With the so-called Arab Spring and Occupy, but also with the German PEGIDA, a seemingly new
transnational wave of dissent movements has arisen. What we consider new in these movements is
their constitution as a heterogeneous multitude based on physical presence, temporarily gathering
an otherwise highly diverse population. As much as these groups appear united concerning their
shared enemy – namely political and economic elites – as well as with regard to the name in which
they act (“the people”), they remain of inner dissent insofar as they put the possibility of an
overarching identity of the movement into question. What we witness, hence, is the dissolution of
the belief in traditional emancipatory movements united by class, gender or ethnicity standing up
against a hegemonic regime and its substitution by the hope for the subversive and revolutionary
potential of a post-identitarian counter-public performing their being-in-difference. Yet, their ability
of representing “the people” seems to disappear in spite of the proposed inclusiveness and
multivocality, as their radical dissent leads to non-representation: They refuse to traditionally
represent “the people” by making claims or engaging in formulating positions.
At the same time, these protest movements certainly stand and fall with the production of symbolic
politics likely to be disseminated via social media sites, newspapers and TV or radio broadcasts .
Pierre Bourdieu had already noted that the success of mobilisations depended on the existence of a
“symbolic apparatus” for the production of epistemological claims about the world – a fait social
that becomes even more decisive regarding the organisational ephemerality of current movements.
Taking this changing notion of political movements with their underlying anti -hierarchical,
non-representational, fragile and network-based logic as a starting point, the workshop aims at
critically investigating current formulations of dissent by specifically broaching the issue of the
(im)possibility of representing the unrepresentable. By doing so we evidently focus on the so -called
crisis of representation but aim at enlarging this debate to those intentionally organising to
“disrepresent” representation.
Engaging this problematic, the following question may serve as our starting points:
How is non-representation performed on the streets, for the mass media or in more intimate
settings?
Which symbol practices are employed and to what extent are they grounded in narratives of earlier
protests or resistances (e.g. the altermondialist movements of the 1990s, the uprisings in French
banlieues in 2005-2007, or the riots in the UK in 2011)?
How do these practices connect to current discussions of direct democracy (e.g. David Graeber’s
thoughts on anarchist anthropology in the wake of Occupy)?
Can we discern national, social, cultural or gendered lineages that contain (and maybe limit) these
narrative and aesthetic forms?
