From ECOS 21 (1) ps.2-9

The New Intemperance: Protest, Imagination and Carnival.

 

Playful and subversive forms of protest have frequently been used by  environmental direct activists. This article briefly examines the impact and potential of such actions and argues that by invoking the concept of carnival, activists have been able to maintain a coherent collective identity for radical environmentalism, whilst allowing space for the variety of tactics and strategies other groups might wish to employ.

 

GRAEME CHESTERS

 

On the 27th May 1997, I was out walking in the Cheshire countryside. Having gone a little over a mile through woodland and meadow on a wonderful early summer morning I came across my rendezvous, a small group of pirates thigh deep in the River Bollin, dragging rubber dinghies behind them and arguing with a Police Inspector. In their wet suits, purple tunics, head scarves and face paint they resembled some ramshackle amateur dramatics society performing the Pirates of Penzance to an audience of unamused police officers and three particularly frightening bailiffs in black overalls. This was direct action at its most irreverent and most enjoyable. This was the site of the second runway at Manchester Airport. Up stream from the confrontation lay ‘River Rats’ camp, as yet untouched by the eviction process and in typically youthful and vibrant mood, yips, yells and general festivity met the news of the arrival of the ‘Sea Sabs’, albeit they were some 60-70 miles away from the sea .

 

Seriously irreverent

 

This was one scene in the theatrics of direct action that environmental activists have regularly employed to dramatic effect. Bizarre as this intervention appeared, the argument of the Sea Sabs was well grounded and effectively exploited an anomaly in the eviction process. They argued that the possession order granted to Manchester Airport only applied to land, and that consequently, the Bollin, as a navigable river, could not be subject to the jurisdiction of the Undersherriff’s bailiffs. As the River ran through the entire site, the Sea Sabs claimed that they should be left to float up and down it, unimpeded, giving whatever support they felt able to those ensconced in tree houses and tunnels. Over a period of two weeks their persistence caused the Airport and the evicting authorities numerous moments of embarrassment, the Manchester Evening news referred to one attempt to get on site as a “daring.. SAS style raid”, whilst video footage I recorded on that May morning was shown on local and national television, dramatic images of the brave purple pirates being dragged from the water by the ‘men in black’. The final denouement to this story came on the 31st May when the motley Pirates made their final, publicly announced attempt to gain access to the site. This time we were met by an enormous array of force, three police vans, thirty police officers, a Chief Inspector, Bailiffs, and nearly one hundred security men. Either side of the river bank razor fencing enclosed the site and a scaffold bridge had been built across the water. Trudging up the river in their garish costumes, dragging the bright yellow dinghies which now contained ‘humanitarian aid’, and followed on the banks by about twenty locals, came the Sea Sabs, in a scene reminiscent of an Ealing comedy, but on water, a face off began.

 

The farcical nature of such a confrontation was not lost on any of us, except perhaps the bailiffs who were more than aggrieved when we were finally allowed to cross the bridge, and deliver supplies to those in the trees, the Sea Sabs arguments and strange behaviour, lauded by locals, having finally convinced (or bewildered) the forces of law and order. As they were escorted down stream with myself filming the police vans that accompanied them on either bank, what struck me was how such cheek, inventiveness and wit could draw out the power structure underlying such conflicts. Here in this quiet Cheshire valley, the field of relations which exist in every episode of environmental direct action had been dragged out in to the open. The state and its respective agents - the police and the bailiffs, the intelligence gatherers from Brays Security, the climbers and tunnelers, the array of previously unemployed security guards who were soon to be so again, were all here, all lined up behind each other, stood by a river, nobody knowing what if anything they were protecting, from whom it was to be protected and who if anyone was in charge. All brought to this one place to contain a small group of bedraggled men and women in funny costumes with children’s boats, who wouldn’t give up or go away.

 

From protest to ‘carnival’

 

This is of course, only a small example of how the Radical Environmental Movement (REM) has utilised playful, irreverent and performative strategies to disturb, provoke or illuminate. Other examples which come to mind immediately, are the arrest of a pantomime cow at Newbury, or the celebrated Fokker bi-plane that was ‘crashed’  in to the upper reaches of a tree at Mary Hare camp, in the same campaign[1]. Elsewhere SHAG (Super Heroes Against Genetics) have invaded Monsanto’s offices dressed in their fetching super hero garb, sculptures have doubled as barricades in Claremont Road on the route of the M11, The Third Battle of Newbury suffered an ‘Art Bi-pass’ and huge Carnival figures hid the planting of trees on the M41, in the middle of a Reclaim The Streets party. In these actions and others the symbolic mixes with the irreverent, the instrumental with the bizarre, theatricality, humour, performance and ritual are merged and the only constraint appears the imagination of those involved.

