Play, Creativity, and Social Movements

If I Can't Dance, It's Not My Revolution

Benjamin Shepard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415849197
• eBook ISBN: 9781136829642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As we play, we step away from stark reality to conjure up new possibilities for the present and our common future. Today, a new cohort of social activists are using it to create social change and reinvent democratic social relations. In contrast to work or routine, play must be free. To the extent that it is, it infuses a high-octane burst of innovation into any number of organizational practices and contexts, and invites social actors to participate in a low-threshold, highly democratic process of collaboration, based on pleasure and convivial social relations. Despite the contention that such activities are counterproductive, movements continue to put the right to party on the table as a part of a larger process of social change, as humor and pleasure disrupt monotony, while disarming systems of power. Through this book, Shepard explores notions of play as a social movement activity, considering some of the meanings, applications and history of the concept in relation to social movement groups ranging from Dada and Surrealism to Situationism, the Yippies to the Young Lords, ACT UP to the Global Justice, anti-gentrification, community and anti-war movements of recent years.

1

Surrealists, Situations, and Street Parties

History, Play, and Social Movements

The study of play in social movements opens up any number of questions about social and cultural change. Did the Commedia dell’ Arte improvisational performances as clowns, the Zannis, prefigure the French Revolution (Grantham, 2001)? It is difficult to say. Yet surely enough, when Richard Schechner conceptualizes play as an “eruption of liberty” (2002, p. 79), it is not a stretch to imagine Liberty with her breast bared, waving a tricolor banner. But this does not answer the question, what is the relationship between play and social movement activity? Is storming the Bastille play? It depends on whom you ask. “I’ve no idea,” one of Gustave Flaubert’s (1869/2008, p. 27) characters explained when asked what provoked a disturbance during the French Revolution, “and neither have they … It’s a habit of theirs these days. What an excellent joke.” Everyone broke out in laughter. Individual motives are rarely pure. While revolution has traditionally been viewed as a response to desperation, the compulsion to act is rarely simple or heroic. The motivations of those involved in social movements are often a combination of dissatisfaction, affect, anger, love, and maybe a bit of a desire to be a part of the action. A protest over sex-segregated university housing is said to have set off the uprising of 1968 in Paris. During pro-democracy struggles in China in 1989 one of the students was asked what he wanted in Tiananmen Square. “I’m not sure, but I want more of it,” he answered. The public theater of the streets takes any number of manifestations from an embrace of the ‘grotesque’ to a ‘theatre of the ridiculous’ (Kaufman, 2002; Mitchell, 1999). There is something telling about being moved to take the streets, even if one cannot put words around why. Yet, sometimes we know exactly what it means to do so. I will never forget the righteous, yet cathartic plea of a fellow student, who was African American, during the post-verdict street actions during the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. “It’s been four hundred years, baby! Four hundred years!!!” he exclaimed as he sang, skipped, and chanted with the others as riots erupted. “It’s a lot of fun to confront authority,” Frances Fox Piven noted in a recent oral history on her life’s work (Shepard, 2008, p. 14).

If anything, such activity is born out of the motivation to live in a more caring, just world. The subtitle of this study, “If I Can’t Dance,” refers to the famous adage attributed to US anarchist Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution” (although she did not actually say it). As the story goes, she was taken aside at a dance by a young comrade who told her that revolutionaries should not be seen dancing. Goldman is said to have responded:

I did not believe that a cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. (quoted in Highleyman, 2004, p. 501)

Much of Goldman’s philosophy was based on a broad belief in personal freedom. For her, joy and justice intermingled, neither able to exist without the other. Today, Goldman’s adage on dance and revolution provides the underpinnings for the street party–style protest of Reclaim the Streets and the global justice “movement of movements” to create a far more colorful public sphere (see Chapters 4 and 5).

This spirit can be found in the call for a “Pink Silver March—Tactical Frivolity” during the G8 meetings and convergence actions of 2001 in Genoa, Italy. “Dance Down the G8!!” the communiqué declared.

