Revolution and the politics of imagination : the aesthetics of revolution

Abstract

This paper locates the collective political imagination at the centre of any understanding of popular insurrections, revolts and revolution in their common modalities and in the diverse yet unique historical and geographical articulation. In practice this means exploring the intimate multiplicity of corporeal expressions of individuals and crowds that constructs and signifies revolt within socio-spatial landscape and that here we are also relating to the Mediterranean imaginary. We will employ trans-disciplinary - ethno-historical and critical cultural - approach. These will dialogically converge on what could be termed an aesthetics of revolution that is explored through a discussion of meaning within the collective political imagination and articulation. By circumnavigating the usual typologies of revolutionary narratives (Hobsbawm, Rishdie, Zimmnerman and many others) this paper will focus on notions of bodily presence and corporeal movement, as expressions of revolutionary outburst and intent. Here, bodily expression is aligned with the articulation of political occupation and appropriation in terms of space and place. This hones in on the actual event [évenement] or mdeed the evental [évenemental] articulation of social and political rupture (cf. Badiou and Althusser). As a narrative of an event, a revolutionary outburst articulates the breakdown of 'normality of daily life. Quotidianity is accelerated ( cf. Virilio's concept of speed), where 'aesthetic' narratives begin to take precedence in the shaping of political action through sound, colour and performance (cf Camus), as well as a politics of situatedness (cf Marleau Ponty) and the inhabiting of place (cf ·Fanon and Ranciere) and spatial articulation through individual extraordinary actions ( cf. the discussion of violence in Balibar). As these performative events enfold, they begin to replicate individual and collective corporeal expressions as acts of defiance and anger, while at the same time they are soon appropriated and normalized into "mere forms" of political change. To investigate this hypothesis, this paper adopts a dual strategy. At one level we will delve deep into what we mean by repeated and mimetized revolutionary events as acts of 'liberating the collective imagination' -latent in a 'collective political memory' that shapes mythical and utopian world views which emerge from the breakdown of order and shape the 'aesthetics of revolutionary event'. At another level we ask whether this aesthetics of 'liberation' and 'collective imagination' is just a mimetic art and a reconfiguration of past revolutions that is being in tum re-aesthetized, re-ideologized, re-religiosized. Drawing from recent revolutionary events around the Mediterranean, this paper poses a question over a series of simulacra, and whether they ultimately create "new" political realities that are as unstable and potentially oppressive as the regimes that they beat.