 

This mixture of the aesthetic and the political in protest events has a long and well documented lineage[2], and in the light of such a fertile history it is perhaps unsurprising that the concept of ‘carnival’ has recently been invoked by activists as a means of expressing this complex of celebratory and conflictual behaviour[3]. Carnival has long been a metaphor through which diverse synergies of people and events can be described and one which has found use in struggles over land and resources globally. Subcommandante Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatistas, the Mexican resistance movement routed in opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and inspiration for many UK direct activists, describes this ‘new’ understanding as follows:

 

The revolution in general is no longer imagined according to socialist patterns of realism, that is, as men and women stoically marching behind a red, waving flag towards a luminous future: rather it has become a sort of carnival.[4]

 

As I have argued previously in ECOS,[5] Reclaim The Streets (RTS), amongst a plethora of diverse groups has been profoundly important in shaping an antagonistic identity within the REM, and it has frequently framed its actions through the metaphor of carnival[6], thereby allowing the diverse expression of the collective imagination of social and environmental activists,

 

The revolutionary carnival that is emerging will not only ‘turn the world up-side down’ temporarily, but inside out, permanently.[7]

 

The differing skills, orientations and forms of action utilised by various groups and individuals are conjoined in this interpretation, and the resultant movement can articulate its identity through a semblance of tactics which become more meaningful to their practitioners, because they are described within the tradition of the ‘great revolutionary moments’ which have all ‘been enormous popular festivals’[8]. RTS suggests that the street party or carnival is a means to the end of creating a ‘liberated and ecological society’, returning the enclosed spaces of capitalist production and consumption to the commons of interaction, participation and co-operation. This  construction of the carnival as revolutionary transgression is drawn from the work of Bakhtin:

 

As opposed to the official feast, one might say the carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalised and complete.’ [9]

 

Critics of this perspective have argued that such ‘temporary liberation’ merely reinforces the status quo, allowing people a space to ‘let off steam’ and that ultimately such grand pretensions can be perceived as licensed complicity with the prevailing power structure[10]. However, Reclaim the Streets’ seizure of space, “we are not going to demand anything. We are not going to ask for anything. We are going to take. We are going to occupy”[11]  knowingly pre-empts such criticisms of carnival, celebrating instead the capacity identified by commentators for “an attitude of creative disrespect, a radical opposition to the illegitimately powerful, to the morose and monological”[12]. John Jordan, activist with RTS argues that the street party on the M41 in 1996 was “an act of insurrectionary imagination” where “carnival became revolution”[13]. This combination of creative protest, popular festival and revolutionary intent, demonstrates the complexity of what is occurring within the REM. The expressive and strategic tactics highlighted at the beginning of this article are fused with a theoretically sophisticated analysis of the transgressive potential of the carnivalesque, and this is allied to anarchist notions of pre-figuration, the sense that we can live out the future now:

 

To “street party” is to rescue communality from the dissection table of capitalism; to oppose the free market with a vision of a free society. This vision which the street party embodies, is collective imagining in practice. It radically dissolves political, cultural, social and economic divisions in a utopian expression. A utopia defined not as ‘no-place’ but as this-place, here and now[14]

 

Carnival and collective identity

 

In these carnivalesque actions the antagonistic collective identity of the REM is revealed by the activists capacity to give symbolic meaning to their action over and above its specific content[15]. This is not to suggest that each participant interprets their action in the same way as the meaning accorded to it by those who are involved in its organisation, or indeed by those who are observing it. However, it is normally apparent to activists that such forms of action (conflictual, expressive, playful, irreverent, bizarre) successfully create moments of inversion - ‘the world turned upside down’, which are experienced without mediation, and within which the operation and structure of power and the means of its maintenance become visible. Therefore such actions are able to communicate and express the deep conflict between those in the REM and those maintaining the status quo, its participants are no longer protesters in the sense that protest is often marked by the ease with which its ‘message’ or ‘issue’ is assimilated, co-opted or more accurately rendered mundane[16]. Rather these actions constitute a form of resistance, an ongoing process of identifying oneself as an actor within a profound social conflict, which can never be fully expressed, represented or contained by a single issue.