We are a colorful party in the street, a carnival with theatre, pink fairies and radical cheerleaders, clowns and music, a creative, magical and confrontational dance that takes decisions in a horizontal manner through affinity groups. We want to reduce aggressively to the minimum with imagination, samba, art, playing with space (and with the police), to create a relaxed atmosphere with good vibes. While we dance we denounce the brutality of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and all the forms of oppression and domination. (Archives of Global Protests, 2001)

A lineage of such activism leads directly back to the topsy-turvy experimentation of Marcel Duchamp, Dada, the Surrealists, Bertholt Brecht’s theater, and the liberatory gender play witnessed in the Berlin cabarets of Weimar Era Germany (Kaes et al., 1994; Buhle and Schulman, 2005; Ferrell, 2001, Marcus, 1989). The Situationists specifically located their project within this milieu. The group recognized the liberatory potential of the intersection between art and play found in the Dada spectacle. “It was in fact from art that play broke free. The eruption was called Dada,” argued Situation-ist Raoul Vaneigem (1967/2003, p. 257). “The Dadaist events awoke the primitive-irrational play instinct which had been held down (ibid.) This lineage represents a vital chapter in the history of play in social movements. It is the subject of the following chapter.

DADA AND SURREALISM

Formed in 1916, the Dadaists juxtaposed their delight in paradox with the ridiculous, up is down, down is up world of the years after the First World War (Hopkins, 2004). With mass carnage and the stench of the trenches in mind, Dada yearned “for a changed world” (Plant, 1992, p. 39). Tristan Tzara (1918) opens the Dada Manifesto with these words, which hint at the anarchistic impulse of the new movement:

DADA EXCITES EVERYTHING.
DADA knows everything. DADA spits everything out.

A sense of silliness and “wordplay” characterizes much of the movement (Marcus, 1989, p. 4). Its absurdity stood in stark contast to the rationalizations used to justify overwork, nationalism, stress, and ultimately war. Tzara (1918) begs the question:

HAS DADA EVER SPOKEN TO YOU:
about the fatherland
about sardines
about Art (you exaggerate my friend)
about heroism
about mustaches
about lewdness
about genius, about genius, about genius
about the eight-hour day
about heroism.

Instead of asking about “work” or “heroism” or the “fatherland,” Dada was a movement for which those things no longer mattered. “NEVER NEVER NEVER” has Dada asked these things, Tzara (1918) conceded. “DADA doesn’t speak. DADA has no fixed idea.” Tzara addressed those reading along:

If you have serious ideas about life,
If you make artistic discoveries
and if all of a sudden your head begins to crackle with laughter,
If you find all your ideas useless and ridiculous, know that
IT IS DADA BEGINNING TO SPEAK TO YOU.

The absurdity of Dada served as a provocation and homage to a topsy-turvy world. The movement’s targets: work, war, capital—all of which seemed to be making everyone crazy. Even Freud (1961) conceeded that only a few of us could actually sublimate our desires into our work. There had to be more to life than this.

Dada would help the world ask questions about what that could be. One of the movement’s foremost practitioners was artist Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades put into question the very ways we understand art and culture. It all started in 1917 when he responded to a call from the New York Society for Independent Artists. Anyone willing to pay six dollars could display two works. Duchamp submitted a urinal and said it was ready to be presented, “readymade.” This readymade “art” object conjured up images of men urinating, among other provocations (Mink, 2006). Yet, mostly it was a joke on the world of art and bourgeois social mores. “In Duchamp’s slapstick-infused readymades, the idea and the actuality of play offer possibilities for examining the tangled knot of work and leisure in everyday life,” suggests Helen Molesworth (1998). In another work, Duchamp penciled a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache, adding “L.H.O.O.Q.” French shorthand for “she’s got a hot ass” (Mink, 2006, p. 63). Through such juvenile humor and silliness, the realm of play, jokes, and humor found their way into social critique (Molesworth, 1998).

Sexuality was also part of the art, activism, and cultural experimentation of the era. Throughout the decade, movements in radical ecology, aesthetics, and gender play contributed to the pulsing public sphere of the Berlin Cabaret (Kaes et al., 1994). Here, an ethos of pleasure and generativity marked a stark contrast to the authoritarian, nationalist impulses that had driven Germany into WWI in the first place. Sex as a relational activity, as play and pleasure rather than procreation (and production of children with material needs), represented a new way of living (Foote, 1954; Turner, 1982).

By 1924, Surrealism established itself as Dada’s heir. For the Surrealists human nature was best understood as an irrational social force (Hopkins, 2004). If it was modern civilization which set forth to divide up, take sides, and conduct four years of slow suicide, then these movements wanted nothing to do with its morality. The group rejected work “in favor of play” while experimenting “with forms of expression disallowed in capitalist society,” explains Sadie Plant (1992, p. 40). Rather than dedicating life to producing and consuming, the Surrealists “argued and played with the system of values which entrapped them,” disordering the senses through “anti-bourgeois free play” (Hopkins, 2004, p. 16; Plant, 1992, pp. 40, 42). Much of this took shape via new kinds of relatedness, supported within the active interplay between the conscious mind and an inner world of ideas of daydreams. Here, a movement pulsed within a space between a cacophony of ideas, free association, word soup, and fantasy (Breton, 1924/1972; Plant, 1992; Molesworth, 1998).

