DEMONSTRATIONS ARE ACTS OF PROPHECY
No. 14
Teju Cole
8 panels depicting Eric Garner’s eyes, created by the an artist know as JR (photo: Tumblr/JR)
There are a lot of people who have a lot to say right now, but who are not in conversation with you. An exchange of words is not the same as a conversation.
This is why you should be skeptical when someone says, “But that is not how to achieve your goals.” Who is speaking? A statement is potentially meaningful if it comes from someone who is with you. If it comes from someone who is not with you, it is both meaningless and dangerous.
As for the media, it reports only within the radius of its leash, focusing on smashed glass, burned buildings, and disrupted traffic. The intensity and scale of the slow violence that led to the symbolic acts of interruption in a demonstration eludes the media completely. Media language echoes that of the State. Both are interested in maintaining the State’s monopoly on violence—even symbolic violence. Hence the absurd and monomaniacal focus on broken glass.
John Berger wrote, in an essay titled “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” the following helpful words:
——“It is in the nature of a demonstration to provoke violence upon itself. Its provocation may also be violent. But in the end it is bound to suffer more than it inflicts. This is a tactical truth and an historical one. The historical role of demonstrations is to show the injustice, cruelty, irrationality of the existing State authority.”——
Berger wrote this in 1968.
In addition to being acts of truth-telling, demonstrations are acts of prophecy. On a given site, a demonstration imagines a change that until this moment was thought of as unimaginable. It doesn’t and can’t by itself bring such change into being, not usually. So, what does a demonstration “demonstrate”? It demonstrates a collective bodily imagining of that someday-to-come change. It demonstrates the persistence and unextinguished dignity of the “we” that the State has refused to see.
The demonstration occasions a reconstituted “we.” This imagining is achieved at high and sometimes shocking cost to the demonstrators. Yet, it is a cost willingly borne because the alternative—slow suffocation without voice and without end—is far less tolerable.