 

These carnivals are intensely problematic to police or control because of their inherent ambiguity, individuals and groups are acting autonomously, within a collective, yet independent of each other. They may be acting, dancing, performing, creating art or creating nuisance, philosophising, reading poetry, disrupting, disturbing or even conforming, they may be interested in animal rights or sustainability, third world debt or eco-anarchy, yet they are together, albeit briefly, in the space of the carnival. Such actions defy interpretation through the framework of understanding associated with traditional public order situations, for the police if it’s not a picket, a demonstration or a single issue protest then surely it must be the beginnings of a riot? An interpretation which often becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when the police decide to act against street parties or carnivals. Naomi Klein, in her recent book on corporate greed and ‘culture jamming’, catches this ambiguity perfectly when citing a Toronto police report of an RTS event:

 

This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over.[17]

 

Revealing power through the aesthetic

 

So what does all this mean? Put simply I am arguing, along with many others[18], that the playful, creative and collective imagination displayed in environmental protest has been resoundingly effective on a number of different levels. In practical terms it reveals the mechanisms of power and special interest which support and protect those engaged in environmentally destructive practices, it enables activists to mock and reproach such power and to highlight the asymmetry in resources between large corporations, the state and the REM. This is important, as the Italian social theorist Alberto Melucci suggests, because these processes feature heavily in the development of antagonistic social movements, as social actors are not ‘by essence’ conflictual, rather they become “antagonistic actors in a specific conjuncture at which domination is made visible”[19].

 

Allied to this is the return of an aesthetic to protest through the metaphor of carnival, a mingling of confrontation, romanticism and performance which enables diverse coalitions to act in apparent unison. Such an aesthetic recalls Herbert Marcuse, who believed that in the “mixture of the dance floor, the mingling of love, play and heroism, and in the laughter of the young” he could detect a sensibility towards beauty and the imagination which was subversive to “the institutions of capitalism and their morality”[20]. Such an aesthetic has deep roots in radical art practices, such as Dada and the surrealists, and was a strong feature of the sixties movements. Jerry Rubin, an American activist of that period described the actions he was involved in, in the following terms, “Life is a theatre and we are the guerrillas attacking the shrines of authority.. The street is the stage. You are the star of the show and everything we’re taught is up for grabs”[21]. Similar eulogies to street protest and cultural subversion are frequently made by radical environmentalists and often appear to be the glue which holds the myriad tensions of large scale ‘days of action’ together. There is, however, an important distinction to be made here, which moves beyond the enthusiasts (my own included) need to develop an analytical framework to collectivise what is otherwise an incredibly diverse group of people, and it has its origins in arcane debates associated with ancient Greece and Aristotle in particular.

 

The act of intemperance

 

In ancient ethics there is a difference between ‘intemperance’ and ‘incontinence’ and it is one that I believe is pertinent to our consideration of carnivalesque resistance. Incontinence, is vulgar and abusive unruliness, based upon a disregard of laws to allow for immediate satisfaction of one’s appetites. Intemperance, however, is something entirely different, in that it opposes an intellectual understanding of what could be, to the given ethical and political standards of the day. The intemperate person or collective is not ignorant of the law or social norms, nor do they merely oppose them for the sake of opposing them, rather they set out to discredit them by connecting the general intellect to political action. In the instances described above, the irreverent water borne stunts and carnivalesque days of action, the law, and more importantly those corporations hiding behind it, are discredited by the appliance of a general intellect which is increasingly intolerant of pollution for profit, or profit before people. This ‘intemperance’, this short tempered, immodest, intolerant disposition towards polluters and profiteers is strikingly evident in events such as the ‘Carnival Against Capitalism’ in London on June 18th 1999, or indeed the Seattle actions against the WTO, but is not based upon wilful disdain, it is built upon collective knowledge of the operations of these institutions and their role in environmental destruction and human exploitation.