For the Surrealists, play offered a space to excavate, imagine, and meander through the recesses of the unconscious mind. The movement was profoundly influenced by psychoanalysis, where thinkers also grappled with the meanings of play and dreams (Freud, 1961; Piaget, 1962). Within play “the child or adult is free to be creative,” argued psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1971, p. 53). In child’s play, the child is free to traverse the edges between pleasure and reality, dream and material worlds, and even self and external object (Freud, 1961). Here “real” objects are incorporated into a world of “make-believe” where the child maintains a sense of agency. And, the playground functions as a psychic space for creative exploration of “complete freedom” (Freud, 1914, pp. 147–56).

“Surrealism is not a new means or expression, or an easier one, nor even a metaphysic of poetry,” wrote Surrealist Andre Breton (1924/1972). “It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all that resembles it.” For Breton and company, this was a movement in support of complete “freedom of thought.” For only here could humans approximate the possibility of happiness. “Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be,” mused Breton (1924/1972, pp. 4–5).

In his essay “Surrealism,” German social critical Walter Benjamin (1978, p. 189) confessed that he found the group’s “energies of intoxication for the revolution” tantalizing. For Benjamin, this revolutionary project came as close as anything he knew to realizing the humanist promise of Marx. “[O]nly the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock” (p. 192).

Much of this revolution was buttressed within an ethos which favored eros over repression, the free expression of “desires, pleasures, and imaginations” (Plant, 1992, p. 49). Yet, it seemed as soon as it began, the life-affirming possibility of the Surrealists and the Weimar cabaret was forced to contend with oblivion. The Nazis specifically targeted the cabarets and Magnus Hirshfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research for destruction in their first weeks in power (Gordan, 2000). Yet, the era’s legacy persevered. Throughout the postwar period, Dada and Surrealist thought influenced any number of movements (Crimp and Rolston, 1990; Jordan, 1998; Rosemont and Radcliffe, 2005; Sakolsky, 2002). Surrealist calls “to make a Revolution” of the imagination were largely echoed by graffiti from Paris in 1968: “All Power to the Imagination” (Breton, 1924/1972; Marcus, 1989). Here, eruptions of play, festivity, and spontaneity burst into the political consciousness of a generation.

THE SITUATIONISTS

By the late 1950s and 1960s, the Situationists recognized that the impulse to play and create had not been—and could not be—rendered extinct by capital, war, fascism, rationality, or more overt efforts to contain their anarchistic contours (Debord, 1967). “The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which banished it,” declared Situation-ist theorist Raoul Vaneigem (1967/2003, p. 257). Still, much of the edgy, volatile character of play had been marginalized, exiled to a periphery of peoples’ lives (Marcuse, 1955, 1964). All reification is forgetting, Herbert Marcuse (1978) would explain (though he was neither a member of nor influence for members of the group). In response to this pattern of flattening out, activists looked to art, culture, and play to animate social life. In order for these elements to break free, lines demarcating work and play would have to be dissolved. Escape valves would have to be shut off before pressure built for the system explode. Here, art and play would move out of the galleries and playgrounds and into the streets. “[W]ith the crisis of the spectacle, playfulness, distorted in every imaginable way, is being reborn everywhere,” Raoul Vaneigem elaborated (1967/2003, p. 256). The group saw play as means to escape an all-encompassing “spectacle” that colonizes countless aspects of our lives (Debord, 1967).

The Situationists combined Hegelian Marxist social theory with radical impulses of the avant-garde. Influences ranged from Rimbaud to Marx, Lukacs to Lefebvre. For the Situationists, there had to be something outside of work and necessity. “Economic necessity and play don’t mix,” Raoul Vaneigem explained (1967/2003, p. 256). The group recognized that mechanisms of alienation existed not just in labor, but the ins and outs of everyday life (Aufheben, n.d.). The time had come to eclipse this “iron cage of despair.” In one of its earliest papers, the Situationist International (1958) looked to practices including pranks, jokes, and game playing aimed at provoking and cultivating authentic experience. Play would serve as a site of resistance (Vaneigem, 1967/2003), infusing desire and vitality into everyday living (Sunshine, 2003). Here, play was thought to be the vehicle for a new type of society.

