. This work may be playing fast and loose with "Now"—but listen to the way as Angela Davis studded her 1969 DeFremery Park speech with the word. "Now" resounds so many times that listening to it in 2010 makes anachronism less into an error of happenstance and more into a kind of tolling bell against the industry—war—that Davis so eloquently deplores. Now is still now if we are still, now, waging war.
The site of "now" is, of course, the celebrated substance of live performance. Live performance is most often (and some would say too often) considered to be an ephemeral medium, due to its composition in time, making it take place only now, and otherwise disappearing. Reenactments complicate the singularity of "now" and approach performance by mixing and matching time, playing across temporal registers through explicitly and literally re-playing. The re-play is arguably the property of theatre that Gertrude Stein called its troubling "syncopated time" (1935:93)—a trouble many contemporary artists are keen to deploy. The queering of time (to borrow from 21st century scholars such as Puar, Pellegrini, Jakobsen, Frecerro, Dinshaw, and Freeman) troubles our heritage of Enlightenment (and Capitalist) investments in straight forward linearity as the only way to mark time—and points to a politic in veering, revolving, or turning around.
So, to go back for a moment: even if "revolution seems impossible, at least for now," this project suggests that it may nevertheless be possible to revolve. This is the sense of revolution that the cultural materialist Raymond Williams, whose work was widely read by the New Left in the 1960s, brings out in his influential Keywords where he reminds not to forget that the word revolution stems from simply turning around (1985:270). Perhaps this sense of revolution has gained a certain political viability—at least in art circles. The sheer numbers of 21st-century artists exploring reenactment as medial material, as a fertile mode of inquiry, as a means of making and as a mode of art practice, should be indicative of a turn toward temporality as malleable substance, capable of intervention and (re)articulation. In such a turn, in-time events themselves might be given, like an object, to (re)touch—causing one to question the promises as well as the limits in thinking through (and even acting in) cross-temporality. Does cross-temporality or inter-temporality bear material weight or pull? Or, using Elizabeth Freeman's terms, is there political efficacity in "temporal drag"? 2
I started with the Zinn epigraph, above, because the Howard Zinn re-speech was the only one of the Port Huron Project reenactments I attended at the live moment of its performance. Seeing the reenactment live on the Boston Commons, flush (if not packed) with photographers and videographers as well as passersby, and listening to the againness of the actor re-intoning Zinn's speech, there was no hiding the fact that this re-event was not about singular moments, ephemerality, or the disappearance of some unitary performing subject. Rather, the "liveness" of the event was itself syncopated with other times no longer live. The time, then, was not (only) now. It was past and present, present and deferred into the future when it would obviously be reencountered screenally. The presence of technology and the explicit citationality of re-speech tilted time off of the straight and narrow—even at moments when it seemed that "Zinn" might indeed be speaking about "today" (too). Perhaps particularly in the re-live event, time was explicitly folded. There was simply no singular or discreet "nowness" to the action re-acted, nor was there any invitation to suspend disbelief and forget that it was, indeed, now—it was 2007 and not 1971. But then, even in 1971, Zinn was not "starting from scratch."
Listening to the Zinn reenactor, I looked across the way to other performers and activists simultaneously using some of the Commons space nearby. There was a living sculpture mime standing rock still in whiteface as if timeless. Another man protested the Chinese government's treatment of the Falun Gong by displaying photographs of tortured practitioners. A Christian fundamentalist read aloud from the Bible beside a poster advertising salvation and the second coming. I wondered exactly what was anachronistic in any of these the scenes, including the faux Zinn, and what was not? How was there even such a thing as anachronism when the citational or ritual properties of passersby waving hello, or stopping to listen to "Zinn" for a moment before tossing a dime to the "Statue of Liberty," were as studded with cross-temporal possibilities, references, and memories as the Zinn reenactment itself. That the actor Matthew Floyd Miller was not Zinn himself, that the date was not May 1971, that references to "now" were also "then"—none of these things could fully dismiss the possibility of efficacity. That some attendees or passersby might have shrugged and said "it's only an act," or that some Youtube viewers might sigh and think "too bad the time for action is over, " or that some of us who are curious might wonder at the seeming ability of this project to arrive so late to the scene—these criticisms are only one aspect to the event's time-warped theatricality. The flip side to these important criticisms is an equally important possibility—one that irrupts only sporadically in listening to the re-speeches: the fugitive moments of distemporality, of uncanniness, of error, or of a return to sense that happens in pauses, or stray sentences, or tiny moments when the "now" folds and multiplies—even if only for a fugitive flash.
The promise in a flash of fugitive realization feels something like: Yes We Can. Yes We Can protest now. And yes we must protest the limits of a "now" handily considered by Left Melancholists to be completely subjugated to the terms of linear time.3 The time to protest the War in Afganistan is not over. The time to protest the war in Iraq is not over. The time to protest the war in Vietnam is not over. And as Zinn has made clear across his life's work, the time to protest WWII is not over. Clearly, if sadly, the time to protest the Crusades is not over. In fact, the time to protest war and its inevitable ties to industry, to capital, and to the drive to empire is not, and is never, complete. (My scholarship begins to sound like a protest speech—as if such speech might be infectious?) It is Now. It is Again. It is the necessary vigilance of arguing for Never—Again. And Again.
1. In this vein, and in homage to NOW (National Organization of Women), we can consider artists such as Mary Kelly and Sharon Hayes who have recently reenacted precedent feminist protest actions. Mary Kelly's WLM Demo Remix is a ninety-second film loop in which Kelly uses a slow dissolve to blend a photo of a reenactment of a 1970 "women's liberation movement" political demonstration in NYC with the archival photo the first image reenacts. The loop begins with the later image and slowly dissolves to combine past and present—with the archival image either super-imposed upon or shining through the photo of the reenactment. Interestingly, the present image never completely fades—and the archival image is never completely clear.
2. See Elizabeth Freeman, "Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations." New Literary History, 2000, 31: 727–744. The act of revolving, or turning, or pivoting off of a linear track, may not be nostalgic, if nostalgia implies a melancholic attachment to loss and an assumed impossibility of return. Rather, the turn to the past – or a gestic journey through the past's possible alternative futures -- bears a political purpose for a critical approach to futurity unhinged from Enlightenment and capitalist investment in time as linear. On the limits of the "American" denigration of nostalgia as compared with the cross-temporal and visceral promise in the Greek root, see Nadia Serementakis, The Senses Still (Westview Press, l994: 4). See Julia Bryan-Wilson on nostalgia in Tribe's work in "Sounding the Fury," Artforum, January 2008.
Works Cited
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. "Sounding the Fury." Artforum. January 2008.
Freeman, Elizabeth. "Packing History and Count(er)ing Generations." New Literary History, 2000, 31: 727–744.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.
Serementakis, Nadia. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory and Material Culture in Modernity. Westview Press, l994.
Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America. Random House, 1935.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, 1985.
Zinn, Howard. Declarations of Independence. Perennial, 1990.
Zinn, Howard. A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2007