 

A good example of this intemperance was the ‘trashing’ which occurred in Seattle during the WTO meeting. Much has been written since about the moral or strategic implications of smashing the windows and shop fronts of major banks, financiers, and the retail outlets of multi-nationals[22]. Despite many possible strategic reservations, such activities are far from the irrational vandalism they were portrayed as in the mainstream media, and which would equate with Aristotle’s concept of incontinence. Instead, they are routed firmly in an analysis of the way these corporations work and are aimed at demystifying them in a direct and unmediated way[23]. Whilst it does not require any great wisdom to select Nike and McDonalds over a local coffee shop, this trashing reveals the application of a critique, the use of a general intellect shaped by current debates in the environmental movement, discussions on economic globalisation, and the continuing cultural hegemony of the USA.

 

Environmental protest is revitalised and opened to new directions by the actions of these ‘carnivalistas’ who are ultimately not that dissimilar from the provocative pirates of Manchester Airport, behind the strange outfits, the pirate boats, street parties and the broken windows lies a belief in the imagination of those participating to create something different - a truly free and diverse society, a truly ‘ecological’ society[24]. The concept of carnival allows this to spill over into collective action which is capable of retaining and expressing the evident contradictions, without nullifying or exaggerating them, it simply provides the space through which they can be explored and through which new alliances, coalitions or projects can begin to emerge, this is collective imagination at work, this is the new intemperance.

 

Notes and references

 


[1]See Merrick,  (1996) Battle for the Trees Godhaven Inc, Leeds.

[2]See most recently Stephens, J. (1998) Anti-disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism, CUP, Cambridge.

[3]The most recent example was the ’Carnival Against Capitalism’ on June 18th 1999, See Chesters, G. (1999) 'Resist to Exist? Radical Environmentalism at the End of the Millennium', ECOS, 20, 2:19-25.

[4]Rachenburg, E. and Heau-Lambert, C. (1998) ‘History and Symbolism in the Zapatista Movement’ in Holloway, J and Pelaez, E. (eds.) (1998:33) Zapatista: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, Pluto Press, London.

[5]Chesters, 1999.

[6]I have argued elsewhere that this metaphor could equally be applied to those who radical environmentalists oppose, who display an ‘incontinent’ rather than an ‘intemperate’ disposition towards the environment, see Chesters, G. (1999) ‘June 18th: If I can dance then it’s not my revolution’, Reflections on June 18th, Reclaim The Streets, London.

[7]RTS Agitprop, May 1998.

[8]RTS Agitprop 1, July 1996.

[9]Bakhtin, M.M. (1968) Rabelias and His World, trans. Iswolsky, H., MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. U.S.A. p.109.

[10]Sales, R. (1983) English Literature in History 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics, Hutchinson, London.

[11]Anonymous (1997) Do or Die, 6:1

[12]Stamm, R. (1982) ‘On the Carnivalesque’, Wedge 1:47-55.

[13]Jordan, J. ‘The art of necessity: the subversive imagination of anti-road protest and Reclaim the Streets’, in McKay, (ed.) (1998) DIY Culture: Parties and Protest in Nineties Britain, Verso, London.

[14]Anonymous (1997) Do or Die, 6:6

[15]The Italian social theorist Alberto Melucci regards this capacity as an essential part of an ‘inner nature’ which is produced in such situations. See Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes: Collective action in the information age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.108.

[16]The term ‘recuperated’ is often used by activists to denote this process and is demonstrative of their cultural and political reference points, in this instance the Situationist International.

[17]Klein, N. (2000) No Logo, Flamingo, London, p.311.

[18]See Do or Die, 6: 1-14.

[19]See Melucci 1996:108.

[20]Marcuse, H. (1969) An Essay on Liberation, Allen Lane, London, p.27-28.

[21]cited in Stephens, 1998:97.

[22]see Z magazine online at: http://www.zmag.org/

[23]see Black Bloc Communique at: http://216.173.206.96/display.php3?article_id=508

[24] I use the term ecological in the same sense as Andrew Dobson uses it, to define a more holistic perspective with a vision of a future post-industrial society radically changed in its political, social and economic practices. See Dobson, A. (1995) Green Political Thought, Routledge, London.

 

 

Graeme Chesters is Research Fellow in the Centre for Local Policy Studies at Edge Hill University College and an activist with Lune AC, a strange and entirely contradictory mix of cultural workers and political agitators.