“All true play involves rules and playing with rules,” Vaneigem asserted, invoking the image of the playground: “Watch children at play. They know the rules of the game, they can remember them perfectly well, but they are always breaking them, always dreaming up new ways of getting around them” (1967/2003, p. 258). Play with new rules could shift the experience of the everyday into a game without losers. “Play, pleasure, and participation were to be hallmarks of a new form of social organization appropriate to a world in which the imperatives of survival no longer legitimate relations of domination, alienation, and separation” (Plant, 1992, p. 71).

To achieve this end, the Situationists talked, thought, and strove to create a theory of practice around the struggles of the everyday. A primary intellectual supporter for this disposition was French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre suggested that thinkers make sense of the difference between “fulfilling” authentic engagements of the lived moment, and “alienating” “negative elements” (Harvey, 1991, p. 42).

In 1958, he was suspended from the French Communist Party, having spoken out about the events in Hungary two years prior. Yet, it was his forgery of Marx—“Art is the highest joy that man can give himself”—that was listed as an official reason (Lefebvre, 1947/1991, pp. 255, 69–70). In the years to follow, Lefebvre developed an increasingly festive, exuberant, even playful Marxist urbanism. Asked if he had become an anarchist, he is known to have replied, “I’m a Marxist, of course … so that one day we can all become anarchists” (quoted in Merrifield, 2002, p. 72). The decidedly playful answer was reflective of both the author’s sense of humor and his increasing emphasis on a flexible, open-ended practice over a heavy-handed fixation on ideology. Lefebvre suggested a new praxis could be developed within the enactment of differential space (p. 72). He called for urbanists to demand a new “right to the city,” achieved through a new jouissance, of sensual pleasure, free conscious movement, protest, carnival, theater, rent strikes, and recognition of the radical possibility of a lived moment (p. 84). He loved Paris and hoped it could remain a space for art and ideas, the sexy, creative space it had always been. “Are we entering a city of joy or the world of unredeemable boredom?” he wondered, contemplating its fate (p. 81). Faced with high rents and imagination-crushing imperatives of labor, he called for an urban experience of spontaneity and vitality, laughter and even mockery. “[R]evolutions of the past,” including 1789 or even the Paris Commune of 1871, “were festivals,” he noted (p. 83). Without space for such activities, urban spaces lose their connection with the imagination. He called for citizens to carve out spaces where “use” was prioritized over “exchange”; and improvisation and conversation were considered part of the “right to urban life” (p. 85). “Power … regards spontaneity as the enemy” (p. 87). The streets were the rightful space for such a politics, street parties a rightful heir to such thinking.

In 1957, Lefebvre taught in Strasbourg, where he met a group of young radicals who had been involved in occupations and demonstrations. Through these students, he came in contact with the burgeoning Situationist movement and inadvertently became a mentor to one of its leaders: Guy Debord. Both shared a fascination with the workings of everyday life, the limitations of docile urbanism, and a disdain for Baron Georges Haussman’s Paris. “Today’s urbanism’s main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing quantity of motor vehicles,” Debord quipped (1967, p. 94). Both worried that the modern metropolis of drab order was gradually suffocating the life-affirming creativity of the city (p. 95).

Like the Dadaists and Surrealists before them, Lefebvre and Debord recognized the potential for a new kind of ludic experience. “[T]he Situation-ists defended the urban mix, wanted to get beyond the rational city, strove to reassert daring, imagination and play in social life and urban culture,” notes geographer Andy Merrifield (2002, p. 96). The crux of such a politics was the construction of heightened lived moments. “Play, as well as politics, was fundamental to any Situationist situation,” Merrifield continues. “In fact, play was fundamental to any politics, too. Play nourished politics and political man was very much Homo Ludens” (ibid.). Debord spent much of the 1950s not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes toward an Introduction: From Play to Eternity
• 1 Surrealists, Situations, and Street Parties: History, Play, and Social Movements
• 2 Play as Prank: From the Yippies to the Young Lords
• 3 Send in the Clowns: Play, Pleasure, and Struggles against Oblivion
• 4 Play as Community Building: From Gardens to Global Action
• 5 Play as Street Party: Reclaiming Streets and Creating More Gardens!
• 6 Playing in Topsy-Turvy Times: From Carnival to Carnage
• 7 From Play to Panic: Ludic Organizing in Absurd Times
• 8 The Limits of Play: Radical Clowning vs. Tomato Picking
• Notes toward a Conclusion: Reflections on the Study of Play in Social Movements
• Interviews
• A Brief Glossary of Groups
• References
• About the Author
• Index